Category Archives: Releases

Coming to PBS’s America ReFramed series tonight, Tuesday, February 17: SHELL SHOCKED

John Richie’s exploration of the impact of gun violence on New Orleans’ youth has been showcased at community screenings in Louisiana and around the country since 2013. It has also played at regional film festivals such as Myrtle Beach, Connecticut, and Trenton.

Inspired to take action by the disturbingly high murder and violence rates in New Orleans, and the corresponding growth of hopelessness and fatalism among the city’s youth, Richie and his crew set out to find examples of positive solutions. Speaking to community leaders, activists, program coordinators, and, most affectingly, the mothers of young victims, the filmmakers humanize the statistics, and present models that offer alternatives to the dangers of the street, from a small video production house that uses satire to spread more positive messages to youth programs designed to keep at-risk youth off the streets. Even more importantly, Richie trains his camera on several teenagers, who are encouraged to speak frankly about their day-to-day confrontations with violence, death, police harassment, and futility, providing a space for their perspectives to be heard. While the film’s survey approach lends it a scattershot feel, its intent remains welcome, injecting a sense of hope, attention, and concern in an otherwise often overwhelmingly grim reality.

Coming to DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, February 17: PURGATORIO: A JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF THE BORDER

Rodrigo Reyes’ essay film on the border had its world premiere at Guadalajara in 2013. Other festival berths included Los Angeles, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, San Diego Latino, Chicago, Documentary Fortnight, and Traverse City.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

New to DVD this week: AMERICAN ARAB

Usama Alshaibi’s personal exploration of Arab-American identity had its world premiere at IDFA in 2013. It went on to screen at Big Sky, Chicago Underground, Cleveland, Stockholm, Revelation, Kansas City, and the San Francisco Arab Film Festival, among others.

Alshaibi, an Iraqi-born, US-based filmmaker, takes a largely autobiographical approach in this examination of the experiences of Arabs and Arab Americans in a post-9/11 American society. Narrating and sharing his life experiences, and those of his family, the director expresses an ever-present awareness of the difficult tightrope he, and others with a similar ethnic background, have been forced to walk, contending with Islamophobia both blatant and more insidious, conflicted feelings about assimilation vs tradition, and a shifting sense of identity influenced by complex geopolitical developments. While he surveys the stories of others, from a woman who had her hijab forcefully snatched from her head to a young Iraqi immigrant whose father was victimized by both insurgents and US armed forces, these are too slight and episodic to fully breathe, with the default focus returning to Alshaibi’s personal biography to diminishing returns for the project’s too brief running time. While the film is not wholly successful, it does pose provocative, worthwhile questions that would benefit from more extended consideration.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, February 10: LOVE & ENGINEERING

Tonislav Hristov’s look at an engineer’s attempts to hack dating debuted at DocPoint last year. It went on to screen at Tribeca, Hot Docs, Karlovy Vary, Sarajevo, Bergen, DOK Leipzig, Flahertiana, DokuFest Prizren, and Visions du Reel, among others. FilmBuff now releases the film on various VOD platforms, including Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, iTunes, Sony PlayStation, Vudu and Xbox Video.

Atanas, a Bulgarian engineer based in Finland, is confident that he has love figured out. After all, unlike his hapless colleagues, he’s married, while they struggle to even have a conversation with the opposite sex. Convinced he can apply science to the typically inscrutable laws of the heart, he offers to coach his four friends with the goal of finding them the perfect mate – even if he warns them they have to keep their expectations realistic: No models, but good companions. Hristov follows Atanas in his efforts to school his hopelessly nerdy guinea pigs, watching them through painfully awkward blind dates, scientific experiments, and counseling sessions with experts. As a whole, the result is a lighter, and sometimes humorous, exploration of the search for love, but it ultimately feels contrived and without any fundamental revelations that would make it particularly memorable.