what (not) to doc

New to VOD via Amazon Instant Video this week:
AUSTRALIA’S LOST GOLD: THE LEGEND OF LASSETER

Director:
Luke Walker

Premiere:
Melbourne 2012, under its original title LASSETER’S BONES

About:
A quest to find legendary gold in the Australian bush.

Borrowing a page from the Morgan Spurlock/Michael Moore school of documentary filmmaking, Walker appears onscreen, an active participant in this treasure hunt. He joins Bob Lasseter, the 95-year-old son of Harold Lasseter, who claimed that he discovered a rich vein of gold in central Australia in 1897. As the filmmaker, archival materials, and animation reveals, the elder Lasseter managed to secure financing to set out on an expedition to retrieve the gold in 1930, but none was found and the treasure-hunter instead lost his life. A follow up decades later cast further doubt on Lasseter’s claims, but his son, who barely remembers his father, has been searching for the gold for decades to try to vindicate his father. Walker attempts to retrace Lasseter’s steps and research his claims, more often finding little clarity given the passage of time, conflicting stories, and, ultimately, the possibility that, even if there is gold to be found, it very well might be part of sacred Aboriginal lands and thus off limits. While crafting a generally engaging and sometimes fun mystery, albeit a padded one, Walker’s on-camera presence is an unnecessary distraction that further lends an unfortunate television feel to the proceedings.

New to VOD via iTunes this week:
IN THE TURN

Director:
Erica Tremblay

Premiere:
Seattle LGBT 2014

Select Festivals:
Inside Out, Ottawa, St Louis, FilmOut San Diego

About:
A profile of an inclusive queer roller derby team.

Tremblay’s subject is the Vagine Regime, a loose-knit intentional family of roller derby players who reside in different cities and countries. Ostensibly, the film is meant to focus on Crystal, a Canadian pre-teen MTF whose school bars her from playing in sports. After her overworked but supportive mother learns about the Vagine Regime, she shares Crystal’s story with them, inspired by their openness to queer and trans players. In practice, however, Crystal and her mom almost immediately fade into the background while Tremblay proceeds to profile one player after another – ultimately far too many characters to keep track of or invest in, including some too tangential figures. While Crystal eventually comes back into the doc for a happy, hopeful coda, the scrappy film’s overall structure remains problematic.

New to DVD and VOD this week:
LOOK AT US NOW, MOTHER!

Director:
Gayle Kirschenbaum

Premiere:
Sarasota 2015

Select Festivals:
DocAviv, Woods Hole, Rhode Island, Woodstock, Orlando, Mumbai, and Jewish fests in Toronto, Nashville, Atlanta, Palm Beach, Miami, Baton Rouge

About:
The filmmaker attempts to come to grips with her overly critical mother.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to PBS’s WORLD Channel as part of its #MyBlackHistory programming tonight, Wednesday, February 8:
BLACK WOMEN IN MEDICINE

Director:
Crystal Emery

Premiere:
NYC’s Cinema Village (August 2016)

Select Festivals:
Pan African Film Festival

About:
A consideration of the history of and challenges facing African-American women in the medical profession.

A response to the slow progress made in diversifying the United States’ base of physicians, with less than 5% African American representation – and, further, only 2% African American women doctors nationwide – Emery’s project is an earnest attempt to provide positive images and push back against stereotypes. Its natural venue is educational settings, where the stories of its subjects – both older pioneers and recent medical school graduates – can serve as inspiration for young African American women otherwise lacking in role models in medicine – in the words of one of the trailblazers here, former Surgeon General Dr Jocelyn Elders, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Beyond this worthwhile function, however, the doc is otherwise clunky and non-cinematic, abandoning more focused profiles of a small handful of promising subjects to instead stage dry, somewhat repetitive group panel discussions that unfortunately feel more like outtakes from a public access television program.

New to DVD and VOD this week:
ZIMBELISM

Directors:
Jean François Gratton and Matt Zimbel

Premiere:
International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) 2016

Select Festivals:
Hot Docs, Salem, Shanghai

About:
A profile of the career and work of documentary street photographer George Zimbel.

Jean François Gratton and Matt Zimbel – George’s son – offer an appreciation of the photographer’s career, highlighting some of his more notable work, including a celebrated series on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street in the 1950s and a series of travel shoots for the New York Times Magazine, including work that helped make public plans for a hydro plant in Storm King which sparked resistance that ultimately stopped the project. While acclaimed as a humanist photographer of everyday people, and with Zimbel here downplaying the importance of celebrity portraiture such as iconic images of Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate and a series on retired President Truman, the film nevertheless oddly places an undue focus on the latter, creating a strange tension that is never fully explained. The filmmakers make use of Zimbel’s 1960 campaign photos of JFK and Jackie Kennedy as a thread throughout the film, a bone of contention in a rights claim against the New York Times. This is illustrated here somewhat too repetitiously through a series of back-and-forth letters between Zimbel, who demands the return of a photo that was licensed for a one-time use but was never returned to him, and the Times‘ officious-sounding legal department, which insists the photo is their property. Having left NYC life long ago for an extended stint in Canada’s Prince Edward Island and later Montreal, Zimbel is still productive, shown walking around taking photographs, and maintaining the life of a freelancer – though he bemoans the state of the modern world and its privacy laws which limit his documentary street photography work.

New to VOD via Microsoft this week:
ORANGE SUNSHINE

Director:
William A Kirkley

Premiere:
SXSW 2016

Select Festivals:
BFI London, Newport Beach, Maui, San Sebastian, Athens, SF DocFest

About:
The story of 1960s Southern Californian drug culture via the recollections of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the biggest smugglers of LSD and hash of the time.

Kirkley’s sprawling film focuses on several of the founding members of the Brotherhood, particularly Johnny Griggs and his wife Carol. After an encounter with LSD connected Griggs to a sense of the divine, he felt emboldened to turn on the entire world, abandoned his typical suburban existence, and began to indoctrinate friends. After he drugged the initially resistant Carol’s orange juice, she too was along for the ride, and the newly formed community fell into becoming the biggest suppliers of LSD in the country. Once the substance was deemed illegal, they formed a church to try to protect themselves and to spread their message of enlightenment, moving to Laguna Beach and forming the Mystic Arts World psychedelic emporium, a sort of Southern Californian Haight Ashbury. Timothy Leary joined their group, finding a kindred spirit in Griggs, but as their notoriety grew, they became the target of surveillance, eventually leading several members to live on the run under assumed identities before the law finally caught up to them. Kirkley maintains a loose tone throughout, and while this matches the subjects’ freewheeling utopian mission, it also leads to a sense of anecdotal excess at times in what otherwise is a generally entertaining tale.