Hot Docs ’03: Baader-Meinhof: In Love with Terror

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK
**/****directed by Ben Lewis by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Or rather, Ben Lewis: In Love with Obviousness. This brief history of the ultra-left Red Army Faction, whose terrorism swept West Germany during the '70s, doesn't really deal with the issues that created it; the film is far more interested in the sensational aspects of their rampage than in any of the questions that it raised. Admittedly, some of the details depicted are fascinating: I didn't realize that Andreas Baader's squeeze Gudrun Ensselin was a sex-movie queen, or that the BMW, RAF getaway car of choice, became known as the "Baader-Meinhof Wagon."…

Hot Docs ’03: Hush!

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Russia
***/****directed by Victor Kossakovsky by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By far the most original of this year's crop is Hush!, in which director Victor Kossakovsky turns his gaze through his apartment window and collects the goings-on outside. Lovers meet in the street, dogs are walked, street cleaners sweep up the curb, and public workers tear up the street to do... something. Seasons change, rain and snow fall, a police van has a close call at an intersection and the hole in the street gets bigger and bigger as the workers continue to do God-knows-what. Sometimes the action unfurls in real time,…

Hot Docs ’03: The Day I Will Never Forget

Posted inAuthors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK
***½/****directed by Kim Longinotto by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The co-director of Divorce Iranian Style is back with this intelligent and powerful documentary on female genital mutilation in Kenya. Not only does it show, in a chilling centrepiece sequence, the immediate and excruciating pain it causes the young girls subjected to the practice (as well as the health consequences of dirty instruments and heavy stitching), but it also explores the cultural mechanisms that ensure that people, even women, will continue it. The ears burn at hearing tribal leaders offer their explanations of the logic in its implementation, as well as at…

Hot Docs ’03: Rockets Redglare!

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
***½/****directed by Luis Fernandez de la Reguera by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The lively but tragic saga of Michael Morra, a.k.a. Rockets Redglare, is explored in this somewhat crude but extremely moving documentary. Morra/Redglare lived a life that would be ennobled by the word "marginal": he was born a heroin-addicted baby, raised in grinding poverty, all but witnessed the murder of his mother, and bounced from needle to rehab to needle again in a titanic losing battle with addiction. But he was also an extremely creative individual, and rose in the '80s to become a character actor, comedian, and performance artist…

Hot Docs ’03: And Along Came a Spider

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Iran
Va ankaboot amad***/****directed by Maziar Bahari by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You'd think it would be clear-cut: a serial killer who murders 16 prostitutes should be treated with a maximum of scorn. But that's not how it happened in Iran, where the notorious Saeed Hanei dispatched members of society who were already believed to have been the scum of the earth. The sadistic "spider-killer," already high on killing from the Iran-Iraq war, believed that he was doing God's work, and interviews with his family reveal that they are proud that their son/husband/father was taking a stand on those who would corrupt…

Hot Docs ’03: Kim’s Story (1997)

Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
**½/****directed by Shelley Saywell by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is the story of Kim Phuc, who was napalmed during the Vietnam War and became the subject of an infamous photo that shocked the world. Her life is full enough of incident: Having become a symbol of America's brutality during the war, she was turned into a propaganda instrument by the Vietnamese government and subsequently defected to the west. She remains, however, a committed pacifist and continues to build bridges between herself and veterans--including, in the film's biggest surprise, the pilot who dropped the napalm on her. Alas, the crew that…

Hot Docs ’03: How High is the Mountain + How Deep is the Ocean

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Taiwan

HOW HIGH IS THE MOUNTAIN
***/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN
***½/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover These are two tangentially related films by the Taiwanese director Shiang-Chu Tang, and they're like nothing else in the Hot Docs festival. They're neither as overly schematic as so many socially-minded documentaries nor overly aestheticized like the school of Errol Morris. In fact, those poles don't really apply to these films, which record social processes through the examples of individuals and which have a formal beauty to them that is totally non-coercive. Watching them, you don't feel forced into taking a stance–you are provided with the stuff of peoples' lives to draw your own conclusions as to how they ended up the way they did.

Hot Docs ’03: Generation of Hate

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
**/****directed by Shelley Saywell by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In Generation of Hate, Shelley Saywell goes to Iraq and doesn't come back with much you didn't already know. Apparently, the Iraqi people hate America for constantly attacking them and aren't allowed to speak about Saddam's oppression--shocker! Sure, it can't hurt to hear that one more time, but Saywell's primitive technique doesn't give the subject much urgency beyond the common liberal "tsk." Lacking in structure and confused in focus, the video ricochets from subject to subject, taking sound bites here and there and imposing frightfully obvious voice-overs that often repeat themselves. The…

Hot Docs ’03: The Lost Boys (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, UK
**/****directed by Clive Gordon by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Can a film have a wealth of new information and still be a failure? If the film is Clive Gordon's The Lost Boys, the answer is an unfortunate "yes." Dealing with the ultimate fate of some of the "lost boys" of the Sudan, who fled to northern Kenya when they were attacked by the Arab army, it shows a handful of the 3,500 who were selected for resettling in America. On the plus side, it shows a process that rarely is seen on film, that of people struggling to adjust to a…

Hot Docs ’03: Algeria: The Nameless War

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Sweden
***½/****directed by Agneiska Lukasiak by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Director Agneiska Lukasiak got more than she bargained for when she went to shoot in Algeria and fell in love with one of its countrymen, Habib. Not only was she in a country racked by civil conflict, she also had to face up to her culture shock at the country's radically different approaches to love. Despite her amour fou for Habib, his familial obligations make it impossible for her to marry without destroying his family's means of support. As she ponders her unhappy love, she wanders around Algiers illegally taping war zones,…

Hot Docs ’03: Juchitan, Queer Paradise

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Chile, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
Juchitán de las locas**½/****directed by Patricio Henriquez by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This documentary has a honey of a subject: a Mexican Zapotec town with a high tolerance for homosexuality. Unfortunately, it blows it when it takes a personal angle that obscures the town's inner workings. At first, the film gets your hopes up by showing Juchitan's relaxed nature--gays and the transgendered are treated with respect, women are given a high rank in society, and the Zapotec language is still spoken in a country where native languages are quickly disappearing. But Juchitan quickly shifts gears to follow several residents of the town,…

Hot Docs ’03: Strip Club DJs

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Television
***/****directed by Derrick Beckles by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One approaches a film on this topic with a sense of humour: surely it couldn't have anything other than good ribald laughs. But as Strip Club DJs inches ever closer to its conclusion, it becomes more and more disturbing, until you are choked-up with a combination of contempt and pity for those who would play the tunes at your local peeler bar. It turns out that the DJ is the nerve centre for the whole operation: not only must he spin the discs, he must also arrange who has the rights to…

Hot Docs ’03: My Flesh and Blood

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
***½/****directed by Jonathan Karsh by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Susan Tom more or less adopts special-needs children; this is her story, and it's both gripping and moving. A woman described by her mother as trying to fill her own "loneliness," Tom has taken on the children who are too much for other people--there are kids missing limbs, who have been horribly burned, who have cancer and cystic fibrosis, and one hyperactive boy with a terrible mean streak. The film takes stock of a year with Tom and her family, and considers what it takes to care for children who demand so…

Hot Docs ’03: Bruno S. – Estrangement is Death

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs
Bruno S. - Die Fremde ist der Tod***/****directed by Miron Zownir by Travis Mackenzie Hoover At the Cannes premiere of one of his films, Werner Herzog discovery Bruno S. decided to play his accordion outside the theatre; unfortunately, no one knew how to take this, and the police were called in to arrest him. That pretty much sums up the life of Bruno S., who, after two films with Herzog, faded into obscurity, never to catch the public eye again. But that wasn't the only rejection in his life: Not only was he the victim of neglectful parents, but his…

Hot Docs ’03: Wheel of Time

Posted in2000s, Austria, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Italy
*½/****directed by Werner Herzog by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I was initially bewildered by the substitution of this film for the cancelled Bus 174--how could a film by Werner Herzog, one of the big names of the German New Wave, have not been initially selected for a festival that could use the publicity? As it turns out, there is a reason: Despite some unusually good intentions (for Herzog, anyway), his documentary is disorganized and lacking in rigour. The film plays as sort of What I Did On My Spiritual Vacation, with Herzog visiting various Buddhist holy events as people pray, listen…

Hot Docs ’03: Chicken Ranch (1982)

Posted in1980s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK
***/****directed by Nick Broomfield and Sandi Sissel by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is the story of a Nevada brothel--the transplanted inspiration for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas--and it's not a particularly happy one. On the surface, everything runs like a well-oiled machine: the girls troop out for selection by the customers, they negotiate the price with the customers, and the proprietor beams for journalists about what a public service he's providing. But, at least according to this film, the job of being a prostitute is an aggravating one, and as the women complain about inconsiderate tricks and fears of…

Hot Docs ’03: Echelon: The Secret Power

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Espionage, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs
Échelon, le pouvoir secret***/****directed by David Korn-Brzoza by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is a sometimes gripping, sometimes irritating film about international espionage and those who direct it. An information-gathering organization with tentacles in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, "Echelon" long ago abandoned the post-WWII directives that created it and started gathering intelligence on private citizens through highly questionable means. Now that the electronic and information ages are upon us, Echelon, the NSA, and various satellite organizations can listen in on your telephone calls and whatever other electronic transmissions you might be making; the Anglo-American coalition uses…

The Straight Shooter: FFC Interviews George Hickenlooper

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

GhickenlooperinterviewtitleApril 20, 2003|There at the beginnings of Billy Bob Thornton and Naomi Watts, after the success of 2002’s The Man from Elysian Fields, it may finally be director George Hickenlooper’s turn in the spotlight. In the mountain resort for the twelfth annual Aspen Shortsfest, I scouted out a place in the deserted lobby/bar area; Hickenlooper, suffering from the onset of a head cold, was down in a flash.

A skilled documentarian and interviewer, Hickenlooper is a friendly presence, cutting an unassuming swath through the impossibly nice lobby of Aspen’s Hotel St. Regis. Starting his career after Yale with an internship under Roger Corman, the filmmaker has worked in several genres, earning his first major break with the exceptional documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. What impresses most about Mr. Hickenlooper, however, is his knowledge of film history and respect for the auteur theory–in his presentation as a part of the fest’s “Masterworks” programming, he not only clarified what Bogdanovich defined to him as the two philosophies of editing (mise-en-scène vs. montage), but also made mention of Cahiers du cinema, Dziga Vertov, and the politics of shot selection that can actually save a director’s vision from meddling studio interests.

Biggie & Tupac (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Documentary, DVD, Music, UK

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B+
directed by Nick Broomfield

by Bill Chambers A few days ago in THE HOT BUTTON, Dave Poland distinguished Nick Broomfield from his peers in the documentary field better–or, at least, more succinctly–than I’ve ever seen it done: “[Broomfield] creates an atmosphere in which you connect emotionally not with the characters in the film, but with his plight in trying to get his film made.” That’s certainly true of Broomfield’s Biggie & Tupac, in which almost every sequence carries the subtext of peril: A bona fide Dante in headphones, Broomfield latches onto a Virgil (ex-police officer Russell Poole) who escorts him, more or less, through circles of Hell (the gang-marked territories of Compton, the rap-music industry, and finally prison). An alarming number of the director’s interviews in Biggie & Tupac begin with a summary of attempts on the subject’s life, and in a deleted scenes section on the DVD, we see that Broomfield tried and failed to chat with the owner of L.A.’s notorious “Last Resort,” a bar at which gangbangers receive an ace-of-spades merit badge for their first killshot. A red ace means a flesh wound; a black ace means fatality.

Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (2002)

Posted in2000s, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Theatrical, War

Im Toten Winkel – Hitlers Sekretärin
Blind Spot. Hitler’s Secretary
***½/****
directed by André Heller & Othmar Schmiderer

by Bill Chambers A significant source of Blind Spot. Hitler’s Secretary‘s power is the au naturel form it takes. There are no re-enactments, there are no such visual cues as photographs or stock footage; there isn’t even any underscore–only the talking head of Traudl Junge, who, with her rotating cluster of sweaters and ascots, is the film’s aesthetic. Directors André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer (Heller interviewed, Schmiderer shot) either believe Junge to be so compelling a presence as to challenge the need for newsreel aids, or fundamentally appreciate that they risked depersonalizing Junge’s fresh, intimate perspective by going the History Channel route. I only skimmed the press notes (which are rather regrettably written: “Like Adolf Hitler, [Heller and Schmiderer] were also born and raised in Austria,” begins an introduction to the filmmakers) to keep from cheapening Blind Spot‘s enigmatic approach–that ambivalence–for myself: The film casts a spell as fragile as that of an ILM spectacle.