Documentary Archives - Page 2 of 18

Sundance ’20: Be Water

January 25, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Martial Arts, Sundance

*/****
directed by Bao Nguyen

by Walter Chaw Bao Nguyen’s Bruce Lee documentary Be Water is a moving hagiography of a legend immortalized by his sudden death at the beginning of his career. He reminds of James Dean in that respect, captured in amber as this eternally young punk icon for the disenfranchised, the alienated, the frustrated. He was a point of pride for Asian-Americans and became a peculiar rallying point for African-Americans, too. The pressure for me to write favourably about this film is crippling and depressing. It occurred to me not to review it at all. Bruce Lee’s legacy is complicated. He was someone I lionized when I was a kid. Slight, wiry, he looked like me when I was little. That he could become something so huge in my imagination was to me extraordinary. If he, with his heavy accent and ferociously Chinese demeanour, could refuse to assimilate and yet rise, maybe this country meant what it said. You know what, though? It doesn’t mean what it says.

Sundance ’20: Aggie

January 25, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance

**/****
directed by Catherine Gund

by Walter Chaw Agnes Gund is a fantastic person, a philanthropist art collector who sits as President Emirita for the Museum of Modern Art. She champions artists while they’re living, visits them in their studios to better understand the hands that move the creations, and recently sold a famous Roy Lichtenstein original (“Masterpiece”) for an ungodly sum of $162 million, which she used to create a foundation called “Art for Justice” dedicated to penal reform, with the ultimate aim of eradicating mass incarceration. She’s been called the “last good rich person” by the NEW YORK TIMES and it’s hard to argue, though the bar is admittedly low. The temptation is to launch into a long screed on the moral abomination of allowing such a thing as a billionaire to exist in the first place, just one of the many digressions that daughter Catherine’s able, functional documentary Aggie inspires. There are moments in this film where Gund, now in her eighties, needs to be cajoled into speaking (they’re played off as more of her humility), intercut with archival footage of a younger Gund demonstrating a more able public persona. She’s slowed down considerably, and I wondered a time or two if she has someone to manage her estate. I worry about her, but the film does not.

Sundance ’20: The Painter and the Thief

January 23, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Norway, Sundance

****/****
directed by Benjamin Ree

by Walter Chaw Shot over the course of three years, Benjamin Ree’s documentary The Painter and the Thief details the relationship that blooms between artist Barbora Kysilkova and a man, Karl-Bertil Nordland, who stole two of her paintings from a gallery. That’s it. You should see this movie and then come back here because I want to talk about it with someone–but you should see it first. Okay. You back?

Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)

November 4, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Documentary, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Midge Costin

by Alice Stoehr "Sound is half of the experience," says George Lucas over a muted excerpt from Star Wars' opening shot. The din of laser artillery and John Williams's score have fallen away, so the director's voice accompanies two vessels drifting in the silence of space. This sequence caps an introductory montage darting from Jurassic Park to The Elephant Man to Lawrence of Arabia in order to sensitize viewers (and listeners) to the intricacies of film audio. Midge Costin leans a lot on such montage in her documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. They're groupings of iconography à la Chuck Workman, part of her bid to demystify the craft. She structures two-thirds of the film as a rough history via sound-design heavyweights while leaving the rest for anecdotes from other luminaries in the field. Oscilloscopic sound waves are her primary graphic motif. It's instantly accessible, very Film 101. Costin, like the film's writer, Bobette Buster, is a professor at USC. (Lucas and Steven Spielberg endowed her position.) Their work together has all the clarity of a syllabus. The 1992 doc Visions of Light went deep into the art of cinematography; this, decades later, is its ear-oriented counterpart.

TIFF 2019: Pain and Glory + Varda by Agnès

September 8, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Spain, TIFF

Dolor y gloria
***½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Asier Exteandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Varda par Agnès
****/****
directed by Agnès Varda

by Bill Chambers Salvador Mallo is first seen in hydrotherapy for his scarred back, lost in an underwater reverie. The lapping waves trigger a memory of his mother (Penélope Cruz, who must have a painting of herself rotting away in the attic) washing clothes in the river when he was just a boy. Played by Pedro Almodóvar discovery and muse Antonio Banderas, Salvador is an informally retired film director who dresses like Almodóvar, resides in Almodóvar’s real-life apartment, and suffers a litany of ailments–spinal problems, tinnitus–much like Almodóvar’s own. The kinkiness of Almodóvar’s work has always made it seem personal and confessional, but with Pain and Glory he moves into the roman à clef territory of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz–although Pain and Glory is considerably more chill, treating even picking up a heroin habit in middle age as less self-destructive than incorrigible. Salvador is introduced to the drug while making amends with Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), star of his acclaimed Sabor (“Flavour”). Alberto is a long-time junkie; Salvador once held this against his performance in Sabor but no longer does, because time has altered his perception of it. The two agree to do a Q&A at a screening of the film’s restoration, which, uh, doesn’t quite go as planned but does lead to Alberto putting on an unpublished play that Salvador wrote, which leads to Salvador briefly reconnecting with Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the old lover the play is about. This spurs him to be proactive about his health: Salvador realizes that he needs to get back to making art, because sharing this one story with others has turned out to be so much more rewarding than wallowing in nostalgia.

Hot Docs ’19: Campo

May 8, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019, Portugal

***½/****
directed by Tiago Hespanha

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Despite its occasional stop/start rhythm, Campo is a consistently hypnotic audiovisual essay that ventures onto the Herzogian turf of Alcochete, Portugal’s Field Firing Range, called “Campo” for short after the Portuguese word for “field.” At 7,539 hectares (i.e., around 47 square miles), it’s Europe’s largest military base–so large that there’s room for livestock, including a herd of sheep, to graze on its grass, mostly undisturbed. A series of vignettes alternates drills and wildlife, though these juxtapositions aren’t quite that uniform, and oftentimes humans are present in the animal sequences, where they’re cooperative and not a blight. (A beekeeper closely monitors a hive to make sure his bees aren’t losing their radar like they have been all over the world.) Some scenes smudge the lines of fiction as indicated by this being a training facility, such as when medics labour to stop the bleeding of an allegedly wounded trainee who says, coughing up blood (for effect?), “When my father hears about this, he’ll shoot himself.” One camera angle, so peculiar it must be intentional, reduces a jeep and the soldiers inside it to action figures straight out of Marwencol.

Hot Docs ’19: For Sama

May 5, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019, Syria, UK

***½/****
directed by Waad al-Kateab, Edward Watts

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Born out of student journalist Waad al-Kateab's first-person video diary of the early days of the uprising against the Assad regime in Aleppo, For Sama is a startling document of how everything from parenting to the concept of home to the myriad forms of political resistance available to the young and idealistic is rendered uncanny by life under wartime. Co-directed by al-Kateab and Edward Watts, the film is both a daring work of frontline reportage and an appropriately anxious time-capsule message left to be discovered at some later date by al-Kateab's daughter, who is born during the conflict and whose future is ever-threatened by the precarious political status of her parents in the besieged city.

Hot Docs ’19: On the President’s Orders

May 3, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019, UK

***/****
directed by James Jones, Olivier Sarbil

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers A co-production of ARTE France and PBS's "Frontline", On the President's Orders covers a period of relative calm in Duterte's Philippine Drug War, which saw a death toll of 3,000 suspected drug pushers in its first year. In an effort to curtail the amount of bloodshed on both sides, Jemar Modequillo is installed as the new police chief in Manila's Caloocan district, the epicentre of the country's drug-related violence, and sets to work remolding the trigger-happy "wankers" under his command into a constabulary that patrols the seediest streets in search of alleged suspects to haul off to a seriously overpopulated jail. As we see, there is little distinction made between dealers and users (who typically aren't motivated enough to sell drugs), and a profound lack of empathy for addicts in general among members of law enforcement. "Drug users are a nuisance for society. Unless you get rid of a pest, it will get bigger," says the prison warden, Agustin, who gets his jollies out of hurting the detainees and isn't shy about it on camera. 'On the president's orders,' in other words, Modequillo created his own version of ICE, substituting junkies for migrants–and on one level, the film feels as if it's intended as a counterweight to Trump's characteristically mindless praise of fellow media-hating despot Duterte at a 2017 summit in Manila. On another level, like a lot of current documentaries (including the two I've already covered for this year's Hot Docs), On the President's Orders suggests a creative solution to critiquing a subject who's just too overexposed and partisan for any documentarian to have a real shot at being heard. We're in a redux of the Bush era, in that sense.

Hot Docs ’19: The World or Nothing

May 3, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

***/****
directed by Ingrid Veninger

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda On the surface, Ingrid Veninger's first documentary feature The World or Nothing seems a departure from her scrappy, micro-budget semi-autobiographical work to date. A slice-of-life portrait of Rupert and Rubildo Ridinza, late twenty-something twins trying to make it big in Barcelona as YouTube celebrities without losing their connection to the family they left behind in Cuba, the film seems distant from early projects that starred members of Veninger's family, their characters typically displaced on European trips that test and form them. Though Veninger's latest follows a different family unit at a somewhat safer distance, it shares her earlier work's flinty but genial sensibility, as well as its thematic preoccupation with outsider artists engaged in the sometimes-indelicate art of self-promotion.

Hot Docs ’19: Maxima

April 29, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

**½/****
directed by Claudia Sparrow

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Shot with a little of that Jennifer Baichwal flair for Martian landscapes, Maxima is an almost tediously straightforward yet galvanizing précis of one Peruvian woman’s struggle to keep the bulldozers away from her homestead. Having ransacked a huge patch of the Andes for its gold, the Yanacocha mining company wants to spread their tentacles as far as the Tragadero Grande, where Máxima Acuña has lived since purchasing the territory in 1994. In 1995, Yanacocha zoned for their proposed Conga Expansion Project in a deal that falsely included Tragadero Grande, and in 2011, Máxima was arrested for squatting on her own land following a violent confrontation with the police that left her battered and bruised and without a roof over her head, since the cops demolished her hut. Refusing to be cowed, Máxima accepted that the alternative to handing over her deed in the wake of this incident would be a years-long legal battle that still hasn’t been settled by the end of the film, making all of her victories along the way frustratingly Pyrrhic. But they are victories, moral as much as personal: Máxima’s stubbornness is protecting the surrounding lakes that nourish the lowlands, which Yanacocha would pollute with 96,000 tons of toxic waste per day. (That number, courtesy of fellow activist Milton Sánchez, sounds high to me–maybe something was lost in translation–but really, what would be an acceptable figure other than zero?) “It’s almost like a slow death sentence,” Máxima says. “There won’t be any clean drinking water for the communities.”

Hot Docs ’19: Killing Patient Zero

April 26, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

**½/****
directed by Laurie Lynd

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda “Everyone was praying it was going to be something we could give up,” editor and interviewee Michael Denneny says in a sobering moment in Laurie Lynd’s Killing Patient Zero, which offers a moving if somewhat scattershot account of the collision between sexual liberation, panic, and state indifference in the early days of the AIDS crisis while fleshing out the life of so-called “patient zero,” Gaétan Dugas. Based on Richard McKay’s book on Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant remembered here for his charisma and frankness about his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was pathologized as an illness in North America, Lynd’s film is most effective as a reparative intervention into its subject’s cruel afterlife as the media’s favoured scapegoat in false summaries of the early transmission of HIV. Yet the documentary’s emotional impact is dulled by Lynd’s vestigial gestures to the source text (from which McKay awkwardly reads via a teleprompter), his overly familiar style (which cribs its score from The Social Network and its interview setup from Errol Morris), and his curious compulsion to frequently sideline Dugas’s story to make way for talking-head interviews with a who’s who of queer celebrities, such as Fran Lebowitz and B. Ruby Rich.

Hot Docs ’19: On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship

April 25, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

***/****
directed by Karen Stokkendal Poulsen

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers It’s telling that the reality of Myanmar as a kind of Hell on Earth has subverted Hollywood’s couple attempts to set a white-saviour narrative there (John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo), and Karen Stokkendal Poulsen’s illuminating On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship shows how hopeful roads out of that Hell have come to dead ends. On the surface a pro forma mix of talking heads, archival footage, and a little bit of scenic tourism, the piece distinguishes itself with its high-profile interview subjects and a structure that gives certain ironies their due for those only passingly familiar with the country’s history. (Like me.) From 1962 until 2011, the once and future Burma was under military rule, having violently resisted a brief democratic uprising in the late-’80s led by Aung San Suu Kyi, who was subsequently imprisoned in her home for close to two decades. But with strict sanctions placed on all its prominent generals in the U.S. and Europe, the military decided to rehabilitate their international reputation by rebranding the government a democracy.

Madonna and the Breakfast Club (2019)

March 17, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Documentary, VOD

**/****
written and directed by Guy Guido

by Alice Stoehr Madonna Ciccone was born in 1958. She left Michigan for New York City in 1978. Her debut album “Madonna” saw release in 1983. After that, she rocketed to stardom. But for several years in her early twenties, she paid her dues as a musician, working menial jobs while learning drums and guitar. The semi-documentary Madonna and the Breakfast Club tells the story of that period through a bundle of techniques. The bluntest and most expedient of these is voiceover narration. When Madonna moves to then-boyfriend Dan Gilroy’s home in a former synagogue, a woman’s voice says, with studied neutrality, “It was here that Madonna would begin her journey into music.” More versatile are the talking-head interviews with old friends like Norris Burroughs, who introduced her to Gilroy (no relation to the Nightcrawler director); Stephen Lewicki, who directed her in the no-budget movie A Certain Sacrifice; and Ed Gilroy, Dan’s brother and housemate. These subjects recall those years with some nostalgia and mild disbelief over this woman they used to know. “I had a sense that she was somebody who was gonna do something in the world,” says Burroughs, his stance no doubt bolstered by hindsight. The Gilroys go so far as to display photos and demo tapes from Madonna’s tenure in their band, Breakfast Club. These artifacts, which include an embryonic draft of Like a Virgin‘s “Over and Over,” sketch a portrait of the artist as a young tunesmith.

FrightFest ’18: Hammer Horror: The Warner Bros Years

October 1, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, FrightFest

**/****directed by Marcus Hearn by Walter Chaw An affectionate if standard talking heads-plus-clips documentary covering those last years of the hale British studio's run as they tried, from the late-'60s on, to compete with the new era of permissiveness and transgression in film, Hammer Horror: The Warner Bros Years, from Hammer authority Marcus Hearn (who's published multiple volumes on the subject), is lockstep, even dry alas, but indisputably informative. I was most interested in the revelation that Hammer had wanted to work with director Michael Reeves post-Witchfinder General but that Reeves died prematurely, leaving the very weird Hitchcock riff Crescendo…

FrightFest ’18: Frankenstein’s Creature

September 26, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, FrightFest

***½/****written by James Swantondirected by Sam Ashurst by Walter Chaw Of all the remembrances and resurrections marking the 200th birthday of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, perhaps the most innovative is Sam Ashurst's document of James Swanton's one-man stage play Frankenstein's Creature, featuring Swanton as the monster on a single dilapidated set, delivering a ninety-minute tour de force monologue that zeroes in on the most-forgotten aspect of Shelley's novel: its wit. Swanton is by turns needling and pathetic, demanding attention and then declaring that he knows he's ugly...but look closer. He takes delight in his part in his "maker's" downfall, gleefully reenacting…

TIFF ’18: Fahrenheit 11/9

September 17, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****directed by Michael Moore by Walter Chaw Michael Moore is an often-terrible filmmaker and a repugnant human being. His films are scattershot and on the whole unhelpful. In a few meandering minutes of his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, he notes that members of Trump's inner circle have invested in his films and that when given the opportunity to hold Trump's feet to the fire in a public forum, he played the Jimmy Fallon. He appears to be owning that he's part of this disaster, but it's not clear, ultimately, what the fuck he's on about. Moore also spends time with…

TIFF ’18: Monrovia, Indiana

September 8, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Frederick Wiseman

by Angelo Muredda To anyone who might still be labouring under the delusion that Frederick Wiseman’s method is simply to point a camera at a bunch of bureaucrats and watch the policy talk and human foibles fly, there’s now Monrovia, Indiana, one of the nonfiction master’s fleetest, funniest, and most conspicuously structured films in some time. Though you could read it as a purposefully timely attempt to dig deep into the earth of a so-called flyover state that the so-called coastal elites attending slam-poetry readings at the New York Public Library might deride, the film more accurately suggests a minor B-side to the loftier work of its predecessor, Ex Libris, which, among other things, considered the library as a necessary and all-too-vulnerable point of contact between the working poor and a wider world that grows increasingly out of their reach. Monrovia, Indiana revels instead in the earthier pleasures of local institutions like Hot Rod’s Barber Shop, where everyone gets the same military-grade haircut, and the surreal space of a grocery store that stocks Donald Duck’s orange juice and lights its lemons, limes, and tomatoes like pop art.

Hot Docs ’18: The Night of All Nights

May 6, 20182018, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

Die Nacht der Nächte**/****directed by Yasemin Şamdereli and Nesrin Şamdereli Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Basically the interstitial interviews from When Harry Met Sally... writ large and given an international twist, The Night of All Nights sees four elderly couples reminiscing on their marriage--though as the film opens Americans Bill Novak and Norman MacArthur, who've been together since 1962, are only finally getting to tie the knot. Germans Hildegard and Heinz-Siegfried Rotthäuser are probably the most sitcom-perfect subjects,…

Hot Docs ’18: The End of Fear

May 5, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Netherlands

***/****
directed by Barbara Visser

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Barnett Newman’s divisive abstract painting “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III” becomes both a forensic site and a compelling structural absence in Dutch conceptual artist Barbara Visser’s debut feature The End of Fear. What might have been an annoyingly palatable art doc about Gerard Jan van Bladeren’s vandalism of the painting in 1986 (van Bladeren was so outraged by the work’s abrasive shock of red, dramatic asymmetry, and obstinate refusal of representationalism that he decided he had to slash it) and subsequent failed restoration becomes something more slippery and interesting care of Visser’s puckishness as not only a filmmaker but also a presence on screen, where we see her coolly hiring a hungry grad student to create a close reproduction of her own, apparently in the filmmaker’s name. Though the project suffers at times from the preciousness of its noncommittal form–spanning everything from the expected talking heads lecturing about the painting’s mixed critical reception and tabloid history to process-based interludes of Visser’s hired gun hard at work, to abstract top-down tableaux of unnamed, black-clad gallery workers mapping out the painting’s history on the jet-black floor with masking tape and archival photos–for the most part its free-roaming approach to questions of valuation, ownership, and work in contemporary art feels playful in the right way, opening up a number of avenues for discussion out of what feels like genuine curiosity.

Hot Docs ’18: McQueen

May 5, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

**½/****
directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s McQueen opens, as any look at Alexander McQueen, the queer, working-class, Stratford-raised ruffian turned couturier might well be expected to, with an aesthetic contradiction. The opening credit sequence, which unfolds as a series of smooth pans and tilts across extreme close-ups of baroque, CG-kissed headgear and flower-enmeshed skulls, soon gives way to ratty old videotape of the designer in his pre-Givenchy days, punning on “haute couture” and looking more like a hired hand than like one of the most influential designers of the late twentieth century. The contrast arguably makes for an easy rhetorical move and a reductive treatment of a mercurial man. But in McQueen’s case, the clichéd approach to the departed artist as a divided self–a schlubby guy who made impossible clothes for people who might never have been in his orbit in another life–feels appropriate and true, and marks a fair introduction to the equal attention the filmmakers pay to Lee, the unassuming and devoted family member, friend, learner, and tailor, and McQueen, the image-maker who channelled his own dark history and mental-health struggles into his creations.