Reviews - Page 106

Giving you our points of view on the latest docs in release and on the circuit.

Review: ‘Mental’

Mental (Japan/USA, 135 min.) Dir: Kazuhiro Soda Programme: Kazuhiro Soda: Making Images Speak Near the end of his 2008 doc Mental, Kazuhiro Soda gets questioned by one of the psychiatric patients he’s interviewing. The man, a schizophrenic, who like many of the other patients in the film, shows clarity of mind that contradicts stereotypes about the mentally ill. The man asks Soda if his movie has a theme. What’s his point? Simply and directly, the filmmaker tells the guy what he’s up to. No blah blah and folderol. There’s a curtain over the world of the mentally ill, Soda says, and

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Review: ‘I Think You’ve Been Looking for Me’

I Think You’ve Been Looking for Me (Canada, 44 min.) Dir. Kacim Steets Family is an endless source of inspiration for documentary filmmakers. While these wild-but-true yarns can often be too personal for their own good, they can, if revealed carefully, tap into part of the collective consciousness and extend the story beyond one family circle. I Think You’ve Been Looking for Me, directed by Kacim Steets and produced by Frederic Bohbot (whose short The Lady in Number 6 won an Oscar), unravels a revelation within the director’s family that raises multiple questions about the bonds between parents and their children. It’s a

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Review: ‘The Waldheim Waltz’

The Waldheim Waltz (Austria, 93 min.) Dir: Ruth Beckermann Programme: Special Presentations If Donald Trump had been US president when the Kurt Waldheim scandal erupted in the 1980s, he would have ignored public evidence (and confidential CIA reports) that Waldheim lied about his Nazi affiliations during the war. “Kurt is a good man,” Trump would have said. “He told me three times he was innocent. Fake news!” Beckermann’s film, Austria’s Best Foreign Language Film entry for the 2019 Oscars, shows Waldheim implying that he was being persecuted by the media, under the spell of the World Jewish Congress. The WJC had unearthed convincing evidence

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Review: ‘Hale County This Morning, This Evening’

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (USA 76 min.) Dir: RaMell Ross Programme: International Feature Competition ReMell Ross sums up his poetic meditation on black life in small town Alabama when we hear Billie Holiday singing over the end credits: “We lived our little drama/And stars fell on Alabama last night.” A large format photographer and basketball coach, Ross’s film is constructed entirely of mostly small dramas, and even mundane moments that are never explained, with heightened images of the sun, moon, and stars. Whether the characters are pounding across a basketball court, jumping up and down, getting a painful nose-piercing,

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Review: ‘Memory is Our Homeland’

Memory Is Our Homeland (Canada/Poland 90 min.) Dir: Jonathan Durand Programme: The State of the World At this point in the 21st century, as the horrific details of past and present atrocities accumulate like a metastasizing disease, you’ve got to wonder exactly what demons in human beings, especially the powerful, prod them to torture, enslave, and eliminate people, and do it as if it were perfectly normal. Jonathan Durand’s film is a personal view of a catastrophe that most people know little about. During World War 2, Poland got hit by a double whammy: both the Russians and the Nazis

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Review: ‘A Sister’s Song’

A Sister’s Song (Canada, Israel 80 minutes) Dir: Danae Elon Programme: Canadian Feature Competition Danae Elon’s visually sensitive doc plays like a dramatic feature. It unfolds with scenes so intimate, you can imagine that the two main characters are probably engaging in psychodrama for the camera. They are Russian-born Israelis Tatiana and Marina, sisters who have been out of touch since Tatiana became a Greek Orthodox nun. Her passion for the religion was ignited when Marina, researching a school project, asked Tatiana to join her on a visit to a Jerusalem monastery. That was back in the 1990s. Marina now

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Review: ‘The Apollo of Gaza’

The Apollo of Gaza (Switzerland/Canada, 78 minutes) Dir: Nicolas Wadimoff Programme: Artifice Co-produced by the NFB, The Apollo of Gaza recalls Orson Welles’s documentary F for Fake in its mesmerized exploration of the blurred lines between reality and fantasy, truth and con game. Director Nicolas Wadimoff begins his convoluted, intriguingly unresolvable story on a beach in Gaza. We meet a fisherman who in August 2013 found what appeared to be a submerged statue of Apollo, God of the Arts and Poetry. At first, he was frightened that he was seeing a drowned man. Eventually, he and several other men struggled to get the statue out

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Review: ‘Of Fathers and Sons’

Of Fathers and Sons (Germany, Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, 99 minutes) Dir: Takal Derki Programme: International Feature Competition A powerfully disturbing film, Of Fathers and Sons transports you into the daily lives of a Syrian al-Qaeda family. Given the doc’s intimacy and its revelations about its subjects, you wonder how Takal Derki, posing as a pro-Jihadist filmmaker, won over Abu Osama, leader of al-Qaeda’s Al-Nusra Front. Then again, for Abu Osama, his comrades, and eight sons, violence, war and death that seem shocking to outsiders are just plain normal down in their bleak, arid world. An affiliate of al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra is a hard-core

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Review: ‘The Woman Who Loves Giraffes’

The Woman who loves Giraffes By Marc Glassman Alison Reid, director In 1956, Anne Innis Dagg, a 23-year-old Torontonian, went where no female, or male biologist, had ever gone before—-to study the behaviour of giraffes in the wilds of South Africa. The determined young woman, who is truly Canada’s Jane Goodall and has shown a life-long fascination with giraffes, succeeded in convincing a farmer near South Africa’s acclaimed Kruger National Park to allow her to stay in his home in exchange for clerical services. It took Anne Innis Dagg a number of weeks to convince Matthew, the farmer, to let

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Review: ‘New Homeland’

New Homeland (USA, 93 min.) Dir. Barbara Kopple Check the Twitter feed for stories about migration and the USA, and the results are dire. Sensationalized and politicized accounts of a caravan rising up from Latin America to the USA border, for example, portray immigrants as a faceless tidal wave threatening the homeland. Ditto stories of refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East: to Trump and company, they’re all agents of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban. These deeply troubling accounts miss the greater story that behind each person arriving to a new homeland is a tale of courage, survival, and resilience. Thankfully, director Barbara Kopple didn’t receive

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