Reviews - Page 130

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

Review: ‘Sunday Beauty Queen’

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Sunday Beauty Queen (Hong Kong, Philippines, Japan. 95 minutes) Dir: Baby Ruth Villarama Programme: World Showcase (Canadian Premiere)   On Sundays in Hong Kong, many Filipino domestic workers enjoy preparing and staging beauty pageants. What initially seems like a quirky subculture turns out to be a more substantial subject in Sunday Beauty Queen, a big-hearted documentary from Filipino director Baby Ruth Villarama. At the end of a first pageant we see onscreen, when the embroidered gown has been packed and the mauve lipstick wiped off, one of the contestants misses her Sunday night curfew. Promptly fired by her employer, she

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Review: ‘The Challenge’

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The Challenge (France/Italy 70 minutes) Dir Yuri Ancarini Programme: Magnificent Obsessions (Canadian Premiere)   Decadence has rarely looked as gorgeous as it does in The Challenge, Italian video artist and filmmaker Yuri Ancarini’s film, which is nominally about a falconry contest among the super-wealthy sheikhs in the world’s wealthiest per capita country, Quatar. Though the main contest is about whose bird can kill a pigeon better, the film is really a portrait of a state of consciousness held by wealthy young men in white robes and checkered scarves, indulging in games of speed, colour and spectacle against a vast canvas

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Review: ‘About My Liberty’

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About My Liberty (Japan, 165 minutes) Dir. Takahashi Nishihara) By Liam Lacey   In 2015 and 2016, Japan witnessed the biggest student protest movement since the 1960s. The cause was a bill by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party that would allow Japan, for the first time since the country’s surrender in 1945, to send troops to foreign countries. Director Takahash Nishibara’s film focuses on one organisation, Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALD). SEALDs’ leaders, in their early twenties, include two young men, Aki Okuda, Yoshimas Ushida and the one woman, Mana Shibata, well-read, media-savvy activists who carefully

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Review: ‘Maison du Bonheur’

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Maison du Bonheur (Canada, 64 min.) Dir. Sofia Bohdanowicz Programme: World Showcase (North American Premiere)   Taking a trip to Paris, director Sofia Bohdanowicz visits with Juliane Sellam, the grandmother of a colleague, for her second feature film Maison du Bonheur. Sellam, a 77-year old astrologer who has lived in her lovely Montmartre home for half a century, shares with us her everyday life. Intimately capturing Sellam’s enchanting storytelling as well as her charming daily routine, Maison du Bonheur is as much an idiosyncratic portrait of Sellam as it is a personal journey for Bohdanowicz as creator. The film is

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Review: ‘Gilbert’

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Gilbert (USA, 96 min.) Dir. Neil Berkeley Programme: Special Presentations (International Premiere)   Gilbert Gottfried has been compared to Lenny Bruce because like Lenny, he is a taboo-breaking, absurdity puncturing stand-up comic, whose most outrageous gags have landed him in deep shit. There was the 9/11 joke that prompted someone in the audience at a Friar’s Club Hugh Hefner roast to shout, “Too soon!” More recently his Japanese Tsunami tweets lost him a lucrative gig voicing the Aflac Insurance company duck mascot. After that catastrophe, his manager told him, “I don’t think you should be asking about pay rates anymore.”

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Review: ’69 Minutes of 86 Days’

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69 Minutes of 86 Days (Norway, 71 minutes) Dir: Egil Håskjold Larsen Programme: International Spectrum. (North American Premiere)   The most emblematic photograph of the Syrian war to date was that of the corpse of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, drowned on the Mediterranean beach in September 2015, after his refugee family’s third attempt to reach the Greek island of Kos. Norwegian director Egil Haskjold Larsen’s 69 Minutes of 86 Days begins on the Greek shoreline in what feels like an alternative history. It’s the story of another three-year-old refugee, this time a girl named Lean, who sets out with her parents

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Review: ‘A Cambodian Spring’

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A Cambodian Spring (UK, 121 minutes) Dir. Chris Kelly Programme: International Spectrum (World Premiere)   A visceral, complex film that should come with a “For further study” list, A Cambodian Spring was made over six years by the Irish, London-based filmmaker, Chris Kelly. This unavoidably complicated examination of Cambodia in the new millennium involves the authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen, runaway development, police violence, corruption, land claims, overlapping anti-government movements and the return of an exiled politician, culminating in the 2013 mass protests of the “Cambodian spring” of the title. Kelly’s original idea, eclipsed by later events, focused on local

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Review: ‘The Force’

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The Force (USA, 93 min.) Dir. Peter Nicks Programme: World Showcase (Canadian Premiere)   It’s often easy for verité filmmakers to become so precious about their technique that they lose track of the narrative, allowing formal purity to come at the expense of content. So it’s refreshing to see that with The Force, the filmmakers were wise enough to capture the smallest details with surveillance-like precision, never losing focus as the situations for their participants changed. As a look at contemporary law enforcement reform, The Force is a precise and focussed work that surveys the much maligned Oakland Police department

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Review: ‘Quest’

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Quest (USA, 107 min.) Dir. Jonathan Olshefski Programme: World Showcase (International Premiere)   Quest may be one of the most important films about the American experience ever filmed. A wonderful, captivating portrayal of a family, which spans the time from Obama’s inauguration through to the election of Trump, the film manages to be both epic and intimate, offering a story that’s highly specific to a small community yet breathtakingly universal in its scope. Christopher “Quest” Rainey’s day job is as a newspaper delivery man, throwing papers with the prowess of a professional ball player. His self-built recording studio is home

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Review: ‘I Am Another You’

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I Am Another You (USA, 85 min.) dir. Nanfu Wang Programme: International Spectrum (International Premiere)   I Am Another You is an intricately layered, visually seductive exploration of the longing for absolute freedom, the thin white line between vision and madness, and director Nanfu Wang’s search for her own identity via her main character. Having moved from China to New York, travel-loving Wang hits the road for Florida where she meets Dylan, who quickly becomes the subject of this film and an ongoing obsession. He fascinates her with his philosophy of unconditional freedom and craving for all forms of human

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