Reviews - Page 141

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

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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Review: ‘Next of Kin’

Next of Kin (Canada, 44 min.) Dir. Nadine Pequeneza Witness some astonishing sleuthing in Next of Kin. This CBC Docs POV work from director Nadine Pequeneza (The Invisible Heart) goes to the front lines of family services as two social workers play Sherlock Holmes. Next of Kin follows Jackie Winger and Amanda Elam, two employees of the non-profit organization RAFT (Resource Association For Teens) in St. Catharines, Ontario as they use creative thinking and expert problem solving with hopes of reuniting families. They aren’t cracking crimes or chasing down bad guys: they’re digging through archives and following clues to save lives. Pequeneza packs a lot of information into 44

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Review: ‘Dolphin Man’

Dolphin Man (Canada/Greece, 77 min.) Dir. Lefteris Charitos “I am like an animal,” says Jacques Mayol. “I live intensely in the moment.” Late free diver Jacques Mayol was hardly the first person to compare himself to an animal, and he will not be the last. Mayol’s story is one of the sea, a journey through the depths of human endeavour as director Lefteris Charitos portrays the diver’s intense love for the ocean. Many characters in Dolphin Man refer to Mayol as “the French Dolphin” and few people share such close affinity with non-human animals. Mayol’s only equals might be Jane Goodall with

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Review: ‘The Raft’

The Raft (Denmark/Sweden/USA, 97 min.) Dir. Marcus Lindeen Would the world be a better place if we just put all the men on a raft and sent them off to sea? Maybe, although The Raft makes a fair case that sending certain men seaward might afford them some necessary perspective. This unique documentary by Marcus Lindeen, which won the top prize at CPH:DOX earlier this year, offers a fascinating study in the dynamics of power and control, particularly as they pertain to gender. The film reflects upon a controversial 1973 experiment by Spanish-Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés in which five men and six women

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