Reviews - Page 142

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

(Pictured: Kedi / Blue Ice Docs)

‘Life Without Basketball’ Puts Representation on the Court

Life Without Basketball (USA, 98 min.) Dir. Jon Mercer, Tim O’Donnell Life Without Basketball puts a new spin on the phrase “right to play.” The inspiring doc, which screens at TIFF’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival, gives audiences a glimpse into the everyday pleasures of which one can be stripped simply for one’s beliefs. For a six-foot white guy like myself, hitting the basketball court and casually shooting hoops while growing up was a privilege I never had to consider; for a young Muslim-American woman like Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, for whom basketball was her life and dream, the love of the game

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Different Brainwaves: ‘The Divided Brain’

The Divided Brain (Canada, 78 min.) Dir. Manfred Becker The world, like the brain, is split between the left and the right. Left-wingers favour democracy and progress, while the folks on the Right tend to be more about numbers and bureaucracy. In the brain, however, things are reversed: the left hemisphere favours the analytical while the right hemisphere offers a creative drive. Science, colloquially speaking, says that a fine balance between both sides of the brain is good for a person’s cognitive skills, development, and self-expression. The same goes for politics with checks, balances, disagreement, and dialogue. Dr. Iain McGlichrist

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Looking Outside the Box: ‘No Box for Me’

No Box for Me. An Intersex Story (France/Switzerland, 58 min.) Dir. Floriane Devigne “Dearest Deborah, my shell is cracking before my eyes…You exist. We exist. He, she, and shes exist and it absolutely isn’t a big deal…” This correspondence marks the breakthrough moment for intersex person M at the conclusion of No Box For Me. An Intersex Story. Part of the 16th annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival, the beautifully composed and engaging film directed by Floriane Devigne brings together M and Deborah, two intersex people, as they seek to understand their bodies and explore their identities. Their journey reveals both

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‘The Invisibles’ Brings the Past to Life

The Invisibles: We Want to Live (Germany, 110 min.) Dir. Claus Räfle Past, present, fact, and fiction weave an effective collage in The Invisibles. This powerful doc-drama hybrid tells the story of the 1700-odd German Jews who disappeared beneath the surface of Berlin and survived for years, long after Joseph Goebbels declared the city “free of Jews” in 1943. The Invisibles thrusts audiences into the lives of four of these survivors—Cioma Schönhaus, Hanni Lévy, Ruth Arndt, and Eugen Friede—as they escape the Nazi death camps by going undercover and blending into the action of everyday Berlin thanks to the help of some German

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‘Blue Notes’ Hits a High Note

Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes (Switzerland, 85 min.) Dir. Sophie Huber Featuring: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Norah Jones, Don Was, Lou Donaldson, Robert Glasper, Michael Cuscuna, Rudy van Gelder, Ambrose Akinmusire, Terrace Martin, Kendrick Scott, Alfred Lion, Francis (Frank) Woolf, Monk, Coltrane. It’s one of the truisms of jazz that it has been best appreciated in Europe and Japan, and not in its racially charged homeland, the United States. So it isn’t a surprise that a lovely film tribute to the American jazz record label Blue Note would be created by the Swiss documentarian Sophie Huber. With Blue Note Records:

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Home Cooked Documentary: Aube Giroux’s ‘Modified’

Modified (Canada, 44 min.) Dir. Aube Giroux Ten years and many emails to bureaucrats later, Aube Giroux’s Modified is available for all of Canada to see. The doc’s journey, Giroux tells us in voiceover, began as a seedling planted by her mother, Jali, when the Aube was just a little girl. As the director tells audiences in Modified’s intimate narration, Mme. Giroux taught her kids to savour the natural wonders of the Earth. The film introduces viewers to the Giroux family’s home garden where scrumptious fruits, veggies, and other healthy things were at their disposal on a seasonal basis. Giroux describes how her mother

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Winogrand and the Women

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Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable (USA, 90 min.) Dir. Sasha Waters Freyer There’s a photograph by the street-wise photo artist Garry Winogrand that haunts me. In the photo, six women are sitting on a park bench, framed by two men, one African-American and the other, older and reading a paper. The young black man is engaged in a serious discussion with the woman sitting next to him. She’s wearing sunglasses and gesticulating towards him, making what must be an important point. Beside her are three women: the first is whispering to the woman next to her while the third

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Review: ‘The Little Prince’

Invisible Essence: The Little Prince (Canada, 90 min.) Dir. Charles Officer What turns certain books into classics? Scott Fitzgerald wrote some fine novels and many terrific short stories but it’s The Great Gatsby we return to read again and again. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is clearly the product of the same novelist as Sense and Sensibility but which is the overwhelming favourite? If you have the time, you can easily read all of J.D. Salinger’s work but the only one you have to encounter in your life is The Catcher in the Rye. So it is with the vast majority of writers including the very gifted

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‘Panama Papers’ Spotlights Truth Tellers in a Dark Age

The Panama Papers (USA, 97 min.) Dir. Alex Winter Alex Winter is quickly becoming a master of something one could call the techno-thriller documentary. After the Napster doc Downloaded (2013) and the true crime caper Deep Web (2015), comes another quickly paced, slickly assembled, and tech savvy film about the world 2.0. The Panama Paper offers a deep dive into one of the most seismic leaks in world history. It will have audiences feeling maddened and motivated. Perhaps outmatched only by the whistleblowing of Edward Snowden, and whatever bomb is ticking in the Mueller report, the story in The Panama Papers relays how governments were toppled and titans

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