Reviews - Page 83

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

Reel Asian Review: ‘Jeronimo’

Jeronimo (USA/Cuba/Korea, 100 min.) Dir. Joseph Juhn A personal holiday inspires a collective portrait in Joseph Juhn’s Jeronimo. The adventure begins when the filmmaker, a second-generation Korean American, embarks on a trip to Cuba. He lands in the small Latin-American island, eager to soak up the sun and get some R&R, but is immediately struck by the presence of his taxi driver, the first person he sees upon leaving the airport. She’s Korean. The driver, Patricia, explains to Juhn that she’s a third-generation Korean-Cuban. Juhn benefits greatly from Patricia’s gift for gab and soaks up her family history as she tours

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Reel Asian Review: ‘Love Boat: Taiwan’

Love Boat: Taiwan (Taiwan/USA, 60 min.) Dir. Valerie Soe In 1967, the government of Taiwan created a particularly interesting program to bring second-generation Chinese and Taiwanese young people from around the world back to Taiwan for a six-week cultural immersion program—the Overseas Compatriot Youth Formosa Study Tour, better known, for reasons later revealed, as the Love Boat. In Love Boat: Taiwan, Valerie Soe, a Love Boat alumna herself, details the history of the tour. She paints a multifaceted picture of an establishment that is well-know among diasporic Taiwanese communities, but has yet to be documented for all audiences to see. The

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‘A Kandahar Away’: What’s in a name?

A Kandahar Away is a film that evolves as you watch it. Turning the camera onto her own family, Aisha Jamal’s documentary starts with a dinner. Here, we are introduced to her brothers Shaker and Nasser, sisters Gina and Hasina, mother Amina and father Abdul. Abdul and Amina, refugees from Afghanistan, brought their family to Canada, where they have now settled in Toronto. For the first time in over 10 years, the family plans to take a trip together—to Kandahar, Saskatchewan, where Abdul has bought plots of land for each of his family members. The film starts as a quirky family vacation.

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imagineNATIVE Review: ‘One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk’

One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Canada, 113 min.) Dir. Zacharias Kunuk One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk is a comedy of manners that is no laughing matter. The latest film from Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Maliglutit) sees Inuit-settler relationships humorously and tragically lost in translation. The film observes Noah Piugattuk (Apayata Kotierk) as he leads members of his community both young and old on the seal hunt his ancestors enjoyed. But when a white man interrupts the clan’s merriment on a mission to persuade Noah to move to a settlement in Igloolik, Kunuk realizes an

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Conviction: Orange is clearly not the new black

Conviction (Canada, 78 min.) Dir. Ariella Pahlke, Nance Ackerman, and Teresa MacInnes Three filmmakers invite four incarcerated women and one female guard to collaborate on a documentary. Powerful haikus, slams and drawings are shared and a lot of tears are shed. Convicting a society instead of its citizens, Ariella Pahlke, Nance Ackerman, and Teresa MacInnes gave all these women a voice in their new documentary Conviction. The outcome is an admirable collective and participatory endeavour, resolutely choosing community over punishment. Orange is clearly not the new black. Bianca, Treena, Caitlin and Laura tell us about the structural lack of help and

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PiF Review: ‘When Tomatoes Met Wagner’

When Tomatoes Met Wagner (Greece, 72 min.) Dir. Marianna Economou One can happily report that the fruits of When Tomatoes Met Wagner are certified fresh. This sure-fire crowd-pleaser from director Marianna Economou should appeal to fans of this year’s sleeper hit The Biggest Little Farm. Tomatoes, like Farm, invites audiences to witness the toils of hard-working hands that tend to the fields that feed us. When Tomatoes Met Wagner is Greece’s official submission in the Oscar race for Best International Feature–one of few docs in contention–and it has its Toronto debut at this year’s Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival before hitting Hollywood with its savoury goodies. The film

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Maureen Judge Captures the Lives of Young Women in ’17 and Life Doesn’t Wait’

17 and Life Doesn’t Wait (Canada, 80 min.) Dir. Maureen Judge Women’s lives are full of myths and symbols. Whore? Saint? Amazon? Wife? Witch? Princess? Yet women’s actual lives feel nothing like the stereotypes. Maureen Judge has devoted her career to holding up a mirror so that we can see what our lives are actually like. Her distinguished body of work, mostly in collaboration with TVO (TV Ontario), has covered weddings (Unveiled: The Mother Daughter Relationship), aging parents (Mom’s Home), and children moving back home (In My Parents’ Basement), among other real-world situations. Growing up has been of recent interest. My Millennial Life looked

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Audrey’s Archival Adventures Continue with ‘MS Slavic 7’

MS Slavic 7 (Canada, 64 min.) Dir. Sofia Bohdanowicz, Deragh Campbell Audrey Benac’s adventures in the archives continue with MS Slavic 7. After being thwarted by limited user time and bad egg sandwiches in Veslemøy’s Song, Benac is back browsing through the stacks. Played again by Deragh Campbell, the character explores another aspect of writer/director Sofia Bohdanowicz’s family history. It’s not Bohdanowicz’s first time twisting her family’s past into fiction. The filmmaker previously loaned her grandmother, Joan Benac, and her grandfather’s music teacher Kathleen Parlow, to Audrey’s soul-searching in Never Eat Alone and Veslemøy’s Song, respectively. One can’t help but enjoy the film as her

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NYFF Review: ‘College Behind Bars’

College Behind Bars (USA, 222 min.) Dir. Lynn Novick The first hour of Lynn Novick’s four-part documentary series College Behind Bars plays out pretty much how one would expect this story to be told. [The four-part work screens in a single feature presentation at the New York Film Festival.] We meet a series of incarcerated individuals in a number of New York State correctional facilities who are enrolled in the Bard Prisoner Initiative (BPI). Ostensibly a free college education for those behind bars, BPI is set up for a disparate group of individuals who have traded sweeping floors or laundry duty for book studies.

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VIFF Review: ‘Symphony in Aquamarine’

Symphony in Aquamarine (Canada, 78 min.) Dir. Dan Popa Boats of all kinds are the preferred vehicle for Dan Popa’s poetic composition Symphony in Aquamarine, the first solo documentary feature of the young Quebecois with Romanian roots. After travelling by car (Taxi pour Deux, 2012) and by plane (Île et Aile, 2014), we are now invited to embark on a maritime journey. On a kayak or on a cargo ship, the film roams international waters from the Black Sea to the Arctic (and back) in four movements. While Popa offers some factual information by means of a recurring Romanian radio broadcast

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