Reviews - Page 86

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

Ostrov – Lost Island Review: A Community Adrift

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Winner of this year’s Best International Feature Documentary Award at Hot Docs, Ostrov – Lost Island is a stark portrait of a community abandoned. The film visits the titular island in the Caspian Sea where a few remaining inhabitants cling to hope following the collapse of the USSR and the commercial fishing that sustained them. Approximately fifty people remain on the island, which lacks electricity, infrastructure, and virtually any legal means of making a living. As one elderly resident says while the villages toast the bygone days when black caviar extraction let the community prosper, “We used to eat like

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Nike’s Big Bet Review: Sports Doc Is Dope

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At what point does flexing the rules bend towards cheating? This question motivates the energetic sports doping doc Nike’s Big Bet. Directed by Paul Kemp, the doc should prove especially engaging for fans of the Oscar-winning Icarus, about the Olympics doping scandal, as well as viewers keen to navigate the complicated grey areas of sponsorship, branding, and ethics. The film examines the case of Alberto Salazar, a runner turned star trainer who shepherded many runners to Olympic glory until he received a four-year doping ban in 2019. This news shocked the sports world and ended Nike’s famed Oregon Project that

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The Crime of the Century Review: A towering examination of the Opioid Crisis

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We all know that way too many people have died from overdosing on supposedly legal drugs, but have you looked at the numbers lately? In Alex Gibney’s brilliant new investigative series The Crime of the Century, the stats confront us at the film’s end. 487,842 Americans have died from overdosing on OxyContin, Fentanyl and related substances and it’s estimated that over 10 million are misusing drugs. In Canada, it’s estimated that 20,000 Canadians have died from apparent opioid-related overdoses since 2016—smaller but still deadly numbers. Working with the investigative unit of the Washington Post, which might now become as renowned

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I’m Wanita Review: Hot Mess Hits a High Note

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Wanita Bahtiyar is one hot mess. The Australian honky tonk singer aims to hit the restart button on a stillborn musical career. Her comeback fuels the offbeat, entertaining, and consistently surprising documentary I’m Wanita. The singer, who goes simply by Wanita professionally, explains that her love for country tunes began she first heard Loretta Lynn and Glenn Miller albums twanging through the speakers as a child. She credits Lynn as her true inspiration and the “Coal Miner’s Daughter” singer has obvious influence on Wanita’s style and voice. As director Matthew Walker chronicles Wanita’s quest to breakout in the USA, and

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The Return: Life After ISIS Review – Or, the Fog of War

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Superficially, every war is binary in its construction. There is one side versus another, a dialectic of destruction where one side claims the moral high ground. Rules of engagement are often based on pragmatism rather than what’s right, especially against an enemy that claims to fight not merely for political purposes, but also for holy struggle. Alba Sotorra Clua’s The Return deftly navigates the border between these divides. It focussed on a group of women who have survived the battles of ISIS and found themselves in limbo living in a camp in Kurdish controlled Syria. The title of the film

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No Hay Caminio Review: Heddy Honigmann’s Strength

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Trust one of the Netherland’s true auteurs, Heddy Honigmann, to create a film title that works both as a life philosophy and a primer for documentary making. A Peruvian Jew by birth who has become an integral member of Holland’s film community, Honigmann has made two countries her home at various times in her life and knows that “there is no path” to success. Rather, it’s through trusting your instincts and improvising in the moment that one can film a great scene or have a significant interaction with anyone, whether a friend or someone you’ve just met. As she says

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Her Socialist Smile Review: Framing Helen Keller Anew

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It’s hard to believe how famous Helen Keller was during her life. She was a medical miracle: a deaf and blind woman who learned how to communicate so well that she enrolled at Radcliffe College (then the female section of Harvard) and excelled there. Keller became the first deafblind person to graduate a college anywhere in the world. She was, to say the least, one of the best “good news” stories of the early 20th century, when progress in science, industry and education was extolled everywhere. Keller became a symbol of that forward thinking, which so informed the U.S. in

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