Reviews - Page 94

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

A Black Jesus Review: Faith in Humanity

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Director Luca Lucchesi’s documentary opens with two men, both African refugees in Italy, walking along the beach, discussing a paradoxical phenomenon of the town where they are temporary guests. “In this town there is a statue of a Black Jesus,” one says. “The funny thing is that the locals don’t like the Black people, but they love this Black Jesus.” The town is Siculiana, on the Italian island of Sicily, and the refugees, several hundred of them, are staying in an old hotel, which has been converted into a centre for refugees from Ghana. Some of the townspeople are involved

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Welcome to Spain Review: Spotlight on Refugees’ Stories

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Spain, often a first stop for refugees entering Europe, is a country that offers an officially welcoming message to refugees that’s at odds with its relatively low acceptance of new immigrants. Director Juan Antonio Moreno Amador’s film is less concerned with the political contradictions than in the refugee’s stories. The film’s most distinctive feature is Amador’s jaunty voice-over narration which echoes advertising pitches to Spanish tourists. The centre of the story is a hostel in Seville, a former fancy brothel in the historic, tourist-friendly neighbourhood of Torreblanca, where the residents’ tales form a traveller’s anthology, like The Decameron or The

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All-In Review: Identity at a Crossroads

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At the beginning of the Turkish tourist season, Ismael and Hakan, two young men from small villages are taken on as apprentices at a Mediterranean all-inclusive hotel. In their first Human Resources interviews, Ishmael, 18, shy and gentle, says his goal is to send money back home to his family. Hakan, in his mid-twenties, says he believes the work will help him overcome his social anxiety and provide him a gateway to his real desire: To emigrate to America and make movies. For both of them, it’s their first real job. The Human Resources manager at the hotel sees himself

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Magaluf Ghost Town Review: Documenting Debauchery

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In the past decade, online videos and tabloid photos of binge-drinking Brits getting “mortal” during their Easter and summer breaks in Spain have made having fun look alarmingly like the aftermath of a war. Too often, we see half-naked unconscious bodies lying on the streets in the sun and ever popular viral videos of public sex games while also reading annual reports of injuries and deaths of drunks attempting to balcony dive into swimming pools. The resort town of Magaluf (slangily called “Shagaluf”), on the island of Majorca off Spain’s east coast, has been struggling to reform its sleazy image,

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La Madrina Review: A Survivor’s Savage Story

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Some characters lead lives that demand to be celebrated and commemorated on film and Lorine Padilla, is surely one of them. The Puerto Rican-American “Madrina” (Godmother) of Raquel Cepeda’s La Madrina: The Savage Life of Lorine Padilla (winner of the audience award at last year’s DOC NYC festival), has led a complicated life: A former “First Lady” of The Savage Skulls gang, a spiritual counsellor, abuse survivor and spirited community activist, who is now in her sixties, she recounts her battles with frankness and salty insight. From the start, Padilla seems to have been built for drama. As a child,

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Tiny Tim: King for a Day Review – A Different Drummer

The list of one-hit wonders in music contains artists with many popular songs. Lou Bega got audiences shaking with “Mambo No. 5” and Donna Lewis dethroned Celine Dion from the top of the charts with “I Love You Always Forever” before fading into obscurity. Perhaps second only to Vanilla Ice in the world of one-hit wonders, however, is Tiny Tim. The eccentric man with the signature falsetto is immortalized in his nasally pitched hit “Tip Toe Through the Tulips.” Tiny Tim: King for a Day profiles the late artist to celebrate his uniqueness and eccentricity. The doc is a quirky

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Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide Review – Pop’s Art

If Boomer nostalgia music docs were the rage of 2018, 2019, and 2020, then New York street artist bios are the doc fad of 2021. On the heels of Martha: A Picture Story and Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker comes Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide. It’s a rollicking portrait of the NYC pop artist. The doc is cut from the cloth of poppy profile docs, although any bleary-eyed doc fan trying to keep pace with the truly insane volume of film releases these days could easily mistake it for the other two. Martha Cooper and her photography actually appear in

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Chinatown Rising Review: Housing Problems and Community Advocates

The recent shooting in Atlanta, Georgia that claimed the lives of eight people at a spa has brought renewed attention to anti-Asian racism. These acts, which range from micro-aggressions to violent hate crimes, are not new—they were sadly normalised by the previous White House administration amid the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the long overdue racial reckoning inspired in response to the murder of George Floyd and ensuring resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer, attention to the systemic discrimination that Asian-Americans and Asian-Canadians face has been relatively muted until now—even since the tragic events of March. The history of

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Nomadland Review: The Drama of the Open Road

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Much of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland simply observes actress Frances McDormand as Fern, a woman travelling the USA in search of seasonal work, in conversation with fellow nomads. These mobile-home-dwelling workers, or “workampers” as they call themselves, are not professional actors like McDormand. They’re genuine workampers enacting the drama of their lives. Their stories inform the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, on which Zhao bases her film. Workampers like Linda May and Charlotte Swankie tell their stories in Nomadland once again, but this time to McDormand. The two-time Oscar winning actress delivers a masterfully understated

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