In 2009, filmmakers Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell presented Until the Light Takes Us, an enlightening – excuse the pun – exploration of Norway’s black metal movement, a scene that picked up steam in the 90s and became inundated with controversy surrounding church burnings, murders and satanic posturing.
Shot using multiple unmanned digital cameras on an Atlantic Ocean fishing trawler, Leviathan plunges us directly into the ship’s chaotic machinery, revealing a dissonant, alien world. The latest collaborative work from anthropologists and filmmakers, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, is a profoundly original documentary and a staggering, hallucinatory piece of cinema. There is no narration and no interviews; from the outset, we are thrust unaided and disorientated into the cacophony, bombarded with anarchic point-of-view shots and haunting, discordant sounds.
Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic Directed by Marina Zenovich Written by Marina Zenovich and Chris A. Peterson 2013, USA For fans of legendary comedian Richard Pryor, eight years removed from his death in 2005 is as ripe a time as any for a thorough cinematic retrospective. The task falls to Marina Zenovich, following up documentary Roman Polanski: …
Filmmaker Mark Donne took to the stage of the East End Film Festival Opening Gala to reassert an unabashed love for his country, inadvertently echoing author JK Rowling’s previous definition of a patriot as someone who gives back to their nation, invests in its potential and favours those less fortunate. The villains of his documentary and opening film The UK Gold do not abide by this compassionate idiom, nor do they care to defend or justify their actions. Rejected outright by the tax avoiders whom he deigned to document, Donne instead took his camera to the likes of Channel 4’s Jon Snow, Private Eye’s Richard Books and UK Uncut’s Danielle Paffard, to have them chronologically chart the spiralling calamity of tax avoidance and its far-reaching consequences.
Drako Oho Zahar Zahar is an enigma of sorts, having survived two comas, two nervous breakdowns and two suicide attempts, emerging on the other side with his life intact yet his mind forever shattered into uncollected fragments. This documentary’s ostensibly crude title, The Man Whose Mind Exploded, refers to the destructive effect Drako’s comas have had on his memory. Each day he awakens, vaguely aware of who he is, where he is, though uncertain of what may have come before.
In his latest project, Mark Cousins treats us to a broad and sweeping analysis of the ways in which children are captured in film. His starting point is a candid home video of his young niece and nephew, Laura and Ben, playing in his Edinburgh flat, which enables him to identify some of the archetypal representations of children in film. It takes the form of a personal cine-essay, using spontaneous connections and free association to build affinities between the most disparate of films and work towards a kind of conclusion. Drawing on extracts from 53 films from around the world, Cousins proves once again to be a knowledgeable and insightful commentator, a true cinephile of extraordinary scope.
Simon Ennis’s Lunarcy! is an affectionate, knowing documentary that looks at a diverse group of individuals who share an obsession with the moon. The star of the piece is Christopher Carson, whose enterprise, The Luna Project, is aimed at kick-starting the process of moon colonisation. Armed with the slogan, Luna City or Bust!, he travels to science fiction conventions, high schools – anywhere he might find a disproportionate number of geeks – spreading the word and raising money to get his project off the ground. If this was a dramatic film, he would have to be played by a young Jeffrey Combs – he has that combination of weird wit and obscure intelligence – but is a lot more self-aware than he initially appears.
How can a documentary ever satisfactorily tell us the truth? No matter what the topic of debate is, how can the filmmakers relay to us the supposed truth of a situation without any form of bias or creative control poking through? Hell, what is truth? Yes, such heady philosophical notions and questions are present in each moment of Sarah Polley’s newest film Stories We Tell, a documentary of sorts, in that it’s structured around real lives and real people.
We’re cast right into the clanging of metal and the harsh winds of the North Atlantic. Though ostensibly advertised as an immersive look into the commercial fishing industry, our viewing lens is at first murky and dim. This sort of visceral thrust is at once foreign and familiar, a transporting non-linear journey keen on the laborious modes of living at sea.
It’s quite reassuring that despite living in such a fast paced, busy and prioritized world that seems to have waved a thin
If there is one thing human beings have mastered, it’s thinking about the future. Theologians, affianced lovers, political theorists, social revolutionaries, TV franchise creators, actuaries and bankers all have that fundamental activity in common. Whether we are entertaining sweeping changes on a global scale, or merely wondering about our own prospects for retirement, we cannot help but beam mental images onto the blank screen of what’s to come.
Recently screened at the Birds Eye Film Festival (a London festival dedicated to showcasing films by female screenwriters and directors), El Gusto, Safinez Bousbia’s first work in film sounds like a miracle by its sheer existence- a chance encounter in an antiques shop in Algiers’ Casbah inspired Bousbia to trace the destinies of the musicians who used to make up one of Algiers’ pre-independence chaâbi music orchestras, learning film-making in the process, going bankrupt, getting cancer, getting more funding, completing the film in 8 years, and undertaking a sold-out tour with the reunited orchestra, now in their 80s and 90s.
Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines Directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan USA, 2012 Though its namesake is derived from perhaps the most famous of super-powered fiction females, Wonder Women goes beyond just looking at the development of comic book heroines, examining female role models and revolutionary characters in television and film. In looking at …
The Jeffrey Dahmer Files Directed by Chris James Thompson Written by Chris James Thompson and Andrew Swant 2012, USA The opening frames of The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, which linger on fish swimming in an aquarium as Jeffrey Dahmer (Andrew Swant) admires them, suggest this film isn’t like the other documentaries. And in many ways it is …
5 Broken Cameras Written by Guy Davidi Directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi 2011, Occupied Palestinian Territory/Israel/France/Netherlands, imdb, RIDM I walked into the RIDM screening for 5 Broken Cameras with trepidations and I walked out with questions: trepidations about the subject of the documentary and the way that it was filmed; questions about human nature …
Waiting for Lightning Directed by Jacob Rosenberg Written by Bret Anthony Johnston USA, 2012 Waiting for Lightning represents a war, a struggle of duality in documentary form. This 90-minute look at the life of skateboarder Danny Way and his insane but inspiring attempt to skateboard across and over the Great Wall of China, at its …
[callout] The Imposter Directed by Bart Layton [/callout] [quote by=”Josh Spiegel”] Your mind play tricks on you all the time. You’re presented with a clear-cut fact, something that is immutably true, and you doubt it. You wake up in the middle of the night, but your mind convinces you that you’ve had a full night’s …
Once considered by many as either high art, propaganda or educational videos, documentary film has developed into a popular and visible form of entertainment, sometimes breaking into the mainstream, and often having a greater effect on society. Every year it seems more and more docs are produced and thus not even our hard working staff …
Meaning of Robots Written and directed by Matt Lenski USA, 2011, imdb, RIDM My favourite film of Montreal’s International Documentary Film Festival, RIDM, so far is a poetic four minute film about an obscure New York film miniature builder and animator named Michael Sullivan. Sullivan’s New York city studio apartment looks like the before picture …
The Flat Directed by Arnon Goldfinger Written by Arnon Goldfinger Israel and Germany, 2011 Curiosity can easily be a curse. No matter what you’re so interested in, the message we get from modern popular culture is that, somehow, we’re better off not knowing the full truth. So why even ask the questions? You may think …
The Rencontres internationales du documentaires de Montreal (RIDM) was founded in 1998 and every year since has highlighted the very best documentaries from Canada and around the world. With a special focus on documentaries that really test boundary between fiction and reality, while presenting singular and personal perspectives that might change our view of the world around …
West Of Memphis Directed by Amy Berg With Peter Jackson, Henry Rollins, Eddie Vedder In 1993 the small town of West Memphis in Arkansas was rocked by the horrific triple murder of three eight year old boys. Stripped naked, trussed and bound, one of them had been subjected to a severe sexual assault before being beaten …
Room 237 Directed by Rodney Ascher With Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns It’s inevitable really. Whenever you get a gaggle of film fanatics together soon the impenetrable argot of a celluloid subculture will come to the fore, with fiery debates on the merits of diagetic sound or Academy ratios, dolly zooms and chiaroscuro lighting …