documentary
There are no shortage of docs that explore underworlds and subcultures most of us have hardly considered, if we knew they existed at all. These sorts of films, which have been a hallmark of the modern documentary since Salesman and feature subjects as varied as those of Paris is Burning and Murderball, serve both to reveal what is unique about adherents of a particular subculture as well as communicate how they have the same hopes and dreams as everyone else. The new documentary Tickled is no exception, but it flips the idea on its ear.
I first saw My Brief Eternity at the Wales International Documentary Festival, and such was its impact on me that after meeting the director Clare Sturges, and after writing up the festival itself, I resolved to review it so that others would come to know of it. The short documentary is a joint project between Maggie’s and Brightest Films, the former being a cancer charity, the latter Sturges’ production company. The film is about the Welsh artist; Osi Rhys Osmond.
Varda Bar-Kar’s latest documentary Big Voice follows the lives of a Santa Monica school choir over the course of a year, under the instruction of their inspirational yet no-nonsense teacher. Mr Huls, teacher extraordinaire, is an intriguing character – full of passion and with motivation to make the choir bigger and better than ever before. Whilst Mr Huls is certainly the driving force in the documentary, it is Bar-Kar’s interviews with the students which are arguably most interesting.
Chantal Akerman is a unique director whose minimalist compositions have earned her a reputation as one of cinema’s foremost screen artists. Best known for her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Akerman’s body of non-fiction work stands out with deliberately punctuated documentaries, giving the term “fly on the wall” new meaning. While Akerman’s body of work is varied, her vision of melding reality and fantasy are sometimes indistinguishable, and this omnibus of her work shines a light on an omniscient eye for capturing the world around us.
We know that the hemp plant has been used in production of products since at least the 1600s. Up until the 1930s, marijuana was legal, used, and widely accepted. In the 1930s, with the onset of the great depression and American paranoia, “reefer madness” propaganda started to sprout up, as a huge anti-marijuana prohibition came underway.
This year saw the very first Wales International Documentary Festival, which ran from 12th-14th May in the valleys of South Wales. Blackwood, to be more specific, north of Cardiff, and the home of the band Manic Street Preachers, the boxer Joe Calzaghe and the Dream Alliance race horse syndicate. They are, in fact, the very reason why the WIDF has found its home here.
On the surface, what the medical industry should be doing is simple: saving and improving lives. All possibilities should be explored and tested, with the breakthroughs made readily available to anyone who needs it.
I was on holiday with two of my closest friends last week. Amidst the flow of beer, the puffing of cigarettes and the non-stop giggling, the conversation turned to our grandmothers. We talked about how our grandmothers had grown up in such a different time to ourselves, how we are (as women) afforded things that our grandmothers would never have been.
I love a good documentary, more than that I love a good mystery. While documentaries such as The Wolfpack have great stories, it’s the films that delve into the depths of the truth that really shine through for me. Finding Vivian Maier and Carol Morley’s Dreams Of A Life excel at this.
Aside from sports bloopers, a few Hemingway novels and stock footage I don’t know much about bullfighting. Common sense dictates that provoking a bull to charge you to stab it going to be dangerous, and there’s bound to be a daredevil mentality to being a matador. With that rudimentary knowledge, it felt like Gored would provide some insight into bullfighting, the cultural identity of matadors, and the passion of its subject.
Searching For Hell is an international exploration of infernal places around the world, with a loose but entertaining concept of what hell is. In five segments, the audience visits the site of the deepest recorded excavation into the earth in Serbia, the tourist town of Hell, Michigan, a house designed to reconstruct the Buddhist conception of hell according to tenth-century writer Ojoyoshu, the toxic sulphur mines of Indonesia, and the chaotic capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each vignette has its own style, varying from the carnivalesque to the dialectic to the observational, and the decision to release the documentary online through the Virtual Reality Cinema (VRC) app Cineveo can only add to its dreamlike, haunting quality.
Ryan and Amy are sitting nervously on a sofa in a nondescript room. A doctor addresses them, “Mr and Mrs Green, I’m sorry, it’s not good news”. The doctor continues to tell them that their one year old son’s chemotherapy has not worked.
A fatal flaw runs through many conversations about gender issues: they narrowly focus on women. The problem largely stems from comfort, as that is how the battle has been framed for decades.
If you’ve ever wondered what inclusive cinema looks like, you should watch Becoming Bulletproof. Michael Barnett’s documentary captures the filming of a Western, called “Bulletproof,” starring performers with different abilities. Among the cast are people who struggle with impediments to speech and mobility, and working with their different needs creates an unique atmosphere behind the scenes.
The old is boring and the new is exciting; right or wrong, that’s just how our brains our wired. So when something is in danger of becoming not just old but extinct, it’s only natural that they would seek to extend their longevity by latching onto something new. We could be witnessing an extinction event for one such aging institution, the daily newspaper.