A ‘talking heads’ documentary can be a bit of a chore when it’s your 33rd film of a festival but the subject matter in Sébastien Lifshitz’s heartfelt documentary keeps you engaged.
Continue readingCasa Susanna (2022)
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Four Daughters (Les Filles d’Olfa) (2023)
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This is one of the most heartfelt and inventive documentaries I ever remember seeing.
Continue readingThe Eternal Memory (2023)
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Maite Alberdi allows us to travel back-and-forth through the life of writer Augusto Góngora. Part of the documentation and reconciliation after Chile’s fascist junta, his own memories are now scattering with Alzheimer’s.
Continue readingPictures of Ghosts (Retratos Fantasmas) (2023)
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Kleber Mendonça Filho takes us on a slow, self referential meander through his home suburb of Recife in Brazil and the history of its cinemas.
Continue readingLe Spectre de Boko Haram (2023)
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Children are the same everywhere, except the ones living in a Cameroon civil war zone tell stories of people being blown up and make art and drawings about tanks and guns.
Continue readingParadise (Paradis) (2023)
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A couple of cinematic hours in a remote, Siberian village is never a bad thing. I still remember the exquisite Ága (2018), an intensely beautiful exploration of silence and subsistence that immersed you in a life that seems far removed from what we think of as Russian culture.
Continue readingIt’s Only Life After All (2023)
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My heart was full after spending two hours with Amy Ray and Emily Saliers a.k.a. the Indigo Girls.
Continue readingHello Dankness (2022)
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Time Bomb Y2K (2022)
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The Carnival (2023)
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Isabel Darling’s The Carnival reminded me of a particular ilk of great Australian documentary storytelling, like Maya Newell’s Gayby Baby (2015) and In My Blood it Runs (2019) and Justine Moyle’s Tall Poppy (2021). The storytellers find a subject or a family who seem absolutely ordinary and build a rapport that allows them to tell the story of how they are extraordinary.
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