Results tagged “documentary”

With the endless parade of legal dramas, small claims reality shows, and an entire network devoted solely to the wheels of justice, it's understandable if you've hit the point of fatigue for any sort of filmed courtroom experience. Improbably, director Joe Berlinger actually brings something new to the table in Crude, which looks at a long-running, multi-billion dollar class action suit involving 30,000 residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon on one side, and oil giant Chevron on the other. The residents claim that Chevron (actually, Texaco, whose legal liability Chevron assumed when they purchased the company) left millions of barrels of oil sitting in pits all along the villages lining the Amazon, contaminating the land and the water, and causing outbreaks of cancer, birth defects, and horrific skin conditions. The environmental impact is estimated to be many times that of the Exxon Valdez spill.

When Michael Moore went looking for funding for his newest film, he claims he told the studio that it would be a kind of sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11, the director's most financially successful film to date. They handed over the cash, and he turned around and made a film that has little to do with that anti-Bush polemic, that is instead unapologetic about biting the corporate hands that feed him. That doesn't mean that Capitalism: A Love Story isn't a sequel, though. It's just that its direct antecedent is Moore's debut (and arguably still his best), Roger & Me, which was released 20 years ago this December.

Imagine for a moment that you're sitting in your rather modestly sized one bedroom apartment. Now imagine being in that space and being surrounded by over 4000 paintings, sculptures, and other pieces of modern art. So much art, in fact, stacked in every corner, to the ceilings, in every conceivable space, that when you donate it to one of the largest museums in the country, they don't have room to accept it all. The art itself may be Minimalist, but there's nothing minimal about that mental picture.

Most of America only really knows two things about Marion Barry: he was once the District of Columbia's mayor, and he seemingly can't stay out of trouble with the law. With yesterday's HBO premiere of the new documentary, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, it's likely that many people have gained a broader sense of who Barry was and what he once represented for the District. But even with the additional context provided by the film, it's less likely that all that many people will become more sympathetic to the aging local politico and his persistent troubles.

The new documentary by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer about D.C.'s own Mayor for Life, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, premieres on HBO tonight at 9 p.m. DCist caught the film when it debuted at SILVERDOCS earlier this summer, and overall the reviews have been a mixed bag. Critics already familiar with Barry and his lengthy history wanted more, while others were pretty much satisfied. You can be the judge for yourself tonight, if you've got access to HBO.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Did you know that Lyme Disease affects Americans at a rate possibly as high as 10 times that of AIDS? Did you know that the test recommended by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) to diagnose Lyme misses it 3/4ths of the time? Or that in areas of the country where infectious deer ticks are closest to the population — like nearby Loudoun County — entire households are often afflicted? Or that it can and does result in death? All of these facts are covered in Andy Abrahams Wilson's new documentary, Under Our Skin. But simply raising awareness of these and other facts isn't the point of the film — what concerns Wilson more greatly is why there is so little public discussion of the most common vector-borne disease in the country, and why the disease has become so politicized and controversial.

There is a pool that sits by the ocean in Sea Point, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. Like most public pools, it is a place where a diverse cross-section of the community come together to relax and to play. Unlike many other locations, however, South Africa is a place where the concept of "coming together" is still taking some getting used to.

AJ Schnack returned to SILVERDOCS last night with the world premiere screening of his latest, Convention. Schnack received the festival's Cinematic Vision Award a few years back for his About a Boy, an elegiac tribute to Kurt Cobain featuring taped interviews with the singer combined with filmed images of the places where he lived and grew up. It was an acquired taste as a film, but even its detractors couldn't deny it's simple beauty. For his latest feature, though, Schnack was required to take a far more journalistic approach, as he set out to cover the behind-the-scenes workings of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Anyone who's ever spent time cleaning up after others knows it's a thankless job. Add to that the stigma attached and the tendency of people to look down their noses at anyone who's ever had to be elbow deep in a public toilet for a paycheck, and it's easy to assume that custodians do what they do because they can't do anything else. As one custodian in Patrick Shen's The Philosopher Kings sadly tells it, some people just stop talking to you when they find out what she does. Another tells of how some people won't even respond if he speaks to them while working.

There's a screening tonight at SILVERDOCS of Brett Gaylor's RiP: A Remix Manifesto, and another on Saturday night. It's a must see film, and you should try to get out to the festival to check it out, but don't sweat it if you can't make it. You can always just download it. No need to go combing through torrent sites looking for a decent copy, though. You can download it directly from the filmmaker. If you want to pay him, great. You name the price. If not? That's cool, too. And if you want to re-cut his footage and post your edit online, or contribute original material to next year's planned 2.0 release, go right ahead. All of this is the point of the film: creativity, ideas, and media need not be controlled by the few; it belongs to us all. And copyright law needs to be rebuilt so that it serves its original purpose: to encourage creativity, not restrict it.

A cynic might be a little saddened that the newfound freedoms of the Afghan people are manifesting themselves in their adoption of a segment of our pop culture as disposable as American Idol. But Afghan Star, the documentary about the analogous Afghan television show of the same name, shows that in a different context, that show's format can be seen as evidence of a people's liberation.

Worlds collided at last night's SILVERDOCS opening screening and after-party. While someone like Ira Glass might qualify as a mega-star personal appearance for the documentary aficionados that make up the festival's core audience, last night brought star power of a completely different sort, as basketball phenom LeBron James (and entourage) showed up for last night’s screening of More Than a Game. The film documents the domination James and his teammates (collectively, the Fab 5) held over the world of high school basketball in the early '00s. Excited fans lined the red carpet for James' arrival, and the Blair High School marching band even performed inside the theater. After the screening, the band led everyone across the street to the Discovery building for the after-party, at which local rapper Wale performed to a largely dance-resistant crowd. When a DJ later tried to whip the crowd into a party mood by asking if anyone wanted to hear some go-go, he was largely met with blank stares. Not even a choice Backyard Band track could get those bodies moving.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Kirby Dick likes making movies about secrets. In his last documentary, This Film is Not Yet Rated, the director went on a quest to determine the identities of the MPAA ratings board, a secret the Motion Picture Association guards closely. In the process, he provided a shrewd examination of the unfair practices of that committee, and, more generally, of American attitudes towards sex, violence, drug use, and language in our entertainment. His latest film, Outrage similarly attempts to cast light on people seeking to remain in the dark, in this case the dark of the closet.

The AFI-Discovery Channel SILVERDOCS Documentary Festival will close out its 2009 run with a film chronicling the life of times of D.C.'s own Marion "Mayor for Life" Barry, festival organizers announced today. The world premiere of The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, by filmmakers Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer, is set for Saturday, June 20 at the AFI Silver, and is billed thusly:

Many people remember Marion Barry as the philandering drug-using mayor of the nation's capital, who was famously caught in a 1990 FBI sting operation. Yet others know him as a folk hero, a civil rights champion and defender of the poor. Barry’s soaring achievements, catastrophic failures and phoenix-like rebirths have made him a symbol of mythic indestructibility. Who is Marion Barry, really? A hero? A scoundrel? Why is he such a polarizing force? And why do people still vote for him?

Tia Lessin's path to her first feature documentary as a director started right here in Washington D.C., and carried her through production duties on some of the biggest profile documentary projects of the past decade, including three Michael Moore films (and his TV series), and Martin Scorcese's Dylan doc, No Direction Home. With her co-director Carl Deal, she has created one of the definitive documents of the impact of Hurricane Katrina, told through one young couple who attempted to weather the storm in the Lower Ninth Ward before being forced to flee on the rising waters. Trouble the Water was a particular highlight of the films we saw at this year's SILVERDOCS documentary festival earlier this summer, and the film is opening today for a brief run here in D.C. at the Landmark E Street Cinema, where Lessin and Deal will be on hand at a number of screenings this weekend. Tia Lessin answered a few questions for DCist about her experiences making the film.

No roads may lead to Antarctica, but all longitude lines do. It's these lines that the continent's few residents have followed, from wherever they started, to their shared terminus at the bottom of the planet, stepping, as one resident puts it, "off the edge of the map." Werner Herzog has made a career out of films based on characters on the margins. Some are real, some are imagined, but nearly all of them are obsessives with tenuous grips on sanity and singular fascinations with often fantastical quests. It is inevitable, then, that Herzog's career would end up taking him to a continent where nearly every inhabitant is the potential star of a Herzog film. Where every character has quite intentionally gone to the margins and then over it.

It sounds like — if you’ll pardon the expression — something out of a movie: Junior Middleweight Champion fighter Kassim “The Dream” Ouma escapes the darkest of pasts to find his way from Africa to America, arrives penniless and unable to speak English, and within a year he’s a professional fighter with a surrogate family, money in his pockets, and a smile on his face that makes you like him before you know anything about him.

At the outset of Lost Holiday, a charming, funny, and almost unintentionally political documentary out of the Czech Republic, director Lucie Králová rather cheekily declares the film, via the opening credits, to be a "detective documentary." It's a touch that borders on precious, and a tone that continues in the often wry intertitles that mark time throughout the "investigation" that is the film's subject. What they're trying to detect are the identities of six men who they know only through photographs. A man that Králová meets through an art project in which she was involved happened upon a suitcase in a dumpster in a run-down neighborhood near Sweden's Göteberg airport. Inside there was nothing but a plastic bag containing 22 rolls of undeveloped film. He had them processed, and found himself with over 700 photos of six Asian men on what appeared to be a holiday throughout Scandinavia. What Králová wanted to know is if it's possible, in the interconnected world we now live in, to track down these men based solely on what they can glean from their photographs.

“I want war. I don’t want peace,” says German armored-car merchant Fidelis Cloer at the beginning of Bulletproof Salesman. An hour later, in the doc’s final moments, he offers a slightly more nuanced view, pointing out that he did nothing at all to instigate or sustain the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan than have proved such a windfall for his company. As he puts it, Coca-Cola and Burger King have been doing good business in Iraq, too. “The difference is, we do not have to create demand for our product,” he observes.

Director Alex Gibney (who we interviewed earlier this year) is making a mounting case for a future legacy as the first great documentarian of the 21st century. Hot on the heels of his incisive investigations into the collapse of a major corporation and the collapse of America's wartime moral compass, Gibney has switched gears. Rather than going after an entity whose misdeeds he feels are in dire need of being exposed, he has made what will likely be seen as the definitive filmed biography of the life of someone who was similarly dedicated to exposing the sleaze of the evildoers: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

With the recent cinematic dramatizations of the life of Che Guevara, from his early days as a road tripping med student in the excellent The Motorcycle Diaries to Steven Soderbergh's lengthy version of his revolutionary years in the four and a half hour biopic that just premiered at Cannes, an unusual perspective was obviously necessary to any documentary version of his story to keep it from seeming stale or overly academic in comparison. And the makers of Chevolution have done just that, constructing a history of the man that not only succeeds in avoiding either blind lionization or reactionary condemnation, but also looks at him with the lens through which we most often see him. Literally.

Director Alex Gibney was recently nominated for his second consecutive Academy Award for his documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side. Gibney has a history of scathing documentaries investigating corporate and government wrongdoing. His previous film (also nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, examined the shocking levels of corruption at the top of one of America's largest corporations that ultimately led to its downfall, and before that he adapted Christopher Hitchens' damning profile, The Trial of Henry Kissinger for Eugene Jarecki's 2002 documentary. With Taxi, the director takes on the United States' interrogation policy, and the allegations of systematic torture that have been leveled at the Bush Administration in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the deaths of numerous detainees during the course of the war on terror.