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Review: Prodigal Sons

Reviewer: Erin Donovan Rating (out of 5): ****½

In 2005, Kimberly Reed documented her first trip back to her hometown of Helena, Montana after moving away 20 years prior. The impetus is a high school reunion, but Reed's nervousness about returning to her small town roots goes beyond the typical teenage angst laid on top of mid-life anxieties. During the long separation, in the years since Reed graduated high school, she transitioned from male to female and has actively avoided seeing anyone from her "Paul" years.

But her former classmates provide nary an ounce of coastal schadenfreude. While word has certainly gotten around that the former star high school quarterback is now a lipstick lesbian living in Manhattan, most of her former classmates find the transgender issue a fairly dull one. One woman laments, "None of us are who we thought we'd be when we were 18." Another cracks a joke about 'lady drivers' when discussing Paul's driving habits back in the day.

Blog entry 07/14/2010 - 10:47am
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Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

By Kevin B. Lee and Keith Uhlich

John Gianvito spent much of the '90s burning through credit cards to produce and direct The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, a multi-layered critique of the First Iraq War. Though mostly neglected upon its release, in hindsight it is one of the most relevant films to describe the political and psychic traumas of this decade. Financially and emotionally exhausted by the endeavor, Gianvito planned a more modest follow-up, a short film inspired by Howard Zinn's populist study A People's History of the United States. That project evolved into Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, an hour-long feature guided by a deceptively simple premise: a chronological tour of the gravesites of victims of social oppression as well as the activists who stood up for their rights.

The steady procession of historical narrative (as told by the tombstones), graced by a soundtrack consisting of the ambient surroundings, transforms vérité documentary into a hypnotic aesthetic that combines a meditation on nature, remembrances of past heroic struggles to better the lives of others, and a stirring call to carry their legacy into the present. These three themes permeate the following interview with Gianvito, conducted by Kevin B. Lee and Keith Uhlich at the film's 2007 Toronto Film Festival premiere.

Blog entry 05/05/2009 - 4:28pm
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Gonzalo Arijon: "It's About Miracles"

Gonzalo Arijon By David D'Arcy

"Because the story has already been told in Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, the 1974 best seller by Piers Paul Read, and retold in its 1993 screen adaptation starring Ethan Hawke, why again?" asks Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The short answer is that in [Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains], all 16 of the survivors, now middle-aged, tell the story in their own words." And Salon's Andrew O'Hehir finds the resulting film "intimate, terrifying and positively riveting... One way of explaining Stranded is that [director Gonzalo] Arijon's after not just the objective facts of what happened and when, which are dramatic enough, but also the subjective reality, the psychological and physiological desolation of the experience."

David D'Arcy talks with Arijon about why he's retelling a well-known tale.

Stranded is now out on DVD.

Blog entry 04/28/2009 - 12:34am
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A Drowning Nation: An interview with Trouble the Water directors

 By John Esther

Trouble the Water [trailer] looks deep and hard at America before, during and after Hurricane Katrina led to the flooding of New Orleans and, in particular, the Bush Administration's typical gross incompetence in responding to the catastrophes.

Directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, the film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary category this past year. "Save for some righteous indignation at the close," wrote Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, "Trouble the Water makes its points without didacticism. [The film] ebbs and flows like great drama."

A producer who has worked with Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11), Martin Scorsese, Bob Dylan and others, Trouble the Water is Lessin's feature debut. A co-producer on Fahrenheit 9/11, Deal's other credits include being an archivist for Bowling for Columbine, God Grew Tired of Us and Murderball. The film premieres on HBO Thursday, April 23, before making its debut on DVD this summer from Zeitgeist Films.

In this exclusive interview, John Esther spoke to Deal and Lessin about Trouble the Water.

Blog entry 04/21/2009 - 8:39am
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Best Documentaries of 2008

Best Documentaries of '08

by Erin Donovan

FLOW: For Love of Water - Irena Salina's directorial debut examines the privatization and potential crisis of a worldwide water crisis with a brilliant amount of breadth and depth. Most surprisingly of all, this is one of the most inspiring and hopeful documentaries of the year.

Up the Yangtze - Equal parts heart-wrenching coming of age tale and geopolitical expose, Yung Chang's directorial debut follows two teenagers working on the Farewell Cruiseship lines giving westerners tours of the rural villages that would soon be (and now have been) engulfed by the Three Gorges Dam project. [Jeffrey Anderson's review >>]

Blog entry 12/30/2008 - 2:26pm
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Tara Wray's Doc-in-Progress

(Updated Note: Wray's documentary was not only finished but released and is now out on DVD. We're proud to say we both have the DVD and were following the film since long before it was finished. -- ed. 11/14/08 )

By David Hudson

Tara Wray had been writing stories and editing a literary journal when she decided one story would be best told as a film. Working with co-producer Michel Negroponte and a grant from the Anthony Radziwill Documentary Fund, she's now tackling her troubled relationship with her mother. David Hudson talks to her about Manhattan, Kansas.

Page 11/14/2008 - 3:00pm
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Benson Lee: "Fug film school, Make a documentary!"

bensonleer.jpg By Cathleen Rountree

"Planet B-Boy considers the international resurgence of breakdancing and closely follows five of the most prominent teams from Korea, Japan, France, and the US as they prepare for the annual Battle of the Year (aka the 'World Cup' of b-boying) at its home base in Braunschweig, Germany, which is attended by 10,000 spectators."

Cathleen Rountree talked with director Benson Lee.  The film is now out on DVD.

Blog entry 11/10/2008 - 2:43pm
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Uncounted DVD Contest!

uncounted GreenCine's Erin Donovan called the documentary Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections "a timely doc...diligently researched and deeply passionate," and in the Salem Monthly Shawn Estes wrote called the film "a horror movie - not in the Freddy Krueger way, but about how our country's democracy is in jeopardy." Adds DocumentaryFilms.net, Uncounted is "information dense and utterly shocking...Regarding this documentary simply as preaching to the choir is a disservice." And now, thanks to Earnhardt-Pirkle/Uncounted The Movie and GreenCine, we're giving you an opportunity to win the movie on DVD -- each copy signed by the filmmakers! - if you're one of the five lucky winners of our giveaway.

To enter, email contest@greencine.com and include your name, email address, mailing address, and, if you're a GreenCine member, your username in the email, and "Uncounted" in the subject header. Entries without all this information will not be considered. (You will not be added to a mailing list!). 5 winners will be selected at random from all valid entries. The deadline to enter is November 1st (just in time for election day). Winners will be notified by e-mail and announced in future editions of the GreenCine Dispatch newsletter.

Win the film, and then invite your friends over to watch it with you.

Blog entry 10/17/2008 - 3:12pm
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Errol Morris: "The Photographs Actually Hide Things From Us"

Errol MorrisBy Sean Axmaker

"This is a very complex, convoluted story on so many, many different levels," Errol Morris tells Sean Axmaker. "I think it is, in many ways, a story about American women in the military. I think that's one of the things about the photographs that made the photographs particularly strange, particularly appalling, particularly perverse. I've often imagined, when [Charles] Graner was taking those pictures, of his 90-some-odd pound, twenty-year-old girlfriend, holding that leash on that the prisoner known as Gus, he was in some very deep sense reenacting American foreign policy."

Standard Operating Procedure is now out on DVD.

Blog entry 10/13/2008 - 4:29am
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Uncounted: Timely doc - will it happen again?

Reviewer: Erin Donovan

Rating (out of 5): ***½ uncounted

On last Sunday's episode of This Week with George Stephanopoulos, reporter Katrina vanden Heuvel mentioned during the journalists' roundtable that a lack of polling place preparedness could sway the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and she was nearly laughed off the stage. I repeat, the very notion of compromised voting eight years after the supreme court appointed a president and just four years after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (in a joint decision with Congress) deemed it necessary to send international observers to monitor our elections for the first time, was immediately discarded by a group of prominent political writers from the most widely read news sources in the country. It's possible there's never been a clearer illustration of the mainstream media's apathy to question status quo that has served us so well for the last several years. This void has left a public more primed than ever for the chaos and clumsiness of blogs, talk radio and agit prop documentaries.

A popular misnomer about documentaries is that they are objective, or somehow at their best when they are striving to be objective. But documentaries are meant to communicate ideas and that is most easily borne from a strong point of view (though preferably one with a curious mind). Or in the case of Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, a very strong sense of outrage.

Blog entry 10/08/2008 - 1:24pm
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