Category: Documentary

By Joe Bendel. The Mosuo people are considered somewhat exotic in China, but that is a decidedly mixed blessing. Their traditional matriarchal way of life is slipping away, but there are opportunities to perform in Tibetan themed bars and dancehalls – at least for the pretty ones. This again is a dramatically mixed blessing. When the impact of the global financial crisis forces the siblings to return home from Beijing, they start to rethink their long term plans in Marlo Poras’s The Mosuo Sisters, which screens during the proceeding-as-scheduled DOC NYC 2012.

Juma and Latso’s Himalayan Village is close to exactly nowhere. Returning home after their employer shutters her Beijing bar is an arduous, depressing journey. For Latso, the younger sister, it is a particularly bitter pill to swallow. Having enrolled in an accounting class, she had hoped to support her family with a more professional career. Now she is returning, knowing full well it will be difficult to leave again. Indeed, it is Juma, the superior earner who is sent out (this time for Chengdu), while her mother keeps her home to work on their hardscrabble farm.

One hopes the sisters will reap some benefit from Poras’s film, especially if it airs on public television. After production wrapped, their village was shook by an earthquake, which leveled their family’s home. Currently living in tents according to the film’s Facebook page, their family could use some of those Kickstarter funds.

Even before disaster struck, the year and a half Poras spent with the sisters dramatically illustrates Socialist China’s vast economic inequalities. Being an ethnic minority is also a dubious distinction for the sisters; it is considered intriguing, but often for the wrong reasons, to the wrong people. For instance, Juma must often endure misconceptions about Mosuo “Walking Marriages.” Roughly, those are procreative arrangements, in which the wife and husband live in their mothers’ households, but jointly raise their children during evenings spent together. Often deliberately misunderstood as an institution fostering promiscuity, they are anything but.

Of course, the status of China’s ethnic minorities has always been rather tenuous, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. However, Poras keeps the focus exclusively on the sisters’ here and now. Blessed with natural screen presence, viewers will definitely root for them. They might be from the middle of nowhere, but they are not bumpkins. In fact, they are quite intelligent and extremely sensitive. Yet the way they evolve and mature over this period of time is surprising.

While not even covered in the film’s post-script, the current condition of the sisters’ family speaks volumes about the nature of the Chinese government. We witness first-hand how unabashed gangsters thrive in a city like Chengdu, but education is practically a luxury. Poras’s frequent shots of Chairman Mao’s portrait staring down on the proceedings add an unmistakable layer of irony to their difficult struggle for survival.

A number of unvarnished documentaries addressing China’s social ills have been released internationally in recent years, but Mosuo Sisters has a somewhat different angle. It captures a vanishing culture and features two primary POV figures who completely win over audience sympathies. Strongly recommended, particularly for China watchers, Mosuo Sisters screens this Saturday (11/10) at the IFC Center. If you go, also bring some cash in case they pass the hat for the sisters’ family. Consider it a helping hand extended from one disaster area to another.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on November 5th, 2012 at 9:35am.

By Joe Bendel. They debuted under the baton of Arturo Toscanini and often worked with guest maestro Leonard Bernstein. Founded as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) is one of the world’s most prestigious orchestras. Yet their founding members were very nearly caught up in the tragedy of the Holocaust. Bronisław Huberman’s tireless efforts to save Europe’s most accomplished and at-risk Jewish musicians – and the subsequent creation of Israel’s national symphony – are documented in Josh Aronson’s Orchestra of Exiles, which opens this Friday in New York.

Huberman was a child prodigy who played around the world. Yet he was also a politically aware Zionist, who had no illusions about the state of Europe in the early 1930’s. Obviously, the colonial territory the British called Palestine held great significance for him. For years, Jewish immigrants had come there, hoping to realize the Zionist dream home by home. However, the British occupiers halted Jewish immigration in response to Arab riots at a time when it was most needed.

Hoping to establish a symphony for the yet to be recognized nation, Huberman doggedly attempted to work around the various restrictions imposed by the British. Indeed, much of his heroics involved the paper-chase for this or that travel document. There was an important goal in sight: as a principled anti-Fascist, Toscanini had agreed to conduct their premiere performances.

Exiles captures the spirit of a certain group of people at a certain point of time for whom life and art were intrinsically intertwined. Indeed, the founding of the Symphony was critically important for the early émigrés, who dearly missed the refined culture of pre-war Europe. Aronson maintains an appropriately respectful tone throughout, but he stages a number of unnecessary dramatic recreations. For the most part, they are not very dramatic – aside from Alex Ansty’s agreeable appearance as the larger than life Toscanini.

With helpful context provided by an elite cast of interview subjects, including Itzhak Perlman, Indian-born IPO conductor and music director Zubin Mehta, and the Grammy Award-winning Joshua Bell (who currently performs on Huberman’s Stradivarius), Exiles is classy and authoritative. Regrettably, it comes at a time when the civilized world is becoming less civilized. Just over a year ago, an IPO performance in London was disrupted by extremists who were never prosecuted, partly due to the Royal Albert Hall’s refusal to pursue trespass charges (bad show, chaps). While conventional in its approach, Orchestra of Exiles is an elegant and informative film. Recommended for classical music connoisseurs and those who want (or need) a fuller appreciation of Israeli cultural history, it opens this Friday (10/19) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on October 23rd, 2012 at 10:43am.

By Joe Bendel. Freedom and democracy are not the same things, but they tend to go together. Democracy advocates in Venezuela, Malaysia, Egypt, Zimbabwe, and the Ukraine understand only too well how their repressive regimes use rigged elections to legitimize their rule. Largely informed by the writings of Hoover Institute fellow Larry Diamond and the expelled Prince Moulay Hicham of Morocco, Emmy-winning filmmaker Ben Moses follows the struggle for free and fair democracies in all five countries throughout A Whisper to a Roar, which opens this Friday in New York.

Whisper uses an animated fable as a framing device that illustrates how the corrupting influence of power makes today’s hero tomorrow’s despot. Indeed, Hosni Mubarak might have been popular immediately after the Sadat assassination and the freshly “re-elected” Hugo Chavez might have been legitimately elected originally, but that was then. Up until the Arab Spring, elections in Egypt never involved alternative candidates. They were simply an up or down referendum on retaining Mubarak. Likewise, Chavez has rigged the Venezuelan electoral system through the mother of all gerrymandering and forcibly silenced the independent press.

Probably nobody interviewed in Roar has paid a higher price for their advocacy than former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who was twice arrested and tried on trumped-up sodomy charges, a transparent attempt to make him socially radioactive in a country where Islam is the official state religion. Yet, Malaysia seems to be one of the two countries that have made the most progress towards democratic reform, along with Zimbabwe.

When longtime dictator Robert Mugabe finally agreed to share power with reformist Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai it represented a dramatic victory for the opposition. However, that victory came at a high cost, after militias loyal to Mugabe systematically beat and killed supporters of Tsvangirai’s party across the country. Mugabe’s cynical land reform proposals, clearly intended to stoke racial resentment, also offer a textbook example of how dictators resort to demagoguery to hold onto power.

Most frustrating is the case of Ukraine, where Viktor Yushchenko survived a poisoning attempt to lead the Orange Revolution, temporarily sweeping the neo-Soviet government out of office. Unfortunately, divisions within the Orange coalition opened the door for the old regime’s return in the next election, fair and square. As journalist turned opposition deputy Andriy Shevchenko trenchantly observes, winning freedoms is an arduous process, but surrendering them is quick and easy.

While Roar obviously has an agenda, it is one that just about all people of good conscience will buy into. It features some valuable on-camera interviews with prominent world figures, including Yushchenko, Tsvangirai, and Ibrahim, as well as boots on the ground activists, such as Roberto Patiño in Venezuela. Even the animated transitions, narrated by Alfred Molina, are rendered with more style than you might expect.

The only problem with Roar is hardly Moses’ fault. Each of these stories is still very much developing. Despite hopeful signs in Zimbabwe and Malaysia, Venezuela has only gotten worse, while the Ukraine has taken one step forward and then one step back, whereas Egypt remains an open question. As a result the five strands do not parallel each other very well and none has a satisfying sense of closure. Of course, Moses and his colleagues would surely like nothing better than to produce happy epilogues for each country, for reasons beyond the cinematic. As things stand, they interwove their stories rather well.

Informative and remarkably even-handed, A Whisper to a Roar is a very watchable status report on the state of undemocratic democracy. Recommended fairly highly for general news junkies and those particularly interested in any of the five subject countries, Roar opens this Friday (10/12) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on October 8th, 2012 at 2:22pm.

By Joe Bendel. They collaborated on some of the least romantic films ever (see Hour of the Wolf, for instance). Yet Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann became the first couple of international art cinema. The Swedish auteur’s romance with his Norwegian muse would not last, but their relationship continued to evolve and endure. Ullmann reflects on each stage of her career-defining association with Bergman in Dheeraj Akolkar’s Liv & Ingmar, which screens as part of the 50th New York Film Festival’s Cinema Reflected sidebar.

What a difference a few years and a more northern latitude make. Whereas Ingrid Bergman was pilloried for leaving her husband to take up with Roberto Rossellini, Ullmann essentially did the same thing with Bergman, but with no attendant outrage from the world press. As she tells it, she was widely encouraged by friends to do so. Indeed, the film is entirely presented from Ullmann’s perspective, relying almost entirely on her narration and extended interview sequences to tell their story.

Nevertheless, there is no score settling in L&I. Even after the dissolution of their intimate cohabitation, the legends of Scandinavian cinema remained on good terms, eventually becoming the closest of friends. There is definitely a lesson in that, especially if you think documentary crews will one day be interviewing your former lovers. However, it might not make the most compelling viewing.

Ullmann still offers some insight into the dark places manifested in Bergman’s films, but that is about as far as the film goes. As a result, L&I is permeated with a fatal sense of respectability. Granted, nobody wants or needs to see a great filmmaker like Bergman trashed by an ex. The fact that he and Ullmann continued to mean so much to each other is quite touching and nearly the extent of the film’s takeaway.

Scenes of Ullmann revisiting Bergman’s Fårö Island home give the documentary a vivid sense of place and there are plenty of tellingly illustrative clips from their films. L&I is quite a heartfelt tribute, but as a work of cinema in its own right it is hardly essential (though it is an interesting film to see in conjunction with Francesco Patierno’s thematically related War of the Volcanoes, also screening during this year’s NYFF). Mostly recommended for dedicated Bergman and Ullmann admirers, Liv & Ingmar screens this coming Monday (10/1) and Tuesday the 10th during the 2012 New York Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on September 28th, 2012 at 1:21pm.

By Joe Bendel. To his colleagues, Chick Webb was a musicians’ musician. For dancers, he was their bandleader of choice. Yet, the man who drove the Savoy’s house band is not as widely recognized alongside the Dukes and Counts of jazz royalty as he ought to be. Surviving friends and fans help rectify that in Jeff Kaufman’s thoroughly entertaining documentary profile, The Savoy King: Chick Webb and the Music that Changed America, which screens as part of the 50th New York Film Festival’s On the Arts sidebar.

Chick Webb did not have much margin for error in life. He was an African American, naturally slight of stature, whose childhood back injury led to a broken body and a short lifetime of pain. He could play those drums, though. A reluctant bandleader, Webb held his outfit together during some decidedly hard times, largely thanks to the quality of his personality and music. Eventually, they hit it big through the perfect combination of venue and band.

Under progressive management, the Savoy Ballroom was unlike other Harlem nightspots, allowing interracial socializing. It welcomed neighborhood residents onto its dance floor—and dance they did. The eternally youthful Frankie Manning explains how the Chick Webb Orchestra became the band of choice for Lindy Hoppers in general and especially for him. In fact, it was Webb providing special rhythmic support for the first time Manning publicly unveiled his still dazzling air-steps.

Those familiar with Ken Burns’ Jazz will also know the basic story of Webb’s legendary battle of the bands with Benny Goodman. Yet, Savoy King tells it from a slightly different perspective, through the written recollections of his friend and promoter, Helen Oakley Dance. Webb also had the distinction of giving a band singer named Ella Fitzgerald her first big break. It all happened in thirty-four all too brief years.

Indeed, one of the many drawbacks of dying at a young age is the difficulty of staking one’s claim on history. Savoy King rightly does so on his behalf, calling upon expert testimony from the likes of Manning, the impossibly cool Roy Haynes, and trumpeter Joe Wilder, a true gentleman of jazz if ever there was one. He also enlists an all-star cast to give voice to the giants of the era, including Bill Cosby (a frequent host of the Jazz Foundation of America’s Great Night in Harlem gala concerts) fittingly cast as Webb himself. For his colleague and favorite arranger Mario Bauzá, Andy Garcia is also about as perfect a match as you could hope to make. However, Janet Jackson as Ella Fitzgerald? She wishes.

Savoy King is a compelling blend of cultural and social history that shrewdly always keeps the music prominent in the mix. Although director-producer-writer Kaufman fully explores Webb’s many tribulations, it is a pleasure to revisit the early swing era in his company. Hip and sensitive, Savoy King is an obvious highlight of this year’s NYFF for jazz fans, but it is also highly recommended for general audiences when it screens this Saturday (9/29) at the Walter Reade Theater and the following Tuesday (10/2) at the Francesca Beale.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on September 26th, 2012 at 3:32pm.