Category Archives: Documentary

Saudi Runaway

Saudi Runaway.   4 Suns

Saudi Runaway is an amazing documentary about a young 26 year old Saudi woman who decides to flee her country and her domineering father because of the oppressive laws against women in Saudi Arabia.  Muna connected with the director through social media and secretly filmed her story on her iPhones for a period of two months before making her escape while on her honeymoon which means she also fled from her new husband.  She had to secretly send the phone footage to the director just to have space on the phones for more of the story.  The film is full of Muna’s emotional dilemma and family scenes. In order to live out her dream she must hurt the people she loves including her mother.  I didn’t know what to expect from this film but was very pleased.  It is an important story to tell as Saudi Arabia is one of the most oppressive regimes toward women in the world.  A postscript noted that women are fleeing the country at a rate of 1,000 per year.  I hope this film gets distributed soon. 

One Child Nation

One Child Nation                              4 ½ stars

One Child Nation is a documentary about a subject we have all heard something about but that very few of us know the whole story.  The filmmaker, Nanfu Wang tells us in very personal terms about China’s policy of allowing families to have only a single child in the name of improving the productivity of the country.  This policy, that lasted from 1979 until 2015 was responsible for many thousands of forced abortions, sterilizations, infanticide and government abductions of children from their parents.  The film was thoroughly researched and tells the story through many personal interviews with those who were forced to carry out the government policy and with those directly affected by it.  Wang was personally affected by it as she was born in China during the policy and had a younger brother who might have been lost if he had turned out to be a girl.  Wang herself has a boy’s name because her family was hoping for a boy, which is the much preferred gender to have as children.  In the nineties when international adoptions opened up in China, the government started the practice of forcing children to be separated from their parents and placed in orphanages where they could then be allowed to be adopted by western parents.  The film is an important one to see as it shows what an authoritarian government can be capable of.  This is the second documentary from Wang who was only in her early thirties when it was made.  Her films which were filmed in China has brought her unwelcome attention from the Chinese government.  The interviews are done in Chinese, but her narration is all done in English.  Let’s hope that she continues her good work in the future.

Where’s My Roy Cohn?

Where’s My Roy Cohn?                                 4 stars

The documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? was on my list to see at Sundance, but I didn’t get the chance to see it then.  Thankfully I found it on cable so just saw it during this time of quarantine.  This film by Matt Tyrnauer tells us about one of the most notorious (and ugliest) figures in the latter twentieth century of American politics.  It covers his career starting with his participating as a prosecutor in the trial of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg resulting in their execution, extending to the Communist hearings with Joseph McCarthy and his connections with New York mobsters as a defense attorney often getting light sentences for them.  The film features many interviews with his various associates and relatives (including Roger Stone), none of whom have a kind thing to say about his character.  However, the point is made that he was a sharp lawyer who was always ready for a fight and would stop at nothing to destroy his enemies.  Through the seventies and eighties Cohn had close contacts with the administrations of Nixon and Reagan playing a role in some of the harshest right wing policies that continue to this day.  The film also goes into Cohn’s gay lifestyle, how it was no real secret that he associated with gay men and frequented gay night clubs.  Yet he always maintained that he was not gay up to his death from AIDs in 1986.  Included is Cohn’s role as mentor to a young New York real estate tycoon named Donald J. Trump.  According to the film Trump learned to never admit being wrong and to never make apologies.  Cohn successfully defended the Trumps in an anti-discrimination lawsuit involving denying housing to African Americans.  Trump even used Cohn’s mob ties to get his Trump Tower built in New York City in the early eighties.  Given how this man is portrayed, one would probably not describe the film as impartial.  It shows how he made a career of using lies and deceit to destroy lives for sake of personal gain throughout his career and how he had no empathy toward fellow humans.  Whether or not you are familiar with Roy Cohn’s career, I recommend you see this movie.

American Symphony

American Symphony                      4 ½ stars

The 2023 film American Symphony by filmmaker Matthew Heineman started as a project to follow musician Jon Batiste as he worked on his classical composition “American Symphony” but turned into a much bigger story about life. In 2021 The band leader of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show had just been nominated for 11 Grammys and granted Heineman access to his life as he worked on this piece. Batiste was writing a classical piece but making it more modern using new styles and musicians from a variety of backgrounds to make it avant-garde compared to traditional classical music. It was quite unusual for a pop musician to enter this genre let alone a black musician, but Batiste gives it all the attention and effort he can. But while this is transpiring on screen, it is discovered that Batiste’s girlfriend/wife Suleika Jaouad has had a recurrence of bone cancer and must undergo lengthy chemotherapy treatments. So, on top of writing the new piece and preparing for the Grammys, Batiste was dealing with the crisis of supporting Suleika through this new crisis. Jaouad is herself a writer and painter producing her own works of art, continuing her efforts through the treatment. The two of them go through tough challenges, encouraging each other, while surprisingly still granting the filmmaker access to their lives. One type of film I especially enjoy is those that show the unfolding creative process of writing music. In American Symphony we see not only Batiste’s struggles with creating his masterpiece, but also the intimate look at a couple going through a difficult time in their lives. The film ends with the finished product being performed for one time only in front of a packed crowd in Carnegie Hall. It is a triumphant finish to a very emotional story. The movie was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song for the song It Never Went Away which is played at the end of the movie.

Free Solo

Free Solo                                                             4 ½ stars

It has been called awe inspiring and a celebration of one of the greatest athletic achievements ever.  Free Solo is a documentary from National Geographic  that covers rock climber, Alex Honnold’s quest to be the first person ever to climb the 3,000 foot face of El Capitan without a rope.  The film was three years in the making and includes interviews with Alex, his rock climbing friends, his girlfriend and his mother.  The film crew play a part in the film as well as they go into it not knowing how it will turn out.  One climber describes the event as a gold medal Olympic event, but if you don’t win the gold, you die.  We see how Alex studies the climb and memorizes every move he has to make on the rock’s most dangerous parts.  The film never shies away from the danger as it reminds us of many other free solo climbers who have died in pursuit of their dreams.  Certainly not for the squeamish, the final climb is a thrill to watch, even if you know the outcome ahead of time.  And it’s a good way to visit the national parks in a time when no one can.

The Great Hack

The Great Hack                 4 ½ stars

This week I return once again to the Sundance releases to find a compelling documentary in The Great Hack.  The film goes into the details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2017 and 2018.  It uses the personal stories of two individuals who got caught up in the scandal involving the Trump campaign, Brexit and many elections around the world.  The British company (named by Steve Bannon of Breitbart) teamed up with Facebook and used the personal data of millions of people to find ways of changing their behavior through the spreading of millions of social network postings to swing elections in favor of their clients.  Their most famous client was of course the Trump Campaign in the election of 2016.  One of their tactics was to get individuals to sign up for an app that provided not only their personal information, but that of their Facebook friends as well.  The film introduces us to David Carroll, a professor who sued Cambridge Analytica to recover his personal data in a case that was heard in the British courts.  The ruling forced the company to comply with Carroll’s wishes which they failed to do, making Cambridge Analylica in effect a criminal enterprise.  The other story told is that of Brittany Kaiser, a one-time director who worked for the company for 3 ½ years in a role that made her very familiar with the practice of data harvesting and using it for the benefit of their clients.  Kaiser became a whistleblower who revealed what she knew in testimonies in Britain and the US.  Cambridge Analytica is now defunct, but the film gives us a stark warning that this practice of gathering our personal data and using it to change our behavior is only going to continue.  The Great Hack makes it clear that it may be a long time before we can have a true free and fair election again.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?       5 stars

The documentary by filmmaker Morgan Neville explores the work of Fred Rogers and his long running children’s TV show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood”. It tells us what a radical departure the show was to what passed for Children’s television back in 1968. By using footage from the show and interviews with his wife, the show’s staff and others that knew him, it gives us a close look at Fred Rogers’ philosophy of life and his way of communicating with young children through his use of puppets and discussing frank issues in a caring way. I confess that I never watched the show when I was young preferring those loud and silly shows referred to in the documentary. The film shows how Fred Rogers was determined to help children make sense of some very troubling issues of the times including violence, death and divorce. The movie is only one and a half hours long and is well worth the time spent.

Generation Wealth

Generation Wealth         2 ½ stars

Filmmaker Lauren Greenfield has made a series of documentaries dealing with obsession. A few years ago she made The Queen of Versailles, a film about billionaires David and Jackie Siegel who tried to build the largest house in the country. It’s all part of a career of examining the excesses and materialism of our modern society. Now she brings us Generation Wealth which examines obsession with wealth and the appearance of wealth. She examines the lives of several Americans and some foreign cultures as well as they strive to achieve vast sums of wealth or spend money like they are wealthy. She has been examining this subject as a photographer for her whole career going back to the nineties when she was looking at spending habits of teenagers and has amassed a collection of hundreds of thousands of photos. She looks at so many aspects of the phenomena that I though the film tended to lose focus. Not only does she talk about billionaires, she also looks at American’s obsession with beauty, plastic surgery, child beauty pageants, work and even pornography. Ultimately, she examines her own life and her indulgence in her own career as a photographer. Her subjects are some of the people she has been following in her work for years and ultimately they come to realize that their pursuit of wealth and material possessions does not bring them fulfillment. It’s a depressing movie that was not quite what I was expecting. It could have been more interesting with more limited subjects and without all of the late regrets. I do recommend her earlier work though, The Queen of Versailles.

Honeyland

Honeyland          4 stars

Honeyland is a most unusual film, a documentary that unexpectantly became an environmental drama. I heard about it at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival but had not seen it until now. The filmmakers set out to make a documentary about one of the last natural beekeepers in Europe, a woman in her 50’s in Macedonia named Hatidze. She harvests the honey from beehives she finds in the mountains for survival and lives in an abandoned village with only her elderly mother and has no electricity or running water. She makes occasional trips into the city to sell jars of honey for what she can get. Otherwise, she takes care of her mother who can neither walk nor see. The drama starts when a nomadic family of cattle herders moves in next door with their herd and seven children. The patriarch of the family sees how Hatidze tends the bees and decides that would be a good way for him to make a living too. Hatidze gives instruction to the father and one of the sons telling them they must always leave a portion of the honey for the bees; otherwise the hive will collapse. Unfortunately, the warnings go unheeded leading to disastrous consequences. The filmmakers manage to film all this giving no hint of the presence of the crew. The beekeeper, Hatidze has a commanding presence when on screen and has a natural way of dealing with children and animals. The film itself is like a parable of man’s responsibility of taking care of the environment. It would have been fascinating to hear the director’s account of the making of the film. Unfortunately, there were no extras provided on the DVD copy that I used. The only other film like this that comes to mind is The Story of the Weeping Camel in 2004.

At the Ready

At the Ready                      5 suns

At the Ready was easily my favorite documentary of the festival. The filmmakers follow three high school students in El Paso, Texas who have signed up for a Border Patrol training program at their high school. This is an extra-curricular activity for students, but instead of playing sports or doing creative writing they are learning how to do drug raids and find illegal aliens. All of the participants are of Mexican descent so there is some internal conflict about what they are learning. The kids even participate in competitions where their team is judged on how well they perform in staged events like drug raids. They handle fake guns so nobody gets hurt, but physically take down the pretend suspects. The kids seem to get support from their families as law enforcement seems to be one of the few viable career opportunities in the community. This is quite a dramatic departure from going to band contest and chess club like I remember from high school! The movie, filmed in 2018 and 2019 finishes with the students’ graduation and with them making plans for the future. In the Q&A session afterwards, the three students were present. When questioned, only one was still planning on a future in law enforcement with life intervening for the other two. President Trump figured in some of the discussions, especially in regard to feelings about the border wall. These high school law enforcement clubs and programs exist in schools throughout the state of Texas. I thoroughly recommend this movie.