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          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                      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.

Sabaya                  3 suns

The movie Sabaya was filmed in the Middle East in 2019 and 2020 and follows the efforts of a small group of Kurds who work to free captive young women and girls from a camp called Al-Hol in Syria. The girls that they are after are of the Yazidi religion of the Kurds and have been kidnapped by ISIS or Daesh as they are known in the Middle East. The girls, some captured as little children are forced to marry Daesh men and serve as sex slaves. The group uses women volunteers who infiltrate the camp and search for the girls in the tent city that is filled with hundreds of enslaved girls. After one is found, men from the group enter the camp and secretly smuggle the girl out to safety returning them to their family if they are still alive. The documentary follows the style of letting the filmed experience speak for itself without the use of narration. There is an occasional printed statement on screen but little explanation beyond that. The scenes where the girls relate the horrors they lived through are quite compelling. The film has to be one of the highest degrees of danger to the filmmakers to be imagined. President Trump gets mentioned a couple of times because of his decision to allow Turkey to attack the Kurdish people (a US ally) following the defeat of ISIS.

American Factory                             5 stars

Filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert produced an excellent documentary in American Factory that came out in 2019. In 2008 near Dayton, Ohio a GM auto plant closed down forcing thousands of workers to lose their jobs. Then in 2015, a Chinese billionaire named Cao announced that a new plant producing automobile windshields would open on the site and would offer jobs to the community. The filmmakers began following some of the workers, both American and Chinese in meetings, the factory floor and their homes. Through interviews and exchanges between counterparts, the cultural clash between the individualistic Americans and the monolithic Chinese is stark. We see how the corporate culture values maximum production at the cost of worker safety and how this impacts the lives of the workers. At the same time we see successful interactions between the cultures where workers come to see and understand one another and that their difficulties transcend national identity. There is a thread following a union organizing effort on the part of some workers and the corporation’s determination to avoid unionization at all costs. Some of the workers will lose their jobs before the film ends. There is a segment where some of the American supervisors are taken to the company headquarters in China. The contrast between nationalities is comical and illustrative of the divide between the societies. It is likely that the filmmakers didn’t know what they were getting into when they started the project, but they have captured the effect of globalization of industry on workers and the unbridgeable gap between American and Chinese cultures. The film won the Documentary Best Directing Award at Sundance, 2019 and the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award for 2019.

I Am Not Your Negro                      5 stars

It has been four years since this documentary about writer and social critic James Baldwin was released and I finally got to see it. The renowned author of several books, plays and essays concerning Black’s place in American history was working on a new project when he passed away in 1987. The book was to be called “Remember This House” and concerned Baldwin’s personal memories of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. all of whom were assassinated when they were still young. This excellent documentary shows how articulate and eloquent he was through footage of speeches he gave and appearances on The Dick Cavett Show as well as readings from the unfinished manuscript read by Samuel L. Jackson. The scenes of angry white mobs and portrayals of Blacks in popular culture illustrate just how bad race relations were in America. More recent scenes indicate that we still have a long way to go, but there is hope. As Baldwin has suggested, you can’t study the history of America without studying the history of the Negro in America. The film is expertly put together and is deserving of the Academy Award nomination it received for Best Documentary.