Doc Corner: Two Films Highlight the Outrageous and the Tragic of North Korea

Films about North Korea have an unfair advantage. The country is one of such baffling oddness that films told about it are often either tragic or outrageous, two extremes that make for memorable viewing. On the other hand, the nature of North Korea’s political situation means few films are indeed made about it. Titles like Solrun Hoaas’ Pyongyang Diaries in which the Australian filmmaker ventured to a North Korean film festival and gave us a glimpse of what it means to be a traveller in this land of fake smiles and concrete, and the giddy delight of Anna Broinowski’s Aim High in Creation in which she travels to North Korea to learn how to make propaganda films from the makers themselves.

This year we can add two more entertaining docs. Both are full of surprises that beggar belief at seemingly every turn: The Lovers and the Despot and Under the Sun. 

The former from directors Ross Adam and Robert Cannan is the most accessible of the pair; an espionage documentary about husband and wife filmmakers who were kidnapped by North Korea and forced to make movies for the country’s dictator leader before their brazen escape from the clutches of Kim Jong-il. Yeah, I know!

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Doc Corner: Nick Cave and The Beatles Show Mixed Musical Results

Thankfully for us, Nick Cave is not a musician who is easily distilled into a formula blueprint. He isn’t an artist who is easy to pigeonhole and that means anybody who attempts to make a film about him is forced to think outside of the box. Consider 20,000 Days on Earth in which Cave celebrated his 20,000^th day of living by driving around with friends like Kylie Minogue and Ray Winstone. That film, partly fictionalized, was only two years ago so if it feels somewhat excessive to have another Nick Cave documentary so soon then the circumstances around Cave’s life since then mean a lot has changed since his 20,000^th day on Earth that has dramatically altered him.

One More Time with Feeling is directed by Cave’s friend Andrew Dominik who Cave had worked with on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Like that film, this is another wholly singular film, the pairing of the two proving to bear the most unique of fruits. Initial sequences suggest that this is going to be a slog of a documentary, the pairing of famous director not known for documentary filmmaking and a famous subject who many filmmakers might just feel the need to point a camera at and shoot and feel as if their work is done.

That is blessedly not the case.

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Doc Corner: 'Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four'

Glenn here. Each Tuesday bringing you reviews of documentaries from theatres, festivals and on demand.

The title of Deborah Esquenazi’s film Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four is not an accident. It has been done to deliberately reference both West of Memphis and The Central Park Five. Those two films were also true crime documentaries that focused on cases in which the wrong people – bundled together under one umbrella with a numerical media savvy nickname – were convicted of a heinous crime. The mistrials of justice in both of those cases were so monumental that multiple films, non-fiction and dramatic, exist about each.

It’s doubtful the same will become true of the San Antonio Four given the crimes for which the four women at the centre of its terribly heartbreaking story were charged and found guilty of were not as sensationally savage as those other stories. In fact, as Esquenazi’s film details, there was no crime at all. No bloodied body for which somebody absolutely had to held accountable. Rather, just a particularly cruel and shockingly stupid lie that steamrolled into the imprisonment of four innocent women. [more...]

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Doc Corner: 'Cameraperson' is Simply Extraordinary

Glenn here. Each Tuesday bringing you reviews of documentaries from theatres, festivals and on demand.

Cameraperson is the most extraordinary of documentaries. A compelling first-person visual memoir that intricately weaves some 15 years of filmmaking into a remarkably watchable cinematic patchwork quilt. A truly wondrous mix-tape that finds documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson taking directorial duties upon herself in the creation of a film about the creation of films. She utilizes b-roll footage, outtakes, and home movies to build, as if like free-form lego, a powerful portrait of not just herself, but the world we live in. Cameraperson is without a doubt the best documentary of 2016, and just maybe the best film of the year, period.

You have surely seen some of the films that Johnson has used footage from. Popular titles like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Citizenfour from Johnson's frequent collaborator Laura Poitras, the latter of which makes a wonderfully obscure and unexplained appearance yet which only proves how impressively that doc was filmed. We’ve even reviewed some of them right here at The Film Experience like Dawn Porter’s Trapped, which was the very first title we reviewed in the Doc Corner.

No matter how many of the 24 titles Johnson draws from that you have seen, you haven’t seen them like this. And any that you haven't will no doubt rocket to the top of your must watch pile...

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Doc Corner: The Cinematic Surprise of 'The Royal Road'

Glenn here. Each Tuesday bringing you reviews of documentaries from theatres, festivals and on demand.

One of the many benefits of doing this weekly column is not just talking about the sort of documentaries that we may be discussing throughout award season, but also being able to highlight those that deserve haven’t a hope that nonetheless deserve the attention. Such is the case with Jenni Olsen’s The Royal Road, an essay film that trades in experimental and avant-garde traditions as a means to explore deeply personal topics.

Using dry yet curiously hypnotic narration, Olsen swerves between discussing Californian history, a long-distance relationship with a woman named Juliet, classic Hollywood movies, and the effects of nostalgia (the latter of which even features a voice cameo by Tony Kuschner). Her film a progression of beautifully captured California vistas of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and everywhere in between, filmed on 16mm by cinematographer Sophia Constantinou whose perfectly composed 4:3 ratio images recall the works of James Benning and offer a striking visual component that elevates the film to the status of true art. By using real film and embracing all of the dots and speckles that come with it, Constantinou’s work adopts the history of the worlds she is filming while also embracing Olson’s edict that nostalgia can be good.

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