Doc Corner: 'Free Chol Soo Lee'

By Glenn Dunks

Whether he liked it or not (most certainly the former), Chol Soo Lee was a pivotal figure in the history of the Korean people within the United States—as well as for the broader Asian community. His name came to symbolise many things, most significantly the inherent racism of anybody who wasn't white that was found within the justice system. His story was a tragic one, struggling as he did to overcome the lasting effects of what happened to him. But his plight as a man wrongly jailed for a crime he didn’t commit brought Asian and Asian-American people together and to the political forefront in ways that meant things wouldn’t be the same ever again.

In Free Chol Soo Lee, Julia Ha and Eugene Yi’s quietly damning documentary about his life inside (and perhaps even more importantly, outside of) prison, we get to reflect on a case that many may have forgotten or which they never knew about in the first place.

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Doc Corner: Bowie and 'Moonage Daydream' at Melbourne International Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

Moonage Daydream is unlike any other Brett Morgen film. If you expected the same stately warmth that imbued Jane or even a tragic rock and roll epitaph like Cobain: Montage of Heck, then you would be wrong. This is evident immediately into its 140-minute runtime, beginning as it does with not just any David Bowie song, but the (incredible, it must be noted) Pet Shop Boys remix of “Hallo Spaceboy” from 1996. I love a bit of trolling the rock crowd, so I was instantly on board. The mere inclusion of this song—to say nothing of the kaleidoscopic, tie-dyed montage that accompanies it—keyed me in that Morgen wasn’t just going to do what a Bowie fan may expect from a biography documentary.

These high-octane opening minutes don’t exactly let up, either. Moonage Daydream is a work of documentary that is almost as exhausting as it is exhilarating.

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Doc Corner: Melbourne International Film Festival shows documentary’s many different forms

By Glenn Dunks

Two years ago (!) I mourned the absence of my local film festival. After another year off in 2021 due to Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns, the Melbourne International Film Festival has finally returned to theatres this month. It has been such a wonderful feeling to sit down and watch films with other movielovers that we will quite likely never have another opportunity to see projected so big.

The festival runs for another week and a half yet, but let's talk about a few of the documentary titles screened so far. They are all extremely different and formally bold takes on the medium that deserve celebrating. From an experimental tour of America to an equally experimental tour of the human body, these have all been films I can't imagine having missed in the cinema. They won't get a sniff of Oscar buzz, but who cares?

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Doc Corner: 'Blue Island'

By Glenn Dunks

Chan Tze Woon’s second feature is also his second about Hong Kong’s fight for independence. It follows Yellowing in 2016. Like many filmmakers working in non-fiction today, Chan incorporates actors and the process of moviemaking into Blue Island. This is a documentary that makes heavy use of recreations and performance, yet these are elements that are frequently weaved throughout rather seamlessly. It doesn’t always work, with some of Chan’s conceits coming and going at whim, but it becomes a smart choice.

For the story he’s trying to tell is one explicitly built around Hong Kong as an epicenter of street activism where one generation’s fighters have much to learn from those who came before. Where history becomes the present with far too much familiarity.

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Doc Corner: 'We Met in Virtual Reality' on HBO Max

By Glenn Dunks

I recently rewatched Steven Spielberg’s largely unsuccessful Ready Player One, a movie with many faults that are not relevant right now. But key to its failings is how completely uninterested in virtual reality it actually is. For all of its effort in setting up its admittedly rather awe-inspiring virtual world, it completely misunderstands (or, more likely, is just uninterested in exploring) why people would turn to such a space in the first place.

I thought of Ready Player One a lot as I watched Joe Huntings’ We Met in Virtual Reality, which is shot entirely in a VR landscape with all the boxy, hyper-coloured, anime-infused glory. This isn’t an action movie though. Rather, it’s a sweetly affecting documentary about online connections and the way some people feel more at home with a dragon tail and hooves than they do in the real world.

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