Interview: Bao Nguyen on "Be Water" and the cultural resonance of Bruce Lee

by Nathaniel R

Bao Nguyen's Be Water premiered on ESPN this past summer and has touched a lot of people since then. It's a lovely meditation on Bruce Lee's life, his relationships to both the East and the West, and the meaning of his legacy and activism. Be Water is one of 238 films eligible for the Oscar this year in Best Documentary Feature. We were thrilled to sit down with Bao Nguyen, over Zoom of course, to discuss his picture and the man and myth that is Bruce Lee.

Be Water was five years in the making, though things sped up considerably once ESPN signed on two years or so ago. Originally Be Water was supposed to come out around Bruce Lee's 80th birthday this past November but demand was so great for new movies during quarantine that the release was moved up to June. Nyugen, had a strange year (didn't we all!) but one recurring joy was hearing from and seeing photos of multigenerational families watching the film together. He describes the film as "connective tissue" and the parents and kids and grandparents could then discuss what Bruce Lee meant to them...

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Sundance: Rita Moreno in the Spotlight

By Abe Friedtanzer 

In a week where we’ve lost both Cicely Tyson and Cloris Leachman, it feels like the right time to celebrate trailblazing actresses who are still earning awards love well into their eighties and nineties. On tap at Sundance in the U.S. Documentary Competition section is Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It. This exploration of her life and the profound influence she has had on so many is a rich, endearing journey that constitutes a truly delightful and energizing look at a remarkable actress who just last week earned her fourth consecutive Critics Choice nomination at the age of eighty-nine.

This film should work equally well for those intimately familiar with much of Moreno’s resumé as well as those who know her only from her signature film role that won her an Oscar, 1961’s West Side Story, or from the great TV work she’s still doing on the recently-wrapped One Day at a Time...

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Sundance: "The Most Beautiful Boy in the World" review

by Jason Adams

"In all the world there is no impurity so impure as old age." -- Death in Venice

The director Luchino Visconti was 64-years-young when he directed his rumination on youth and beauty seen from the opposite end of life. Death in Venice saw Dirk Bogarde vacationing in a plague-riddled seaside hotel where a teen-boy called Tadzio (Björn Andrésen) suddenly sends his overheated brain reeling across platonically idyllic places. And now here 50 years later, premiering at Sundance, comes the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, which turns around and gives us Tadzio's perspective looking back. The sun doesn't shine as brightly from that direction...

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Doc Corner: '76 Days' and 'CoroNation' go inside Wuhan

By Glenn Dunks

Alex Gibney isn’t the only one who can crush a deadline and produce a documentary about COVID-19 in time for the new year. While Gibney’s Totally Under Control, made alongside (but appropriately socially distanced, of course) Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, came out in October in an attempt to radicalise the American voters with tales of the then Trump-led American government’s inept response to the coronavirus outbreak. In doing so it already looks out of date.

Two other features, however, hone in more precisely on the pandemic’s beginnings in the city of Wuhan of the Hubei Province in the heart of China. Hao Wu and Weixu Chen’s 76 Days (made in collaboration with ‘Anonymous’) and Ai Weiwei’s CoroNation take different tacts with this setting, showing a city in chaos and alarming stillness at once.

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Doc Corner: Sundance winner 'Acasă, My Home'

By Glenn Dunks

Acasă, My Home’s opening passage ends with a single shot that is so startling it would normally be quite hard for the rest of the film to live up to its surprise. It’s little wonder then that it won a Special Jury Award for cinematography at 2020’s Sundance Film Festival, having some of the best use of drone documentary photography I’ve seen—something that should silence the naysayers of this common doc tool, at least for a little bit.

It’s lucky then for first-time Romanian filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc—previously only known as a journalist and for featuring in something called, yes, Sick Chicken: What You Need to Know—that drama follows his subjects wherever they go...

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