Doc Corner: 'In My Blood It Runs'

By Glenn Dunks

It can be so good to see a filmmaker take a significant leap in their talents. Such a thrilling moment to realize that a director isn’t just capable of making good films, but great ones. I must say, I didn’t expect a film like In My Blood It Runs from Maya Newell. The Japanese-Australian filmmaker had previously made the cutely affecting Gayby Baby about the children of same-sex parents (Newell herself is a ‘gayby baby’), but nothing there would suggest a film of such cultural specificity as this.

It’s the sort of film that makes me so glad I watch Australian cinema more regularly than most (including my fellow nationals). I feel like I can easily say it’s one of the best documentaries this country has produced in recent years. A work of emphatic poignancy that speaks so much to this country’s institutionalized racism and its assimilationist ideals to the societal and cultural issues facing Australia’s indigenous populations.

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner TIFF Special Edition: Werner Herzog's 'Fireball'

By Glenn Dunks

We're not covering TIFF more broadly this year, but I was lucky to snag a screener or two so we'll be writing about them in a couple of additional Doc Corner columns.

One of my favourite bits of movie trivia is that Werner Herzog is the only filmmaker to have ever directed feature-length films on every single continent. He completed that unique party trick with his 2007 Oscar-nominated documentary Encounters at the End of the World. I’m sure that if he could, he would make a movie in space. For now, however, his latest feature doc about the elements of space will have to suffice.

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds begins in the terrestrial outback of Australia and ends in the shimmering blue plateaus of Antarctica with just about every other continent in between (he just can’t help himself). Herzog traces the history of meteorites with regular collaborator and first-time co-director Clive Oppenheimer...

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: The best of this year's virtual documentary festivals

By Glenn Dunks

Despite what may be happening across the rest of film distribution, the documentary realm has barely had a chance to breathe. Just as there ever was, there are so many titles coming out each and every week that it is impossible to keep up with in a weekly column. This includes not just new releases to streaming, VOD and virtual cinemas (and now, as lockdowns cease around the globe, theatrical), but also festivals.

In fact, I’ve been able to attend more than any before. Whereas I wouldn’t have had the time nor the access to ‘attend’ England’s Sheffield Doc/Fest or the United States’ AFI Docs or Canada’s Hot Docs, I was able to finish my day job in the afternoon and take a quick world tour of some of the finest documentary and non-fiction festivals around. And there’s still more of them to come (like DocNYC) because, folks? There’s just so.many.movies. 

I wanted to highlight the best that I saw across each of the three festivals and give a spotlight to movies that took me to a poisoned Martinique, the frontlines of the women’s liberation movement, and the underground dance scene of Baltimore...

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: Hubert Sauper's 'Epicentro'

By Glenn Dunks

White faces invading Cuba is one of reoccurring images in Hubert Sauper’s Epicentro. And this includes the director himself. It is surely not lost on him that in examining the country’s place as “the epicentre of the three dystopian chapters of history” he at least somewhat places himself among the throngs of white, stickybeak tourists who get their ethnic cultural kicks by swarming barbershops to photograph young black boys getting haircuts before retreating to their glamorous five-star hotels.

But this is what the Austrian filmmaker does, embedding himself within a place that has become a wrestling point of contention for lands beyond its borders... 

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: Barbara Kopple's 'Desert One'

By Glenn Dunks

Barbara Kopple’s new film is an interesting one. But not necessarily for any reason related to style or form and potentially completely by accident. Rather, it’s interesting for how well it encapsulates America’s idealised image of itself. For Desert One is a documentary that charts the various ins and outs of a top secret military mission that was, to be perfectly frank, an utter shit show. A botched rescue attempt in 1980 of American hostages in Tehran that, in retrospect, was lucky to take off in the first place.

It’s in part because of this debacle that we got Argo.

And yet…

Click to read more ...