Something of an aesthetic hybrid between an impassioned cinéma vérité and the bracing docu-fiction of Peter Watkins, Road to Guantanamo is a provocative, confrontational, and impeccably crafted, if oddly sterile and incongruously stylized re-enactment of the plight of the Tipton Three, a group of working class, British Muslim young men on holiday from the West […]
Category: Film Festivals and Retrospectives
Compadre, 2004
At the 2003 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, I had the privilege of seeing an unassuming, underseen film shot in cinéma vérité style by Ditsi Carolino entitled Life on the Tracks (a film that quickly made my short list of favorite films for the year) on a family from the province who had come […]
Delwende, 2005
S. Pierre Yameogo returns from last year’s NYAFF mid-career retrospective with perhaps his most mature, immediately relevant, and socially confrontational film to date, a provocative moral tale on the barbaric (and largely misogynistic) tribal custom of scapegoating through witch denunciation and exile – often of the most weak, disempowered, and vulnerable members of the village […]
Me and My White Pal, 2003
A graduate student from Burkina Faso named Mamadi, forced to find last-minute employment in order to cover his tuition and housing expenses after his educational grants fail to materialize at the local embassy, calls on a fellow countryman and distant cousin – a politically frustrated, self-exiled intellectual with a slew of unpracticed doctoral degrees hung […]
State of Fear, 2005
One of the festival highpoints (and certainly one of my personal favorites) from this year’s slate of films from the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival is filmmakers Pamela Yates, Paco de Onís and Peter Kinoy’s exhaustive (and inspired) documentary, State of Fear: a sobering, trenchant, and disturbingly relevant dissection of Peru’s contemporary history through […]
Good Cats, 2008
Something like Jia Zhang-ke’s portraits of contemporary China by way of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s stationary long shots and sense of landscape, Good Cats returns to the hybrid fiction of Ying Liang’s previous film, The Other Half to capture the dislocation and moral vacuum left in the wake of China’s rapid economic development. Similar to The Other […]