It was once believed that birds were messengers whose flight and song could be interpreted to foretell the future, but over time, as the world became increasingly industrialized, we lost the connection we once shared with their world. Through her documentary, director Su Rynard hopes to call our attention, once again, to what the songbirds […]
Onstage, Janis Joplin wailed the blues, drank whiskey, and drove the crowds wild. Offstage, she drank whiskey, slept around, and died shooting smack in 1971. But Joplin believed in music, worshipped it, seized its power to communicate and transport. Her love of music was the purest thing in her life, and Janis: Little Girl Blue […]
Frame by Frame combines vérité, interviews and never-before-seen archival footage to showcase four Afghan photojournalists documenting their war-torn country. The documentary opens with photojournalist Massoud Hossaini rushing to cover another suicide bombing and segues into historical television and radio reports over a montage of compelling historical photographs. This sets the scene of the country’s complex […]
The behind-the-scenes documentary I Am Thor is about a heavy metal singer who dresses up as, yes, the Nordic god Thor, bends steel bars, vanquishes foes onstage, and smashes bricks with sledgehammers. So, essentially, he’s the band GWAR before GWAR. He almost made it in the halcyon 1980s when He-Man (who he uncannily resembles) and […]
Those who have protested against how Sicario portrayed Mexico as overrun with brutally violent drug cartels, corrupt law enforcement, and distrusted politicians may not be any happier with Kingdom of Shadows. Bernardo Ruiz’s documentary includes all those familiar elements through news montages and sound bites, as well as coverage of the missing and presumed murdered. […]
Haiti, after gaining independence from France in 1804 after a slave revolt–turned–revolution, became known as the first black republic. What has followed in two centuries since are the violent ups and downs characteristic of many post-colonial states. But Haiti, especially after the disastrous 2010 earthquake, has often seemed specially marked for suffering. So when any […]
Three Asian films at the DOC NYC festival reveal spaces we rarely see and people we are unlikely to meet, even in a globalized, connected world. These outwardly calm works contain unpredictable emotions, immense risks, and power games sometimes unseen, sometimes thrust into the open. “We had to destroy the village in order to save […]
In 1970, Steve McQueen was on top of the world as a box-office star, coming off of films like The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt. He was called the “King of Cool” (one of several nicknames you can see on his IMDb profile). So he decided to go for his longtime passion, auto racing, in […]
There is a fascinating story within the documentary Rock in the Red Zone, about musicians and artists under constant rocket attacks in a small town in Israel, but it gets a bit lost. American director Laura Bialis travels to the border town of Sderot, the target for homemade rockets called Quassams lobbed over from Gaza […]