Photo caption: Pavel Talankan in MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.
Nothing has changed since Aeschylus observed that the first casualty of war is truth, as revealed in Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the blistering exposé of Putin’s outrageous domestic propaganda about his Ukraine War.
Pavel Talankan is an unassuming, goodhearted guy with a small-time job as the events coordinator at the school in a remote Russian industrial town. That also makes him the school videographer, so no no one notices that, as he films school assemblies, award ceremonies and performances, he is also capturing the blatant Big Lie propaganda. It’s a surreptitious documentary filmed in plain sight.
Pavel is an unlikely muckraker. He is a free-thinking nebbish who loves Russia and loves his hometown of Karabash in the Ural region, putrefied by a noxious copper plant and called “the most toxic place on earth”.
More than anything, Pavel cares about his students, and he is increasingly disgusted as Putin ramps up the propaganda. First, a cadaverous party hack, whose heroes are the most vile Commie hitmen in history, spreads empirically false information about Ukraine being the aggressor in the war. Then, horrifyingly, Wagner mercenaries are brought in as classroom guest speakers. Silently, Pavel continues to film, letting the propagandists defile themselves for history.
Pavel is a hero, albeit a non-violent one, who risked his life to gather this material. David Borenstein exquisitely formed Pavel’s footage into a searing exposé of Putin’s soul-crushing impact on Russia. The secret audio from the funeral of a former student killed in Ukraine is heart-rending. The film begins with video of Pavel’s midnight escape from Russia,
Mr. Nobody Against Putin has been Oscar-nominated as Best Documentary Feature. I saw it at the SLO Film Fest; it’s now available to stream from Amazon and AppleTV.
Photo caption: Seymour Hersh in COVER-UP. Courtesy of Netflix.
Cover-Up is a biodoc of the hard-charging investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib abuses, and reported on the Nixon-Kissinger secret war in Cambodia and Watergate. These were important stories, and Hersh demonstrated remarkable resourcefulness and determination in his work.
He was a hyper-competitive practitioner of gotcha journalism, who himself was once gotten when duped by a salacious forgery
In Cover-Up, we hear about Hersh’s life and career, chiefly from Hersh himself, so we get a flavor of the man. I thought I was familiar with the My Lai massacre, but we hear about details that emerged after the initial sensation – details that I wish that I still didn’t know.
Today, we have a 24-hour news cycle, publication of gossip and fabrications, facts denied as fake news, media empires that are essentially propaganda, infotainment and so-called news obsession with celebrity. Seymour Hersh is an important figure in an era of journalism – the Woodward and Bernstein Era – that we have have moved past., IMO for the worst So, his story, while a notable episode in US political history during the Vietnam War, just isn’t that relevant today.
Cover-Up, which may interest some Baby Boomers, is streaming on Netflix.
The exceptional American Experience biodoc Kissinger brings a balanced perspective to one of the most visible and important figures in 20th Century US history, Henry Kissinger. It neither canonizes or vilifies Kissinger, but presents a clear-eyed, unsparing look at his career. That’s important, because Kissinger’s genius at public relations may have exceeded his formidable diplomatic skills and distorted his image during his lifetime.
Kissinger is solid, well-sourced history. We hear directly from several former Kissinger staff members with an intimate, inside view of Kissinger the man and his work, We also hear from Kissinger’s son, who adds insightful personal stories about his father. And, of course, we hear and see archival footage of Kissinger himself, although perhaps never candidly. Kissinger is told in two parts over three hours.
Kissinger emerged into American public consciousness seemingly fully-formed in his mid-forties, a Harvard brainiac with a heavy German accent. Kissinger brings us his German childhood, family emigration to the US and the WW II and college experiences that molded him.
Naturally, Kissinger details the two great foreign affairs triumphs of Kissinger’s partnership with President Richard Nixon. First, there was the historic opening of relations with China, a hitherto mysterious and sinister closed society, The story of Nixon’s original idea, of the ping pong diplomacy and Kissinger’s secret trips is still exciting.
Second, once Nixon and Kissinger had established a relationship with China, they had outflanked the Soviet Union. That resulted in detente with the USSR and the SALT negotiations leading to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the first limitation of the proliferation of nuclear arms.
These were real, groundbreaking achivements that sprang from Kissinger’s brilliance, but also his sense of realpolitik. He was all about superpower positioning, which he prioritized above other considerations. Along the way, Kissinger found tradeoffs acceptable that had undeniably momentous consequences.
In the decade from 1965 though 1975, American society was torn apart by the Vietnam War. Taking responsibility for the war in 1969, Nixon and Kissinger based their policy on “peace with honor”, which meant they wanted to avoid the unpleasant optics of Vietnam falling to the Communists. But, from 1968, at the latest, it was always apparent that the Republic of Vietnam would fall to North Vietnam as soon as the US abandoned their South Vietnamese allies. Wanting to avoid the PR consequences of South Vietnam’s ignominious collapse, Nixon and Kissinger extended the war for another six years. That six-year extension of the cost 38,094 American and countless Vietnamese lives, all to achieve exactly the same outcome as a withdrawal in January 1969.
Kissinger references, but does not emphasize something even worse – that Kissinger and Nixon encouraged the Vietnamese Communists NOT to settle with the US in 1968, but to hold out for a better deal with Nixon.
Kissinger does document, in the greatest detail I’ve seen, the Kissinger-Nixon secret war in Cambodia, and their paranoid and unconstitutional concealment of it. And it covers Kissinger’s role in the overthrow of Chile’s leftist, but democratically elected government, leading to decades of human rights violations by the repressive Pinochet regime. Kissinger also presents voices from Cambodia and Chile, pointing out how, over fifty years later, the two nations remain traumatized by Kissinger policy.
And then there’s Watergate. Kissinger shows how the Nixon Administration’s secret wiretapping of Americans was started b.y Kissinger, wiretapping his own staff suspected of leaks to the press. Of course, the paranoid and vindictive Nixon took it from there. Ironically, this led to Nixon’s downfall, while Kissinger remained at the heart of US foreign policy in the successor administration. Of course, Kissinger was always Teflon to Nixon’s Velcro.
While in government, Kissinger’s public image was shaped by his sickening manipulation of the press, who made him popular celebrity. The public thought of Nixon’s War in Vietnam and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, while ,lauding Kissinger for diplomatic wins with China and the USSR. It culminated with Kissinger actually winning a Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he had extended for six years. The guy with whim Kissinger negotiated, Le Duc Tho, turned down his Nobel, rightfully noting that the war was still going on, albeit with Americans having left.
So, Kissinger lays out the history and lets us connect the dots and assesses the legacy of Kissinger’s pragmatism and opportunism. We are able to talk with the Chinese government today, although the relationship is wary at best. We were able to avoid a nuclear showdown with the USSR up to the disintegration of the Iron Curtain in 1991, although Russia remains our most volatile foreign enemy. But at what cost?
If your goal is to project American influence around the world, it’s a fair question to ask, just what does America stand for? If you think that America stands for democratic values, why destroy a democratically elected government? If you think that America stands for freedom of thought and expression, why persecute Americans for their advocacy?
Photo caption: ROADS OF FIRE. Courtesy of New Mountain Films
The edge-of-your-seat doc Roads of Fire explores undocumented immigration into the US by cross-cutting together three stories –
an Ecuadorian asylum-seeker prepares for her deportation hearing,
a small NGO faces the tsunami of migrants being dumped by the Texas Governor into NYC, and and
a group of Venezuelans try to get from Columbia to Panama on the first leg of their journey.
The inside story of the Venezuelans is an incredible insider’s view – down to their orientation by their smugglers. We hear the Ecuadorian woman’s description of the same harrowing route as we follow the Venezuelans. Wow.
Many of the shots involve zipping through the jungle on motorbikes, hiding from authorities and interfacing with human traffickers. With its oft-breathtaking derring-do, Roads of Fire is a significant achievement for filmmaker Nathaniel Lezra. Every year, I screen a bunch of immigration-centered documentaries, and hardly ever do I see one with this much punch.
Super-topical, well-crafted and very compelling, Roads of Fire opens Friday at the Laemmle’s Monica Film Center and next week at the Glendale and the Claremont 5.
History is a compendium of individual human stories, oft caught up in a world event. That’s what drives the riveting documentary Last Days in Vietnam, which chronicles the desperate attempts of many South Vietnamese to escape before the Communist takeover in 1975. Over 140,000 got out in the initial exodus, including 77,000 through the means depicted in this film – mostly compressed into just two panicked days.
As if there weren’t enough American folly in Vietnam, the first evacuation plan didn’t include any non-Americans, even including the Vietnamese dependents of Americans. Then there were evacuation plans that were never implemented because of the blockheadedness of the US Ambassador. In the final week, young American military and intelligence officers took matters into their own hand, and began a sub rosa evacuation – ignoring the chain of command, breaking immigration laws and risking career-killing charges of insubordination.
Last Days in Vietnam is directed by Rory Kennedy (daughter of RFK), who recently made Ethel, the affecting bio-doc of her mother. Kennedy does a good job of setting the historical stage for those who didn’t live through the era, and then letting the witnesses tell their compelling personal stories.
The talking heads include:
the six-year-old who jumped out of a helicopter and then watched his mother drop his baby sister on to a ship’s deck;
the US Navy vet who plays the taped diary that he sent home to his wife after the fateful day;
the CIA analyst who unsuccessfully tried to convince the deluded US Ambassador that the end was at hand;
the college student who managed to get over a wall inside the embassy, but found that his freedom was not guaranteed;
Ford Administration officials Henry Kissinger and Ron Nessen, who relate the White House view of the events.
One heroic young American officer managed with ingenuity and chutzpah to get out hundreds of Vietnamese. In the film’s most poignant moment, it falls to him to tell the final American lie to the 400 Vietnamese remaining in the US embassy, for whom there were no more helicopters.
I saw the movie in San Jose with an audience that was about half Vietnamese-American, some of the age to have lived through this period. San Jose’s 100,000 Vietnamese population is largest of any city outside Vietnam, and many Vietnamese-Americans still memorialize the subject of this film as Black April. The exit from the theater was somber.
Last Days in Vietnam is a PBS American Experience film, and there are many clips, images and audio on their site; the entire film can be streamed from YouTube.
Photo caption: Pavel Talankan in MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.
Nothing has changed since Aeschylus observed that the first casualty of war is truth, as revealed in Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the blistering exposé of Putin’s outrageous domestic propaganda about his Ukraine War.
Pavel Talankan is an unassuming, goodhearted guy with a small-time job as the events coordinator at the school in a remote Russian industrial town. That also makes him the school videographer, so no no one notices that, as he films school assemblies, award ceremonies and performances, he is also capturing the blatant Big Lie propaganda. It’s a surreptitious documentary filmed in plain sight.
Pavel is an unlikely muckraker. He is a free-thinking nebbish who loves Russia and loves his hometown of Karabash in the Ural region, putrefied by a noxious copper plant and called “the most toxic place on earth”.
More than anything, Pavel cares about his students, and he is increasingly disgusted as Putin ramps up the propaganda. First, a cadaverous party hack, whose heroes are the most vile Commie hitmen in history, spreads empirically false information about Ukraine being the aggressor in the war. Then, horrifyingly, Wagner mercenaries are brought in as classroom guest speakers. Silently, Pavel continues to film, letting the propagandists defile themselves for history.
Pavel is a hero, albeit a non-violent one, who risked his life to gather this material. David Borenstein exquisitely formed Pavel’s footage into a searing exposé of Putin’s soul-crushing impact on Russia. The secret audio from the funeral of a former student killed in Ukraine is heart-rending. The film begins with video of Pavel’s midnight escape from Russia,
I saw Mr. Nobody Against Putin at the SLO Film Fest; it releases theatrically this weekend.
The singular documentary Architecton is cinema as high art and surprisingly entertaining. Almost narration-free and elevated by Evgueni Galperine’s original music, Architecton is director Viktor Kossakovsky’s immersion into rocks – rocks arranged and moved by Nature and by humans. The visual experience is hypnotic.
Kossakovsky takes us to the site of Baalbek, with its famed, massive stones, somehow hewn in antiquity and still among the world’s largest quarried stones and to its Roman quarry. We see scores of fallen segments of ancient fluted columns – and, then, the majesty of five columns still standing intact. Kossakovsky presents an enormous, tiered modern quarry, rock-crushing machinery in close-up and light cascading on wet, glisteneing rocks. In a very long shot, we see a seemingly endless freight train pulling a hundred gondola cars filled with rocks.
Architecton begins with ugly Soviet apartment blocks in Ukraine, destroyed by Russian bombardment. Later, we see similar damage in earthquake-ruined cities in Turkey. As the rubble is hauled away, it makes new mountains. It’s like the circle of life for inanimate rock.
There’s an elderly Italian architect named Marcele De Lucchi, who is directing construction of a circle of stones at his home; the only dialogue in Architecton is chatter between De Lucchi and his crew of stone masons.
ARCHITECTON. Courtesy of A24.
Kossakovsky had previously made the highly acclaimed Aquarela, taking audiences into the worlds of water. The movements of the camera and Kossakovsky’s choices of perspectives make looking at rocks for 98 minutes actually enthralling. The cinematographer is Ben Bernhard (Aquarela), who should win awards for his drone photography alone.
Early in Architecton there are close-ups of a rock slide, with four shots taking about four minutes, followed by an overhead shot. The scene could only have been safely captured by a drone zooming in, presumably, on a quarry explosion. It’s absolutely mesmerizing.
I take notes in darkened cinemas, and I wrote, “nowhere I’d rather be than in this theater watching this movie.” That was before the epilogue where Kossakovsky himself prompts De Lucchi to expound on the role of architecture, the malignant impacts of concrete and the planet’s future. The epilogue takes us out of the immersive experience and is a buzz kill, the one weak part of Architecton.
Architecton is now in theaters, and it’s one of those films which must be seen on the biggest screen that you can access.
In the scintillating documentry Made in Ethiopia, businesswoman Motto is the face of a huge, new Chinese industrial park in Ethiopia. How huge? A factory with 3,000 workers is just one of its 130 businesses – and Motto is working on an 18,000-acre expansion.
Motto is smart, zealous, charismatic and utterly non-ironic. Along with the other Chinese, she has drunk the Koo-Aid and sees the park as entirely benevolent – bringing large scale employment and investment to a poor and neglected society. A visiting Chinese official exclaims, “it’s just like China used to be!“.
All of the workers are Ethiopian, who earn $50 per month in what is essentially a clean and gleaming sweatshop. All of the supervisors are Chinese who have left their families behind in China. The local farmers feel ripped off by their government, and an armed rebellion may be brewing. Apart from a global pandemic, what could possibly go wrong? In their first feature, directors Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan have created a brilliant exploration of clashing cultures and economic imperialism.
I screened Made in Ethiopia for the SLO Film Fest, where it made my Best of the SLO Film Fest. Now it’s on PBS’ POV. You can stream Made in Ethiopia on the PBS app or directly at the POV website.
Bix Biederbecke in BIX BIEDERBECKE: AIN’T NONE OF THEM PLAY LIKE HIM YET
The thorough documentary Bix Biederbecke: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet rediscovers a lost jazz legend. Bix Biederbecke was a cornet prodigy and an age peer of Louis Armstrong. His love for and obsession with music was undermined by alcoholism, and he drank himself to death at age 28 in 1931.
Biederbecke was an innovator and soulful performer. One of his bandmates compares the thrill of listening to Bix to hearing a woman say, Yes.
This superbly-sourced documentary was released in 1981 release, and includes interviews filmed in 1978-1980 with fellow musicians and band-mates, including his friend, Hoagy Carmichael. Bix’s sister also appears. There are also recordings of Bix’s performances.
Bix Biederbecke: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet has made my list of Longest Movie Titles.
This is a bit of a Lost Film, having been very, very hard to find on streaming platforms over the last few years. Bix Biederbecke: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet can now be streamed on Amazon.
Pavel Talankan in MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.
Nothing has changed since Aeschylus observed that the first casualty of war is truth, as revealed in Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the blistering exposé of Putin’s outrageous domestic propaganda about his Ukraine War.
Pavel Talankan is an unassuming, goodhearted guy with a small-time job as the events coordinator at the school in a remote Russian industrial town. That also makes him the school videographer, so no no one notices that, as he films school assemblies, award ceremonies and performances, he is also capturing the blatant Big Lie propaganda. It’s a surreptitious documentary filmed in plain sight.
Pavel is an unlikely muckraker. He is a free-thinking nebbish who loves Russia and loves his hometown of Karabash in the Ural region, putrefied by a noxious copper plant and called “the most toxic place on earth”.
More than anything, Pavel cares about his students, and he is increasingly disgusted as Putin ramps up the propaganda. First, a cadaverous party hack, whose heroes are the most vile Commie hitmen in history, spreads empirically false information about Ukraine being the aggressor in the war. Then, horrifyingly, Wagner mercenaries are brought in as classroom guest speakers. Silently, Pavel continues to film, letting the propagandists defile themselves for history.
Pavel is a hero, albeit a non-violent one, who risked his life to gather this material. David Borenstein exquisitely formed Pavel’s footage into a searing exposé of Putin’s soul-crushing impact on Russia. The secret audio from the funeral of a former student killed in Ukraine is heart-rending. The film begins with video of Pavel’s midnight escape from Russia,
I saw Mr. Nobody Against Putin at the SLO Film Fest; I’ll let you know when it gets a theatrical or VOD release.
