documentary

a Sicilian Mafia double bill: THE TRAITOR and SHOOTING THE MAFIA

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Pierfrancesco Favino and Totò Riina in THE TRAITOR, Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Mafia movies have long been a cinematic staple and two current films explore the original Sicilian Mafia, the Cosa Nostra. The true life epic The Traitor and the documentary Shooting the Mafia cover the same territory – the Cosa Nostra‘s utter domination of Sicily until prosecuting judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellini convicted almost 400 mafiosi in the bizarre Maxi Trial in 1986-87, the Mafia War on the State and assassination of the judges, leading to public outrage and arrests which have somewhat tamed the Cosa Nostra. Both films even feature the real village of Corleone, the home village of the fictional Godfather.

Pierfrancesco Favino in THE TRAITOR, Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

The Traitor chronicles the career of Tommaso Buscetta, a mafia figure who traded in billions of dollars worth of heroin. Then, an internal gangland power grab led to the murders of his sons and to his arrest by very harsh Brazilian authorities. Buscetta retaliated by turning state’s evidence and testifying against his former Mafiosi, becoming the first and most important Sicilian Cosa Nostra informer.

The Traitor opens at a Mafia party where Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino) is sniffing out betrayal by his colleagues. It’s poker wisdom that, if you can’t spot the player who is :”the fish”, then it’s you. Or, as Victor Mature said in Gambling House, “You know what I think, Willie? I think I’m the fall guy.”

Written and directed by Marco Bellocchio, The Traitor is a two-and-a-half hour epic that spans decades and three continents. The highlight is the Maxi Trial, held in a super-secure fortified arnea, ringed by over 400 defendants caged around the top.

Pierfrancesco Favino is very, very good as Buscetta, a guy who is firmly devoted to his personal code. Luigi Lo Cascio from The Best of Youth also appears as a Buscetta friend.

Letizia Battaglia in SHOOTING THE MAFIA

The documentary Shooting the Mafia introduces us to Letizia Battaglia, a talented Palermo photographer, whose photojournalistic specialty became photographing murder victims – scores, perhaps hundreds of corpses, bullet-riddled and bomb-mangled, in pools of blood. Her work also documented the grief. trauma and outrage of the Sicilian population.

Battaglia is open and unapologetic about her lusty personal appetites – and she over-shares. She would be an interesting subject for a biodoc even if she photographed ears of corn.

A Letizia Battaglia photograph in SHOOTING THE MAFIA

Shooting the Mafia, an Irish and US production, is directed by Kim Longinotto.

The Traitor can be rented from all the major streaming services. Shooting the Mafia can be streamed on iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.

DISCLOSURE: giving voice to the trans perspective

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Laverne Cox in DISCLOSURE. Courtesy of NETFLIX.

I very much admired Disclosure, the insightful – and even revelatory – documentary about the depiction of trans people in film and television and the impacts of that depiction.

The best thing about Disclosure is the unfiltered trans voice – near as I can tell, 100% of the subjects and talking heads are trans or non-binary people, and it’s an uncommonly articulate bunch. I found the most compelling to be Emmy-winning actress Laverne Cox (Orange Is the New Black), actress/writer Jen Richards (Tales of the City), producer Zackary Drucker (Transparent) and actress Candis Cayne (Dirty Sexy Money).

The first 25 minutes – tracing depiction of trans people in film since D.W. Griffin’s silents – is not riveting. But stay with it – Disclosure pays off big time with these moving personal stories. Near the end, Jen Richards comments on an accepting parent that she saw in another documentary – get out the Kleenex for this moment.

I had always thought of Jaye Davidson’s Oscar nomination for her performance as Dil in The Crying Game as a step forward for trans people. It’s complicated. I had always viewed Stephen Rea’s reaction in the Big Reveal scene from my straight male perspective (cis, if you insist); Disclosure made me consider the trans woman’s lens, too.

Disclosure is streaming on Netflix.

KING IN THE WILDERNESS: an icon, foundering

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KING IN THE WILDERNESS. Photo by Flip Schulke Archives – ©. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

The superb documentary King in the Wilderness follows Martin Luther King, Jr., through his turbulent final two years. Although King had already become an icon, he was facing the challenges of a new political and societal landscape that King himself had helped create. And he was foundering.

  • King’s approach, which overcame the overt cultural racism and statutory segregation in the South, was not working against the de facto segregation and urban riots in the North. Nor was King gaining traction to expand the movement against bigotry into a movement against poverty.
  • His leadership in the Black community was being usurped by younger, more militant, leaders. Stokely Carmichael and his peers were quick to discard longtime White Civil Rights workers and to alienate White America with a message of Black Power, which resonated in the Black community. King refused to use the weaponized term, while trying to hang on to his base.
  • King was under pressure to make public his opposition to the Vietnam War. King’s strong anti-militarism came naturally from his study of Gandhi and his commitment to non-violence. But campaigning against the War would be seen as a betrayal by King’s most effective ally and benefactor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. King was genuinely grateful to LBJ, and LBJ was famously vindictive.

King was just off the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the two greatest legislative Civil Rights victories since the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery one hundred years before. In King in the Wilderness, it’s only a year later, and Martin Luther King, Jr. is facing a big fat case of What Have You Done For Me Lately?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael in KING IN THE WILDERNESS. Photo by Flip Schulke Archives – ©. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

It’s easy for us to forget just how young King was:

  • He was only 26 when he led the Birmingham Bus Boycott.
  • King wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail and led the the March on Washington at 34.
  • He won the Nobel Peace Prize at 35.
  • He led the march from Selma to Montgomery at 36.

After a great historic victory, it can be difficult to find a new objective. It’s hard to gain political power, and it can be just as hard to keep it. It’s difficult for a public figure to remain relevant in changing times. These are the challenges of leadership.

By focusing on this period of King’s life and career, director Peter Kunhardt and writer Chris Chuang have made an inspired choice. They have also sourced it brilliantly, with the remembrances of King intimates, most notably Andrew Young and Henry Belafonte, along with Stokely Carmichael’s fellow SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers. King family confidante Xernona Clayton bookends the movie with the two most poignant anecdotes.

King in the Wilderness was originally aired on HBO and won an Emmy for best historical documentary. It’s now widely available on streaming platforms.

TOUCHING THE VOID: when you must do the unthinkable

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TOUCHING THE VOID

Mountain climbing partners tie a line between themselves so – if one of them falls – he can be saved by the other. But what if an accident puts BOTH of them at mortal risk? What if the fallen climber can’t be pulled up? What if one climber’s fall has doomed the other? The gripping documentary Touching the Void retraces that situation in real life – what happens if you cut your partner’s line?

In 1985, this happened to expert climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates in the Peruvian Andes. The 2005 film Touching the Void re-enacts the incident with the reflections of participants.

There’s no more life-or-death decision than “Should I cut the rope?” Although the issues of betrayal and guilt naturally arise, it turns out to be lot more complicated than that.

That moment of decision is dramatic, of course, but it’s only one segment of Touching the Void, which includes multiple survival stories in one adventure. One of them is absolutely epic.

Touching the Void was directed by Kevin Macdonald, who won the Best Documentary Oscar for 2000’s One Day in September, about the terrorist attack at the 1976 Munich Olympics. Touching the Void has been acclaimed as “the most successful documentary in British cinema history”. Touching the Void can be streamed from Amazon and iTunes.

SPACESHIP EARTH: Last Stand of the Renaissance Man?

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SPACESHIP EARTH, Photo courtesy of NEON.

The latest from Silicon Valley native documentarian Matt Wolf, Spaceship Earth traces an audacious scientific quasi-experiment of the 1990s, the Biosphere 2, perhaps the Last Stand of the Renaissance Man.

A few months ago, Wolf released Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. He is the son of Cinequest documentary screener Sandy Wolf; in this recent profile of Sandy, I also highlight Matt Wolf’s career (scroll down).

How ambitious was Biosphere 2? (Biosphere 1 is Earth.) It was the construction of an enormous structure – big enough to host a series of ecosystems – jungle, desert, etc. And to fill it, like Noah’s Ark, with an array of plant and animal species. And then sealing a team of eight humans inside for two years to survive (don’t underestimate Job 1 in this experimental artificial environment), tend the agriculture and conduct scores of scientific experiments. The promise was to learn about how humans could survive in future space colonies.

Biosphere 2 in SPACESHIP EARTH.. Courtesy of ecotechnics.edu and Spaceship Earth.

Scientists quibble about how closed and controlled the experiments really were. Ultimately, the experiment itself is not as meaningful a story as who did it and why. Wolf could have made this a procedural, or an expose about a cult or a fiasco.

Instead, Wolf made the inspired choice to begin 25 years earlier, with the San Francisco hippie commune that became the core leadershop of Biosphere 2. Led by the charismatic John Allen and a cadre of very smart and able women, they moved to rural New Mexico, then Berkeley and then around the world. These were unusually highly functioning hippies because they didn’t dive into drugs, and they focused on tangible projects like building a seaworthy ship and a hotel in Nepal – and always experimental theater.

Along the way, billionaire-with-a-B Ed Bass took a shining to Allen and the group and became their benefactor and sponsor. That made it possible for a pipe dream about sustainability to become a real project with a budget in the hundreds of millions.

SPACESHIP EARTH, Courtesy of Spaceship Earth

Here’s what is stunning about this story. If someone, say NASA, had undertaken to create an Earth-like closed environment in preparation for space colonization, these are the LAST people who would have been asked to be involved. None of these hippies had academic or professional credentials or experience that even remotely would qualify them, in an objective sense. But they got there first with the idea and with Ed Bass’ money.

That’s what I found so amazing about the folks behind Biosphere 2 – they weren’t specialists, like the folks who build spaceships. Think of the generalist Renaissance Man who works across disciplines. These folks had a profound commitment to sustainability and said “what if?”, much like Da Vinci designing buildings, bridges and fortification, conceptualizing parachutes, helicopters and deep sea diving bells while painting great art. Or like the 18th Century gentleman inventors/scientists/industrialists/collectors.

The resultant 1990s media circus, certainly enough to scar the participants, seems almost quaint today. With an instantaneous and never ending news cycle, tribal and agenda-driven commentary and viral social media, God help them if they tried this today. It didn’t turn out to be the New Age Garden of Eden that was advertised.

Of course, there was hubris and tone deaf PR from the organizers, and the inevitable personality clashes between any eight nonconformists locked up together in a fish bowl for twp years. And then there was that sudden soaring of the CO2 level, threatening the lives of many species, including the humans.

What happened? In Spaceship Earth, it’s not treated as a catastrophe or a self-immolation or a betrayal, although you could make the argument for any of those characterizations. What’s more important is what these folks aspired to do and how far they got.

This was a genuine quest for sustainability, with some valid scientific experiments embedded in grand performance art.

Just released this weekend, Spaceship Earth can be streamed from iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

COLD CASE HAMMERSKJOLD: a historical mystery and a quirkier investigation

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Cold Case Hammarskjöld

Mads Brügger’s eccentric and irresistible documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld purports to solve a historical mystery. In 1961, Secretary-General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld was flying to cease-fire negotiations near the Congo-Rhodesia border when his plane crashed, killing all aboard. There has never been a satisfactory explanation of why or how the plane crashed.

Danish filmmaker Brügger enlists the Swedish private investigator Göran Björkdahl, who has been researching the Hammarskjöld crash, and heads off to Africa in search of witnesses and clues. Björkdahl is dead serious. Brügger is, well, entertaining. With an ironic wink at the audience, Brügger begins by equipping the two with pith helmets for their African exploration.

The two come across a very plausible conspiracy that the Hammarskjöld plane was targeted. And, as they move among the shady world of South African reactionaries, they encounter an even more shocking conspiracy theory. But Brügger is a story-teller, not a historian; fortunately, he doesn’t have to deliver a smoking gun.

Idiosyncratically, Brügger chooses to narrate his film by dictating the “script” to two African secretaries. Midway, he admits that what really drives him is the excuse to hop around Africa talking to aged fixers and mercenaries. And it’s a rich collection of scoundrels that he finds, some revealing old secrets, some covering them up and some apparently spinning wild tales.

That’s the fun of Cold Case Hammarskjöld, now available from all the usual streaming services.

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: behind the one percent

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CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Documentarian Justin Pemberton brings alive Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a critique of the concentration of wealth. There’s no more fundamentally important political topic than inequality, and this theme has resonated through the best of recent cinema, including Parasite and Knives Out.

Pinketty traces the economics of wealth from feudal times to the present, and Pemberton keeps all the economic history lively with plenty of eye candy. Capital in the Twenty-First Century covers a lot of ground – globalization and movable capital, deregulation and privatization, defanging of organized labor, China state capital, and the impact on today’s youngest generations.

Piketty’s proffered solutions are simple and intellectually sound (stopping off-shore tax dodges, taxing inheritance, incentivizing wealth to be invested in productive risk instead of moving around a closed-loop of financial instruments). But, given the political power of great wealth, this is a very heavy political lift.

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century pops along fairly briskly, but, as an entertaining popularizer, it’s no The Big Short or An Inconvenient Truth. Still, about an hour in, there’s a jaw-dropping psych experiment in which people benefiting from pure luck believe and act as though they are entitled.

During its Bay Area virtual run at the Roxie, you can stream Capital in the Twenty-First Century at Roxie Virtual Cinema, or at distributoe Kino Lorber’s new virtual platform Kino Marquee.

VERY SEMI-SERIOUS – glimpsing inside The New Yorker cartoons

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VERY SEMI-SERIOUS

If you’re like me and you worship the cartoons in The New Yorker, then the documentary Very Semi-Serious is a Must See. Very Semi-Serious takes us inside The New Yorker for a glimpse inside the process of creating and selecting the cartoons, chiefly from the perspective of cartoonist and twenty-year New Yorker Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff. You will know Mankoff from his cartoon with the caption, “How about never? Is never good for you?”. (Mankoff has since left The New Yorker for Esquire and the website Cartoon Collections.)

We also meet rock star cartoonists that include Roz Chast and George Booth, along with The New Yorker Editor David Remnick and some aspiring cartoonist newcomers. We are boggled by the tens of cartoons each cartoonist pitches each week and the hundreds that the Cartoon Editor must review. Rejection is a major part of the cartoon life.

We also learn how Mankoff scientifically studies the eye movements of readers to see how/when/if we “get” the jokes. And we get to laugh again at HUNDREDS of cartoons.

I saw Very Semi-Serious at the 2015 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), and now you can stream it from Amazon (free with Prime), iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.

RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT: it seemed crazy at the time…

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. Marion Stokes in RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT, directed by Matt Wolf. Photo credit: Eileen Emond and courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.

The excellent documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, is about an eccentric woman who did something that seemed crazy, but turned out to be be important. For over 30 years, 24 hours per day, on multiple channels, Marion Stokes everything that was on TV – local news, commercials, network shows – the whole enchilada. She left a collection of 70,000 videotapes, Recorder explains the How and the Why.

It turns out that, before digital technology, TV stations did not preserve what they broadcast. So, what Stokes compiled is essential and irreplaceable – a unique archive of broadcasting and of American culture as it has been reflected by television.

Now, this was – and had to be – the project of an obsessive. Stokes’ son sagely observes that the difference between collecting and hoarding is the perceived value of the objects.

Stokes was one of those people whose cause was so important to them that it is prioritized above, for example, family relationships. I found the testimony from Stokes’ household staff – essentially her chosen family – most insightful and touching.

It’s a fascinating story. Stokes was that rare radical activist who both understood the power of media and had the financial means of recording and storing all of these broadcasts. She was an early adopter (her first tapings were on Betamax!), and became an Apple enthusiast.

Director Matt Wolf unspools this story perfectly. He is the son of Cinequest documentary screener Sandy Wolf; in this recent profile of Sandy, I also highlight Matt Wolf’s career (scroll down).

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is streamable on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

BUCK: the man inside the horseman

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Buck Brannaman in BUCK

Buck is a documentary about real-life horse whisperer Buck Brannaman, an exceedingly grounded and gentle man who knows everything about horse behavior.  But the movie is more about human behavior, about the disturbing crucible that formed Buck, and about what we can learn about people from their handling of horses.

Fortunately, Director Cindy Meehl realized that she had a great story and got out of the way.  The understated guitar-based score never becomes melodramatic.  And Meehl never lets the admiring talking heads elevate Buck to more than what he is, which is remarkable enough.  This movie could have easily been painfully corny or pretentious and is neither.  I’d happily view it again today.

Buck’s own background is so nasty that it would totally unremarkable for him to have emerged mean or emotionally crippled – and he is the farthest from either.  With some help from loving people, Buck has chosen to become something different from his apparent fate.  In this way, Buck could be a companion piece to Mike Leigh’s Another Year.

Buck was shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar. You can rent Buck from Amazon, YouTube and Google Play or buy it from iTunes.