Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe
It made sense that this documentary was preceded at its SXSW screenings by the short <i>Star Wars: Retold</i> (retold by someone who’s never seen it). Even people who have never sat through George Lucas’ epic tale of a galaxy far, far away have been touched by its cultural impact.
Directed by Clark Lyda and Jesse Lyda
The T. Don Hutto Residential Center has become infamous as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility up in Williamson County that used to house immigrant and asylum-seeking families as their appeals go through the courts. That makes Hutto a prison for children and parents, none of whom has been convicted of anything.
Directed by Judi Krant
Starring: Jackson Kuehn, Dan Sumpter, Syna Zhang, Deng Jung
Novelties are the benchmark of a great society, proclaims starry-eyed inventor Johnson (Kuehn). But he’s no Da Vinci or Edison: His genius lies in the realm of sneezing powder, pet rocks, and Slinkies – the pieces of irrelevant crap that make someone a millionaire. Flying on a whim and a dream from Woodville, Texas (population 2,415), to Shanghai, China (population 20 million), to find someone to manufacture his closely guarded “humorous domestic hygiene product,” the sweet-natured Johnson falls under the sway of Magnus (Sumpter), an English snake-oil-dealing business consultant after his money.
Continue reading Review: Made in China (2009)
Directed by Grant Gee
Starring: Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Tony Wilson, Paul Morley
Joy Division is not a documentary about the band Joy Division. Or, rather, it’s not that simple. It’s about the English city of Manchester in the 1970s: the rain-soaked, crumbling, devastated, crime-infested and hopeless city that helped form the band and that they in turn kick-started culturally. Inevitably, it must delicately contend with the suicide of singer Ian Curtis and the still-raw wound of his relationships with his wife, Deborah, and his lover, Anik Honore.
Continue reading Review: Joy Division (2008)
Directed by Rebecca Richman Cohen
Issa Sesay is a convicted war criminal. The tragically small number of Westerners who followed the 11 years of blood-soaked revolution in the African state of Sierra Leone know that, and it’s the first fact presented in this measured analysis of Sesay’s five-year trial.
While making the Iraq-based documentary Gunner Palace in 2003, cameraman Michael Tucker was embedded with U.S. soldiers raiding what they thought was a bomb factory. What they found was four brothers in their family home – and no evidence. One brother spoke straight to Tucker’s camera. He didn’t seem angry at the soldiers in his garden but bitterly disappointed. Now Tucker tells the rest of his story.
He was Yunis Khatayer Abbas, an Iraqi journalist working for CNN and other foreign stations. He had been tortured as a dissident under Saddam Hussein and initially welcomed the Americans as liberators. He had no links to the insurgents. Yet, instead of being released, Yunis disappeared into the machinery of the occupation. For nine months, he and two of his brothers were held without charge at Camp Ganci, the low-risk section of Abu Ghraib. With the same clarity that he held the camera’s attention in Gunner Palace, Yunis explains the increasingly bizarre and terrible treatment he and his fellow inmates suffered. Yet he also praises the humanity of American guards who tried to provide some comfort to the prisoners.
(A version of this story previously appeared at AustinChronicle.com)
Continue reading Interview: Michael Tucker on The Prisoner, Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (2007)
Documentarians Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker spent five years unfurling the life of the man behind one of the most famous figures of modern culture: Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who has played Big Bird on Sesame Street since 1969 (portions of this interview originally appeared at austinchronicle.com).
Richard Whittaker: Everyone knows Big Bird, but how did you even become aware of Caroll?
Dave LaMattina: In 2005, I was interning at Sesame Workshop, because I wanted to go into family entertainment, and it was the pinnacle of place you could be for that. Great internship, and then a year or two later I was telling a friend about the various internships I’d had, and I said something about Sesame Street, and she said, oh, I’m actually family friends with Caroll Spinney. I didn’t know who that was, and thought Carroll was a woman, and she proceeded to tell me that he’s a man, and he’s been Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since 1969.
So Chad were emailing, as we are want to do, and we were kicking around some doc ideas, and that came up and we couldn’t really let go of of it. We reached out to Sesame, thinking this would be a lot of red tape. and I think within a week we had a meeting set up with Carroll.
Continue reading Interview: Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker on I Am Big Bird