Reviews

An elegant and insightful blend of childlike art, music and observation helps elevate Vida Dena’s documentary My Paper Life (Ma vie en papier) to something rather special, and helps deliver a thoughtful and warm look into the thoughts, memories and present-day realities for a Syrian family who have escaped the war and are now living in Belgium.

A survivor of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the story of Aurora Mardiganin is the harrowing true story of a teenager who, after seeing her family murdered, embarked on a remarkable journey that involved incarceration within a Turkish harem and escape to the US. Her story was eventually re-told in a silent Hollywood film. That she re-lived that story as star of the film makes it all the more chilling. Armenian Academy Award Int'l Feature submission.

The sense of laid-back cool that infuses the music of the band Cymande is very much reflected in this engagingly straight-forward documentary that traces the history of the band and details the influence their work had on musicians who came after them, especially in the world of hip-hop where tracks often 20 years old were sampled by major players.

A playfully provocative delve into work of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his dance/art troupe La Pocha Nostra, Amber Bemak’s engagingly breezy and busy documentary manages to offer plenty of insight into culture and politics while also playfully blurring the line between filmmaker and subject.

Stories about a return to the homeland to seek fortune and happiness are familiar, but Golden Land manages to offer something generous and gently compassionate to the canon. While drama and darkness lurk in the background (and certainly have an influence on proceedings) the film is permeated with reflections on family and support as it tells the story of a Finnish family who return to Somaliland to follow their dreams.

In Susanna Helke’s cleverly provocative and often very moving documentary, the beautifully hypnotic sound of Anna-Mari Kähärä’s music plays in poignant counterpoint to the words, comments and confessions posted by carers for the elderly in Finland between 2019 and 2021, and sung by a choir up of fellow, exhausted nurses.

A remarkable and provocative film, Children of the Enemy is the moving and powerful story of one man’s lonely fight to try and free his seven grandchildren from a refugee camp in Syria. Gorki Glaser-Muller’s absorbing film is straightforward in structure and tone and wisely never does more than follow Patricio Galvez through his emotionally harrowing journey.

Stylistically dreamlike, emotionally intimate, Srđan Keča’s debut feature, which screens in the AJB Doc Last Minute Cinema section, leads us into the homeless lives of a young girl, her mother and an ersatz grandmother, living in the basement of the never completed Museum of the Revolution in Belgrade.

Urban legend or shocking revelation? A controversial unnamed source provides the spine for Miran Zupanič’s chilling and often shocking documentary which tells the story of how rich foreigners allegedly paid top dollar to join Bosnian Serb Army snipers to shoot at residents of a Sarajevo under siege during the 1992-96 war.

The prodigious talent of jazz legend Louis Armstrong is beautifully celebrated by filmmaker Sacha Jenkins (director of Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men) who revisits the music, the man and his legacy, and reappraises the politics of the legendary jazz trumpeter and singer.