Reviews

With this well-crafted, engaging and touching film, in which his elderly father and uncle are seeking information on their own long-ago departed father, Dutch director Tom Fassaert raises poignant, at times troubling, questions about the personal and private aspects of filming your own family affairs.

A determined Nairobi journalist’s investigation into the complex and dangerously tangled world of land battles in Kenya sees her caught between a faceless multinational corporation, unhelpful local tea growers and a worrying family secret. Co-director Bea Wangondu’s attempt to reveal the truth and unearth the implications of colonialism in Kenya makes for absorbing viewing, though it offers no easy answers. Nor does it hint at any form of justice.

Gara and daughter Nada live on a gorgeous, sparsely populated plateau, which the Montenegrin military is eyeing up as a NATO shooting range. To Hold a Mountain, selected for World Doc Cinema Competition, explains their resistance not through arguments, but through the sublime beauty of the landscape. Because to be there, to live on this ancestral mountain, is to experience the most wondrous sense of space.

A balanced, at times sad and chilling, investigation into the reality and impact of laboratory research into animals, Tony Jones’s rigorously made documentary gives room for both sides of the argument both in terms of animal welfare and the medical benefits. The film is largely seen through the eyes of Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, a primatologist turned animal welfare advocate, whose insight, knowledge and compassion forms the spine of the film.

Just like its subject - 79-year old entomologist Professor Arthur M. Shapiro - this documentary is a wonderful example of focus, calm and modesty. With thoughtful persistence and an eye for detail, the film shows the life of a “slow scientist” who has made an enormous impact with his seemingly small deeds. It is a wonderful film to lose yourself in and reflect upon – a labour of love, not unlike the body of scientific work that Shapira has painstakingly built over more than half a century. 

In the intimate and personal, at times melancholic All My Sisters, two sisters’ coming of age in Iran is beautifully documented by their uncle. The subsequent film, in which the sisters are invited to observe and comment on the material he had shot for almost two decades, speaks of family, loyalty and compassion, but also of oppression and resistance.

In this entertaining, clever and very personal film, what at first appears to be a culture clash story about a Chinese film student returning home from Poland to her family in Huai’an, explodes – or rather, implodes – into something much more intensely and darkly personal, and therefore highly universal. What’s more, it includes some of the most intense and intimate arguments you will have ever witnessed in a documentary film.

Amy Goodman is remarkable. As host and executive producer of Democracy Now, she is a multi-award-winning standard-bearer for independent journalism and a fearless advocate for a just society. Besides a multi-layered portrait, Steal this Story Please! film is a celebration of resistance and compassion, but which furthermore shows just how much the concept of a free press is in danger.

Within a bleak and fading Armenian retirement home – where the ages of residents range from 60 to over 90 - a theatre director sets about casting for his ensemble production of ‘Shakespeare’s Sins.’ While, in the play, we see how Shakespeare’s characters call him to account for their tragic fates, the documentary equally offers the opportunity to delve into the diverse and complex lives of this aged community. 

There’s a gentle prodding of issues surrounding AI in this documentary-fiction hybrid by Marc Isaacs, in which a research lab requests access to his documentaries to help train their AI to display more ‘sincerity’. The resulting film is highly entertaining with its interplay between the real and the artificial but, intellectually, it does not delve so deeply. What ‘sincerity’ is or could be – or could be defined as for AI purposes – is never seriously discussed.