Reviews

The rise of Elon Musk’s ground-breaking electric car operation Tesla serves as a fascinating backdrop for Andreas Pichler’s jarring and revealing feature documentary, as a fatal accident in Florida triggers a protracted lawsuit to hold the company accountable, bringing into serious doubt the company’s much-hyped “autopilot” function.

As the opera house is for opera, and a church is for service, the cinema is a temple to its art form. Victor Kossakovsky’s Trillion, which is best experienced without any prior knowledge of its content, is one of those rare documentaries that has to be seen on the big screen. As a kind of audiovisual ‘music’, Trillion has a theme, but no plot, dialogue or traditional storytelling. But the black-and-white imagery is gorgeous and the sound design superb, making Trillion an immensely immersive experience.

Frustrated teenager, talented artist, battered wife. Mehrdad Oskouei’s remotely directed Afghan niece Soraya is all these things, while she tenaciously tries to enter the EU from Iran and Turkey, hoping to reunite with her mother in Austria. In this nuanced and intimate documentary we follow Saraya as she films herself during her desperate odyssey. Visually, the whole experience is enriched by beautiful, painterly animations which are clearly fantastical, but convincingly integrated into the documentary reality.

Having spent her whole life aspiring to be a professional singer, middle-aged cleaner Gil finally achieves her dream in Maria Clara Escobar’s hybrid documentary, which invents an alternative story in which Gil can shed the mask forced on her by economic and class factors, and at last present her true self, her own voice, to the world.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson’s deliciously paced Vacances is neither a reductive portrait of an old eccentric nor a sensationalist dissection of a dysfunctional family. Although either could probably have been edited from her material. Instead, we mostly find ourselves lounging languidly around a sunny villa in Provence, as the uninhibited, at times inexcusably rude, Granny dominates the proceedings. But at some point, something’s gotta give…

This elegiac ode to a crumbling cinema in Amman intertwines the messy reality of making a documentary [which entails the filmmaker constantly steering his protagonists from behind the camera] with archival news footage on Palestine-Israel. Both meta levels reflect on this beautiful portrayal of the cinema’s last two elderly employees, who struggle daily to keep their doomed movie theatre afloat. Thus say I, a critic and lover of cinema…and of this film.

An enthralling, illuminating and warm-hearted examination of the life and work of a woman who was self-aware of her image and abilities, but who defied the expectations of the tinsel town system, ultimately charting her own course away from the movie world.

A beautifully mounted documentary-fable, The Tale of Silyan is an astute blend of environmental messaging and magical realism, all tightly structured and crafted to offer up an easy to watch (and economical) film that at times feels more like a genial folk tale than a movie with a hard-hitting eco message. That said, within Kotevska’s unique construction the whole thing works rather wonderfully.

A beautifully shot examination of the troubled life of a young welder in modern-day Belarus trying to unite her fractured family against all the odds, Welded Together plays out like a narrative drama, but with a greater sense of emotional resonance, and made with a real sense of heart and compassion.

An affectionate and gently insightful examination of an immigrant story, Karla Murthy’s respectful and thoughtful film charts her father’s journey from India to America, mainly based on a series of recorded interviews with him while he was working the night shift at a Texas gas station. What the doc does quite wonderfully is act as a warm-hearted tribute to an immigrant life and a reflection on the importance of family kindness.