Film Festival | www.jaredmobarak.com

FANTASIA20 REVIEW: The Oak Room [2020]

2020/08/112020/08/25 Jared Mobarak

Goose the truth. It starts with a bottle of beer hitting a bar before an off-screen fight gets that glass bouncing along to the impact of bodies we never see. And it finishes with a similar still life that may or may not be the exact same beverage—a question left in limbo considering bottles are hitting bars past closing time throughout the entirety of director Cody Calahan and screenwriter Peter Genoway‘s film The Oak Room. There are a lot of these almost cyclical moments during its brisk, dialogue-heavy ninety-minutes: drifters…

FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Clapboard Jungle [2020]

2020/08/072020/08/20 Jared Mobarak

The reality doesn’t always live up to the dream. If you know anything about the independent film world, it won’t be surprising to discover the project writer/director Justin McConnell is hoping to get off the ground at the start of Clapboard Jungle isn’t going to be much further along in its pre-production process four years later. That’s the nature of the beast. You’re going to have moments of elation when it appears that funds have come through and the inevitable spiral downward when those plans evaporate. You’re going to hit…

FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Fried Barry [2020]

2020/07/072020/08/19 Jared Mobarak

Some things you just can’t run away from. Barry (Gary Green) is a piece of work. He’s a deadbeat husband to Suz (Chanelle de Jager), deadbeat dad to their son, and all-around deadbeat to Cape Town on the whole considering he’s shooting heroin when he’s not roughing up people who owe him money because he’s been facilitating their habits too. As far as we can tell by the cursory introduction writer/director Ryan Kruger provides, Barry deserves every single insult Suz hurls his way when he strolls home well past the…

CHAT20 REVIEW: The Wanting Mare [2021]

2020/05/212021/01/05 Jared Mobarak

The dream is what’s left. Paradise is the place humanity escaped with the bite of an apple and yet also what we aspire to find upon death. We want it until we have it and subsequently always want more. It’s a pursuit in which we’re inevitably corrupted as selfish greed consumes any shred of empathetic compassion we once possessed. Sometimes someone does come along to remind us—lover, child, etc.—to see through the veil of conquest and recognize the joy we’ve been conditioned to reject, but for how long? Too many…

HOTDOCS20 REVIEW: Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles [2020]

2020/05/112020/05/14 Jared Mobarak

Why am I getting an email from the Met? The choice of “medium” was easy for renowned chef Yotam Ottolenghi when asked by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to collaborate on their upcoming 2018 exhibition entitled Visitors to Versailles (1682-1789). Whether or not Marie Antoinette actually said the infamous line with which she’ll forever be entangled, the excessive decadence and bloody decline of the Château de Versailles as royal court cannot escape its confectionary marriage with cake. So Ottolenghi set his sights on selecting five of the most innovative and…

HOTDOCS20 REVIEW: Finding Sally [2020]

2020/04/262020/04/28 Jared Mobarak

The promise and the agony. It wasn’t until her early thirties that Tamara Mariam Dawit first discovered her father had a fifth sister named Selamawit. When she broached the subject with the other four (as well as her grandmother Tsehai), no one wanted to talk. This was the reason she moved to Ethiopia from Canada, though: to learn about her African heritage. And Aunt Sally wasn’t simply a throwaway piece of that considering the circumstances surrounding both her absence from the family and her eventual disappearance underground as part of…

TRIBECA20 REVIEW: Socks on Fire [2020]

2020/04/222020/04/23 Jared Mobarak

It’s hard to get ahead of a forty-year hurt. The hope is that the sorrow of losing a loved one proves the extent of the pain we must suffer before we set about sifting through what’s left of that expired life. It’s why we throw parties after funerals to try and approach a sense of normalcy through a celebratory remembrance of yesterday’s good times together despite today’s tough truth making it possible. We take a deep breath, confront our grief, and await the will reading meant to put every duck…

TRIBECA20 REVIEW: Banksy Most Wanted [2020]

2020/04/192020/04/20 Jared Mobarak

He’s someone who hits where it hurts. It’s always funny in a crisis like the current COVID-19 pandemic to see people screaming about how they don’t believe artists should receive financial relief. Unless they’ve been sitting on their lawn and staring at the sky these past two months, however, they’ve dealt very extensively with art on a daily basis. Maybe it’s entertainment like books, TV, movies, or music. Maybe it’s property such as homes, furniture, or interior design. And if we dig a bit further, we discover these people are…

BERLINALE20 REVIEW: La déesse des mouches à feu [Goddess of the Fireflies] [2020]

2020/02/182020/12/01 Jared Mobarak

I feel like I’m wasting my life. Die-hard grunge fan (and drug dealer) Fred (Noah Parker) tells Catherine (Kelly Depeault) she can’t play her Hole cd because Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain. It’s a remark that was probably half joke and half memorial that leads into Keven (Robin L’Houmeau) dropping the necessary wisdom of knowing Love wouldn’t have been able to stop him if she tried. Cobain wasn’t a victim. He lived hard and walked a road of his own making to an end he ultimately embraced enough to pull…

SLAM20 REVIEW: Film About a Father Who [2021]

2020/01/162022/01/27 Jared Mobarak

He doesn’t lie. He just doesn’t tell you what’s going on. While director Lynne Sachs admits her latest documentary Film About a Father Who could be superficially construed as a portrait (the title alludes to and the content revolves around her father Ira), she labels it a reckoning instead. With thirty-five years of footage shot across varied formats and devices to cull through and piece together, the result becomes less about providing a clear picture of who this man is and more about understanding the cost of his actions. Whether…

OIFF19 REVIEW: סיבת המוות [Cause of Death] [2019]

2019/11/122020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

I can’t stop thinking about it. Director Ramy A Katz leaves three text cards at the end of his Cause of Death to share responses to the film that were supplied by the Israeli police department, Ministry of Health, and the medical examiner of Officer Salim Barakat’s body upon his death at the scene of a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv on March 5, 2002. Each statement possesses one commonality that doesn’t make sense when read after watching Salim’s brother Jamal’s unofficial investigation into what happened a decade later. It’s…