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HOTDOCS19 REVIEW: Mr. Toilet: The World’s #2 Man [2019]

2019/04/262020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

Turning poop culture into pop culture. This statistic says it all: 40% of citizens on Earth don’t have toilets. A big part of that number is India and China, but it’s still insane to comprehend as someone from a country that won’t allow homes or businesses to be built without one. It’s the type of problem you’d assume tops every nation’s to-do list and yet most cases have it found at the very bottom. Why? Because change isn’t easy. If your family has practiced open-air defecation for generations, why stop?…

HOTDOCS19 REVIEW: Willie [2019]

2019/04/242020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

I’m not done. It was 2003 before a Black hockey player had the honor of being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. That player was Grant Fuhr, the Stanley Cup winning goalie of the Edmonton Oilers and multiple other teams (including a short stint with my hometown Buffalo Sabres). Because he was far from the first Black player in the league, however, you wouldn’t be faulted for wondering why the man with that unique distinction hadn’t already been enshrined. The reason was simple: Willie O’Ree only played forty-five games…

REVIEW: Amazing Grace [2019]

2019/04/112020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

We want you to let the folks know you’re here. Released in 1972, Aretha Franklin‘s live album with Reverend James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir entitled Amazing Grace took the country by storm selling over two million copies in America alone on its way to double platinum certification. Knowing it was going to be special, Warner Bros. hired a film crew and director Sydney Pollack to record everything for an accompanying documentary much like they did with Woodstock and Michael Wadleigh two years prior. Fresh off his first…

REVIEW: Cradle of Champions [2018]

2019/03/222020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

Humble, hungry, and ready. There’s no better entry point into a subject as expansive and famed as the New York Daily News‘ Golden Gloves tournament than a pair of talented fighters with history. This way you’re able to turn your focus onto them as they train and work their way to the finals for a brutally close bout wherein both leave everything in the ring. Sprinkle in some historical tidbits about the tournament itself with a litany of legendary names cutting their teeth before prolific professional careers and you’ve made…

REVIEW: Apollo 11 [2019]

2019/03/122020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

The Eagle has landed. A black screen with the title Apollo 11 arrives for an instant before we’re whisked away to July 1969 as those in Mission Control and astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins prepare themselves for the first manned spaceflight to land on the moon. There’s no opening interstitial providing context, no narrator explaining what’s next. Director Todd Douglas Miller goes full “direct cinema” here—or at least as much as one can despite adding a propulsive score and expert cuts alongside ample split-screens—to immerse us in…

REVIEW: Ksiaze i dybuk [The Prince and the Dybbuk] [2018]

2019/03/112020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

He never spoke about his past. The title says it all: Ksiaze i dybuk [The Prince and the Dybbuk]. Rather than describe two separate entities, however, Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosolowski‘s documentary portrays director Michal Waszynski as both and neither. Their investigations lead them to multiple countries as close friends and basic strangers attempt to piece together who he really was on-set and off. This means interviews with his “second family” in Italy (the Dickmanns), World War II veterans who served in the Polish/Russian unit he documented, an extra from…

REVIEW: Die Unsichtbaren [The Invisibles] [2019]

2019/03/032020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

After a little while you noticed that they were scared. We’re so used to stories of Holocaust survivors talking about what they endured inside the concentration camps that we forget around seven thousand Jewish men and women stayed hidden during World War II. While only about fifteen hundred ultimately walked away to live their lives in the aftermath, it’s impossible not to hail them and those who assisted them as heroes. The tales of close calls and secrets alone are worth discovering and yet these four (Cioma Schönhaus, Ruth Gumpel,…

BERLINALE19 REVIEW: Kameni govornici [The Stone Speakers] [2019]

2019/02/152020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

We need both spiritual and physical healing. Writer/director Igor Drljaca takes us on a contemplative tour through four towns in Bosnia-Herzegovinia with his documentary Kameni Govornici [The Stone Speakers]. We never hear him speak nor watch any of his subjects respond. All we hear are their disembodied words atop static portraits of them standing against the backdrop of their environment and all we see are the remnants of and creation from destruction post-World War II and civil ethnic unrest. There are the locals lamenting their dying land as its unable…

BERLINALE19 REVIEW: Ringside [2019]

2019/02/132020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

You can hit people and you can’t get in trouble. Boxing became the way two fathers in Chicago could keep their sons off the streets. Kenneth Sims Sr. was a brawler back in the day before turning his passion into a career as a coach. Destyne Butler Sr. was a pugilist aficionado who succumbed to the allure of drug dealing before getting out of the game. They therefore knew how easy it was to fall into a hole that seemed impossible to climb and what it took to do exactly…

REVIEW: Period. End of Sentence. [2018]

2019/01/312020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

This is something only God knows. The patriarchy in India is real. I went there a few years ago for a week with a friend of mine—a trip she organized and therefore had all our local reservations under her name. Regardless of whether they knew hers was a woman’s name or not, you can’t diminish the fact that almost every single person we met from tour guides to drivers to hotel employees made the assumption to come to me and call me by her name. It didn’t matter when we…

REVIEW: Black Sheep [2018]

2019/01/242020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

That could have been one of you guys. You hear it often: “Just fit in.” Parents say it to their children while friends wield peer pressure for similar goals. But those sentiments move beyond words when it comes to a world so ingrained with racism that some are deluded enough to believe it doesn’t exist. Actions begin portraying this mantra as a byproduct of those who deem to call others inferior. Racism at its core is a philosophy wherein a people demean “others” via violent, political, and/or psychological actions simply…