TIFF17 REVIEW: Los Burritos [Cocaine Prison] [2017]

“If it doesn’t happen, what can I do?” If you’ve ever watched season three of “Prison Break” and wondered what was going on with Sona’s weird open air slum-like community barely watched by guards, know that the truth isn’t very far off. Just look at Bolivia’s San Sebastian Prison in Cochabamba, a small concrete establishment that ballooned from 180 inmates to over 700 in less than five years. You have to purchase a cell for $2,100 American dollars of your own money if you don’t want to sleep in the…

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REVIEW: American Promise [2013]

“I hope times have changed” Before Boyhood began its eleven-year gestation as a fictionalized document of a real life coming-of-age journey in America, multiple documentary projects were born in the same vein. The Up Series started in 1964, Doug Block‘s The Kids Grow Up used home video from as far back as the 90s to give context to his daughter’s graduation, and American Promise‘s cameras commenced rolling in 2000 on two five-year old African American boys about to step into the high-pressure environment of Brooklyn-based K-12 independently-operated and predominantly white…

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REVIEW: I Called Him Morgan [2017]

“I’m making the biggest mistake of my life” The life of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan was one of extreme highs and lows. He was a musician plucked towards superstardom at the age of eighteen by Dizzy Gillespie, eventually touring with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers while helping create the Blue Note label’s sound. But he’s also a guy who took to heroin hard enough to risk and almost destroy his career and life. Guys who would later play with him after rehab recall catching a glimpse of what looked…

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REVIEW: Bienvenue à F.L. [Welcome to F.L.] [2015]

“It’s hard to figure out exactly who you are and then it’s even harder to actually become that person” It would have been difficult for filmmaker Geneviève Dulude-De Celles to find a better metaphor in action than the one at the center of her documentary Bienvenue à F.L. [Welcome to F.L.]. Beyond the wonderfully spare and candid interviews with students lies a photography project known as “Inside Out” where classmates pair up to take each other’s portrait for an art installation on their school’s exterior façade. Here’s an example of…

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REVIEW: David Lynch: The Art Life [2017]

“They got along like Ike and Mike” If you remember back to 2007, a documentary entitled Lynch came out portraying an all-access pass into the creative process of auteur David Lynch‘s final feature-length film, Inland Empire. There was a lot of smoke and mirrors surrounding its release from the use of a nom de plume where the director was concerned (some even speculated it was Lynch himself at the time) to the notion of a collective known as the Lynch Three Project. This film became “One” with a short named…

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REVIEW: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City [2017]

“If you can understand a city, then that city is dead” The 1960s were a hotbed of activism by necessity. You had civil rights battles for racial and gender equality, protests standing in opposition of new wars coming down the pipeline after just finishing one that risked destroying everything, and America’s growing wealth disparity reaching an apex yet to be solved even today. You had an expanding populace surviving domestically in cities that were falling apart and in desperate need of resuscitation. Suddenly the “first world” hit a decision point…

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REVIEW: Contemporary Color [2017]

“Stage this way” You have to give David Byrne credit. He stumbled upon the idea of color guards, looked into the excitement and spectacle of their “sport of the arts,” and sought to open their world to the rest of us ignorant to their craft outside of football halftime shows. So he called upon modern music luminaries (Lucius, Nico Muhly + Ira Glass, Nelly Furtado, Devonté Hynes, St. Vincent, How to Dress Well, Money Mark + Ad Rock, Zola Jesus, tUnE-y-ArDs, and himself) to compose wholly original pieces that would…

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REVIEW: Class Divide [2016]

“It was here first” You won’t get a better depiction of gentrification on film than Marc Levin‘s Class Divide, but I’m not entirely sure that’s enough. The central premise is to show how there can be two worlds separated by nothing more than the width of a street: public housing projects on one side and a $40,000 a year private school on the other. How do the children raised in each find balance and how does that gap get bridged? These were questions I hoped to see answered because we…

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REVIEW: Kedi [2017]

“Without the cat, Istanbul would lose part of its soul” I’m not an animal lover, a reality one subject in Ceyda Torun‘s documentary Kedi presumes means I cannot love anything. Such a sentiment is hyperbolic, but there’s something to be said about people’s interactions with animals exposing how they’ll interact with humans too. You don’t have to be an animal person to understand their role in others’ lives or the fact that they too are living, breathing entities. At a certain point you must reach down and give a dog…

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REVIEW: Fuocoammare [Fire at Sea] [2016]

“The mountains couldn’t hide us” The story within Fuocoammare [Fire at Sea] is a personal one for director Gianfranco Rosi, himself a refugee from Eritrea during its war for independence at thirteen. He left his parents behind, arriving in Italy on a military plane. So to see statistics about 400,000 men, women, and children leaving Africa and the Middle East for the tiny twenty-square km island of Lampedusa in twenty years isn’t to simply be wowed by the abstract numbers. He understands the struggle, hope, and uncertainty that go into…

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REVIEW: Life, Animated [2016]

“Just your voice” It’s 2017 and yet I’m pretty sure you think about one of two things when hearing the word autism: Rain Man or vaccination. This is a shame because it only helps bolster the stigma assigned to the disorder. Pop culture has latched onto the “spectrum” with multiple examples of Asperger’s syndrome, but full-blown autism remains relegated to a nightmare scenario instead. So just imagine what Ron and Cornelia Suskind must have thought during the early nineties when their son Owen was officially diagnosed. Hardly a few years…

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