Simon Zhou previews the Framing Reality section of the 2010 NZ International Film Festival. See more previews here.
Inciting, insightful, incendiary.
Is how I hope my reviews will be received.
Simon Zhou previews the Framing Reality section of the 2010 NZ International Film Festival. See more previews here.
Inciting, insightful, incendiary.
Is how I hope my reviews will be received.
The cause célèbre of this section devoted to documentary films is that there is no chance of Paranormal Activity popping up.
I was flicking through the festival programme with my girlfriend, and a particular film in this section caught her eye, Babies (dir. Thomas Balmes). To quote her, “Wow. Babies”. I have nothing to add.
The rest of this section is rich with documentaries exploring subjects both familiar (Love, Lust & Lies, dir. Gillian Armstrong) and exotic (Strange Birds in Paradise: A West Papuan Story, dir. Charlie Hill-Smith), political (Presumed Guilty, dir. Roberto Hernandez, Geoffrey Smith) and intimate (The Oath, dir. Laura Poitras), tragic (Russian Lessons, dir. Andrei Nekrasov, Olga Knoskaya) and funny (His & Hers, dir. Ken Wardrop); dealing with issues of identity as cultural transaction (Secrets of the Tribe, dir. Jose Padilha), economic crisis as singular greed (Inside Job, dir. Charles Ferguson), history as personal trauma (A Film Unfinished, dir. Yael Hersonski), and rugby as feminist reform (Salam Rugby, dir. Faramaz Beheshti).
A myriad of films to provoke and edify; of particular note is Collapse (dir. Chris Smith), An Inconvenient Truth centred around doom theorist Michael Ruppert, whose insights have a terrifying relevance to how we are living our lives, and Jia Zhang-Ke’s I Wish I Knew, a collective portrait of the orphans of China’s industrial expansion. More well known for his narrative work (Still Life, The World), Jia Zhang-ke is the heir to the cinematic style of luminaries Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Yasijiro Ozu in that he equates politics to the most minute rhythms of everyday life, and presents the most minute rhythms of everyday life as inextricably political.