Once My Mother isn’t necessarily an exemplar of expert filmmaking. Chronicling the life of director Sophia Turkiewicz’s mother, Helen, who travelled the perilous journey from war-torn Poland through a Siberian gulag and Zimbabwean refugee camp before arriving in Australia, some formal failings are understandable: Turkiewicz filmed the bulk of the documentary with no funding, meaning…
Paris is Burning is a document of the New York drag ball subculture of the eighties, providing a precise record of the intricate minutiae that came to define these LGBTIQ gatherings: the language, the fashion, the behaviour –in such fascinating detail that it remains a cultural touchstone. Sub-cultures create meaning through specificity. You say this…
If you pitched Next Goal Wins as a fictional film, you’d be laughed out of the office. This soccer documentary reproduces every cliché of inspirational sports films like The Mighty Ducks or Cool Runnings. The lowest-ranked soccer team in the world, American Samoa, who infamously lost 31-0 to the Socceroos in 2001, fill out the…
In Bob We Trust unapologetically positions Father Bob Maguire as an icon of goodness, an old man with an infectious good humour, idiosyncratic charm and, above all, a deep respect and love for humanity. Defined by his generosity in the community and his outspokenness in the media, this documentary chronicles Bob’s battle to try and…
A few minutes into Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley’s documentary about her family history, I decided I wasn’t going to like the movie. I have a natural disinclination towards documentaries built on recollections. Stylistically they’re built on talking heads, recreations and snippets of stock footage – a far cry from the cinematic creativity behind most…
“Why do people watch films about Nazis? To see power and sadism! We can do that! We can make something even more sadistic.” – Anwar Congo The Act of Killing, one of the best films of 2013 – and certainly its most confronting – has been the target of significant criticism recently (A.J. Schnack’s article…
“In the war against terrorists, forget about morality.” The Act of Killing and The Gatekeepers have a lot in common. The Gatekeepers doesn’t have the surreal style of Oppenheimer’s film. Its presentation is traditional: talking heads, stock footage, computer animation. The titular “gatekeepers” are six ex-leaders of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet; men who…
All documentaries have an agenda; all documentaries reflect the perspective and opinions of the filmmakers producing them. The Act of Killing is a profoundly difficult film to watch because of its agenda. It’s not surprising that a film about the Indonesian mass-murders of 1965-66 would be confronting: this was a time where hundreds of thousands,…
“Human life was cheap. Film was cheap. It was a great place to make a picture.” Machete Maidens Unleashed! is Mark Hartley’s follow-up to his debut, Not Quite Hollywood, which was an oral history of Australian exploitation (“Ozploitation”) films. Similarly, Machete Maidens is an entertaining romp through B-movie history, now focusing on films made in…
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