‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ Review: A Teacher, a Camera, and the Machinery of Propaganda

David Borenstein’s Mr. Nobody Against Putin has the makings of a very dark sitcom. The documentary focuses on Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, a fun-loving and caring primary school teacher in Karabash, a toxic mining town in Russia that became YouTube famous for being one of the most polluted cities in the world. Pasha also serves as the school’s videographer and has turned his office into a hangout for students—the safe space he wished he’d had when he attended that very school. (In fact, his mother is still the librarian there.) Pasha, who’s also credited as a co-director on the film, gets along well with his colleagues. They’re mostly female and equally dedicated to the calling of education, save for one ominous-looking male instructor who teaches—preaches—a Russian nationalist, revisionist history class that’s even scarier than his vampire visage. And then the real terror begins—first for Ukraine and then for any Russian citizen who dare stand with that country’s “neo-Nazi regime.”

To read the rest of my review visit Slant Magazine.

“It Was Too Dangerous To Make This Film in America”: Eugene Jarecki on The Six Billion Dollar Man

Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man, much like its main character Julian Assange, is a doc destined to spark controversy. Jam-packed with gripping never before seen footage (much of it captured by Ecuadorian embassy CCTV) and an eclectic roster of interviewees (from Edward Snowden to Pamela Anderson), the film offers a sort of vertigo-inducing alternative history of the WikiLeaks founder and his tabloid-sensationalized troubles; and in doing so asks us to reconsider the media narrative that’s long been built by unseen hands around him. For how much of what we know about the information freedom fighter is actually “true,” and how much a manipulation by covert forces willing to go to any, even illegal, lengths to protect unsavory secrets? In other words, The Six Billion Dollar Man uses the story of an eccentric public enemy number one to expose an even more consequential and seemingly unaccountable protagonist — our own US government. A few days before the December 5th theatrical release of the Cannes-premiering film (which won both the L’Œil d’or Jury Prize and the Golden Globe Prize for Documentary), Filmmaker caught up with the acclaimed veteran director (Why We Fight, The House I Live In, The Trials of Henry Kissinger) to learn all about attempting to craft “the definitive telling of this saga.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“There Were Many Fragmented Aspects to Sara Jane’s Testimony”: Robinson Devor on “Suburban Fury”

Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury, made in collaboration with writer Charles Mudede (who also co-wrote Devor’s 2005 acclaimed narrative feature Police Beat and 2007’s provocatively disturbing Zoo), is as counterintuitively intense as its title might imply. The unconventionally riveting doc takes us on a wild and winding (car) ride back in time, via the backseat reminisces of its enigmatic star Sara Jane Moore, who in September 1975 tried to shoot President Gerald Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Eschewing recreations for cinematically staged interviews with the infamous nonagenarian (who passed away in September at age 95), along with evocative archival footage from the era, the film attempts to solve the riddle of how and why a social-climbing housewife became an FBI informant, radical leftist and eventual would-be assassin. And even more thrillingly, leaves us with more questions than answers as the stranger-than-fiction journey ultimately becomes the destination itself. A few days prior to the December 5th theatrical release of Suburban Fury, Filmmaker caught up with the Seattle-based director, whose Zoo made our 2009 list of “Top 25 Indie Films of The Decade.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“She was simultaneously mentally ill and a run of the mill woman of her time”: Riefenstahl review

“For some things to be remembered other things must be forgotten,” we’re told in voiceover at the beginning of Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel’s riveting archival dive into the life of the titular pioneering propagandist of the Third Reich. An actor, filmmaker, and ardent Nazi who dubiously insisted that her passion for art rendered her clueless to politics, Leni Riefenstahl once even insisted in a televised interview that if she’d been commissioned by Roosevelt or Stalin to craft Triumph of the Will she would have agreed to do so. Which for a narcissistic sociopath forever focused on her own wellbeing above all else, is perhaps the one honest admission Hitler’s fave director makes in the entire film.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

SUBURBAN FURY

Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury has been in the works for some time. In fact, the team sent out a press release all the way back in 2010, announcing that production was underway on a documentary about Sara Jane Moore, the conservative, high society hobnobber, turned FBI informant, turned radical leftist who tried to shoot President Gerald Ford in September 1975 outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Though no title was revealed, the teaser “Think of it as Errol Morris‘s Mr. Death meets Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation” promised plenty of intrigue. Fortunately, Suburban Fury has been worth the wait.

To read the rest of my review visit Hammer to Nail.

STRAY BODIES

Though Elina Psykou’s Son of Sofia took top honors in the International Narrative section back at Tribeca 2017, the acclaimed Greek director’s first documentary, last year’s unconventionally cinematic Stray Bodies, has yet to find distribution on these shores. Which is an inexplicable shame. Debuting at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2024 – where riot police were dispatched in response to far-right threats – the film next played CPH:DOX (where I saw it), before hopping the pond over to Hot Docs in Toronto. It was a notable festival journey for a doc about “involuntary body-related traveling” (as the CPH:DOX synopsis so spot-on stated) – specifically throughout Europe, but in the wake of a global crackdown on reproductive rights, a topic not far from anyone’s shores.

To read the rest of my review visit Hammer to Nail.

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