Egotism and incompetence: Totally Under Control

CORONOAVIRUS: After 200,000 deaths and staggering economic losses, Alex Gibney & co. look into the Trump administration's disastrous response to COVID-19. Totally Under Control, its title a tongue in cheek reference to President Trump’s repeated declarations regarding his administration’s clear-as-day chaotic response to our cataclysmic health crisis, is (one of) the latest from the US’s most ADD prolific documentarian, Alex Gibney. It’s a film the Oscar and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker – along with his co-directors/producers/conspirators Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger – made in secret in a mad dash of five months, in a race to get it in the can and out to the American public prior to the November presidential election. Whether it will change any voter’s mind – let alone get in front of the eyes of any Fox News cult follower – is dubious. What it will do, and has done already, is allow the left-leaning liberal viewership (and I count myself in that camp) to feel equal parts enraged and vindicated. It’s a primal scream catharsis. Yes, the f*ckup was as bad as we feared. And much much worse.

To read the rest of my not-so-devastating critique visit Modern Times Review.

Neither banal nor evil: Me and the Cult Leader - A Modern Report on the Banality of Evil

CONTROL: A search for understanding from a survivor of Aum Shinrikyo's 1995 sarin gas attack on Tokyo's subway. True to its arresting title and media sensation subject matter, Atsushi Sakahara’s Me and the Cult Leader – A Modern Report on the Banality of Evil makes for some undeniably riveting viewing – but for the most unexpected of reasons. Ostensibly a revisitation of the 1995 sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system carried out by members of the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo religious cult – which left a dozen dead and hundreds more to suffer lifelong complications, including the director himself – the film is as much a story about Sakahara’s relationship with the mastermind behind the inexplicable acts of terrorism as Roger & Me is about Michael Moore and a similarly invisible yet omnipresent GM CEO.

To read the rest of my take visit Modern Times Review.

Doc Stars of the Month: Boniface and Njeri Mwangi, 'Softie'

Premiering at Sundance, going on to open Hot Docs, and now set to air on POV October 12, Nairobi-based director Sam Soko’s Softie is both inspirational character study and unnerving cautionary tale (at least for those of us here in the West who’ve long taken our democracy for granted and may now be paying a costly price). The film follows Boniface “Softie” Mwangi, a grassroots activist-turned-politician, as he faces down his country’s entrenched corruption — paying for votes, power-brokering behind closed doors, and police blithely gunning down protestors is all just business as usual in Kenya — by doing the unthinkable: Running a clean campaign. And by Mwangi’s side is his wife, Njeri, who likewise does the unthinkable — allows herself (and their three young children) to be out in public and in front of Soko’s lens. She proudly supports the unlikely candidate for regional office as he battles to overcome overwhelming skepticism and outright hostility with unbridled optimism and heartfelt idealism, all while knowing exactly where the nonstop threats to her husband’s life might very well lead. Which is why Documentary is honored to feature this heroic, change-making couple — who are also the co-founders of Kenya’s artist-activist hub Pawa254 — as our October Doc Stars of the Month.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Another brick in the wall: Zaho Zay

PRISON: A picturesque hybrid documentary within a hopelessly overcrowded prison in Madagascar. Zaho Zay is as complex and richly layered as it is troubling and compelling. An Austria/France/Madagascar co-production from an Austrian male director and a French female filmmaker of Malagasy origin, this unusual hybrid is not quite doc, not quite fiction, neither shamelessly colonialist in its gaze, nor entirely free from the outsider’s POV. Taking its title from the roll call response («It’s me!») given by inmates in the real Madagascar prison where much of the film is set, the experimental project is also less focused on the men (and, towards the end, women) behind the proverbial bars than in the visual springboard their faces and bodies provide for the daydreamy narrative (which is accompanied by a lyrical voiceover, written by a French/Malagasy writer).

To read the rest of my critique visit Modern Times Review.