Shining a light on hidden places FILMS WORTH WATCHING Robert Alstead
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arking Australia Week (April 3-6) for the second year running is OzFlix: Australian Film Weekend at the Pacific Cinematheque, April 4-6. One of the highlights, Lucky Miles, won the Audience Award at the Sydney Film Festival. The film, which screens on the first night of the festival, is a humorous outback survival story dealing with the hot button issue of asylum seekers. Based on an apparently true event in 1990, refugees are abandoned on an Australian desert coastline, at the mercy of the elements and a halfhearted border patrol. The OzFlix program also includes the surf movie Bra Boys, about a working class gang of wave-riders in Maroubra in Sydney’s south. Narrated by Russell Crowe, it was apparently the “most successful theatrical documentary in Australian history.” Television documentary
anything else. Shine a Light opens at the IMAX on April 4. In The Forgotten Woman, debut director Dilip Mehta picks up on the theme of sister Deepa’s Water, about the plight of widows in 1938 India. The new documentary looks at the state of widows in India today and director and cinematographer Dilip goes into the ashrams and streets, where millions of Indian widows are still forced by tradition to live their remaining years isolated from and shunned by society. Deepa is credited as the writer of the film. The Forgotten Woman should be out now. Having survived a month-long binge on Big Macs, super-sized greasy fries and sugary drinks a few years ago, Morgan Spurlock puts himself back in harm’s way in the documentary Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? (April 18). The premise for this escapade arises
Morgan Spurlock puts himself back in harm’s way in the documentary Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
Crowded House – Woodface, features the Oz rock band of the title as they strain to put out their Woodface album. Bit of Black Business, a series of short films created by indigenous filmmakers, explores contemporary Aboriginal life. (You can get tickets to the films separately or a weekend pass and membership for $40.) There’s a short archival clip in Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light where a fresh-faced Mick Jagger is asked if he can see himself still performing when he’s of pensionable age. His response: “Absolutely. Easily.” And here he is 63-years-old, his looks weathered by time, but still throwing his skinny frame about the stage like a man decades younger. Shine a Light was shot by a crack team of cinematographers at the Beacon Theatre in New York City in 2006, during the band’s “A Bigger Bang” tour and on the occasion of the 60th birthday of former US President Bill Clinton. Scorsese, whose other music filmwork includes editing on Woodstock, directing the Bob Dylan biopic No Direction Home and a forthcoming documentary about George Harrsion, takes the concert movie route here. Archival footage is interspersed with renditions of the Stones’ performing a repertoire of classics. It’s more about the live performance, and Jagger’s in particular, than
when the Super Size Me star decides that, in order for his new-born child to be safe, he must find the most wanted man on the planet. Borrowing elements from his smash hit – even his doctor makes another appearance – Spurlock plays the naive American abroad getting to know the Arab world a little better. How funny you find it will probably depend on how much you like Morgan Spurlock. At the other end of the spectrum, in terms of its artistic approach to the US in the Middle East, is Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure, due out May 2. Morris’s The Fog of War (2003), a potent, candid piece of documentary filmmaking, captured the Cold War mindset through its portrait of former US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. This time, Morris turns to the Abu Ghraib prison incident five years ago and those infamous images of hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners piled on top of each other. In what Morris has described as his “non-fiction horror movie,” he endeavours to go beyond the media story. Morris takes the view that the infamous photographs, while exposing the horrors of the prison were also “a cover-up” because they didn’t get to the root of the crime. Robert Alstead made the Vancouverset documentary You Never Bike Alone, www.youneverbikealone.com APRIL 2008
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