Documentaries

“I’m a pusher,” says Pamela B. Green, director of the documentary: Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, the first director-male or female - to introduce the concept of fictional storytelling to moving pictures, and who went on to become the first woman studio head.

Nico, 1988, which opened the  2017 Venice Horizons section and also played in Toronto, is not the first documentary about Christa Paffgen, better known as Nico, the superstar of Andy Warhol’s famous Factory and later lead singer of The Velvet Underground. In 1995, another female director, Susanne Ofteringer, chronicled in Nico Icon the self-destructive lifestyle of the German singer, actress, and model, but it was a too broad documentary that tried to encompass a whole life in the frame of one hour.

Documentaries can be a joy to watch if they are well made, and the Michael Caine-produced and narrated My Generation is a delight. The 84-year-old actor was welcomed to huge applause at the premiere of the Swinging Sixties doc at the Palazzo del Cinema.

In Venice, Ai Weiwei is more likely be expected to be at home across the lagoon, at the Biennale of contemporary art concurrently showing at the Arsenale, but this year the Chinese artist is walking the carpet at the film festival.  Human Flow, Ai’s first foray in the feature-length documentary form, is a powerful indictment of the global refugee crisis engulfing the world.

The Glass Castle is the most recent entry in a subgenre of sorts detailing the coming of age of children in non-conformist families. Last year Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic explored the effects of an eccentric patriarch (Viggo Mortensen) on his brood of children while Doug Pray’s 2007 Surfwise was the documentary account of one actual such family and their peripatetic raising of nine children in a wandering surf commune.

“The climate crisis is not a partisan issue. It never should have been, but it has become one.

Eleanor Coppola famously directed Hearts of Darkness, behind-the–scenes documentary and companion piece to husband Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the groundbreaking rethinking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the ultimate Vietnam-era existential war movie.  At the age of 80 she has now directed her feature film debut, Paris Can Wait starring Diane Lane as a woman of a certain age who takes a wide detour through the French countryside – and the midlife rethinking of her marriage on the way to Paris and perhaps beyond.

You never know who might stop by the HFPA lounge in Cannes. Today it was none other than ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Sundance is that rare festival that does not shy away from opening with a documentary. This year was no exception, and Al Gore’s urgent wake-up call with An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power was just the beginning of a series that spanned every topic from Hulk Hogan to Jonbenet Ramsey, from law enforcement to water heist, protests, labor rights and kill safaris, from dancing to surfing to doping and gut wrenching war stories.

It’s been a busy festival for Sundance regular – and lifetime honorary Hobbit – Elijah Wood. The actor/producer was at Eccles for the premiere of Macon Blair’s I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, a quirky millennial noir, which takes an unexpected turn into gore territory (think Coen Bros).