Reviews

  • Festivals

Sundance Docs: Knock Down the House

Knock Down the House is an apt title for the documentary by Rachel Lears, which follows the campaigns of four insurgent candidates as they try to pull upset primary victories against Democratic incumbents ahead of the 2018 mid-term elections. The four women are part, as we are appraised at the beginning of the film, of a nationwide grassroots movement sparked in opposition to Donald Trump’s election, which aims to wrest control of the House of Representatives from Republicans but also to reshape the Democratic establishment with an infusion of young, independent-minded citizen-candidates.
  • Festivals

Garrett Hedlund Shines in Burden’s Tale of Redemption

Andrew Heckler’s directorial debut, Burden, was twenty years in the making but, as the writer-director said, it seems more relevant now than it was in the nineties, when the actual story of Klansman repudiating a life of hate took place in South Carolina. It's not by the film’s linear though compact structure or straightforward photography by Jeremy Rouse that provokes interest,  but the fact that racism is examined through the eyes of a Ku Klux Klansman, who finds himself in a classic dilemma, torn between the woman he falls in love with and the community that raised him.