A soulful assemblage: A review of Come Worry with Us!
Come Worry With Us! is a film by Helene Klodawsky that follows Montreal-based band, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra on a North American tour. A collage-like documentary, the film…
reviews
Sheen and gloss, personal and political: A Review of We are the Giant
We Are the Giant, a powerful portrait of five human rights activists in Syria, Libya, and Bahrain, personalizes the multiple, simultaneous, and in many ways ongoing struggles often monolithically referred…
A visceral, jarring work: A review of Children 404
“Children like me simply don’t exist for them.” With these ominous words, spoken over a crackling telephone connection, Children 404 draws to a close; its unsettling conclusion signaled by an…
Abortion at sea: A review of Vessel
Vessel (Diana Whitten, USA, 2014) is fast-paced, heart-thumping adventure into reproductive rights and activism on the high seas. This was one of my favourite films at Hot Docs 2014, and…
Evaporating Borders explores asylum-seekers in Cyprus
“… it’s a place I call home, although I blend in only as a familiar stranger.” Evaporating Borders, written and directed by Iva Radivojevic, is a five-act exploration of asylum-seekers…
Hot Docs 2014 preview: politically punchy program, diversity festival gap still needs work
It’s springtime in Toronto and that means Canada’s premiere documentary showcase is back for another jam-packed ten day event that will deliver the world of doc to eager local audiences…
The Act of Killing: a step forward in a country that must look back
Editor’s note: Christine Phang, the author of this article, has also responded to attacks on the film by BBC critic Nick Fraser. Indonesia’s history as an independent state has been…
Mars at Sunrise is a Cinematic Tone Poem
In times of stress we turn to torn fragments of ourselves and worship them as if they were whole nations (From Mars at Sunrise). Mars at Sunrise (2014) is director…
The Act of Killing: Liberal Porn or Daring Activism?
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous, Christine Cynn, 2013) is a documentary about Indonesia’s anti-communist purges of 1965 that thankfully abandons the traditional interview format in favour of something…
Gender Mender: XXY is a cinematic exploration of intersexuality
From a purely organizational standpoint, there are plenty of reasons for the gender binary. The system delineates male and female characteristics as separate and static, ostensibly facilitating a natural and…
Countering Colonization (and other great books)
So University of California Press has just made 700 of its books available for online reading (to read on a tablet you have to copy paste into some other program…
Shadows: a Blog Tour
Recently, I heard about Tundra Books doing a blog tour for Paula Weston’s “Shadows”. I have done a blog tour for Tundra Books before, and it was a great experience.…
Engineering an obesity epidemic
How would you react if I told you it wasn’t your fault you’re fat? Not entirely, anyway. Not the way that the medical profession or society at large would have…
Hungry Planet pictures what we eat around the world
Whenever I shop for groceries, I’m reminded of our collective obsession with processed and packaged foods. As someone who makes an reasonable effort to make decisions that are good for…
Why Internet make you dumb
Much of this video’s content is covered in Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows, What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, in detail. Here’s my review of the book: The…
Temps Libre: an album filled with hope, inspired by the printemps érable
Something happened last spring: a whole generation of Montrealers was mobilized, politicized, made aware that they had a voice. Finally opening their windows onto spring mornings as the snow melted…
Harper government misled Canadians on environmental assessment “delays”: Study
New study confirms government misled public on Environmental Assessment ‘delays’ By: Sierra Club Canada | Press Release: OTTAWA – A study published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic…
The Ghosts in Our Machine defends the animals on our screen
Over the last decade of programming political documentary for Cinema Politica I can say with confidence that there are two subjects that have always been decidedly divisive and caused the…
The Act of Killing: My family lived through it
Editor’s note: Christine Phang has recently written a contextual analysis of the Oscar-nominated documentary, The Act of Killing. After we read her essay we asked her to give us her…