Monsoon is about Kit, who left Vietnam as a child with his parents as refugees, returning home after a life in England, to scatter his parents’ ashes. The sense of dislocation he feels in the economically booming and modernising Saigon is tempered somewhat by the company of Louis, an African-American entrepreneur, who he meets for…
I’ve been watching these films as part of the Take One Action Film Festival, and the recurring theme is colonialism is a living force in the world. People talk about the legacy of colonialism, as though that process of domination, cultural eradication, and extraction of wealth stopped, and we now live in a time after…
In My Blood It Runs is a documentary following Dujuan as he turns 10 and 11. Aboriginal Australian, of Arrente and Gurrwa heritage, he speaks 3 languages, can drive a car, and practices traditional healing. But at school, he is seen as being on the bottom rung, academically underachieving, truanting, and having behavioural issues. It’s…
Radio Silence is a documentary following Carmen Aristegui, a Mexican journalist and living folk hero, as she tries to get back on the air to report on government corruption after state censorship caused her to be fired. This is a documentary which wears its viewpoint on its sleeve. The filmmaker states openly that since she…
Coded Bias is one of those shit-yourself-with-fear documentaries. It’s about the propagation of artificial intelligence algorithms and facial recognition technology in a million unseen ways throughout our society right now, and how the racist and sexist biases existent in our societies are being replicated and compounded by those technologies. Almost nothing in the documentary is…
Miss Juneteenth is about a mother and daughter, as they strive to make a better life. The mother, Turquoise, is a former Miss Juneteenth, who was granted a full university scholarship with the title, but through circumstances almost certainly to do with her drunk mother and waster boyfriend, was forced to drop out, and now…
The Last Ice is a documentary about the Inuit people of the Pikialsasorsuaq region of the Arctic, a place that straddles Canada and Greenland. They fight to protect their communities and way of life against climate change and those who would profit from its effects. The most important thing to take away from this film…
A Voice Above Nature is a short film being shown as part of the Take One Action Film Festival. It explains the issue of oceanic noise pollution by expressing whale song and dolphin echolocation visually, filming in black and white the vibrations of water. And then it introduces man-made oceanic noise such as ship engines…
Went to see this coz I gret at the trailer. A story of sisterhood in the face of hardship. Rocks is a teenage lassie who is left to look after her young brother after their mum takes a nervous breakdown and disappears. Rocks spends the movie trying to handle this on her own, and stay…
Pier Kids is a documentary about the queer kids of colour whose only real home, place of safety, place of acceptance, is the Christopher Street Pier. Instantly that places it in the same lineage of films as Paris Is Burning and Kiki, which does 2 things: It shows up the progress with this film being…