Reviewed by Rachael Kaines The introspective and sedate documentary Walk With Me, from directors Marc J. Francis and Max Pugh, works as a soothing balm to a hectic mind, much like the mindfulness practice that the Zen Buddhist pioneer Thich Nhát Hanh introduced to the west. Thich Nhát Hanh was forced to leave Vietnam in the sixties when his efforts towards peace were not appreciated. Now 91, Walk With Me…
Read MoreFilm Review: Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
Joan Didion, the subject of this moving documentary now available on Netflix, is one of America’s greatest living writers. Her unsentimental, yet lyric vision surfaced in the essay “On Respect”, when she was a young sub-editor at American Vogue in the early 60s. Her voice was shaped by a childhood spent in her birthplace, Sacramento, California, with its ethos of small c-conservatism, a West conquered by heroic pioneers and a…
Read MoreFilm Review: 78/52
One of the most iconic scenes in cinematic history receives a thorough examination and analysis in Alexandre O. Philippe’s intriguing yet overlong documentary 78/52. The film’s title refers to the 78 camera set-ups and 52 cuts which Alfred Hitchcock used to capture the infamous shower scene in Psycho. Assigning a full 7-days of a 30-day schedule to filming the short sequence, Janet Leigh’s brutal murder in the shower at Bates…
Read MoreLFF 2017: My Generation
My Generation is Michael Caine’s personal take on the swinging sixties; the decade that brought fame and success for many working-class upstarts in the world of film, music, fashion and the visual arts. As one of the film’s producers, Caine works with documentarian David Batty and screenwriters Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement to weave a portrait of a decade for which the term “unreliable narrator” seems to have been…
Read MoreSheffield Documentary Festival: Are We Scared Of The Word “Documentary?”
(Twitter: @maysamoncao) For a filmmaker, documentary filmmaking is probably the hardest medium. Try uttering the word “documentary” to an investor and he will probably shut all doors in your face, unless you are Werner Herzog. The view people have regarding this medium is that it is “teaching you something” in the most boring way possible. Lots of voice-over, steady-cams and hundreds of interviews with people you’ve hardly heard of. It…
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