Kristi Jacobson’s HBO-aired documentary goes inside the segregation units at Red Onion State Prison, a supermax facility located in rural Virginia. The convicts incarcerated here are among the most violent in the penal system – and while they initially come across as articulate and charismatic in their on-camera interviews, the insouciant manner in how they detail the carnage that landed them behind bars is more than a little unsettling.
In Cleveland, a murderer and rapist is accumulating victims while people do not seem to care about the missing women. This documentary explores his victims, through surviving family members and, most importantly, through surviving victims. This is done with interviews, court footage, and information written on the screen.
Brooke Guinan is the first transgendered woman firefighter in the FDNY, something that has come with challenges beyond her transitioning and her private struggles. Now seen as an example of a courage and tenacity, she tells her story through showing her life and interviews.
For the first time since the sport has been played around the world, the World Box Lacrosse Championships were held on an Indian Reservation. Spirit Game: Pride of a Nation explores the road to these championships, the sport’s history, and what it means to the Indian nations.
BOOTLEG FILES 591: “Afrique 50” (1950 French documentary short by René Vautier).
LAST SEEN: It is on YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Never officially released in the U.S.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: It would be welcomed.
In 1949, a newly-minted film school graduate named René Vautier received his first big break when the Ligue de l’enseignement commissioned him to create a nonfiction film highlighting its educational mission in France’s West African colonies. Upon arriving in the French African colonies, the 21-year-old Vautier did not find evidence of French benevolence in Africa. Instead, he witnessed a degree of economic exploitation and repressive rule over people who were slowly simmering in their resentment of colonial occupation. As a decorated member of the French Resistance during World War II and a Communist Party member, he was not about to sit back and just tsk-tsk this situation.
Wim Wenders’ ode to the music of Cuba and the Buena Vista Social Club is a brilliant and poetic documentary that depicts the art of music as something that’s soothing to the soul and can ease even the most tumultuous situations. Wenders’ documentary is very much about music with a lot of performances, but it’s also a thoughtful and deliberately paced meditation on the meaning of music. It defines something within the subjects we meet in “Buena Vista Social Club.” And even in spite of the economic turmoil, it’s kept people within the society of Cuba going forward and doing their best to show their love for the art form.
Back in the eighties and nineties, I spent much of my youth in and out of video stores. During the weekends when there was a guarantee there’d be nothing on television we’d trek to the video store in our neighborhood and I always drifted to the horror section. One of the highlights of going through the horror section was perusing through the boxes and gaping in disbelief at all the amazing and often creative box art. Back then artists had to sell a movie with one striking image, and they often did it very well. The box art was only a small result of the art of movie posters, and how once upon a time movie posters were a symbol of a movie that were used to sell their respective cinematic properties, and create lasting memories.