Fatal Assistance

Fatal Assistance

Fatal Assistance (Director: Raoul Peck): Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck spends two years documenting the ineffectual international relief efforts that followed the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the country with an estimated 250,000 deaths and approximately 1.2 million people left homeless. It’s a thoroughly discouraging examination of wide-scale political bureaucracy and self-interest, masked as philanthropy, by many of the more than 4,000 aid organizations that became involved.

Peck’s deconstruction of the boondoggle casts most of the blame on the fact that the foreign humanitarian agencies weren’t inclusive enough with Haitian officials in determining where both financial and manpower resources should have been allocated, resulting in distrust and massive disorganization from both sides. It should be noted that the biggest reason for the lack of trust from outside agencies is Haiti’s long history of political corruption, an angle that Peck’s otherwise comprehensive film doesn’t seem to probe deeply enough. There are stories about most of the rebuilding work going to foreign contractors and companies at the expense of much-needed employment opportunities for Haitians, the unwillingness of relief organizations to allot enough attention to the dire requirement of debris removal because it wasn’t a “sexy” enough area of the relief effort (building housing and schools carries a lot more cachet), and supplies such as water and food being shipped in from donor countries at a much higher cost than if the same resources from Haiti had been used. Other exasperating examples of waste include details of some rebuilding jobs unnecessarily being worked on by multiple agencies, large amounts of relief funds mysteriously vanishing, and small wooden housing units being poorly constructed and lacking electricity, kitchens, or bathrooms.

Highly visible figures from the relief effort seen (but not interviewed) include Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, and Sean Penn, while former President Bill Clinton really draws Peck’s disdain as the co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). The director frames Clinton’s involvement as rather disingenuous, as the former leader takes on numerous lofty titles and is surrounded by a young and inexperienced support staff. Peck, Haiti’s former Minister of Culture, also gets interview access to top tier Haitian government officials, such as former Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. Usage throughout the film of poetic correspondence between a male and female relief worker effectively adds a more intimate perspective to the frustrations over the incompetent handling of the relief effort, acting as a sorely needed personal touch to offset the extensive number of statistics and many acronymed organizations to keep track of.

Although it can move quite slowly at times, Fatal Assistance will definitely fuel your cynicism for the effectiveness of the international community’s emergency aid process.

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Muscle Shoals

Muscle Shoals

Muscle Shoals (Director: Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier): In the 1960s, Muscle Shoals, Alabama became a hotbed for some of the greatest R&B and rock music ever recorded. How did a small town on the banks of the Tennessee River become a destination for Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and The Rolling Stones? Director Greg Camalier has crafted a toe-tapping music documentary that explains the magic and music of this legendary place.

Muscle Shoals has some similarities to Dave Grohl’s film, Sound City. The famous Neve soundboard and the acoustics of the recording studios at Sound City provided the magical sound that attracted so many famous musicians. In Muscle Shoals, Camalier suggests that the physical environment has something to do with the magic of the place. The singing Tennessee River, the mud, the wind in the cotton fields, the southern lifestyle and the local musicians provide the “Muscle Shoals sound” that has inspired the famous musicians who have recorded there.

At the centre of the film is Rick Hall who founded FAME Studios and put Muscle Shoals on the map. His story is fraught with tragedy but his drive and determination to succeed created an environment that was unique. At the height of the civil rights movement he brought black and white musicians together. In one of several interviews he recalls that in the studio, the colour of your skin didn’t matter. Everyone was treated equally and collaborated to make music.

Hall brought together local session musicians who became the in-house rhythm section known as The Swampers. They had a distinctive, funky sound because they “didn’t know how to make it smooth” as one of the musicians recalls in the film. They won the respect of Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett and after a few records, everyone wanted the “Muscle Shoals sound.” Paul Simon called the studio and wanted to work with the incredible black musicians who played on “Mustang Sally” and “Respect.” Little did he know that they were a bunch of nerdy looking white guys.

The Swampers decided to leave Rick Hall at FAME Studios to form their own studio called Muscle Shoals Sound. Surprisingly, both studios survived and a steady stream of musicians made the pilgrimage to Alabama, including more and more rock musicians like The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Both bands recorded music here at the beginning of their careers and the Swampers argue that Southern Rock was born in their studio.

The film includes some fantastic interviews with the likes of a very entertaining Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, who describes Muscle Shoals less as a magical place and more as a place that inspired the Stones to play differently, more soulfully. Richards mentioned that the band managed to record four tracks in two days (including “Wild Horses” and “Brown Sugar”) which he joked as being pretty good for the Stones.

The film has a number of fascinating stories explaining how several famous songs came to be. I didn’t want it to end and thoroughly enjoyed the steady stream of interviews, music and the treasure trove of archival footage that is blended beautifully with modern day footage at FAME Studios.

It sounds cliché to say that the film has “beautiful cinematography” but it really does. The high production value adds to the terrific storytelling. If I had to complain about one thing, it would be the interview with Bono. It feels out of place and completely unnecessary when compared to the interviews with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge and other musicians that actually recorded hit records at Muscle Shoals.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auGUm2r0cLs
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Downloaded

Downloaded

Downloaded (Director: Alex Winter): This insightful film, which made its international premiere at Hot Docs, looks at the rise, fall, and legacy of Napster, the peer-to-peer file sharing service that forever changed the music industry. Originally conceived as a dramatic feature by director Alex Winter (probably best known as the Bill character from the Bill & Ted movies), it evolved into a documentary over the ten year period that Winter was involved on and off with the project.

Winter thoroughly explores all aspects of his subject, incorporating an extensive number of archival clips with new interviews from Napster opponents which include music industry executives and artists like Beastie Boy Mike D, Henry Rollins, and Public Enemy’s Chuck D, along with the Napster side via interviews with the service’s legal representatives and the main figures behind it, notably co-founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. The affable pair evoke more sympathy than you’d expect, discussing the idealistic origins of the service that “came from a very pure place,” as Fanning puts it, and them coping with the enormous scope of what they’d created, which included contending with numerous nasty legal battles with the music business over their enabling of wide-scale copyright infringement. It’s easy to forget over a decade later that Napster’s impact was incredibly swift – the service’s “heyday” lasted less than two years before it was effectively shut down in 2001, later being acquired by other companies as a means of legal music distribution.

Downloaded presents the most balanced and definitive summation of the Napster saga that I’ve ever seen or read, with a compelling David vs. Goliath dynamic and an abundance of thoughtful discussion on the divisive issue of file sharing.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ai6K2VIEXM
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Alias

Alias

Alias (Director: Michelle Latimer): Actor, producer, writer, director and former Hot Docs programmer Michelle Latimer unveiled her first feature-length documentary at Hot Docs 2013 on Friday, a portrait of Torontonian rap artists and producers, entitled Alias.

The film is a labour of love, four years in the making, an intimate look at the lives and careers of Alkatraz, Alias Donmillion, Trench, Keon Love and Master Knia. If some of these names aren’t familiar to you, Torontonians might know Alias Donmillion through his high-profile arrest and conviction, stemming from an incident at Caribana in 2007 where he attempted a “West Indian Salute” and fired a weapon in the air in a crowd. Out of jail and trying to recapture the career that he lost, Alias and this group of artists try to keep their lives from getting too real and overshadowing their art and dreams.

While Toronto does have a respected hip-hop and rap culture, there hasn’t been much respect given through mainstream media coverage. But as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that Latimer really took the time to connect and understand her subjects and they provide her access that is almost startling in its intimacy.

In one of the earliest scenes, Master Knia is organizing a hip-hop night at the Opera House, trying to get lesser-known artists on a bill for the evening. As he admits, things don’t start quite on time as the crowd arrives late, the show starts late, and the night runs out with several artists still left to perform. While the concert featured a bevy of young, moderately talented artists bouncing around with more entourage on stage than original hooks, our seasoned subjects are left standing at the side, ill at ease with the organization of the night, but trying not to give Knia a hard time, watching their chance to perform slip away. All five of them have kids, and as any parent knows, taking a night off from child care requires not just finding a babysitter, but losing out on quality time with their kid, and when reality sets in and they can’t get onstage, it’s hard to watch as they each reveal their disappointment. Not exactly the first personal reveal you’d expect to see in a film about hip hop artists and the scene.

After this scene, it’s very evident that we’re not watching a film about cocky, up-and-coming artists; these are veteran performers looking to stay relevant and get that next big break, while also juggling other commitments like family, work and education at the same time. But as the film progresses, it reveals the darkness that sits at the edges of each subject’s psyche. Violence, crime, discrimination and poverty, in some form or another, are daily reminders of the difficult reality during the day-to-day of their lives. Keon Love reveals early on that she’s lost 11 people to violence alone in the last year, and as two others admit to hustling on the side to survive, they live in fear from cops on a regular basis. But throughout it all, the documentary is full of moments that highlight the hustle and the struggle that this group puts towards their art, despite any mixed results. A mid-afternoon music video shoot is delayed by late dancers, a less-than-ideal weather situation and disorganized friends, but still they manage to pull it together in the end. In some moments however, real exhaustion seems to set in. For all the positives, there’s always the threat of violence, and when the instance occurs in the film, it’s from the hands of a force you least suspect, but unfortunately, ultimately expect.

Overall, Alias is a tight, unflinching look at a musical movement that is definitely generated by class struggles and geography, a genre created when people are told they can’t expect to do much with their lives and fight back through art, and a group of local artists trying desperately to not fall into the trap of living a life realer than their lyrics.

Alias plays with My Black Box, a short documentary about Quebecois hip-hop artist Dramatik and his use of rap to conquer his stutter.

Alias screens again on Saturday, May 4, 8:45pm at Scotiabank 4. You can buy tickets in advance at the Hot Docs website, hotdocs.ca

oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtiAz2SigmA
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Another Night on Earth

Another Night on Earth

Another Night on Earth (Director: David Munoz): Munoz packs a lot into this hourlong verité observation of Cairo’s harried taxi drivers. Filmed in 2011, while protesters were still occupying Tahrir Square, everyone in Another Night on Earth has an opinion on the revolution. What’s most surprising and refreshing are the messy but absolutely honest exchanges between people you’d never expect to see together. The real revolution seems to be the emerging role of women, from the rare female cabbie who’s been driving for 30 years, to the young niqab-wearing revolutionaries arguing for their right to work and an education. Everyone complains about corruption and poverty, hoping that current events will help, though most seem resigned to more suffering.

Some of the best moments, though, aren’t political at all. An argument over the quality of Egypt’s footballers leads to a hasty exit; a cabbie scolds a kid because he only seems to play sports on Playstation; a woman’s rowdy kids sing a song about getting stoned while the driver complains of a headache. Throughout it all, Cairo’s lively culture of bluntness mixed with polite religious platitudes makes for an enlightening and interesting ride. Director Munoz mostly stays out of the way, but does vary the camerawork enough that you don’t feel trapped in the traffic, unlike his subjects.



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