Shared Darkness

Simple, straightforward, first-person testimonials have been an integral part of nonfiction filmmaking for decades, lending voice to social issues and providing powerful personal contextualization for events whose scope can otherwise seem overwhelming. It’s just these sorts of powerful interviews which form the framework of the extraordinarily moving Uprising, which tells the remarkable story of the 2011 Egyptian revolution that toppled dictatorial President Hosni Mubarak from power. Augmented by equally amazing extant footage, this documentary is the authoritative behind-the-scenes snapshot of a watershed event in human history — the first digital age people’s revolution.



Directed by Fredrik Stanton, Uprising benefits from the sort of clean, well-framed narrative that typically only comes into focus years or in some cases decades after such a historical event. The film posits that four basic elements went into the Egyptian revolution. The first was the repression and unbridled corruption of Mubarak, who racked up a personal fortune worth an estimated $40-70 billion during his three decades of rule, which never repealed the martial law under which he assumed command after the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. Finally fed up with this, an activist youth movement turned to social media, and on April 6, 2008, formalized itself in protest.

Then, in June, 2010, the murder of Khaled Said, a young computer enthusiast who exposed police corruption sparked widespread outrage, fomenting further objections. The following January, the Tunisian revolution toppled the regime of brutal autocrat Ben Ali, just two weeks before a planned January 25 Egyptian protest. Spurred on by that example, students and other young people took to Facebook. They had no idea at the time, but the revolution would be televised, it turns out.

There were the expected jokes at the time, organizers admit: Is there a dress code? And what’s the couples policy — does one need a date for the revolution, or can they come stag? But thousands upon thousands turned out, including popular actor Amr Waked (interviewed here). Many men and older people felt empowered to join only after seeing so many young women take up the banner. (Indeed, one YouTube video even includes an uncoded appeal: “If you’re a man, come join us.”) After a day of peaceful marching and protest that filled Tahrir Square, the conflict became more pitched in following days. State media published newspaper pictures with captions claiming supporters were rallying for Mubarak, despite banners within the photos showing the opposite. Then, of course, things got bloody, exacerbated by statements from Mubarak that were by turns defiant and clueless. Seeded with secret police and hardline party loyalists, camel-riding thugs took to the streets, beating people. Bullets and tear gas followed, felling over 800 and leaving 6,000 more wounded. It wasn’t until the Egyptian army sided with the people that the tide finally turned.

Uprising doesn’t try to take the same big artistic bite out of the apple that Ali Samadi Ahadi’s The Green Wave, which documented the unprecedented protests that rocked Iran in June, 2009. That movie interweaved animated segments to dramatize events. Uprising has gripping cell phone camera and home video footage (some graphic). Like that film, however, Uprising is an impactful snapshot of the very basic human yearning for dignity and freedom — a fact about which interviewees speak eloquently, and is also glimpsed through their brave actions.

The democratic struggle in Egypt is still ongoing, of course, so the true, concluding chapters of Uprising are not yet really written. But this is a well-expressed movie. Powerfully told from the perspective of the Egyptian revolution’s leadership and key organizers, Stanton’s film is more than just a rough draft of history, it’s a gut-punch cri de coeur, and a reminder of the universal values and desires we all share, regardless of culture or ethnicity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Pasadena Playhouse 7, click here to visit its website. (Rebellion Films, unrated, 83 minutes)

Ever wonder exactly how and why, more than a decade since the September 11 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York City, the site’s rebuilding hasn’t been completed, or in fact even come close? Enter director Richard Hankin’s 16 Acres, a vital and in certain ways even cathartic documentary overview of the sort of sharp-elbowed but slow-footed bureaucratic maneuvering that comes with city planning, most especially of a site this fraught with emotional baggage. At once fascinating and maddening, it’s a clear-eyed, fair-minded and exhaustively sourced look at the sort of story that national news organizations often have a hard time distilling and tracking through time.

Aside from the often under-reported staggering engineering challenges related to the river-adjacent tract of land, a major complicating factor in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site is the massive number of parties involved. Real estate developers, insurance companies, architects, local residents, families of first responders and other 9/11 victims and of course politicians all lay claim to the area in various fashion, and have often had mutually exclusive feelings about what sort of rebuilding is appropriate. Just as a matter of sheer dramatic surface engagement, then, 16 Acres delivers an engrossing tale.

A few of the highlights: developer Larry Silverstein, the owner of the site who was left still paying $10 million a month in rent after the attacks, filed a lawsuit over whether the felling of the WTC Towers was one incident or two separate events, for the purpose of recouping as much insurance money as possible. After initial plans for a new WTC site were scrapped, an international open competition was held. Then, after two finalists were named, New York Governor George Pataki unilaterally reversed the decision of the commission charged with studying and choosing the winning design, even after word leaked in the press of the supposed winner.

Architect Daniel Libeskind was picked for his visionary master plan, but had no experience at all with skyscraper design. Silverstein, then, brought in yet another architect, David Childs. Naturally, their visions clashed — as did the feelings of some families of victims with Michael Arad’s widely praised design for a reflecting pool-type memorial. And lest one think good, old-fashioned snafus couldn’t be part of the mix, the final, meticulously arrived at building design then had to be scuttled due to security concerns somehow lost in transit between the Port Authority and the New York Police Department. “At some point the anger just gives way to depression,” says one interviewee, and you totally feel where he’s coming from.

The victory of Hankin’s film is its scope and open airing of all these contrasting opinions. Both Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg submit to interviews, as well as Silverstein, the aforementioned architects and many other less well known figures, including reporters who covered the story for the New York Times and other publications. The result doesn’t demonize anyone unfairly. It’s a story about ego and hubris, yes, but also the better angels of our nature. Maybe Winston Churchill was really on to something when he said, famously, that after every option has been exhausted, Americans can be counted on to do the right thing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, meanwhile, click here to visit its website. (Tanexis Productions, unrated, 92 minutes)

A jumbled nonfiction jeremiad of raw-nerve feeling built around at once ominous and vague proclamations of “where we’re going” as a country, American Empire is like a vitamin B-boosted espresso shot for left-leaning paranoiacs. A whispery, overwritten voiceover of dread by someone who sounds a lot like a dinner theater Holly Hunter impersonator doesn’t much help matters, but director Patrea Patrick’s film chiefly suffers from a scattershot focus that finds it alighting on a variety of social and economic issues without ever really connecting the dots in grand fashion like it believes it’s doing.

After a meandering preamble, the movie settles into a brief history of the Federal Reserve Act, a sort of cartel agreement forged on Jekyll Island in 1910 by Frank Vanderlip, lieutenants of J.P. Morgan and other titans of finance. Before American Empire can fully devolve into a rage stimulus package for disaffected Ron Paul followers (“Audit the Fed!”), however, it spins off into issues of agriculture — including food security, genetic modification and independence from monoculture cropping — water safety and other environmental concerns, only to then double back to corporate tax avoidance and other issues of fiscal fairness and a level economic playing field.

There are a few arresting flashes of what passes for new (or at least very under-reported) news, like WikiLeaks revealing U.S. cables that the government drew up plans to retaliate against European nations who resisted GMO seed crops. But American Empire, in its slapdash construction and lazy attempts to appeal in back-patting fashion to its core constituency, never builds up a head of steam. Instead it merely lurches to and fro, passing off as incontestable the passionate opinions of its many interviewed authors, academics and activists. “I think the empire is revealing itself, in many respects — it’s becoming pretty obvious that dastardly deeds are being done,” says one interviewee; “Clearly there will be attempts to resist [change], and shoot people,” says another. Well… not really clearly.

To boot, stock footage and edited news clips are choppily interspersed amidst interview tidbits, with little care for contextual elucidation. By the time the movie delves into “codex aliementarius,” endorsing fringe assertions that United Nations agreements are being imposed on top of American law, it comes off as truly black helicopter stuff — the unhinged, barely comprehensible rantings of a well-educated nutter, but a nutter nonetheless. There’s the well-meaning soul of a connected, socially conscious citizen here, it’s just that the manic, poorly made American Empire is a notably deficient vessel for its (many) messages. American Empire opens in Los Angeles this week at the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information about the movie, click here to visit its website. (Heartfelt Films, unrated, 95 minutes)

A searing, stirring and deeply humanistic documentary look at the collateral damage and terrible consequences of the United States’ decades-long “war on drugs,” Eugene Jarecki‘s The House I Live In is an emotionally shattering work, but also one that has a hefty, legitimate intellectual punching power. Suffused with a righteous anger that the filmmaker methodically turns up to a full boil, this Grand Jury Prize winner from this year’s Sundance Film Festival is a compelling portrait of failed social policy.



While the drug war is for many synonymous with the Reagan administration, it was actually formally launched under Richard Nixon. Since 1971, it’s cost more than $1 trillion and racked up 45 million arrests. The result? Of the 2.3 million people imprisoned in the United States, more than 500,000 are for nonviolent drug crimes. In the meantime, the rate of drug use has remained relatively constant, and in some arenas actually gone up.

Jarecki (Why We Fight) uses his own seemingly unlikely personal connection to the drug war as an in point. Jarecki grew up with Nannie Jeter, an African-American maid and caregiver of his parents who was like a second mother to him, and he played with Nannie’s kids and their cousins. Experiencing the loss of her son and others around him through this prism, Jarecki tries to square U.S. governmental policy with the facts of its disproportionate impact on the African-American community.

The House I Live In also has an array of powerfully informed and articulate interview subjects who have decades of research and experience in the field. This roster includes, probably most notably, author David Simon (creator of HBO’s The Wire, above) who spent years as a journalist covering Baltimore’s crime beat. He highlights in unnerving fashion the financial incentivization of the system as presently constituted; paid both in overtime for the number of arrests (due to extra processing time and paperwork), and, departmentally, in civil forfeiture, police departments operate on statistics, essentially. With prison beds to be filled and budgets in some cases needing to be supplemented, basic human nature frequently dictates targeting the lowest-hanging fruit.

The film really hits a groove, though, when it delves into mandatory minimum sentencing, and the legally mandated disparity in prison terms for crack and powder cocaine, which for decades stood at 100:1. (After intense pressure, this was finally, during President Obama‘s tenure, trimmed… to a 18:1 ratio.) This and much other evidence point to a systematic war based on race and class, something further driven home by a historical overview of the criminalization of other drugs which were linked to different immigrant populations and ethnic minorities spanning time — from the opium dens of Chinese-Americans in the late 1800s and early 1900s to the popularity of marijuana with Mexican farmhands in the 1930s.

Those hard of heart will not want to cede the point above, but The House I Live In is no empty, reflexive work of pure liberal feeling — a charge often levied at the work of Michael Moore, say. It is filtered through a personal lens but rigorously researched, and compelling for its scope and the inclusivity of opinion of those (like judges, prison guards and inmates) themselves caught up in this maddening cycle with seemingly little bottom-line benefit. Jarecki’s film is a call for a reasoned, humane approach to a problem we have mis-prosecuted. It’s one of the year’s best documentaries, but also a work that needs the heft of citizen supporters behind it, because it might be able to actually help make a difference. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Abramorama, unrated, 108 minutes)

A remarkably humane and well-rounded look at a perhaps unlikely yet nonetheless incredibly divisive political hot-button issue, director Scott Thurman’s The Revisionaries delves into the Texas School Board of Education’s attempts to vacuum out through legislation various language and historical examples objectionable to movement conservatives from the nation’s textbooks. Pointed without being nasty or unfair, this fascinating movie is a gripping, must-see work for nonfiction film aficionados, politicos and current events intellectuals alike — an engrossing social document of our turbulent times and often at-odds relationship with not only science but, more broadly, experts-in-field.



It seems utterly ridiculous, but in Austin, Texas, 15 people actually sit ready to exert undue influence over what is taught to the next generation of American schoolchildren. Once every decade, the state’s Board of Education (BOE) rewrites the teaching and textbook standards for its nearly five million students. And when it comes to textbooks (because of the state’s purchasing power, and 110 percent upfront payment), what happens in Texas affects the nation as a whole, since textbook manufacturers are often hesitant to act against their “recommendations.”

Various right-wing organizations have cannily sought to advance their agenda through this process, making for an unusual frontline in the country’s ongoing, so-called culture war. After briefly serving on his local school board, Don McLeroy (above), a dentist and avowed young-Earth creationist, was elected to the BOE, and later appointed chairman. During his time on the board, McLeroy — who once declared, “Education is too important not to be politicized” — has overseen the adoption of new science and history curriculum standards, aided by Liberty University law professor Cynthia Dunbar and others.

The Revisionaries charts this bureaucratic trench warfare, wherein language regarding evolution and intelligent design is argued about back and forth, and subjected to various amendments. Kathy Miller, of the liberal-minded Texas Freedom Network, and Ron Wetherington, an anthropology professor from Southern Methodist University, are among those who weigh in on behalf of what is widely accepted as settled science during these board meeting debates, where politicking and barely concealed contentiousness are ever-present, bubbling just around the edges. Later, as the debate shifts to language about topics like slavery, suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement and important minority historical figures, McLeroy fights for his chairmanship and then his very re-election to the BOE.

Through all of this, director Thurman gives equal time to these heartily clashing viewpoints. Rather than remaining satisfied with leaning on two-dimensional archetypes, he gives all of the aforementioned subjects a chance to explain both their personal views and their opinions of the BOE’s mission. The movie also follows McLeroy around at his dental practice and church, showing a private side of him that sometimes contrasts his rhetoric (in both directions) in interesting ways. The result, rather remarkably, deflates the fanned flames of partisan discord, while still highlighting the legitimate stakes involved in some of the curious erasures the more right-wing members of the BOE seek. The Revisionaries takes a state issue that has national implications, but doesn’t hog-tie it to national frenzy and political party talking points.

It helps, of course, that Thurman’s subjects are for the most part impassioned but not rhetorical bomb-throwers of the first order. Wetherington is a calm but shrewd academic who doesn’t stoop to automatically demonizing his foes; after all, he can parry with facts and scientific method, so when he decries the “flammable mixture of ignorance and arrogance” involved in the GOP’s rabblerousing pushback against so-called elites, it has less unfocused rage and more the surgically precise, knuckle-rapping exasperation of your favorite Socratic teacher. McLeroy, too, for his part, comes across less as a conniving anti-intellectual and more genuinely befuddled by the contempt for his efforts — a decent family man trying to split perhaps unsplittable hairs when it comes to pruning “liberal” viewpoints and claiming that he is not actually advocating for his personal beliefs. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Kino Lorber, unrated, 83 minutes)

You may think you know about Anonymous, the decentralized online collective who have merrily pranked and disrupted high-level corporate and governmental websites, and gone to war with Scientology to boot. You don’t, proves Brian Knappenberger’s wildly new engaging documentary, We Are Legion: The Story of Hacktivists.



Over the past couple years, Anonymous has been associated with raids or denial-of-service attacks on hundreds of targets, from Mastercard, Visa, PayPal and Sony to the Motion Picture Association of America and cyber-security/intelligence firms like HBGary Federal. We Are Legion not only details their exploits, but also delves inside the roots and culture of the group, exploring early hacktivist collectives like Cult of the Dead Cow and Electronic Disturbance Theater before charting Anonymous’ birth and fitful “maturation” from an offshoot message board on the website 4Chan.

The film’s technical package is fairly unexceptional, save for two notable elements. Composer John Dragonetti’s contributions provide We Are Legion with some extra oomph, and Skype-recorded video chats with various masked Anonymous members help give a rounded authenticity to the project. While tech authors like Richard Thieme and Steven Levy, amongst other talking heads, provide wonderful mainstream context and recap, it is these chats (and other more professionally recorded interviews with outed Anonymous members) that give Knappenberger’s movie a real personality, and a charged sense of self-narration from an organic, evolving entity.

Anonymous started out pulling goofy stunts en masse — think videogame-crashing, Rick-rolling, LOLcats, and other popular Internet memes. Then, in 2006 and ’07, they turned their sites on Hal Turner, a white supremacist with a self-syndicated radio show. Internet-based pranks were paired with other means of disruption of his hateful messages, and a kind of greater activist consciousness was born. Some of its other battles — including its tangles with Scientology, over their serial harassment of ex-church members and any journalist who deigns to write something critical about them — are epically hilarious, and their narrative recap here is fun and entertaining on a level completely devoid of any other sociopolitical context.

Still, while Anonymous’ support of WikiLeaks and its embattled founder, Julian Assange, got big press when the group targeted online financial companies who disabled their contribution buttons on the site, a lot of folks in the world at large don’t realize the group’s connection and indeed critical importance in not only fomenting the Arab Spring, but providing crucial support to besieged democracy activists in Tunisia and Egypt — validating SSL keys and certificates to help circumvent governmental shutdowns of the Internet, and sending out tips on how to make homemade gas masks and protective body armor. The pat soundbite gained some traction even in the mainstream media — that these governmental overthrows were made possible by Facebook, Twitter and social media — but We Are Legion shows that it’s no cliché.

For this reason and others, the governmental crackdown on some of these hacktivists should give freedom-of-speech-and-assembly town criers plenty of pause. There are sometimes laws broken, but a lot of what Anonymous does and supports could easily be described as civil disobedience — witness their early embrace of the Occupy Wall Street movement. After all, we live more and more of our lives online these days, so do we not have a right and space to also protest online? For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, including its trailer, click here to visit its website. (Luminant Media, unrated, 93 minutes)

A sort of voting rights companion piece to Steve York’s A Force More Powerful, which was a rangy nonfiction film about non-violent resistance movements around the world and spanning time, Ben Moses’ A Whisper to a Roar is a powerful documentary that ties together the heroic and ongoing efforts of democracy activists in five countries, and reaffirms the human spirit’s innate desire for freedom.

“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong,” Voltaire once wrote, and A Whisper to a Roar offers up ample evidence of this axiom, in the form of lethal pushback by dictators, autocrats and other corrupted power systems when faced with challenges to their authority. A striking segment focusing on the Ukraine opens with the story of kidnapped journalist Georgiy Gongadze, and then charts the rise of the country’s “Orange Revolution” of 2004, and the poisoning of reformist presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez’s distastefully violent rhetoric and overreach in closing radio and TV stations that offer dissent to his policies is examined. Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s slandering and incarceration is detailed, as are the brutal policies of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. And in perhaps the strongest narrative strand — or at least the one freshest and with the most direct implications for the United States — Egypt’s crackdown on democracy protesters and imprisonment of opposition leader Ayman Nour is cast into stark relief.

Shot over the course of three years, A Whisper to a Roar deftly intercuts back and forth between all of these narratives, which unfold at different times over the past 15 years. In doing so, it shows their commonality in “breaking down the barrier of apathy,” as one interviewee puts it. Social media and/or liberalized press have helped open new channels of communication amongst disaffected constituencies, and emboldened calls for democratic participation. The poor and otherwise marginalized see, by way of both other international examples and the skittish actions of their own authoritarian governments, the precarious and assailable nature of systemic corruption and oppression, through sustained public pressure.

The production package is fairly straightforward, but the range of interviewees runs the gamut from frontline demonstrators and participants to more intellectual members of the international commentariat, which give the movie a rooted sense of scope. Smartly, too, director Moses doesn’t tip the hands of his narrative in advance by fully identifying the occupations and standings of his subjects, leaving room for some suspense for those who don’t follow or recall international news. Emotionally engaging and impactful, A Whisper to a Roar is a well put together look at the yearning and universal nature of values we too frequently ascribe as uniquely American. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. A Whisper to a Roar opened this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7. For more information, visit the movie’s website. (Appleseed Entertainment, unrated, 94 minutes)

A quirky sociopolitical mockumentary experiment that plops down its title character as a sort of straightfaced, deep cultural embed amidst all the jockeying leading up to this election cycle’s Iowa Republican Presidential Caucus, Janeane From Des Moines is a movie of both hits and misses, but one that certainly never gets boring. If it could benefit from a more focused sense of purpose, director Grace Lee’s film also pulls off some undeniable coups, placing its fictional true believer in close proximity to all of the leading GOP contenders and by extension providing a snapshot of the reductive nature of national campaigning.



The movie centers around Janeane Wilson (Jane Edith Wilson, above left), a conservative housewife who works as a home health aide and keeps busy with gardening, her church’s Bible study group, and partisan political canvassing. With her college-age daughter showing few signs of returning home for the holidays, and her trucker husband (Michael Oosterom) becoming more and more distant in the wake of losing his job, Janeane throws herself into the Tea Party movement, convinced that gay marriage (“I don’t understand when it came to be that gay people own all the rainbows”), “Obamacare” and Planned Parenthood are destroying the country she loves. Traversing Iowa, she attends all sorts of rallies, speeches and events for Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney, asking them questions about their stances on issues and trying to figure out who best represents her values.

The film’s cinéma vérité material sometimes awkwardly abuts staged drama, and the personal tragedies Lee and Wilson (a co-writer) heap on Janeane feel over-stacked by maybe just one misfortune. There is certainly some dryly comedic gold found in the mining of these seams (fretting over dwindling money, Janeane attends a seminar of financial advisor Dave Ramsey, who preaches learning how to handle money “in a way that honors Christ”), but a twist involving Janeane’s husband lacks the necessary depth of a more nuanced set-up.

Borat this is not, in other words — at times to its detriment, since Wilson displays a real comfort with low-key improvisational interacting with real people. Lee’s insistence on a fuzzy emotional throughline also undercuts the film’s satirical punching power against some of the uninformed hypocrisy that helps animate in this case partisan cultural conservatives. Ergo, Janeane From Des Moines connects fitfully — as a sort of curated glimpse behind the utterly bizarre photo-op stagings of candidate appearances at ice cream parlors and the like.

The twin jewels of Janeane are its capturing of candidates unawares and Wilson’s finely calibrated performance, which is in its own strange way complementary to Meryl Streep’s turn in Hope Springs. They exist in markedly different stories, obviously, but both performances are similarly predicated upon an accumulated weight of heartache, frustration and regret finally reaching its tipping point. That happens most electrically when Janeane tearfully reconnects with Romney on the eve of the Iowa Caucus (an encounter that received national news coverage), but the film’s true, remarkable pièce de résistance is a coffeeshop sit-down with Bachmann and Iowa Congressman Steve King in which the former spins a personal question about getting kicked off health care rolls into a digressive monologue concluding with a pointed statement about what gas prices were when President Obama took office. It’s proof that retail presidential politics can be every bit as full of thick-headed, off-topic speechifying as air-game national message massage. Until there is sustained push-back against this, we get what we deserve, I suppose. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more on the film, meanwhile, and its iTunes/VOD availability, click here to visit its website. (Wilsilu Pictures, unrated, 78 minutes)

As the United States stands on the precipice of another presidential election, with one major party committed to striking down legislation that provided the most reform on the issue in many generations, health care is again in the headlines — if frequently only tangentially, as Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama tangle over claims over what the Affordable Care Act will and will not provide when it goes fully into effect. A new documentary, however, rather persuasively suggests a collective societal myopia on the subject — that a more accurate diagnosis of what ails the country can be found in a fee-for-service system which rewards doctors based not on patient outcomes or improvement but rather simply the number of patients they see.

Co-directed by Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke, Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and picked up the Social Issue Award at Silverdocs. Its title — as explicated by Dr. Don Berwick, the head of Medicare and Medicaid from 2010-11, who years ago gave a speech later published under the same name — relates to the story of a group of Montana smokejumpers battling a particularly brutal forest fire in the 1940s. Trapped at the bottom of a steep ridge by the rapidly rising blaze, the foreman struck a match, set fire to the patch of grass in front of him and then took shelter in the newly burnt area, calling for his crew to join him. Clinging to old ideas and means of safety, they ran on. The fire spread quickly up the hill and overtook the crew, killing 13 men and destroying over 3,200 acres. The foreman survived, nearly unharmed.

The American health care system finds itself in a similar quandary, asserts Berwick, and Escape Fire offers up ample evidence in support of this point-of-view — that we’re looking past smart and effective solutions to problems, clinging to outdated models. The United States of course has enormous technological resources, and lots of people in the health care sector doing their jobs relatively well, the film argues, but it’s simply that the jobs were designed with a misplaced focus. Ergo, whereas other developed countries spend around $3,000 per person annually on health care, the average in America amounts to around $8,000. It’s a profitable (and explicitly for-profit) “disease care” system that wants you neither to die or really get better, but instead keep coming back for the treatment of chronic and largely preventable illnesses.

The film has the requisite array of expert-in-field talking heads, along with statistics of gut-punch effectiveness: the United States spends more than $300 billion a year on pharmaceuticals, almost as much as the rest of the world combined; and if other prices had risen at the same rate as health care costs since 1945, a dozen eggs would cost $45 and a gallon of milk would be $48. Yet its greatest strength lies in some of its normal subjects, like a rural primary care physician who struggles with patient volume and decides to leave for another opportunity, and a PTSD-addled soldier strung out on a cocktail of nearly three dozen pharmaceuticals. Other interviewees — including Dr. Andrew Weil, a pioneer in “integrative medicine,” and Dr. Dean Ornish, the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute — are more famous, but these figures help create an enormously sympathetic pull.

If there’s a qualm, it’s that Escape Fire suffers a bit from a jumbled focus, and hiccups in editing. Still, its core message comes through — we live in a high-tech world, but if we’re serious about societal betterment we need to transform our medical care into a “high-touch” operation, to give patients and doctors more time to spend with one another, preventing disease rather than just managing its symptoms. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, which is also available on iTunes and across VOD platforms, visit its website. (Roadside Attractions, PG-13, 100 minutes)

With its glitz, glam and commercial-crossover appeal, the NBA is the gleam in the eye of every young, aspirant professional basketball player. Of course, roster spots are finite, and not everyone ends up there. For those who don’t make it, however, there are any number of overseas hoops leagues where, for at least a handful of years in their 20s, these players can go make some nice money while continuing to play the game they love — including, it turns out, in Iran. A fascinating and surprisingly funny story of unlikely cultural ambassadorship, the documentary The Iran Job charts one such season in the life of an American hoopster, culminating against the backdrop of something much bigger than basketball — the uprising and subsequent suppression of that Islamic country’s reformist Green Movement.



Perhaps because it’s directed by German-born filmmaker Till Schauder, The Iran Job locates an absorbing, cross-cultural universality with surprising ease. Part of this is achieved by way of eschewing a more rooted explanation of the talents of subject Kevin Sheppard, who hails from the city of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and played collegiately at Jacksonville University. Schauder smartly begins his story with Sheppard’s family — the mother and longtime girlfriend he’s reluctantly leaving behind — but The Iran Job doesn’t frame its story as a de facto Hoop Dreams sequel. It presents Sheppard simply as a hard-working guy who’s accepted a job that involves a lot of (admittedly unusual) travel, and the result is a movie that one need not have any obsession or even familiarity with basketball to enjoy.

Speaking no Farsi, Sheppard arrives in Iran having accepted a one-year contract from A.S. Shiraz, an extremely young squad new to the prestigious Iranian Super League, a 13-team association whose rules provide a limit of two foreigners per squad. His roommate is seven-foot Serbian Zoran Majkic, the team’s other foreigner. The team’s owner makes it a stated goal to make the playoffs after the 24-game regular season, something no first-year team has ever done. Sheppard, a “nobody” in the United States, is looked to as the leader and go-to guy in Shiraz’s push for excellence.

Despite the many cultural differences — women and men are segregated in the crowd, each on different sides of the court — basketball is surprisingly popular in Iran. Big crowds turn out, and fans support their hometown teams in rowdy fashion, waving signs, shouting and banging homemade drums. The Iran Job is in this way a classic and often hilarious fish-out-of-water story. The local restaurant delivery boy is an amazing comic presence; he and Sheppard have a demonstrative dance that they cycle through whenever they cross paths. And when Sheppard corrals his affable landlord to help him search for a Christmas tree, the culturally confused results that unfold at a local botanist (“We’re looking for a large bush — it would be okay if it’s dry”) are flat-out hysterical.

Still, while The Iran Job connects so quickly and easily in large part to Sheppard’s laidback personality and charm, the movie achieves a deeper resonance from a surprising source — by presenting a nuanced look at various Iranians who don’t slot into Western preconceptions. Most notably, Sheppard is befriended by the basketball team’s nurse and physical therapist, Hilda Khademi, as well as two of her friends — reform-minded Laleh and Elaheh, a pretty would-be actress with a melancholic center. Despite cultural restrictions that place many of their interactions outside the law, these women become almost co-leads of the movie, sharing their thoughts about religion, politics and gender inequality with Sheppard and Majkic in a series of late-night conversations at their apartment. Later, they dine as guests at Elaheh’s home.

These guileless interactions recall time on a pre-school playground or in a kindergarten class, where socially malleable tots regard one another with equal helpings of wide-eyed curiosity and sincerity. The Iran Job connects so deeply precisely because of its focus on the underclass — everyday people caught up in the hope of two respective presidential campaigns (2008 in America, and 2009 in Iran), and stepping over and around the more bellicose rhetoric of their governments. These shared and very human moments of tenderness and open-heartedness illustrate better than a thousand words of flowery rhetoric the principal of binding universality, and reveal the extolled American value of freedom to be a value for all humankind. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, visit its website. (Paladin Films, unrated, 100 minutes)

Held in socio-economic limbo for almost a full half century by a military dictatorship that turned away the just election of eventual Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, and sentenced her to two decades of house arrest, Burma (or Myanmar, as it’s known to many inside the country) is probably the second most isolated country on the planet, behind only North Korea. Filmed clandestinely over a two-year period, the contemplative new documentary They Call It Myanmar provides a fascinating, beyond-the-manicured-travelogue-hedges snapshot of the second largest country in Southeast Asia, home to more than 60 million people — many stuck in terrible poverty but still hopeful for their country.

Directed by Robert E. Lieberman, a physics and former math professor at Cornell, They Call It Myanmar is a work of humanistic reportage, blending together stunning footage of everyday Burmese life with interviews from Suu Kyi and others. Tourism travel is permitted in Burma, but foreigners are watched, and filming and photography — especially of governmental buildings and institutions — is controlled. Ergo the discreet arrangements, in which many surnames are withheld in detailing the stories of children who only spend two or three years in school, and families who habitually pawn their blankets and cookware just in order to be able to afford busfare to work.

Lieberman eschews didactic set-up, but still provides an effective historical overview for those unfamiliar with the country — its rich tradition prior to British colonial rule, and its wars and messy existence post-independence. He also imparts a sense of the culture and climate, pointing out such details as the tropical weather by way of a special, cooling wood paste many people wear on their faces.

The rich emergent portrait of underclass life and love is marked by moments of heartbreak and joyfulness, sadness and levity, and slots favorably alongside Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Position Among the Stars. That nonfiction film charted the tumultuous ups and downs of an extended Indonesian family trying to work their way out of the slums, but did so with an artfulness that approached heart-stopping. Lieberman’s movie casts a broader net, and his technique isn’t as honed, but it achieves a similar spell in its best moments. They Call It Myanmar features smart, light musical contributions which underscore the film’s sense of latent prosaic wonderment, and its visits to religious temples and other sites are amazing.

While going out of its way to point out the unusual (and perhaps more insidious) nature of the oligarchic control of Burma’s isolationist military dictatorship — which doesn’t rely on a cult of personality — They Call It Myanmar also illustrates the gap between populace and regime, which is a dignified goal and achievement. For those with an interest in the world at large, and especially the challenges inherent in abetting democracy in developing countries, this is an absorbing work. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Photosynthesis Productions, unrated, 83 minutes)

The title of Electoral Dysfunction, a new political documentary hosted by Mo Rocca, hints at a roiling discontent that isn’t much part of the tone of this irreverent, civics-minded offering. Sure, in offering up a look at the United States’ Electoral College and the many weird incongruities that our general lack of federal voting standardization procedures elicit, co-directors Bennett Singer, Leslie Farrell and David Deschamps’ movie is very illustrative of the different political party mindsets when it comes to voter registration drives, absentee ballots and other mechanisms of induced greater election participation by citizenry. But this is an engrossing and eye-opening work that neither delights nor aims to particularly poke anyone in the eyes.



Electoral Dysfunction begins by noting that although the phrase “right to vote” is part of the popular vernacular, our Constitution makes absolutely no mention of that fact — unlike, say, the Constitution of South Africa. The history of voting in our country, of course, is a long and complicated one — both with respect to who gets to vote, how that vote is counted (the shameful “three-fifths compromise“), and how the Election Day popular vote from the now more than 13,000 electoral districts gets filtered through the Electoral College, which officially selects our presidents.

After sifting through some of this history — including a very amusing example election for a classroom of first-graders involving markers and colored pencils — the movie then sets out to provide an overview snapshot of exactly how voting works (and maybe doesn’t work) in America. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 election between Barack Obama and John McCain, Rocca heads to Indiana, home of one of the strictest voter I.D. laws in the country, to trail both a Republican and Democratic party loyalist as they each endeavor to mobilize their party’s get-out-the-vote campaign in the notoriously sharp-elbowed and swing-happy eighth and ninth Congressional districts.

One might assume that, owing to its temporal remove, Electoral Dysfunction is kind of dated, but that’s far from the case — especially as voter identification laws in Pennsylvania and other states, laws passed by Republican state legislatures after their gains in 2010, wind their way to the courts in advance of this year’s presidential election. Mainly, though, since it unfolds against such a historic election, with the highest national voter turnout since 1964, the movie has a charged, electric feel to it. One feels caught up in the uncertainty of the moment and the passionate feelings of those volunteers on the ground.

Rocca, of NPR’s Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me! and formerly of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, is an amiable guide, and the interviewees are almost uniformly great as well — from Republican National Committee member Dee Dee Benkie and Democratic operative Mike Marshall, the two main subjects, to Harvard professor Alex Keysarr and would-be electors in both parties. Rocca even gets into a functional critique of ballot design (including those infamous Palm Beach County butterfly ballots, over 6,600 of which were thrown out for double-punches in a state decided by only 530-odd votes in the 2000 presidential election) with professional designer Todd Oldham.

Electoral Dysfunction is utter catnip for politicos and documentary film fans, but its attractive presentation and easygoing nature also make this important and instructive movie approachable for level-headed audiences of various political stripes. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information about the film — which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7 — as well as its companion book, click here to visit its website. (Trio Pictures, unrated, 91 minutes)

Dated by the criterion of certain cinephiles (it premiered at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival) but still dispiritingly relevant, director Vibeke Løkkeberg’s Tears of Gaza, a visceral documentary look at the 2008-09 Israeli bombardment of Gaza launched in retaliation for Hamas bombings of southern Israeli cities, is a shattering anti-war movie that pierces one’s heart. A tough watch even for those who believe they’ve seen it all, this subjective offering is a grim portrait of human atrocity and a cinematic evocation of the old protest song query: “War, what is it good for?”

Tears of Gaza is exceedingly effective in the gall and sadness it provokes. But amidst all the graphic horrors it chronicles, there may not be a shot more heartrending than a toddler uncomprehendingly clutching and kissing the framed photograph of a father he won’t remember. Løkkeberg’s film confronts complacency by forcing its audience to watch these and other moments that showcase not only wanton destruction, but the too-soon death of innocence. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Nero Media, unrated, 84 minutes)

A wild, darkly comic slice of nonfiction branded “performative journalism” by its creator, The Ambassador sets out to expose the corrupt business of selling diplomatic titles to exploit the lucrative natural resources of war-torn third world countries. In the vein of the Yes Men or the work of Sacha Baron Cohen, Danish journalist and provocateur Mads Brügger contracts a cultural ambassadorship through a private European broker, then heads to the notoriously corrupt and dangerous Central African Republic to wheel and deal with government officials and black market diamond peddlers.



The results are shocking and unnerving all rolled together. If the Congo is the heart of darkness, then the Central African Republic — a magnet for white men with vague job descriptions and hidden agendas — is its appendix, Brügger asserts, and there seems to be little reason to disagree. Upon arriving, he starts taking (and taping) meetings with all manner of other diplomats and local officials, and quickly becomes privy to the all sorts of back-channel intrigue.

It’s not merely theoretical cloak-and-dagger fun and games, however. As Brügger sets up a phony front company and delivers various “envelopes of happiness” to grease the wheels of a local miner who promises to provide him with a steady supply of diamonds, the lack of formal paperwork from Liberia (his ostensible host country) endangers his cover. When a governmental head of security with whom he spoke ends up dead, the grim and risky reality of the chess board upon which he’s playing is cast into further relief.

Financed by Lars Von Trier‘s production company Zentropa, The Ambassador is a ballsy, attention-grabbing idea, certainly, and engaging and a lot of fun for anyone with an interest in matters geopolitical. Brügger, with his minor affectations (he smokes and wears riding boots to a meeting with local Pygmies) is an amusing guide, and he doesn’t overplay his hand. Still, as it wears on, The Ambassador doesn’t drag so much as just lose its head of steam. As the more overtly funny bits of his set-up and entry fade away, and Brügger gets deeper in the weeds, the movie feels like it could benefit from a fresh pair or two of eyes in the editing room. Even as shady contracts are signed, the specifics of his plan and end-game remain a bit hazy, and the film’s conclusion and coda are a comedown from its early high-wire heights. Still, this is fairly outrageous activist cinema — undeniably something bold and different. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the movie’s trailer, meanwhile, click here. (Drafthouse, unrated, 93 minutes)

An unflinching, diamond-sharp salvo about the roots of the American economic crisis and its impact on particularly the middle class and working poor, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? offers up a fusillade of facts that convincingly paint the United States as an oligarchy with fairly corruptible political leadership. Co-directors Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher largely eschew traditional partisan truncheons and dig past more familiar villains and boogeymen to shine a light on the damaging impact of three-plus decades of rampant deregulation, job outsourcing and tax policies aimed almost solely at further empowering large business owners and the individually wealthy. The finished product is almost impossible not to raise ire and heart rates.



Narrated by Thom Hartmann, the well-researched Heist slots in comfortably alongside documentaries like Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job. However, it also takes a long view of our current economic situation, revealing the roots of planning that led to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which limited affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms, and other consumer financial system protections. Given particular scrutiny is an important memorandum penned by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell — the deciding vote in 1978’s First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a forerunner for the Citizens United case in which corporations were granted new rights to spend money in order to influence political processes — in which he extolled the free market system and deemed that the end of business regulation would somehow benefit all.

Specifically, Powell (and later his acolytes) advocated business control of raw political power, and mechanisms of punishment for those who opposed their policies and ideas. In foreseeing saw how corporate money could talk louder than organized labor and consumer protection groups — and advancing that cause — the Powell Memorandum provided a veritable blueprint for the creation of ideological marketing organizations masquerading as think tanks, and laid groundwork for news organizations as bloviating big business opinion peddlers. Through these mouthpieces, massive rollbacks on capital gains and dividend taxes were achieved, along with the stripping back of other important measures of federal oversight. In this environment, rapaciousness and excess were then allowed to run amok.

Heist is a cinematic gut punch, to be sure, but not one entirely devoid of hope. It sounds an alarm, and makes a compelling case for greater political involvement and education by those with less means than the moneyed elite of this country. Whether that call is answered en masse may say a lot about the future trajectory of the United States of America. For more information on the film, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7, click here. For my full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Connect the Dots Productions, unrated, 76 minutes)

An alarmist nonfiction film in the mode of the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth or debt-busting docs I Want Your Money and I.O.U.S.A., director Peter Navarro’s Death by China targets what it deems the most urgent problem facing America today — our country’s increasingly destructive economic trade relationship with a rapidly rising China. There’s an impassioned level of energy here, and certainly the weight and force of much educated opinion. But like a teenager whose emotionality trumps their ability to rationally and cogently articulate an argument, Death by China is a bit too manic, scattershot and overheated to impart its case with surgical precision. It feels, by God, but it also overwhelms.



When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 — after having their entrance lobbied for by both President Bill Clinton and prominent members of the Republican-controlled Congress as well, like former Speakers of the House Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay — it was viewed by many as it was forthrightly sold: as a level-playing-field market opening for American businesses to what amounts to basically one-fifth of the world’s population. Of course, that sunny scenario required China to play by fair rules, instead of working to subvert American companies through currency manipulation, intellectual piracy and a tsunami of cheaply produced products courtesy of human rights abuses and forced labor prison camps. In retrospect, the United States’ more-carrot-than-stick approach seems incredibly naïve and wrongheaded.

Narrated by Martin Sheen, and based on Navarro and Greg Autry’s book of the same name, Death by China makes, by its conclusion, a fairly convincing case that a good portion of America’s 50,000 shuttered and disappeared companies over the past decade-plus (many in the manufacturing sector) and much of its three trillion dollar debt to China can be blamed on a willful and crooked gaming of the system by China’s communist government, who has taken economic advantage of illegal subsidies and the world’s most degraded environment to achieve cost advantages that outstrip baseline profitability in various industries. Of course, the notion that China would play hardball to achieve its own economic objectives shouldn’t be wildly surprising.

But Navarro’s hammy, feverish directorial flourishes, of which there are many (export subsidies are represented by animated bombs ripping apart an American map) do much to undercut the intellectual balance of his film’s case, as does his jumpy editing. The parade of interviewees — including AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, Forbes columnist Gordon Chang, and various Congressmen and other government officials — lends credence and credibility to Death by China‘s anxious claims. But the movie skips around and alights on some crazy divergences (wait… China engages in government-sanctioned organ harvesting?) instead of also more fully rooting down into American sociopolitical complicity in the creation and sustenance of a culture that extols profit over middle-class jobs. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, visit its official website. (Area 23A, unrated, 79 minutes)

NOTE: Death by China opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, where director Peter Navarro will appear for Q&As on both Friday and Saturday evenings.

A striking and powerful documentary overview of the populist protests that rocked Iran in June 2009 and helped spark the Arab Spring movement, The Green Wave serves as an inventive registering of terrible turmoil, upheaval and governmental crackdown. Working with animator Ali Reza Darvish, director Ali Samadi Ahadi weaves together recreated blog postings and eyewitness accounts with interviews of prominent human rights activists and Iranian exiles, and in the process achieves something fairly remarkable — a record not only factual but equally emotional, capturing the electric sweep of feeling, and commingled hope and despair of the younger generation in Iran and, indeed, throughout much of the Middle East.



In the wake of what was widely regarded as a rigged presidential election victory by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over progressive candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, democratic demonstrations and protests overwhelmed the streets of Tehran. This was notable as something never before seen in the Middle East. Citizens in many other countries, both Muslim and secular, took note. Revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have since then toppled regimes, and civil war continues in Syria. Other countries — Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan and Oman, to name a few — also saw massive protests.

Iran, however, was and remains of special interest. In the news as a pariah because of its nuclear program, the populist uprising put an international face on the average Iranian, showing a desire on their part for fairer social policies, more governmental transparency, and arguably a greater and more conciliatory engagement with the world community. The Ahmadinejad regime’s brutal crackdown — with the certain blessing of the ruling mullahs — unleashed a band of knife- and club-wielding thugs on motorcycles, who roamed city streets beating men, women and children alike. Many more green-clad activists were arrested, and then beaten and/or raped, decried as treasonous “non-believers.”

The Green Wave documents this government-sanctioned brutality and murder, in a manner not unlike Israeli filmmaker Ali Folman’s 2008 Waltz With Bashir, which depicted refracted memories of his experience as a solider in the 1982 Lebanon War. It dramatizes, but also contextualizes and universalizes, with the animated segments and various textual social media updates serving as an artful counterbalance to the pulse-quickening cell phone videos (some graphic) of panicked demonstrators fleeing the wrath of their countrymen.

If there are criticisms, it’s that The Green Wave could benefit from a bit more surgical precision in its exposition and timeline of events and, at only 80 minutes, could also afford to plumb a bit deeper, either via updating the struggle in Iran or — perhaps more dangerously — attempting to rope in voices of hard-line law and order. Still, The Green Wave is an impactful snapshot of the human yearning for dignity and freedom. It serves as a reminder, as one interviewee stresses, that despotic regimes in power today may not be in power tomorrow, and that public records like this — unthinkable a generation ago — will serve as an important first draft of history of their crimes. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. The Green Wave is also available on VOD and via crowd-sourced screenings; for more information, click here. (Red Flag Releasing, unrated, 80 minutes)

A hopelessly broad and undisciplined comedy that features a small handful of amusing ideas but otherwise evinces no great effort or intelligence, The Campaign represents a major missed opportunity for rich Stateside election year satire. Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis each exercise their well-toned individual comedic chops, but director Jay Roach’s movie feels to its very core vague and scared of offending anyone, and therefore has trouble connecting in any meaningful way, no matter the heightened absurdity of its backdrop.

Loads of small narrative missteps and false details also add up. They make for a movie that feels generic and toothless instead of plugged in and alive. Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell’s script aims for big targets, grabbing a couple story beats from political scandals of the last several years, but it never roots down into the foibles of party politics. Instead, it opts to track swings in public opinion for the two candidates through polling response to exaggerated events, as with an uptick for Huggins related to an “accidental” hunting shooting. Unintentionally, this says a lot about the filmmakers’ regard for their audience. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 86 minutes)

In 2009, Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten’s Bananas!* was just one of more than a dozen nonfiction competition entries in the Los Angeles Film Festival — the story of a (successful) lawsuit that a dozen Nicaraguan plantation workers had brought against the Dole Corporation, alleging sterility and other health problems brought about by continued and knowing exposure to illegal pesticides. But the movie itself became a story when, in the weeks leading up to its festival premiere, Dole started flexing its corporate might, and tossed out a steady stream of lawsuit threats left and right if the movie was shown in its present form — owing largely to an investigation of the lawyer working on behalf of the plaintiffs. The Los Angeles Film Festival backed down, screening the movie out of competition, at a separate venue, and under the legal protection of a nicely phrased statement of dissociation.



The Sundance Film Festival-minted Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, then (and yes, the asterix are part of the respective titles), is Gertten’s adjunct offering/follow-up, sort of akin to Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams or, more to the point, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha. It’s a lifted-curtain story of what went on behind-the-scenes during the attempted production/mounting/release of another work of art. It’s also a pretty compelling story about freedom of speech, and how in a worldwide economy and digital age companies are even more apt to take aggressive, proactive and even punitive measures to squelch voices and stories — true or false not really mattering — that can negatively impact their bottom lines. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Big Boys Gone Bananas!* opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena; for more information about the movie, visit its website by clicking here. (WG Films, unrated, 86 minutes)

A compelling documentary that explodes proper and stuffy notions of what a foreign intellectual dissident looks and sounds like, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry offers up a comprehensive snapshot of one of China’s most celebrated contemporary artists, as well as one of its most outspoken critics.



A raconteur to his core, 54-year-old Ai Weiwei is a painter, filmmaker and multimedia artist who has incorporated elements of Andy Warhol’s “factory” approach into his art. After having helped design his country’s iconic Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium, Ai in 2011 became China’s most famous missing person, held in police custody for three months on tax charges and other issues after publicly denouncing the Olympic Games as party propaganda. As an avid Twitterer, Ai drew attention abroad for this sort of commentary, as well as his advocacy on behalf of the more than 5,400 schoolchildren who died as a result of shoddy government construction in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

As directed by Alison Klayman, Never Sorry effectively walks a razor’s edge between a work of serious sociological inquiry and a somewhat cheeky portrait of a guy whose favorite mode of expression may well be an extended middle finger. Klayman approaches Ai’s private life somewhat gingerly, and with good reason. Though the artist asserts his mother and family life are “not representational” of who he is, it’s clear the truth is a bit more complicated — as evidenced both by the fact that his father, a poet, was denounced by the Anti-Rightist Movement and in 1958 sent to a forced labor camp, but especially the fact that during the course of the movie Ai fathers a son by a woman other than his longtime wife, fellow artist Lu Qing, with whom he shares no children.

Ai, who for a dozen years studied and lived in the United States, seems understandably influenced by his time in the West, but not always in the most direct manner that one might expect. Transparency and accountability inform much of his political agitation, rather than some desire for more naked democratic upheaval. Undertaking projects to cast a light on government deceit and cover-up in the wake of the aforementioned earthquake obviously bring him much scrutiny. And when he confronts a police officer following him the evening before Ai is to testify in the trial of a colleague accused of “inciting subversion of state power,” the officer pacifies his wounded pride by having Ai disturbed during the middle of the night. An assault occurs (off camera), and portions of the rest of the film detail the artist’s filing of various paperwork of formal protest and investigation.

Never Sorry is much enlivened by its lively subject, but it is also an ample, interesting and ruminative showcase on China as a society in flux, simply filtered through the prism of this one man. Creativity and freedom go hand in hand, so the government’s attempts to foster and promote the former while still considerably constraining the latter prove problematic. Nearly 25 years after the tinderbox of the Tiananmen Square protest and subsequent crackdown, there are still faultlines evident. When they will rupture again one cannot say, but Klayman’s movie confirms and captures the currents of change. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sundance Selects, R, 91 minutes)