Every year, Design Indaba hosts a film festival which is open to both delegates and the public. The 10-day festival, which this year takes place at Cape Town’s oldest independent cinema, The Labia, kicks off on 20 February 2015 and continues through 1 March. It includes a selection of memorable films, focused upon creativity and design.
20 February — Tim Burton’s Big Eyes
21 February — Regarding Susan Sontag
22 February — Art and Craft
22 February — David Adjaye’s Collatorations
23 February — Salt of the Earth
24 February — Tomorrow We Disappear
25 February — Shake the Dust
25 February — Stripped: The Comic Documentary
26 February — The Newsroom: Off The Record
27 February — Stories of Our Lives
28 February — Dior and I
1 March — Project Phoenix (short film before Saint Laurent)
1 March – Saint Laurent
Here is a quick guide to reviews, summaries and trailers for films and documentaries screening this week. You can buy your tickets here!
The Newsroom — Off The Record
IMDb
A year in the newsroom of Denmark’s leading tabloid newspaper, struggling to survive in a changing media climate.
http://letterboxd.com
“We see what it takes for news to make the front page and in the paper’s machine room we get to see the drastic death battle for the 110 years old paper play out — The question is: Will there be a place for Ekstra Bladet in the media image of tomorrow?”
Stripped: The Comics Documentary
IMDb
Where do comic strips go when newspapers die?
There is, at this point in time, no way of knowing what the future holds for newspapers, books or comic strips. Yet the documentary ends on a positive note, allowing the last panel of Watterson’s “Calvin & Hobbes” to end the documentary: “It’s a magical world. Let’s go exploring.”
Stories of Our Lives
Vice
To dispel Kenya’s myths about homosexuals, the Nairobi-based arts collective the Nest — including director Jim Chuchu, executive producer George Gachara, and screenwriter Njoki Ngumi — created Stories of Our Lives, an anthology of short films recently presented at the Toronto International Film Festival. After collecting firsthand audio testimonials of LGBT Kenyans across the country, they adapted the recordings into fictional shorts that offer a compelling window into modern-day Kenya.
Al Jazeera
The film, directed by Kenyan artist and filmmaker Jim Chuchu, explores the issue of sexual identity at a time when the LGBT community in Kenya and across Africa has been increasingly under siege. It is an effort, said Chuchu, to focus on the human stories behind the headlines, and to shine light on lives that have been persecuted, marginalised or ignored in Kenyan society.
Huffington Post
What makes The Nest’s film, Stories of Our Lives, which was featured at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, such a mesmeric and immersive experience is that the tales told are everyday stories of what it means to fall in love, what it means to explore one’s identity and, ultimately, what it means to be human in a culture where one’s existence is derided and repeatedly mocked as representative of the worst of Western traits.
Dior and I
Variety
Fast-rising helmer Frederic Tcheng privileges the creative process over stereotyped glamor or backstabbing in this multilayered, meticulously woven docu.
IMDb
Melding the everyday, pressure-filled components of fashion with mysterious echoes from the iconic brand’s past, the film is also a colorful homage to the seamstresses who serve Simons’ vision.
Project Phoenix
No trailer available (at time of publication)
“Project Phoenix” is a documentary that follows the journey of a former member of the Numbers Gang. It shows how creativity helped transform him from a hardened criminal into a valued member of society.
Big Eyes
IMDb
A drama about the awakening of the painter Margaret Keane, her phenomenal success in the 1950s, and the subsequent legal difficulties she had with her husband, who claimed credit for her works in the 1960s.
The Guardian
Beneath the recurrent quirky Burton tropes, both visual and narrative, Big Eyes worries away at larger themes of authorship (Walter went to his grave asserting his own genius), the concept of “good” versus “bad” art (we open with a drily laudatory quote from Warhol) and the role of the critic. It also provides a fascinating portrait of a woman first suffering and then challenging a world in which men had the upper hand — domestically, professionally, artistically. Certainly, there is a feminist dynamic to Margaret’s story; for all its outlandishness, this is ultimately an everyday tale of a woman finding her own voice in a chauvinistic environment, escaping the shackles of an abusive marriage to step into the spotlight alone.
Tomorrow We Disappear
Variety
Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber’s “Tomorrow We Disappear” chronicles the razing of a colorful New Delhi colony called Kathputli, destroyed by upscale developers to construct a mall and luxury skyscraper. Though the spectacle of the very rich driving their poorer brethren out of long-established neighborhoods grows steadily more universal, the creative, vibrant nature of the community involved — home to some 3,000 street artists and their families — grants the documentary a particular resonance.
Shake the Dust
The Hollywood Reporter
Journalist-turned-documentarian Adam Sjoberg’s new film sprawls across four countries to chronicle the stories of young hip-hop fans. To teenagers in South America, Africa and Asia, the cultural movement isn’t about fame or fortune — it’s about hope and their individual power. Sjoberg discovers that through break dancing, young people are enacting social change around the globe.
The Urban Daily
The documentary, directed by journalist Adam Sjoberg and executive produced by Jones, focuses on the art of break dancing as it’s seen and practiced around the world.
The Salt of the Earth
The New York Times
“The Salt of the Earth,” Wim Wenders’s new documentary about the life and work of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, elegantly inhabits a moral and aesthetic paradox. Mr. Salgado’s photographs illuminate some of the worst horrors of the modern world: starvation, war, poverty, displacement. They are also beautiful, dramatic visual artifacts, and their power has a double effect. We are drawn into the contemplation of terrible realities, but at the same time our attention turns to the person bearing witness.
Variety
Wenders’ narration contains more than a few choice platitudes — “he looked into the heart of darkness” and such — but the visuals and subject are so strong that they’re easily ignored. What audiences cannot fail to notice, once again, is the director’s exceptional eye for black-and-white, combining his own sensitivity to the form with the influence of Sebastiao’s work (they both have an intense appreciation for skies decorated with clouds in an array of gray tonalities). Juliano’s color lensing also has a sweep and appreciation for light and reflection. The photos look fantastic enlarged on a cinema screen.
The Guardian
Sebastião Salgado is the Brazilian photographer whose nightmarish pictures of teeming, dirt-swamped gold miners electrified the world’s media in the mid-1980s. Now 70, Salgado has had his life story told by the joint force of his own son Juliano and Wim Wenders, and it’s a story that has turned out to have its own uplifting dynamic and character arc.
Art and Craft
The Washington Post
“The Music Man” gave us the perfect prototype of a charlatan: charismatic, theatrical, sociable. Mark Landis is none of those things, which makes his rich history of duping people all the more fascinating.
Slant magazine
A documentary is often only as good as its subject, and Art and Craft has a truly unique and astonishing one. Mark Landis is a balding, soft-spoken middle-aged man who lives in a messy Laurel, Mississippi apartment where he drinks wine, smokes cigarettes, watches old movies on TV, and makes forgeries of artwork that he then donates to Southern museums free of charge, convincing the institutions to take them via wholly phony stories and by using various made-up aliases.
Regarding Susan Sontag
Slate
Ten years after her death, Sontag’s supreme writerly confidence remains both an inspiration and a terror to would-be critics and public intellectuals, and for good reason—she was the embodiment of a certain school of serious, morally committed, iconoclastic, and often deliciously haughty 20th-century criticism. And yet, as Nancy Kates’ arresting documentary Regarding Susan Sontag demonstrates, much of that swagger was a carefully (and wisely, for a woman in a man’s trade) crafted façade. Behind it lived and wrote a person who, despite having the kind of career most writers can only dream about, felt as inadequate as the rest of us.
The New York Times
You’re left with the feeling that Ms. Kates was drawn to Ms. Sontag as a personality and a sexual and political symbol but didn’t really take seriously the work she devoted her life to. That’s a defensible position, but it would have been better to take it head-on, the way Ms. Sontag would have.
David Adjaye – Collaborations
Reviews:
Selectism
Responsible for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture as well as homes for the likes of Alexander McQueen and Juergen Teller, “Collaborations” focuses primarily on Adjaye’s work for the art and design community including artists Chris Ofili, Julie Mehretu, Sue Webster, Lorna Simpson, photographer Taiye Selasi, Thelma Golden (The Studio Museum in Harlem) and Deyan Sudjic (The Design Museum London.)
Saint Laurent (Directed by Bertrand Bonello)
Reviews:
Nymag.com
L’Express described it as: “masterful film directing … each narrative decision required above all a cinematographic film resolution.”
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