Three days into this year's Venice film festival and things are finally starting to clear. The San Polo alleyways seem that bit less narrow; the fruit and veg guys that bit easier to find. Over in the Salle Darsena, however, we found Documentary film maker Joshua Oppenheimer clearing up some smoke of a much darker kind.

Oppenheimer pillaged film festivals and newspaper copy the world over last year with The Act of Killing, his horrifying expose of Indonesia's U.S. supported slaughter of roughly one million supposed communists. Using his status as an American film maker, he convinced the aging death squad killers to get in front of the camera and re-enact the atrocities. The results were harrowing; unique; sensational. His follow up was shot a few years before that film's release, and it serves as the correct accompaniment to it.

The Look of Silence follows a local spectacles salesman called Adi. We learn that Adi lost his brother to the old regime but, having been born after the slaughter, he has been somewhat blinded to the horrors. Adi's brother's murder, we learn, was infamous amongst the militia men for the sheer scale of its brutality and so it was only a matter of time before it came on Oppenheimer's radar. When he eventually learned of this horrendous event, the director decided to track Adi down, reveal it to him, and then document the brave man's efforts to confront the men involved. 

Headstrong, dignified Adi only seeks some modicum of emotional resolution, so he calls upon those responsible armed with just his optical prescription test. The murderers themselves wish to see things clearer, not knowing that this unassuming optician seeks the same thing too; a central metaphor so neat it's almost difficult to believe.

Praise for this film will not be difficult to find so I will finish on a far less fashionable point. It can be difficult to get a real idea of the level of exploitation a documentary film has reached. How those involved put themselves in such positions of risk when the film maker, it would seem, has so little to lose? Adi was present in the press conference, looking shell-shocked but dignified, fielding questions on his family and loss in the most decadent room imaginable. The man has had to uproot his family and leave his country as Oppenheimer sits next to him, practically beaming, happily referencing his recent brush with the academy awards. 

His films, of course, will do an enormous amount of good, but there was just something there which did not sit right. The final question came when a reporter asked what his next project would be. The director stayed silent until the moderator repeated it: Oppenheimer then grinned from ear to ear "I heard, I bowed". Very few films will ever achieve what these remarkable documentaries have done, but perhaps we should look a little closer, that glistening transparency might just be murkier than we think.

Beyond the Hills

The favourite son of Romania’s New Wave follows up his jarring, Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, with another film about two quietly defiant young women- their struggles and their friendship. Cristina Fluter and Cosmina Stratan play Alina and Voichita, two orphaned friends whose troubled past we can only guess at. There are hints that abuse and paedophilia plagued the girls’ orphanage but still, they survived. They also fell in love. We pick up with Alina returning home from a working spell in Germany to find that Voichita has taken solace in the local Orthodox convent. Alina is distraught. She wants nothing more than for Voichita to join her abroad and so decides to fight the priest for her affections. She lashes out and throws fits but when it goes too far the nuns suspect possession. The leading ladies shared the acting plaudits at Cannes for two greatly complimentary performances with Stratan remaining distant and tender while Fluter writhes with fury and passion. Framed beautifully in the grey autumnal light, there’s a fitting coldness here too. Like 4 Months…, this is a film devoid of any sentimentality, there’s just no room for such indulgences. With all of this Beyond the Hills should feel like a horror but amazingly, it looks like real life. Indeed, the films of the Romanian New Wave have seldom told us how to feel. They simply tell us how it is. 

Chasing Ice

National Geographic photographer James Balog assembles a crack team and sets out to gain visual evidence of our planet’s retreating glaciers by painstakingly capturing time-lapse footage over a number of years. Director Jeff Orlowski shoots a travel log of the mission intercut with the usual ominous looking graphs and interviews with straight shooting intellectuals. Orlowski’s documentary can feel a little sparse at times but unlike many of its kind it chooses sentimentality over scaremongering, portraying these vanishing behemoths not as something to fear, but instead as an endangered species. 

Oh the mountain of must-see movies and my humble attempts to scale it...

Progress will be compiled at the end of each month with films listed in order of preference.

The Hustler

Robert Rossen (1961)

The shadows of neo realism hang heavy in the late night bars of this gritty New York tragedy. Paul Newman plays a pool hall hustler called ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson. Felson wants to beat the best in town but a boozed up ego seems to hold him back. He meets a similarly troubled woman (played by Twin Peak’s Piper Laurie) who helps him find his way. That is until a sly local gambler decides to back his talents. Felson hones his skills but in turn, his world crumbles. Laurie gives a performance of reserved brilliance and the young Newman- pocketing some incredible shots- is electric. In a wonderful moment Eddie talks about his cue having “nerve endings”. He’s trying to articulate what it feels like to have flare course through your veins or, perhaps, what it feels like to be alive. The film seems to catch that feeling in a bottle, both its strength and its fragility.

Zéro de conduit/L’Atalante

Jean Vigo (1933/1934)

Despite the apparent tragedy there is something nice about taking in a master director’s entire back catalogue in less than three hours. Tuberculosis was to end Jean Vigo’s life aged just 29. He only directed one feature film but is still held in the utmost regard. The French, who are hardly short on choices, named their premier directing award after him and it’s difficult to imagine Truffaut or his mates picking up a camera had L’Atalante not happened.
His medium length film Zero For Conduct, Inspired by Vigo’s days in boarding school, has a group of lads rise up against their teachers on the day of the school’s inspection. Light on its feet and flavoured with the sublime, it would be remade 35 years later as Lyndsay Anderson’s If… only Anderson would give the lads guns.
Then came L’Atalante. Silent era star Dita Parlo bursts with vitality as a recently married woman who takes her honeymoon on the titular barge before being tempted off by the bright lights of Paris. Its loose narrative style, earnest camera work and natural acting lend the film an enormous sense of youth and joy; for the art form or whatever else. Rightly considered one of the best of all time, Vigo would die less than a month after its release.

Imitation of Life

Douglas Sirk (1959)

Hollywood’s master of melodrama takes a look at racial issues in middle-class American life with this quietly subversive effort. The film follows the adult life of a single mother, played by Lana Turner, who is struggling to make it as an actress. Juanita Moore plays the woman she hires as a live in assistant. Both have daughters and so we see the four grow older together. Turner’s character makes it big on Broadway while Moore’s struggles to identify with her paler skinned daughter. As with most things of this nature, the film’s edge has blunted a touch over the years but even with Hollywood’s rose tinted glasses firmly in place, Sirk’s honesty about human nature still manages to shine through.

Roger and Me

Michael Moore (1989)

Michael Moore was already a dab hand at sticking that thorn in the side when he released his first feature documentary. General Motors CEO Roger Smith ransacked Moore’s once prosperous home-town of Flint Michigan when he decided to close the local auto factory. The film concerns Moore’s attempts to get an interview with the man. Everything that we would come to love about Moore is on show here- His dry delivery, use of music, wry sense of Irony- but as he sniggers at some defenceless local beauty queen, also what some would come to hate. 

Resting on the banks of the Spree in the Deutsche Historische Museum lies Berlin's Zeughaus Kino, a beautiful film house and without doubt one of the city's best kept secrets. Comfortable seating, pleasant clientèle and tall handsome windows which overlook the river. The ticket prices are perhaps the city's most reasonable but- for better or worse- It's 165 seats remain sparsely occupied. The cinema boasts some great programming too and last month it played host to Berlin's DokuArts festival, a remarkable documentary festival which focused solely on films about the Arts. Rodney Ascher's juicy Shining conspiracy caper Room 237 was the festival's poster boy (you can read what I said about it here) but DokuArts also offered two of the most profoundly moving studies this writer has seen.

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction

Sophie Huber (2012)

Sometimes in film making, as in life, it’s better to take a step back. Breath. See the tapestry as a whole. Harry Dean Stanton has been a cinematic enigma his entire career and so for her study of the man, its little surprise film maker Sophie Huber decided to do just that. Shot in the noir-y settings you might hope for- a night drive though LA, Stanton’s local boozer, in black and white at home- her enchanting meditation on the legendary character actor never feels the need to wade in deep. Stanton reflects on an astonishing life: His friendship with James Dean and later with Brando; living with Jack Nicholson; jogging with Dylan. On film he sings with his pal Kristofferson. He drinks a coffee with long time collaborator David Lynch and gives him an interview. He muses on life and the cosmos. It’s a film which accepts that some surfaces are not made to be broken. So when a window is left ajar and we chance a peak inside it hits us even harder. And these moments only come when the actor sings. Revealed in tender close-up, that wonderful weathered façade flickers with longing, regret and who knows what else. Film has always been fascinated with the meandering mind. It's ability to capture it is one of the main things which sets it aside from other art forms. In Stanton we've cherished perhaps America’s best meanderer. Huber seems to know this. Her beautiful documentary does too.

A Story of Children and Film

Mark Cousins (2013)

A perfect companion to Cousins’ near- definitive 15 hour love poem to the movies- The Story of Film an Odyssey- A Story of Children and Film explores, in a similar fashion, what makes kids so damn cinematic. Cousins shoots a home video of his niece and nephew with a marble run and then picks apart what we see. Kids do certain things when they have that sort of cold attention on them- first uncertainty, then playfulness. Showing-off. Wrecking the place. Cousins clocks these traits and then taps that archive of a brain to show them in the movies. With references ranging from more well-known stuff like Kes and ET to leftfield choices from Iranian house arrestee Jafar Pahani and Hirokazu Kore-eda in Japan, the director delivers- in his melodic Belfast lilt- another articulate and heart wrenching visual essay. Only the coldest of hearts need not apply.

Kim Ki-Duk Retrospective

“Why was this old world cursed with a creep like me?” asks the troubled lead of Kim Ki-Duk’s debut film Crocodile. The director arrived on the cusp of the Korean Wave but was far more interested in the depraved end of society than any of the country’s financial muscle. So as the nights grow darker what better time to delve into the director’s work. This month Kino Arsenal showcases a whopping 17 of the directors 19 features; from the aforementioned Crocodile- concerning the tender awakenings of a bridge dweller who picks the pockets of suicide victims on the riverbed- right up to last year’s Gold Lion winning Pieta, in which a cruel loan-shark deals with some troubling mommy issues; but fellow Venice darling 3 Iron- about a young drifter’s love affair with an abused housewife- might just be the pick of the bunch. 

Room 237

Wild rumours of underlying messages in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic The Shining have been doing the rounds for years. For Room 237 filmmaker Rodney Ascher brings together five major fanatics to shed some light on their theories. Greatly detailed throughout, the ramblings range from interesting points on layout and design- which perhaps seem reasonable enough given the director’s infamously meticulous nature- to some fairly way out conspiracies. A large grain of salt may be required but be you sceptic or converted, this a film about the director’s lingering aura. Not some crackpot’s unsolved mystery.

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

Following Twilight’s dominance at the box office it was only a matter of time before something new arrived to keep that demographic all hot and bothered. Adapted from the first book of another bestselling series, City of Bones follows a young woman named Clary (Lily Collins, daughter of Phil) as she juggles with revelations about  her past, pesky demons and  boy troubles while trying to unearth some sacred cup. Miserable stuff (unless you’re into that sort of thing) but hey, at least the werewolves are Irish.

Storm Surfers 3D

Two aging championship surfers spend the southern hemisphere’s winter months trekking out to big-wave hot spots off the Australian coast, using someone called a ‘surf forecaster’ – which is a real job apparently- to monitor oceanic swells and predict what region to hit. There’s some painfully staged basecamp stuff and a rather clumsy narrative but with Red Bull-who have become the Medici of this sort of ludicrous behaviour- .providing some serious equipment, whenever we look to the ocean, Storm Surfers offers plenty to get the heart racing. 
 

                Tears are shed and strings rise but director Eugene Jarecki hasn’t much business with the hysterics of many modern documentaries. His sober, panoramic study on America’s drug epidemic and its shadows in the past examines with surgical precision the systematic process and human error which has led to it and the seemingly hopeless state it finds itself in today.

                Jarecki sets the scene by focusing on the predominantly black crack business in the projects of Yonkers NY. Everyone involved from the low end dealers to the police force seem utterly jaded. The drug war is not the nationwide counter offensive some would like to believe but a sluggish 9-5 operation. From here Jarecki blows it wide open. We see the big business prison system, the racist compulsory sentencing laws and through an Abraham Lincoln historian, the frightening evidence of history repeated. Most interviewees give over a tremendous amount but David Simon (creator of HBO’s The Wire) provides a rock at the film's centre; his interviews anchoring the film before driving it forward to it's earth shattering finale.

As the credits roll down it’s difficult to know whether to ball your eyes out or throw a brick though a window.  The mind gets lost in the frustrations of trying to contemplate something which has gone so far beyond human control. This so called “war on drugs” is now a self-sustained and systematic organism, healthily nurtured with greed and time. Steinbeck perhaps summed it up best in the Grapes of Wrath, that clinical study of the crushing forces of capitalism, when he wrote with seething frustration: Where does it stop, who can we shoot?. 

Indeed.

Malik Bendjelloul’s sprawling documentary about a mysterious musician and his undiscovered fame twists and turns through folk legends and social revolution but what rises to the surface is a story not of grandiose mysticism but of simple humanity and humbling dignity.

                Hopping between continents we are introduced to the parallel worlds of hot sunny South Africa and damp motor city Detroit. Through Steve “Sugar” Segerman we are told of the Legend of Rodriguez, a famous enigma who inspired a whole generation of Afrikaans before ending his life in spectacular fashion. We cut to Detroit where various characters tell of a reclusive musician who never faced his crowd; a star who shone bright only for his promise to go unnoticed. After this puzzling intro we set our focus on apartheid South Africa. Through interviews with members of a once subversive Afrikaans-musical-movement, Rodriguez’ story grows even juicier. He is pronounced as a cultural martyr whose tracks were physically scratched from radio station LPs but still found their way to soundtrack the white voice against apartheid; an artist who was considered a peer of Dylan and who sold half a million records on the way. But who was this elusive character and which story of his demise was true? What truths will Sugar find behind all this smoke and mirrors?

               

It’s difficult to see how a tale so shrouded in mystery will ever play out but when we inevitably meet Rodiguez and the smoke does clear it seems something far simpler is at work. The early flirtations with detective capers and money grabbing record labels seem to disappear and instead we are presented not with some fabled unicorn but simply with a remarkable human being. one of those people who seem to carry an air of electricity; who- as Rodriguez’ co-worker puts it- cut through the bullshit and rise above the mundane; a striking exception to that old rule that one should never meet one’s heroes. From here all that’s left to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.

While the final third is full of wonder there is something tragic about it too, the story plays out not so long ago but it feels like an artefact of a different time. A time before our insatiable hunt for information ground this sort of mystery out of the world. But still the magic of the film is not this bizarre fluke of almost parallel universes but the remarkable man at their centre; this humble gent and gifted artist who became more than a man to the people of South Africa and somehow never had to let them down; a life affirming example that sometimes the fact is better than the fiction and, every once in a while, the man is greater than the myth.

Sarah Polley’s third feature after 2006’s deeply moving Away From Her and last year’s puzzlingly drab Take This Waltz is a fascinating and emotional look at family life and the choices and random occurrences which ultimately make us who we are.

A candid- warts and all- documentary, Polley creates a collage of different mediums and perspectives to tell us the story of her family’s past and her own unique place in it. Through the story of her deceased mother, a vibrant and charismatic woman, we discover much about Polley’s upbringing and the fascinating story of how she came to be. Interviews from her various family members and associates are mixed with super 8 home movie, an ever enduring tool. Her family are a bright and lively crowd and the interviews flow with ease. They are funny, endearing and insightful. Not convinced by the clarity of memory, Polley attempts to show a balanced and fair portrayal of the past by giving everyone involved a chance to have their say and fight their corner. An effort which she admits is ultimately in vein given her eventual power in the editing room.

As the cast of interviewees flows by the real star emerges in Polley’s father, a retired actor and a real gent. His interviews are strong and their relationship is the most significant but his narration is what drives it all home.  Elegantly written and wonderfully delivered as his daughter sits recording. It lifts the film to a different level and shows us a window to that most endearing of bonds.