New films! “Collective” & “Nasrin”
by Gary Palmucci | 18th December 2020 | Gary's Corner
Hello everyone. This week, we’re adding three more documentaries to our lineup, including one “encore” that has been the subject of recent critical attention in the NY Times.
Some of our viewers have asked us, “Why so many documentaries and so few new feature films?”
The short answer is that it’s a function of independent film distribution during this extraordinary time, with major market cinemas still mostly closed and many “A” titles being held back into early 2021 when a belated award season kicks into gear and more key theaters (might be) open. I will address this situation further in an upcoming Gary’s Corner.
In the meantime, here are the films:
City Hall – An extraordinary front page article in the NYT this week made the case for Frederick Wiseman as cinema’s “Great American Novelist,” in the amazing breadth of his six decades burrowing a roving camera into our diverse social classes and institutions. His most recent epic doc City Hall received special focus in the article, so we’re bringing it back after a run earlier this month in hopes that some holiday “downtime” might be the perfect moment to get immersed…
Collective – This award winner (Best Doc of 2020, Boston Society of Film Critics and likely more to come) follows a crack team of Romanian investigative journalists as they try to uncover a vast healthcare fraud that enriched moguls and politicians and led to many innocent citizens’ deaths.
The NYT‘s Manohla Dargis wrote, “There’s no letup in this staggering documentary…it sketches out an honest, affecting, somewhat old-fashioned utopian example of what it takes to make the world better, or at least a little less awful.”
Nasrin – Viewers may recall Iranian Jafar Panahi’s 2015 film Taxi (it had a long run at Lincoln Plaza), in which the director himself played a cab driver shuttling a diverse, revealing group of passengers around a teeming Tehran. One of those was a real-life human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, subject of this new, surreptitiously filmed doc (narrated by Olivia Coleman) about Nasrin’s indefatigable efforts and the extreme price she’s paid for them.
From the NYT‘s Jeannette Catsoulis: “A pocket history of Iran’s volatile record on human rights…director Jeff Kaufman compiles secretly captured footage from multiple sources….One young client, arrested for protesting the mandatory head-covering law, smiles calmly as she accepts the possibility of a long prison sentence. Her courage, like that of so many in this film, is breathtaking.”
– Gary Palmucci