Nowhere has the digital revolution freed up filmmakers to such explosive effect as in documentary. So today I look at Framing Reality and pick what I think looks like the best Documentaries at this years New Zealand Film Festival. COLLAPSE Imminent man-made catastrophe is explained for us with clarity and conviction in this alarming new documentary by director Chris Smith (The Yes Men, NZIFF04). “Collapse takes the nerve-racking theories of Michael Ruppert, a doom theorist, and places the chain smoker front and center to deliver them personally for 82 riveting minutes. Ruppert predicted the economic meltdown with great specificity; he also sees the end of police forces, road systems, air-traffic control and capitalism – within the next 20 to 50 years. You can’t take your eyes off him.” -Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out NY. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a movie that channels the anxieties of our time with the power and terror of the documentary Collapse… The grippingly articulate Ruppert is like Noam Chomsky as a wry pundit of doom.” -Owen Glieberman, Entertainment Weekly. “Collapse is a gruelling peek at a doomsday prophet’s rigorous mind but in a sly way also a compassionate look at the strain Ruppert endures from knowing he has only ever been right.” -Robert Abele, LA Times WHY COLLAPSE? Because for all it’s potential to just be 82 minutes of watching a chain smoking nut-case ramble on, it also has the possibility of being an utterly riveting, fascination, unrelentingly terrifying look at our future. SPACE TOURISTS It costs a cool $20 million to secure a seat in a Soyuz capsule and spend eight days as a civilian guest aboard the International Space Station. This enlightening, visually stunning film takes us on a journey into the 21st-century legacy of the Soviet space programme. Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen has spent years at a time documenting the vast reaches of the former Soviet Union. He leads us to the extraordinary Baikonur Cosmodrome, once the mighty hub of the Soviet space programme and the biggest space station in the world, and to the now-derelict towns that once housed the programme’s engineers and workers. In the Kazakhstan steppes, massive rocket junk falling from the heavens provides a lucrative source of scrap metal that is recycled in startlingly creative ways. Meanwhile, Indian-Iranian businesswoman Anousheh Ansari spends the $20 million, endures rigorous training in Star City and fulfills her life-long dream. Her amazing footage allows us to marvel along with her. Terrific stuff. -NZFF WHY SPACE TOURISTS? Because it has the potential to show two very opposing situations in jarringly obvious conflict – the wastefulness of spending $20 Million on a trip to space vs the poverty that causes derelict towns and the men who hunt the scrap metal that literally falls like manna from heaven. HONORABLE MENTION A FILM UNFINISHED Footage shot by SS cameramen in 1942 in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw has often been quoted in documentary accounts of the Holocaust. Surely familiarity will never inure us to the horror of these images? Streets peopled by walking cadavers; lifeless faces lined up for the camera; the dead stripped naked and stacked into mass graves. Filmmaker Yael Hersonski has followed this footage back to its origins to show us the full hour of the unfinished ghetto film project the Nazis left behind. What was it for, she asks. Combing through the journals of a ghetto social leader and the testimony of a Nazi cameraman, she reveals, amongst other things, the extent to which scenes were fabricated, with residents forced to act out contrived displays of their own inhumanity towards each other. Her simple strategy of constantly interrogating the life behind the camera is powerfully upsetting: what is (or isn’t) happening inside the German heads is as unfathomable, appalling and necessary to witness as the utter despair in the faces they are filming. -NZFF WHY A FILM UNFINISHED? I have an apparently unhealthy fascination with World War 2, so the opportunity to see footage such as promised by this documentary, combined with the ability to look behind the lens to see what was really going on, is enough to get me interested. However, the lack of any trailers online would mean going into the film totally blind.
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