Stunning images and moving scenes from Kirsten Johnson's work as a filmmaker around the world, as well as some from her personal life, making it a memoir of sorts. It's certainly not a conventional one because the segments are spliced together in a way that seems almost random, and in any event, a method that was hit and miss with me. Aside from the creativity, it seems to model one's actual memories of life, which are a kaleidoscope of moments and not a linear march through time, which I thought was pretty interesting. On the other hand, it felt a little overly segmented at times.
There is a method to showing all of these facets of life - birth, family, war, faith, decline, and man's continual inhumanity to his fellow man - but some bits just don't seem to fit quite as well even in that very broad context. We go from a midwife in Nigeria struggling with a newborn who might die, to the man who broke into the FBI offices to reveal domestic spying in 1971, back to the midwife in Nigeria, then to behind the scenes of a boxer upset with the decision in the ring in Brooklyn, then driving past the site of a mass grave in Bosnia in one of the film's sequences. It's just a little too much, and I would have liked more depth on fewer things - but there are always the source documentaries to turn to I suppose.
Regardless of that there were moments that were simply brilliant: the tight shot on the dancers' faces in Nakisenyi, Uganda, the lawyers pulling out the long, heavy chain used by white supremacists to drag a black man to death in Jasper, Texas, the old ladies almost happily hacking away at a dead tree despite the cruelty they've endured in Zalingei, Darfur and just being at the sites where various atrocities took place were all memorable to me.
There is a method to showing all of these facets of life - birth, family, war, faith, decline, and man's continual inhumanity to his fellow man - but some bits just don't seem to fit quite as well even in that very broad context. We go from a midwife in Nigeria struggling with a newborn who might die, to the man who broke into the FBI offices to reveal domestic spying in 1971, back to the midwife in Nigeria, then to behind the scenes of a boxer upset with the decision in the ring in Brooklyn, then driving past the site of a mass grave in Bosnia in one of the film's sequences. It's just a little too much, and I would have liked more depth on fewer things - but there are always the source documentaries to turn to I suppose.
Regardless of that there were moments that were simply brilliant: the tight shot on the dancers' faces in Nakisenyi, Uganda, the lawyers pulling out the long, heavy chain used by white supremacists to drag a black man to death in Jasper, Texas, the old ladies almost happily hacking away at a dead tree despite the cruelty they've endured in Zalingei, Darfur and just being at the sites where various atrocities took place were all memorable to me.