Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 1:58 pm 
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Chris Knipp Festival coverage on Filmleaf.

WATCHING AND HELPING: TWO DOCUMENTARIES--SFIFF

Sacha Mrizoeff, Bettina Borgfeld: Shooting Under Fire (2005)

Shooting Under Fire follows experienced German photo-journalist Reinhard Kraus working as chief Reuters photographer in Israel in close coordination with his Palestinian and Israeli fellow Reuters photographers based respectively in Gaza and Jerusalem. Kraus came in to head the Jerusalem office with the second Intifada and left it for China after the death of Arafat, a little burnt out and stressed out but with a history of fine accomplishment behind him. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains a story without any foreseeable conclusion, but Kraus saw the end of a chapter, he feels. He also established an efficient working system for the Reuters photographers so that those who follow him can continue providing the same rapidly coordinated photo coverage of events and lives in this perpetually dangerous and unstable place.

Shooting Under Fire shows us some of the many striking images captured by the Reuters office during Kraus's watch, including award-winning photographs by Nir Elias of Israel and Palestinian Ahmed Jedullah, and we get a look at both men's lives and hear what they have to say about their countries and their work. Interestingly, Elias doesn't seem too happy with the new fences either, but he doesn't have to spend hours or days at Israeli checkpoints or stuck in Gaza because the gates are closed, as both Jedullah and Kraus did. The film is rich in coverage of coverage: it shows how a digital shoot of a suicide bombing is instantly edited and "moved" to the editors in Europe and it observes the photographers at first hand on location, reviewing a moment when Jedullah took a bullet in the leg shooting dead people on the road in Rafah and might have died, and taking time to show Elias shooting orthodox Jews at prayer. The documentary is narrated by the voices of Kraus, Jedullah, and Elias. There's not much new here for anyone who follows Middle Eastern news, but the film is visually fine and politically balanced -- to a fault when it cuts back and forth relentlessly between Jedullah worshiping with his son on Friday and Jews chanting at the Wailing Wall, as if more than five seconds of either would show bias.

This version made for National Geographic International.

SHOWTIMES
Sun, Apr 30 / 9:30 / Kabuki / SHOO30K
Thu, May 04 / 3:45 / Kabuki / SHOO04K


Adrian Belic: Beyond the Call (2006)

Adrian Belic's Beyond the Call's press material calls its subject a "Mother Teresa meets Indiana Jones adventure" involving "three senior citizens." Ed Artis, Walt Ratterman, and Jim Laws are in their fifties. They have no office, no overhead, and they take their aid, whether cash money or clothes, food, medicine, even a solar oven, direct to the "poorest of the poor" on the edge of war in Afghanistan, Albania, Chechnya, Cambodia, Rwanda and the southern Philippines -- parts of these countries other aids organizations, even the US army, can't reach or are afraid to go to. Two of them, Artis and Laws, are former paratroopers.

Artis' personality is feisty and his language salty. He has no use for politics or religion and he was a bad boy who joined the army to escape a longer time in juvie. His occasional illegal appropriation of things for humanitarian purposes makes him like a Robin Hood -- or a selfless Milo Minderbinder. His cohort Laws is a successful cardiologist and Ratterman is an oddball Pennsylvania construction company owner whose business used to gross $10 million. Now it's down to $2 million, he says, and that may drop to zero. The cardiologist is well off, the construction company owner borderline rich, but Artis, a retired mortgage banker, lives in a little house and has debts he puts off paying. All three men are hooked on doing good: it's a high, and you can feel that watching this film. The three men get in, find out what's most needed, then bring it, or come back later. They get an 80-90% discount on medicines. When they learned a little Afghan school had no money to pay the teachers, they paid out $2000 on the spot, enough for the staff for one year. Another time they handed over $31,000 out of wads of $100 bills for truckloads of food. Beyond the Call inspires admiration for this kind of selflessness and the hardscrabble efficiency of how the men, who call their group Knightsbridge because they're Knights of Malta forming a bridge to the world's most needy, get their aid out to people, despite risks of dysentery, death, kidnapping, and unpaid bills back home. By design, the three men's wives are unseen and undescribed. Clearly Knightsbridge does its own fundraising, but where all the money comes from is a detail the film leaves out, concentrating on breathlessly following the men to various countries and listening to their feisty, expletive-laced monologues.

Also at the Tribeca Film Festival. Adrian and his brother Roko grew up in Chicago with their Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian parents. Their 1999 documentary Ghengis Blues, about a blind Cape Verdian bluesman from San Francisco who became a champion Tuval singer, won the Sundance Audience Award and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Feature Documentary.



SHOWTIMES
Sun, Apr 30 / 6:00 / Kabuki / BEYO30K
Thu, May 04 / 3:00 / Kabuki / BEYO04K

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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