<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="4">Eight of the 14 films I saw at Sundance this year were documentaries, and hopefully some of them will eventually see the light of day in one form or another. Apparently it can be a slow process; last year's big winner, "Why We Fight," is just now going into general release, a year later. But in case you are a fan of documentaries, here is the rundown on what I saw, plus a few I missed that I wish I had seen.<BR>
<BR>
-Matthew</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><U>An Inconvenient Truth<BR>
</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3">aka “Al Gore's PowerPoint about Global Warming.” (Though actually he uses Apple's Keynote instead of PowerPoint, but you get the idea.) It's the movie of the man who “used to be the next president of the United States,” as he likes to joke, giving his slideshow about climate change. He estimates that he has presented the slideshow over 1,000 times to audiences all over the world. It is so comprehensive and compelling that a documentary filmmaker decided to make a movie around it, and it is a spellbinding 90 minutes. <BR>
<BR>
In my experience, a well-presented slideshow really can transform how people think about a topic. If any slideshow is going to save us from this great crisis facing humanity, Gore's is the one. Truly a must-see PPT. All the data in one place to demonstrate that what we have already done to carbon levels in the atmosphere is radically outside the range of the natural variations seen over the last 650,000 years of earth's history -- and continuing to rise rapidly. It has lots of anecdotes and dramatic video, such as the drowning polar bears, the collapsing towers of ice, the melting Arctic and Antarctic ice, the disappearing glaciers (did you know there will soon no longer be a glacier in Glacier National Park, or an ice cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro?). He even has the graphics showing how the inhabited portions of South Florida (and other coastal areas from the San Francisco Bay to large populated areas in India and China) disappear under water when sea levels slowly and inexorably rise 20 feet because the Greenland ice sheet -- over 1,000 miles of solid ice up to two miles thick -- melts into the North Atlantic. <BR>
<BR>
www.ClimateCrisis.net <BR>
<BR>
(See also this recent front-page Washington Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/28/AR2006012801021.html)<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><U>5 Days<BR>
</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3">A very complete documentary record of Israel's removal of all the settlers from Gaza last summer. The filmmaker had eight camera crews and complete inside access to the army, the settlers, the non-settler protestors, even the Palestinians living nearby. The most fascinating part for me was where the film cuts from the weary police officers sitting during a break talking amongst themselves about how brainwashed the settlers are to a group of weary settlers talking about how brainwashed the police are. The Israeli security forces were incredibly well prepared and showed amazing empathy and restraint, which is certainly a sharp contrast to how things went during the forced evacuation of settlers earlier this month at Amona in the West Bank. <BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><U>Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner<BR>
</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3">Tony Kushner, who turns 50 this year, is one of America's great public artists. This fascinating documentary tells the story of his life so far, from growing up Jewish and gay in Louisiana to winning more awards and prizes (Tony, Emmy, Obie, Pulitzer) than one can count. I had seen both parts of “Angels in America” and own the children's book </FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><I>Brundibar</I></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"> that he wrote with Maurice Sendak, but I had no idea about so many other things he has done, for example his play “Homebody/Kabul” about Afghanistan and the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden that was already in rehearsal on that fateful day in September 2001. <BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><U>Black Gold<BR>
</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3">A beautifully-shot film about coffee growers in the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia, and their struggles with the nameless, faceless global market forces that keep them impoverished, even as they produce some of the finest quality coffee in the world. Global coffee consumption has boomed in recent years, yet world prices have plummeted to pennies a pound, leading to malnutrition and disease throughout Ethiopia. The “Fair Trade” movement tries to boost the amount paid to the growers, and we follow the leader of a growers' cooperative as he travels Ethiopia and Europe to help his people. The film's weakness is on the policy side, where it wastes 10 minutes on the WTO's role in excluding African grain farmers from North American and European markets - an important point, but completely unrelated to coffee. Nonetheless, the film is a window into a world we seldom see - the lives of our fellow human beings somewhere thousands of miles away laboring to produce a commodity that we enjoy every day. <BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><U>KZ<BR>
</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3">Many Holocaust documentaries examine the historical record, bringing us the voices of victims and survivors. Rex Bloomstein's latest work takes a different approach - looking at the Mauthausen concentration camp of today - the tourists, the tour guides, and those who go about their daily lives in the town of Mauthausen in the shadow of this incomprehensible place. <BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><U><BR>
Viva Zapatero<BR>
</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3">Sabina Guzzanti's film about how Italian public television network RAI canceled her political satire program “RAIOT” after broadcasting only one episode in 2004 is her revenge against both the government of Silvio Berlusconi on the right that censored her and the gutless opposition on the left that failed to fight for her. It sheds light on both the autocratic nature of the Berlusconi regime and the strangely compliant political culture of the Italian opposition that just does not see satire as a fully legitimate form of political expression. <BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><U>An Unreasonable Man<BR>
</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3">Two and a half hours of Ralph Nader. With all the focus in recent years on presidential politics, it is easy to forget the extraordinary and indisputably positive impact of this one individual on all of our lives over the last 40 years. An Unreasonable Man seeks to rescue Ralph's public reputation by presenting the whole story. And it does so, exhaustively documenting his life and work. It spends a little too much time presenting both sides of the debate over his impact since 2000. Nonetheless, it is a good reminder of the impact that one person can have - especially someone who is willing to forego family life so that he can spend all his waking hours on his chosen projects. One thing I walked away from the movie with was the realization that his years of greatest impact took place prior to 1980, when the Democrats still largely controlled the federal government. <BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><U>Who Killed the Electric Car<BR>
</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3">Until just a few years ago, there were thousands of electric cars on the road in California, most prominently GM's EV-1, as car companies responded to a state mandate that they sell 2% zero emission vehicles by 1998 and 10% by 2003. Today there are none and the mandate is gone. Why? The answers are infuriating, and they showcase yet another sad example of America's Bush-era denial of and refusal to deal with the pressing challenges of pollution and climate change. <BR>
<BR>
www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3"><U>The ones that got away - some interesting documentaries that I'm sorry I missed<BR>
<BR>
</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="3">“Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man”<BR>
The catalog says it's “a riveting tribute concert and artful biopic combined.” I had a ticket, but I had already seen three films that day and was just too tired… I did hear one complaint from someone who thought it was too much of other people singing his songs instead of him. <BR>
<BR>
“Neil Young: Heart of Gold”<BR>
Jonathan Demme's performance film of Neil Young in the studio and in concert last year while working on his new album. Terry Gross did a show on it last week, so it must be opening soon. <BR>
<BR>
“Iraq in Fragments”<BR>
The catalog calls it “a stunning, electric collage of hypnotic sights, evocative sounds, and arresting voices” representing “diverse points of view in three Iraqi enclaves” covering Sunni Baghdad, the Shiite south, and the Kurdish north. <BR>
<BR>
“The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends”<BR>
What our war in Iraq is doing to the soldiers who fight it.<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="4"></FONT></HTML>