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 Music, thanks to the likes of Whiplash, featured strongly in the festival. There’s yet another dynamite jazz soundtrack in documentary KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON, produced by Quincy Jones, made by first-time director Alan Hicks, and the result of five years of filming. We follow the story of young, blind pianist Justin Kauflin, as he is mentored by the increasingly frail Clark Terry, “one of the greatest trumpet players ever” according to Dizzy Gillespie. Clark was Quincy’s idol and used to play with the likes of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, but in his latter years has turned his hand to teaching jazz to thousands. Terry’s diabetes means he is losing his own health, and there is a sweetness in the mutual love and respect between mentor and eager student.
With a more improvised feel in AUSTIN TO BOSTON, director James Marcus Haney’s on-the-road movie, features Ben Howard and The Staves from the UK and American acts, Nathaniel Rateliff and Bear’s Den, as they travel three thousand miles in five old Volkswagen camper vans in just a couple of weeks. Narrated by Gill Landry from the Old Crow Medicine Show, this upbeat documentary shows how ramshackle, yet beautiful an experience it can still be when you take random strangers with only music in common, and send them out to an assorted bunch of venues across the States. Crowds are delighted, and new friendships are forged, as they collaborate and travel together. And the music isn’t bad either. |
 Another documentary that looks and feels like a drama, WAITING FOR AUGUST is the debut feature from Teodora Ana Mihai. It centres around a Romanian family, led by Georgiana, who hasn’t yet turned sixteen. And as if being a teenager wasn’t enough, she has to look after her six siblings in the cramped apartment they share while their mother is away, working in Italy. With remarkable access and fly-on-the-wall technique, we get straight to the heart of this struggling, but close family, and see how they’re affected by the usual pressures of school, friendships and romance as their emotions run high waiting for their mother’s return in August.
Cinephile-turned-film director Mark Cousins gives us another passion project in 6 DESIRES: DH LAWRENCE & SARDINIA, created outside the system and with almost no budget. Or as his producer Don Boyd describes it: “a credit card movie made with a tiny amount of money”. Cousins chooses here to retrace the steps of DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen when they arrived in Sardinia in 1921, with Lawrence’s words voiced by Jarvis Cocker. Movie archive fixes the context as Cousins composes his love letter/ essay, with wry, sly humour throughout, deliberately choosing images that resonate. Starkly recording her own family over ten years and across four generations, I, AFRIKANER is director Annalet Steenkamp’s very personal document of her homeland, South Africa, with a background of wedding celebrations and agricultural work, but also continuing racism, segregated lives, and violent murders. There’s no airbrushing here, as her closest relatives air their attitudes to their fellow countrymen, their passion for their land, their farm and their roots – and their increasing panic as they see it all ebbing away. |
 Eliza Kubarska’s debut documentary feature, WALKING UNDER WATER swirls with watery villages perched on stilts, nomads with income derived solely from fishing, diving with home-made kit – all part of the world into which an uncle takes his nephew, just off the coast of Borneo, where the Badjao tribe struggle to continue their traditions. Full of gorgeous underwater filming, shifting shoals, ancient rites and customs, this is underpinned by universal needs to eat and make a living in relentlessly hard circumstances, yet threatened by tourism.
Finally, some epic restoration work means we can at last see GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS: FACTUAL SURVEY (right), produced by Sidney L Bernstein as World War II was ending and the death camps were being liberated. The film’s original purpose was to undermine any lingering support for the Nazis and safeguard against denial, but events overtook the project, and by September 1945 the moment had passed and the film was shelved. Luckily, it was deposited with the Imperial War Museum in 1952, and their dedicated restoration team gone back to work with the original reels, and used the detailed cutting sequence list, in order to reconstruct the ‘missing’ sixth reel, reassemble the rest of the film from negatives, and record commentary from the original script. Immediately before the packed NFT1 festival screening, a very necessary introduction prepared us for the searing images to come – and a valuable Q&A afterwards helped us process what we’d seen from camps including Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Perhaps the main question that arose was the extent of Alfred Hitchcock’s involvement at the time – some called him the director, but he was actually an advisor who suggested the initial treatment, instructing the filmmakers to shoot long sequences with the camera panning right round, so they couldn’t be accused of any fakery. One of the main restorers, Toby Haggith describes this work as the “lost masterpiece of British documentary filmmaking” that challenges our modern sensibilities and shows the humanity of those whose lives were being destroyed. It may get a wide release – with a specially-made introduction – in 2015, and it is a film that has to be seen. Go to page 4 for the DVDfever Awards 2014! |