Change Your Image
j-singleton
Reviews
Tickling Giants (2016)
Winterish turn in Arab Spring
If you were like me, you were enthralled by the kids who help topple Egypt's Mubarak regime what seems like ages ago. Dr. Bassem Youssef emerged out of that chaos, and played the role of gadfly to the next regime, all-the-while following a script that folks like Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert had made famous in the United States.
Tickling Giants deconstructs Bassem Youssef's story following a combination of interviews, on-air broadcasts and contributions from Stewart, various political pundits and even Youssef's family. It would be a beautiful, poignant take on the life of a comedian, but...of course, the crash of Egypt's brief democratic experiment is reeling in the background.
Sara Taksler--Producer for the The Daily Show--ventures into documentary film remarkably, with a story that does not allow itself to be choked with data nor overwhelmed by the giant personality that is Bassem Youssef. What emerges instead is Youssef's amazing mixture of idiocy and courage, with those who took him to the Ball now begging to be the first to hang him from the rafters. It is a peculiarly effective documentary--moving forward in time but backwards progressively as Egypt descends, and as the threats, charges and actions against Youseff begin to pile up.
Perhaps the most telling part of the film is the courage of Youssef's staff--compiled of an amazing group of talented young writers, it is easy to see why Youseff is so sad. It is not his own but their future that he is risking his jokes to defend. For those who do not have friends from the Arab world, a couple of minutes with his crew tosses aside any preconceptions of what it means to be from the Middle East, and I was left saddened to think that the ones likely to be trampled first when the giants are tickled are these funny, courageous women and men.
On every level, Taksler's years of working with satire and shorts for the Daily show has allowed her to create this documentary like a series of haiku, and the beautiful sadness that is Tickling Giants serves well either as art or education, though it remains a documentary pleading for a better ending than the one Egypt's dictators seem to be planning.
Sarajevo Roses (2016)
A Quarter of a Century in the making...
...Sarajevo Roses moves through the story of not only the city's siege but the entire labyrinth of the Bosnian crisis as if the film itself were being pursued by snipers. Director Roger Richards--a critically acclaimed AP photographer--created the film over almost a quarter of a century, and by doing so the story takes on an almost Opera-esque quality. Films done by photographers can get lost in the cloud sequences, so to speak, but Richards sprints us through alleys, under bridges and into bombed-out buildings in such a way that the poetry never replaces what was a horrific event--one that targeted anyone the Serbs caught in their cross-hairs.
Like Alice in Wonderland in reverse, Richards pops us out of those dark memories with sadly-beautiful stories of those who remain--survivors of an orphanage, a musician who once played for an audience of bullets, doctors who were then interns and finally, an impossible-to-forget sequence that will remain anonymous until you see it. It is impossible to call a film about genocide lyrical, but Richards has captured the resilience of a people who would not allow themselves to be extinguished. In Richards film their lives now mark one of the darkest moments of our time, like living imprints of the "Sarajevo Roses" for which the film is named.