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REVIEW: Fire of Love [2022]

2022/07/042022/07/04 Jared Mobarak

Curiosity is stronger than fear. World renowned volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Krafft died on June 3, 1991, 4:15pm Japan time. This isn’t a fact that Fire of Love director Sara Dosa tries to hide. It’s not a mystery that the pair were ultimately killed doing what they had done ever since meeting decades earlier. You cannot do what they did (chase and document volcanic eruptions to study and hopefully understand the science behind their beauty and destructive force) without death inevitably catching up. Dosa and co-writers Shane Boris, Erin…

REVIEW: Beba [2022]

2022/06/232022/06/23 Jared Mobarak

This is my part. Writer/director/subject Rebeca Huntt worries aloud about whether her family will ever speak to her again after watching her feature debut Beba. It’s a real concern not only because of how intimate and uncensored this introspective look at her life and ancestry proves, but also because they have a history of shutting themselves off verbally and emotionally from each other. Her brother and father haven’t spoken in over a decade. Her brother isn’t seen or heard from during the film beyond still photographs. The depiction of her…

REVIEW: Bitterbrush [2022]

2022/06/132022/06/14 Jared Mobarak

Hopefully the cows like it. While they don’t know it yet, this is the end of a five-plus year partnership range riding together in the American Pacific Northwest for friends Colie Moline and Hollyn Patterson. It’s also their most comfortable after trading the usual camper for an old cabin this summer. With only themselves and a crew of herd dogs for assistance, they take to the Idahoan plains in search of the beef cattle and calves they’ve been contracted to reclaim. The work is tiring and tenuous as far as…

REVIEW: Hold Your Fire [2022]

2022/05/172022/05/19 Jared Mobarak

Lot of regrets. An “us versus them” mentality inherently possesses the type of drama many documentarians seek to bottle when telling their stories. They mine their topic for the message they aspire to share or take that message and search for a topic which speaks its truth—agenda and content always in concert. Like most issues in this increasingly volatile era of media consumption, however, choosing one or the other tends to alienate the audience that needs to hear what the resulting film is explaining. Stefan Forbes has therefore found himself…

REVIEW: Cane Fire [2022]

2022/05/162022/05/17 Jared Mobarak

Keep our land in Hawaiian hands. While director Anthony Banua-Simon uses the revelation as a sort of “gotcha” moment to end his documentary Cane Fire, hearing Kauai-native Larry Rivera—an entertainer who performed at the Coco Palms before it was destroyed in a hurricane and rubbed elbows with the likes of Elvis Presley and Bing Crosby—admit the only “Hawaiian legends” he knows are the ones his former boss Grace Guslander fabricated to awe tourists isn’t really a surprise. He and co-writer Michael Vass had set the table for that truth too…

REVIEW: Cow [2022]

2022/04/082022/04/08 Jared Mobarak

You’re free, babies. There are some real rocket surgeons working on the cattle farm in Andrea Arnold‘s Cow. After we watch #29 give birth for the second time, a farmer feeds her calf with a bottle of milk while she starts getting aggressively protective. We hear another voice ask whether she’s always been “that bad.” The feeder replies, “She never used to be. Old age.” Is it, though? Is it truly that difficult to fathom how maybe she’s grown protective because you’ve already separated her from five calves? Why wouldn’t…

REVIEW: Writing with Fire [2021]

2022/03/152022/03/19 Jared Mobarak

We don’t trust anyone but you. It’s sometimes easy to forget white supremacy is deeply rooted in religion due to race being such a major component of its rise in America. Watching a film that depicts the growing Hindu nationalist movement in India, however, really shines a light on that piece of the puzzle considering how similar their tactics are to what’s been happening here at home. While Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas‘ documentary Writing with Fire isn’t specifically about this development, one cannot easily separate it from their actual…

REVIEW:Dear Mr. Brody [2022]

2022/03/03 Jared Mobarak

It was a pretty intense ten days. Fifty years is a long time, so you must forgive those who’ve forgotten they wrote to Michael Brody Jr. in the first place. A lot of people did, though. Why wouldn’t they upon hearing how the twenty-one-year-old heir to a margarine fortune was publicly giving it away in a bid for world peace? Brody and his wife Renee‘s faces were plastered on magazine covers, newspapers, and TV thanks to Ed Sullivan. Americans from coast to coast were clamoring to get them on the…

REVIEW: When We Were Bullies [2021]

2022/02/162022/02/23 Jared Mobarak

And I participated. It couldn’t have played out better that the person to give writer/director Jay Rosenblatt the crucial perspective that he remembers the bullying incident at the center of his short documentary When We Were Bullies because of his complicity rather than the incident’s severity was his now ninety-two-year-old fifth grade teacher. How perfect is that? While you could place partial blame on her shoulders for punishing the whole class because of one student’s actions and naming him as the reason, her labeling them “animals” during their next class…

REVIEW: Three Songs for Benazir [2021]

2022/02/162022/02/23 Jared Mobarak

We will either be bombed by the foreigners or killed by the Taliban. Shaista wants to make his family-in-the-making proud, but options are limited considering he’s uneducated and locked in a war-time displacement camp in Afghanistan. Forming bricks to sell to his neighbors isn’t enough and working in the opium fields leaves too much to chance. So, his desire is to join the National Army and prove himself worthy of a well-paying job despite his hardships. While we never hear what his pregnant wife Benazir thinks on the subject—she’s relegated…

REVIEW: The Queen of Basketball [2021]

2022/02/162022/02/23 Jared Mobarak

Long and tall and that’s not all. What better way to hear about Lusia Harris than from the woman herself? Ben Proudfoot‘s documentary short The Queen of Basketball sees the charismatic former three-time national champion and Olympic silver medal-winning player going through her scrapbook of memories following a rise from daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers to the first woman drafted by the NBA. Did she pursue what was most likely a publicity stunt? No. She also doesn’t regret the decision when looking back and seeing who her children have become through…