NYICFF REVIEW: Sing Song [2017]

I’m looking for my eyes in your eyes. For Dutch teenager Jasmine (Georgiefa Boomdijk), her homeland of Suriname (a northeastern South American country) is a footnote. She knows little about it or the mother she and her father Winston (Maurits Delchot) left behind sixteen years previously. He refuses to talk about anything pre-Netherlands so her sole connection is a photo of the woman she hasn’t yet resigned herself to believing she’ll never meet. So when a contest held across the Atlantic from where she lays her head asks for online…

Read More

NYICFF REVIEW: Liyana [2018]

And you are going to tell her story. There’s multiple ways to tell stories depending on the message you wish to instill. So when the subject you’re tackling concerns a country like Swaziland with a rampant AIDS epidemic and the resulting insanely high orphanage rate, you can choose a path towards the stark futility of the situation or find a way to unearth the hope that remains despite it. Documentarians Aaron and Amanda Kopp decide to do the latter with Liyana, a unique hybrid wherein fact is projected through a…

Read More