Almada, Natalia

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    ‘Users’ Review: Brave New World

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    In this documentary, the artist Natalia Almada explores both the terrors and wonders of technological progress.“Users,” a new essayistic feature documentary from the artist Natalia Almada, deals in a kind of paradox. While the voice-over narration considers how technological progress has inured us from beauty and intimacy, the film demonstrates marvels of film technology — underwater photography, helicopter shots, breathtakingly crisp close-ups, sinuous slow motion — that affirm the opposite.“Could the Wright brothers have imagined that flying would be so commonplace that we’d be disinterested in the miraculous bird’s-eye view of the earth below?” Almada asks — even as she shows us drone shots of oceans and highways that provoke undeniable awe.This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of “Users,” though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images. Almada was inspired to make the film after giving birth to her son and newly confronting technology’s decisive effects on our relationships. Her view of the present anticipates her child’s future: In interludes throughout the film, she describes familiar realities — childbirth, grocery shopping, 24-hour days — in the past tense, as if they were part of a bygone history. It’s a nifty dystopian conceit, but it reinforces the air of presumption that sands down the pleasures of “Users.”The film is at its best when it allows its images and sounds to let us feel things without naming them. At a waste disposal factory, crushed electronics clatter like a symphony, which flows into the rumble of a freight train. Deep inside a grimy ocean, industrial divers float around pipes holding fiber-optic cables, the veins of our information era. Mingling beauty and terror, trash and wonder, these scenes evoke the elusive temporality of technology, which moves us backward and forwards at the same time.UsersNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour and 21 minutes. More

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      Questlove’s ‘Summer of Soul’ Wins at Sundance

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyQuestlove’s ‘Summer of Soul’ Wins at SundanceThe documentary took home two prizes while “Coda” won several honors for its fictional tale of a hearing teenager in a deaf family.Sly Stone in the documentary  “Summer of Soul,” about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.Credit…Mass Distraction MediaFeb. 2, 2021A documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, often called the Black Woodstock, and a feature about a hearing daughter in a deaf family took top honors Tuesday night at the first virtual edition of the Sundance Film Festival.In the nonfiction category, both the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award went to “Summer of Soul,” a potent mix of never-before-seen concert footage and history lesson by the first-time filmmaker Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove.Among dramatic features, both the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award went to “Coda,” an acronym for “child of deaf adults.” Sian Heder (“Tallulah”) wrote and directed the crowd-pleasing tale starring Emilia Jones as a teenager who serves as an interpreter for her working-class family in Gloucester, Mass. Additionally, Heder won the directing award for American features, and the film won a special honor for its acting ensemble.In the world-cinema feature competition, “Hive,” which follows the wife of a soldier missing in the Kosovo war, won both the grand jury and audience prizes as well as the directing award for its filmmaker, Blerta Basholli. Among world-cinema documentaries, “Flee,” Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated look at an Afghan refugee in Denmark, won the grand jury prize. The audience award went to “Writing With Fire,” from Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, about India’s only newspaper run by women of the Dalit, or “untouchable” caste.Other directing winners included, for American documentaries, Natalia Almada, whose “Users” examines the human costs of technology, and in the world cinema documentary category, Hogir Hirori for “Sabaya,” about an effort to save Yazidi women and girls held captive by ISIS.Because of the pandemic, this edition of the festival, which officially ends Wednesday, was pared back and conducted largely online. For a complete list of winners, see sundance.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More