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    ‘In Our Mothers’ Gardens’ Review: Creating Space for Black Women

    The Netflix documentary sets out to show how maternal lineages have shaped generations of Black women.In the meditative documentary “In Our Mothers’ Gardens” (streaming on Netflix), the stories could warm a room in any season. Opening with a quote from Alice Walker, whose book “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” inspired the film’s title, the documentary sets out to show how Black maternal lineages have shaped the idea of Black womanhood.The director Shantrelle P. Lewis, who also appears in the film as a subject, weaves together interviews with Black women from a variety of backgrounds, including the activist Tarana Burke, the entrepreneur Latham Thomas and Professor Brittney Cooper, the author of “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.” The interviewees offer anecdotes about their mothers and grandmothers, and reflect on how the relationships nourished them. In one scene, Burke recalls a childhood experience of being slapped by a stranger for playing in the supermarket. When Burke’s grandmother heard what happened, she smashed the store’s window with a pipe.Lewis pairs the stories with a lovely collage aesthetic, layering the interviews with home videos, photographs and music. Sometimes, she even frames her subjects within collages of flowers, antique curios and archival images.As a director, Lewis is admirably present. She seems to have gained the trust of her interview subjects, and has taken care to create a space for openness. But as the women explore spirituality, trauma and resilience, an echo effect emerges. Sometimes that echo can sound like repetition. The film’s division into rough thematic chapters reinforces redundancies; some ideas within the “healing” segment could have fit within “radical self-care,” and vice versa. Yet such hiccups ultimately do not detract from the movie’s grace — nor from its showcase of Lewis’s natural gifts as a communicator and as an artist.In Our Mothers’ GardensNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Citizen Penn’ Review: A Portrait of Sean Penn as an Advocate

    The documentary follows the actor’s work helping Haiti, starting in 2011.Sean Penn’s work in Haiti after its devastating 2011 earthquake continues to this day. And this new documentary “Citizen Penn” is a revealing, engaging chronicle of the actor’s activism.One of the opening scenes of the movie, directed by Dan Hardy, is a mini-montage of its subject behaving like the tabloid fodder he was during the 1980s and 1990s. It culminates with a clip from Penn’s acceptance speech at the 2009 Academy Awards ceremony, where he took the best actor prize for his work in “Milk.” He tells the audience, “I know how hard I make it to appreciate me.”Hardy’s subsequent exercise in Penn-appreciation, focusing on Penn’s extraordinary and still-continuing philanthropic activism in Haiti, accepts that challenge, and overcomes it.Speaking with Hardy for this film, Penn reveals, among other things, his acute awareness of the interview as a mode of performance. Dressed in jeans and a denim shirt, an American Spirit cigarette almost ever-present in his hand, the often combative actor adopts a friendly mien and seems frank, engaging and unguarded. He speaks of wasting some time on nightlife in the aftermath of a divorce, and being galvanized by television coverage of the 2011 earthquake.After asking a physician friend down there what was needed, and being told “350,000 vials of morphine,” Penn got them. From the divisive president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, as it happens. After assembling a volunteer force, Penn went to Haiti and was increasingly astonished at how devastated it was.The actor and filmmaker is the “star” here, yes, but Hardy also profiles Haitians and some expatriates in the medical field who were moved to go back to the country. Their commitment and insight fills out the chronicle. These days, the island country is increasingly hurricane battered. And Penn remains a fierce, and appreciated, advocate for its cause.Citizen PennNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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    ‘The Boy From Medellín’ Review: A Dizzying Week in J Balvin’s World

    A documentary about the reggaeton star from Colombia is a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity.The year is 2019 and protests in Colombia — the largest the country has seen in decades — have erupted against the government of President Iván Duque. The killing of 18-year-old Dilan Cruz by a police projectile makes its way into the reggaeton star J Balvin’s Instagram feed, which exacerbates his individual crisis.It seems Balvin wasn’t sleeping well. In the days leading up to a sold-out concert on Nov. 30, 2019, in his hometown, Medellín, he begins to consider his responsibilities as a public figure. Social media users criticize his political disengagement, while uprisings in the city threaten to cancel his big night.In “The Boy from Medellín” on Amazon Prime Video, the director Matthew Heineman captures a week in the life of Balvin, the Prince of Reggaeton, a charismatic performer who appears to be privately diffident.Known for his gritty documentaries about international conflicts (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”), Heineman delivers a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity in this film, armed with stunning concert footage but unoriginal insights into the burdens of modern fame, like the difficulty of balancing the expectations of fans with personal desires.At the very least, attending a J Balvin show looks like it would be great fun.Heineman weaves together clips from Balvin’s youth — his scrappy origins in the local music scene — with snapshots into his chaotic present. As the concert approaches, Balvin seems to be either on the verge of a panic attack or meditating with the help of his spiritual adviser. Destigmatizing mental illness is an important cause for Balvin, for reasons made intimately apparent.Similar recent mythmaking projects like Beyoncé’s “Homecoming” and Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana” have generated their own publicity by giving access to curated versions of the personal lives of musicians, which makes them seem real and relatable. In “The Boy from Medellín,” this curation is obvious.Before Balvin hits the stage, his manager urges him to speak out and cites the activist roots of the American rap group N.W.A. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the comparison, since the artists responsible for explicit protest anthems probably didn’t need any encouragement to express their opinions. In “getting political,” Balvin risks alienating some fans, but he stands to win some as well — the viewers of this documentary, for instance.The Boy from MedellínRated R for language. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Streaming on Amazon Prime Video. More

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    'Colette,' From the Video Game Medal of Honor, Wins an Oscar

    “Colette,” which was featured in the virtual-reality video game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, took home the award for best documentary short.It was a night of firsts: First Korean actor to win an Oscar, oldest performer to win best actor, first woman of color to win best director.And, for the video game industry, its first Oscar recognition for best documentary short.The statuette was for “Colette,” a short film featured in the Oculus virtual-reality game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which is also the first Oscar for Facebook. (It owns Oculus, the virtual-reality group that produced the documentary short along with EA’s Respawn Entertainment.)The 24-minute film, directed by Anthony Giacchino and produced by Alice Doyard, follows a survivor of the French Resistance, Colette Marin-Catherine, as she returns to Germany for the first time since the end of World War II to visit a concentration camp where the Nazis killed her brother, Jean-Pierre.“The real hero here is Colette herself, who has shared her story with integrity and strength,” Mike Doran, the director of production at Oculus Studios, said in a statement. “As we see in the film, resistance takes courage, but facing one’s past may take even more.”Medal of Honor, which is set during World War II and casts players as an Allied agent trying to outwit the Nazis, did not garner much acclaim as a video game. Many reviewers criticized it for its huge system requirements, which were largely the result of the inclusion of so much historical and documentary footage.But now that the film has won an Oscar — well, that might change a few minds. Or at least get it in front of the eyes of nongamers. You can watch “Colette” free online on Oculus TV or YouTube, or on the website of The Guardian, which later acquired and distributed the film.“We hope this award and the film’s reach means” that the memories of all of who resisted “are no longer lost,” Doran said. More

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    ‘Sisters With Transistors’ Review: How Women Pioneered Electronic Music

    This far-reaching documentary from Lisa Rovner looks back at the female composers and artists who shaped modern music.This documentary from Lisa Rovner, about women and electronic music, is hardly as goofy as its title makes it sound. Many of the innovating individuals profiled here contend that women have an affinity for digital technology. And that technology had, and still has, the potential to “blow up the power structure.”Then again, discussing her theremin — an electronic instrument that creates sound via hand movements through what looks like empty space — the performer Clara Rockmore says: “You cannot play air with hammers. You have to play with butterfly wings.” By the same token, Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, 1950s and ’60s pioneers of synthesizers and tape loops who both worked for the BBC, are conventionally proper and polite as they explain their innovations in archival interviews.Narrated by the avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson in a vocal timbre that blends her performance mode with a more conversational one, this film is informative and often fascinating. It is invigorating to hear the great performer-composer Pauline Oliveros ask, “How do you eliminate the misogyny of the classical canon?” — pointing to a tape recorder as a potential tool. (Oliveros, who died in 2016, also discusses her 1970 New York Times Op-Ed titled “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady’ Composers.”The short shrift the movie gives to Wendy Carlos is puzzling. The very brief segment allotted to her begins with a French television clip about “Switched-On Bach” and its high sales. This segues into the composer-performer Suzanne Ciani’s dismissal of Carlos’s work: “The way it impacted the public’s consciousness of what a synthesizer was, was completely retroactive.” Rovner sees no irony in then chronicling Ciani’s work in television advertising.Sisters with TransistorsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch through Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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    ‘Paris Calligrammes’ Review: Recalling the 1960s With Fondness and Passion

    The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger takes us on an unhurried journey through her past.The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is not nearly as well distributed in the United States as it ought to be, is not generally known for sentimentality. Her long, searching films are elaborately costumed and visionary not-quite allegories of queer radical feminism. Representative titles include “Madame X: An Absolute Ruler” (1982), “The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press” (1984) and “Joan of Arc of Mongolia” (1992). She can’t be blamed for getting at least a little wistful, though, in her new “Paris Calligrammes,” an autobiographical documentary. It’s about Paris, after all — her Paris, first experienced in the early 1960s.After the film opens with footage that Ottinger shot in the Paris of today, we’re swept back in time, aurally and visually: Notably by the singers Juliette Gréco and Jacques Dutronc, and a clip from Marcel Carné’s immortal 1945 “Les Enfants du Paradis.” But “Paris Calligrammes” consistently mixes what’s familiar to the Francophile with much that isn’t. The movie takes its title from a bookshop Ottinger frequented as a young woman. She had been enchanted by French culture growing up in occupied Germany, and sought out a connection home once she landed in the City of Lights to study. The bookstore Calligrammes, run by the German-born Fritz Picard, served German expatriates. It was a place where, Ottinger puts it, “The Dadaists encountered the Situationists.” It became a formative aesthetic home for the young artist.Ottinger’s account of a reading at the store by Walter Mehling is one of the movie’s high points. The filmmaker has what seems like a torrent of anecdotes and attendant ideas to impart, but the movie never feels rushed. She created three different narrations, those in French and English read by the actors Fanny Ardant and Jenny Agutter, and one in German, read by Ottinger herself. This U.S. release features the Agutter narration. This reading is as crucial in conveying the mood of Ottinger’s story as the film’s unhurried pace is.We see Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Signoret and Nico, but also now-obscure figures including Raymond Duncan, the dancer Isadora Duncan’s eccentric brother, who stalked the Paris streets in a toga and philosophized at the famed cafe Les Deux Magots. Ottinger’s account of the riot-provoking 1960s Paris premiere of Jean Genet’s play “The Screens” emphasizes how that production’s use of costuming and makeup influenced Ottinger’s own future film aesthetic.Ottinger also remembers alienation: Her account of a strike in May 1968 is less-than utopian. And she is pointed when recalling how when the activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit was agitating in Paris, it wasn’t just the right wing that dismissed him with the categorization “a German Jew.”When she ends the movie by putting Édith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” on the soundtrack, you may think Ottinger has finally succumbed to the sentimentality she’s kept mostly in check. But wait. Just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, “Paris Calligrammes” has a mid-credits stinger — this one about Piaf’s dedication of the song.Paris CalligrammesNot rated. In English, German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema. More