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      ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ Review: Ukrainian City Under Siege

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      While the Ukrainian city was under siege by Russian forces, a team of journalists recorded the brutal war, resulting in this essential documentary.Everyone else was gone: the authorities, the aid workers, the other journalists too. One week into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov was still in the port city of Mariupol, watching from a high floor of a hospital as a tank emblazoned with a white Z pulled up alongside. Smoke kept rising, bitter and black, from the shelled housing blocks a short distance away. There was no way out. Mariupol was surrounded now. Chernov kept his cameras rolling.“20 Days in Mariupol,” a relentless and truly important documentary, engulfs us in the initial ferocity of Russia’s siege of a city whose name has become a byword for this war’s inhumanity: My Lai, Srebrenica, Aleppo, Mariupol. The A.P. journalists were the last from an international news organization in the city, and for three weeks they documented pregnant women fleeing a bombed maternity hospital, the elderly and the displaced boiling snow to obtain fresh water, the freshly dug ditches where children’s corpses were laid to rest. The reporting would win Chernov, along with his colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Lori Hinnant, this year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service, but because internet connections were sparse to absent in the city, Chernov could only transmit a small fraction of his footage during the siege. It all comes out in “20 Days in Mariupol,” in which the battle to survive in southeast Ukraine becomes entwined with the struggle to tell the world what’s happening.This film is very hard to watch, and so it should be, though its episodic structure makes it somewhat easier to endure: Day 1 through Day 20, one at a time, from the first bombs to the team’s flight to safety. On the morning of Feb. 24, Chernov and his colleagues head toward Mariupol, a city of half a million people on the Sea of Azov, and drive by Ukrainian military bases whose antiaircraft systems are burning — the first Russian targets, to prepare the path of their war planes. Many residents doubted the violence would reach Mariupol, and evacuation trains were leaving the city half-empty. Now we follow them into improvised shelters: a cold cellar, a CrossFit gym. “I don’t want to die,” says one young boy. “I wish it would all end soon.”But by Day 4 the fighter jets are overhead, and Chernov is stationed at one of Mariupol’s remaining open hospitals, about a mile from the front line on the edge of the city. He’s there when an ambulance rushes up, and paramedics perform C.P.R. on a 4-year-old girl named Evangelina, severely injured after a Russian shell landed near her home. The medics race her to the modest emergency room, where her blood pools on the floor as they try, and fail, to resuscitate her. (Chernov blurs out her face here, though The A.P. published uncensored images at the time.) “Keep filming,” the head doctor insists — and a minute later, we see the same footage of the doctors at work in grainy reproduction on an MSNBC broadcast and Britain’s ITV News.This blending of high- and low-resolution video registers is a critical tool of Chernov and his editor, Michelle Mizner of “Frontline,” who in many chapters of “20 Days in Mariupol” suture together three kinds of imagery. First comes drone footage of the city — its Khrushchev-era housing blocks, its huge Azovstal steel plant — whose devastation becomes more visible as winter passes to spring. Then follows unique documentation of the war’s early atrocities, shot on high-definition video, but often askew or rocky as Chernov runs after a hospital gurney or flees from the aim of snipers. Finally, at the end of many days, the footage repeats as broadcasts on CBS News, France 24, Deutsche Welle and other AP clients.Even if they feel a touch self-congratulatory, these rebroadcasts underscore two things: the rarity of Chernov’s footage, and the immense challenge of getting it out of Mariupol. The port city’s internet is basically gone by Day 11, when the Russians blockade it from all three sides, and the A.P. journalists risk their lives to hunt for wireless connections after curfew. And there is the matter of Chernov’s nationality. Though he has covered wars in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, he is a native of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and as he whispers at the start of the film, “I have no illusions about what will happen to us if we are caught.”Day 20 comes, and with it a harrowing drive past a dozen Russian checkpoints, with the journalists hiding cameras and hard drives under the seats. One day later, on March 16, 2022, Russian forces bomb the city’s Drama Theater, where hundreds of adults and children have taken shelter. This documentary is more, therefore, than a unique record of particular crimes; it’s a synecdoche for a much larger atrocity, and a model of how we discover the larger truth of war in images of one hospital, one grave, one child.“With every new war, the ethics of war photography are debated again,” regretted the Ukrainian art historian Kateryna Iakovlenko in a recent essay on our self-serving doubt of depictions of horror, made acuter through Russia’s parallel disinformation campaigns. The only moral question before us is whether we take these images seriously, or whether, with a skepticism also known as cowardice, we turn away.20 Days in MariupolNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Five Demands’ Review: Occupying a College for Racial Justice

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      In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, a documentary recalls the occupation of City College 50 years ago.Among the wave of student protests that occurred across American university campuses in the late 1960s, the student occupation of The City College of New York in April 1969 was a highly local yet pivotal act of civil disobedience. The more than 200 Black and Puerto Rican students who occupied the buildings on South Campus for two weeks did so in protest of the school’s admissions policy and the lack of diversity in its student body. At a time when 40 percent of New York City’s high school graduates were Black or Latino, the film reports, only 9 percent of City College attendees were part of those communities. “The Five Demands,” a new documentary from Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, returns to the campus 50 years later alongside former students, now in their late 60s and 70s, who participated in the protests.In interviews, City College alumni who were recruited through the college’s SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) recall being underprepared in their education and made to feel like tokens who didn’t belong there by their white peers. And indeed, the “five demands” central to the occupation largely revolved not only around making efforts to admit more students of color, but also to provide them with adequate support once they were enrolled — a commitment that many elite colleges and universities still struggle with to this day.In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision that rejected affirmative action, the film feels eerily timely. Schiller and Weiss’s direction is utilitarian, cutting together talking-head interviews with montages of the occupation set to era-appropriate protest songs. But to its credit, the lack of flashiness puts the students’ struggles for racial justice front and center, and ultimately serves to highlight a less-remembered aspect of the countercultural student movement.The Five DemandsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lakota Nation vs. United States’ Review: A 150-Year Clash

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      In 1980, the Lakota were offered money for their stolen Black Hills land. They refused to accept the settlement and continue to fight today.Three years after the discovery of gold nuggets on Lakota land in 1874, the Black Hills Act stripped the tribe of most of the acreage in the Dakotas and northwestern Nebraska it had been ceded by treaty decades earlier, making way for droves of fortune-seekers. Ever since, the Lakota people have been fighting to regain that land, a plight recorded in a new documentary, “Lakota Nation vs. United States.”This stunning film, directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli, interleaves interviews of Lakota activists and elders with striking images of the Black Hills and its wildlife, historical documents and news reports, clips from old movies and other archival footage to extraordinary effect, demonstrating not only the physical and cultural violence inflicted on the Lakota but also their deep connection to the Black Hills, the area where Mount Rushmore was erected. (One activist, Krystal Two Bulls, describes the monument as “the ultimate shrine to white supremacy.”) The film covers well known instances of erasure and oppression, such as colonization and Standing Rock, but also lesser known injustices, such as the fate of the Dakota 38, in which dozens of men were executed by the U.S. Army in 1862 for rising up against the government.In 1980, the Lakotas’ case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted them remuneration for the lost land. But the Lakota people refused to accept the money and continue to do so, even as the settlement’s value has increased to more than $1 billion today. What they are fighting for is the land itself. Phyllis Young, one of the Lakota elders interviewed in the film, calls it their Mecca. “The land and the people,” she said, “are inextricably connected.Lakota Nation vs. United StatesRated PG-13 for violent images and thematic elements and strong language. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Have You Got It Yet?’ Review: A Pink Floyd Enigma Illuminated

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      The founding frontman of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett was irresistibly charismatic, but this crazy diamond didn’t shine for long, as this comprehensive portrait shows.The classic rock legends who died young are unfortunately numerous: Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain. Syd Barrett, a founder of Pink Floyd, lived to be 60 — hardly a ripe old age. But his artistic death, a protracted one, happened in his 20s, and he had become a recluse before he turned 30.The documentary “Have You Got It Yet? (The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd)” is long in the making — its co-director, Storm Thorgerson, an acclaimed album designer and a friend of Barrett’s, died in 2013 — but it’s as comprehensive and coherent an account of Barrett’s counterculture tragedy as one could hope for. And while the film, co-directed by Roddy Bogawa, illuminates Barrett to a greater degree than any other account I’ve come across, it maintains the artist’s enigma.Not out of romanticizing him; as enigmas go, Barrett was the real deal. In his brief public tenure as the face of Pink Floyd, Barrett didn’t overtly put out a messianic line like other rock stars of the era. But he was innately magnetic. David Gilmour, who took the guitar duties in Pink Floyd after Barrett could no longer function, was, like the other band members, a friend of Barrett’s from the early ’60s. He calls the man “fiercely intelligent” and says that, before Barrett was ravaged by drug abuse and mental illness, “life was just too easy for him, in a way.”He wrote songs about underwear snatchers, gnomes and the solar system. (Post-Barrett, Floyd became more grandiose, socially conscious and commercially huge.) His psychedelia had a strain of Edwardian whimsy, until it didn’t; one of his last Floyd songs was called “Scream Thy Last Scream” and it wasn’t kidding. The film intersperses frank talking head interviews — Thorgerson, whose company helped craft Floyd’s album covers, is, after all, speaking to his friends and collaborators here — with surreal allegoric scenes both trippy and dire. Barrett’s slide into acid casualty is heartbreaking, yet the man was so singular that one has to call this cautionary tale unique.Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink FloydNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Black Ice’ Review: A Troubled Hockey History

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      The Canadian filmmaker Hubert Davis amplifies the voices of hockey players of color and reveals the sport’s lesser-known pioneers in this smart, sensitive documentary.Hubert Davis’s “Black Ice” candidly and sensitively recounts the experiences of athletes of color in Canadian hockey, and racism endured at the hands of other players, coaches and fans. Letting the athletes speak for themselves, Davis balances infuriating and painful accounts of their experiences with a look at the extraordinary legacy of Canadian hockey players of color, which dates back to the Colored Hockey League founded in the 19th century.“Black Ice” feels analogous to Samuel Pollard’s recent documentary “The League,” which chronicles the achievements of Black baseball players in the United States. But Davis, a Canadian documentarian, zeros in on how hockey has been a vital part of his country’s identity, and what it has felt like for Canadian players of color who love the game to be told, from very young ages, that they do not belong.That reality clashes, the film explains, with both Canada’s self-perception as an ideal multicultural melting pot and hockey’s don’t-rock-the-boat team spirit. Akim Aliu, who in 2020 made news for speaking out about his coach’s racist slurs, is one of several men and women who testify to encountering offensive, exclusionary behavior at various levels of play — not just in the National Hockey League — while drawing on support from friends and family.The fascinating story of the Colored Hockey League, which pioneered fundamentals of the game (including the slapshot), is richly and revealingly intertwined with that of Africville, a Black community outside Halifax, Nova Scotia, razed amid protests in the 1960s. Showing programs to train programs to train young athletes of color and expand the ranks, Davis points toward a different future for hockey.Black IceRated R for strong language, including racial slurs. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Ellen Hovde, ‘Grey Gardens’ Documentarian, Dies at 97

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      She worked with the Maysles brothers on the groundbreaking film about two Long Island recluses, and she later shared an Emmy for a mini-series about Ben Franklin.Ellen Hovde, a documentarian who was one of the directors of “Grey Gardens,” the groundbreaking 1975 movie that examined the lives of two reclusive women living in a deteriorating mansion on Long Island and inspired both a Broadway musical and an HBO film, died on Feb. 16 at her home in Brooklyn. She was 97.Her death, which had not been widely reported, was confirmed last week by her children, Tessa Huxley and Mark Trevenen Huxley, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Hovde (pronounced HUV-dee) worked on several films with the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, in the late 1960s and ’70s, when they were expanding the documentary form with cinéma vérité techniques, eschewing sit-in-a-chair interviews in favor of recording life and events as they happened.In 1969 she was a contributing editor on “Salesman,” a documentary by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin that followed four salesmen as they peddled $49.95 Bibles door to door in New England and Florida. The next year she was an editor on “Gimme Shelter,” the documentary by the Maysleses and Ms. Zwerin that captured a Rolling Stones tour, including the concert at Altamont Speedway in Northern California in late 1969 at which a concertgoer was killed by a Hells Angel.In 1974 she was credited as a director, along with the Maysleses, on “Christo’s Valley Curtain,” which was about an environmental art project the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude erected in Colorado in 1972. That film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary short.The mother and daughter known as Big Edie and Little Edie Beale in a scene from the documentary “Grey Gardens,” directed by Alfred and David Maysles, Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer.Criterion CollectionThe next year came “Grey Gardens.” That film, which garnered considerable attention at the time and in 2010 was named to the National Film Registry of culturally significant movies, took a close-up, often uncomfortable look at the lives of Edie Beale and her mother, Edith Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who had dropped out of high society and were living in East Hampton, N.Y., in a crumbling mansion along with assorted cats and raccoons.The film came about somewhat by accident when Lee Radziwill, Ms. Onassis’ sister, suggested that the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde make a documentary about her childhood. Among the people she suggested they talk to were the Beales — Little Edie and Big Edie, as they were known. The documentary Ms. Radziwill had suggested fell through, but the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde were intrigued by the Beales and proposed a film to them.“Big Edie didn’t really want to do it at first,” Ms. Hovde said in a 1978 interview with Film Quarterly. “Little Edie did.”Soon Muffie Meyer, who would partner with Ms. Hovde on numerous films in the ensuing years, joined the project. Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer received directing credits on the film along with the Maysles brothers, but they, in addition to Susan Froemke, were also its editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.“The person who is doing the editing is doing something very like a mix of writing and stage directing,” she told Film Quarterly. “That person is shaping, forming and structuring the material, and making the decisions about what is really going to be there on the screen — what the ideas are, what the order of events will be, where the emphasis will be.”For “Grey Gardens,” that involved going through dozens of hours of film and shaping a portrait that revealed the codependent relationship between the two eccentric women. Ms. Meyer said that, if portable cameras and tape recorders made the type of filmmaking used in “Grey Gardens” possible, the other crucial element was the editing.“Essentially, massive amounts of footage (usually upwards of 60 hours), unscripted and with little or no direction, was dumped in the editing room,” she said by email. “The editor’s job was to screen it, organize it, take careful notes, and then find the story and the structure. Ellen was a master at all of this, and there are not many masters (Charlotte Zwerin was another).”The team behind “Grey Gardens,” clockwise from top left: David Maysles, Ms. Hovde, Albert Maysles, Susan Froemke and Ms. Meyer. Ms. Hovde, Ms. Froemke and Ms. Meyer were the film’s editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.Marianne Barcellona“Grey Gardens” drew both acclaim and disapproval from critics. The film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time.” But in The New York Times, Richard Eder, while acknowledging that there was “no doubt about the artistry and devotion” involved in making the film, said that “the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter.”The debate over whether “Grey Gardens” and other films in the same style exploit their subjects or invade their privacy has been an ongoing one, and there was a chorus of such complaints when the movie was released. But Ms. Hovde, in the Film Quarterly interview, said the Beales themselves disputed that interpretation.“In the months when there was a lot of controversy about it,” she said, “it was Mrs. Beale and Edie who called us and said: ‘You know there has been this criticism — don’t worry. It’s all right. We know that it is an honest picture. We believe in it. We don’t want you to feel upset.’ That was their attitude, and they never wavered from that.”A musical based on the documentary opened on Broadway in 2006 and won three Tony Awards, and in 2009 HBO’s “Grey Gardens” movie, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Beales, won six Emmy Awards.In 1978 Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer formed Middlemarch Films, which went on to make scores of documentary features and videos in various styles and on a wide range of subjects. Some explored subjects from the age before film and photography and used actors to re-create scenes. One of those, a television mini-series about Benjamin Franklin directed jointly by Ms. Meyer and Ms. Hovde in 2002, won an Emmy for outstanding nonfiction special.Ms. Meyer said that in those types of projects, Ms. Hovde was a stickler for accuracy.“One example was her insistence on the accuracy of the bird tweets and frog sounds in our colonial-period films,” she said. “She drove the sound editors to distraction (and in one late-night session, to tears): ‘Was this frog endemic to the Northeast and did it croak in late fall?’ ‘Was this bird tweet that was added to the soundtrack really a bird that could be found in Virginia in the 18th century?’”Richard Easton was one of two actors who played the title role in “Benjamin Franklin,” an Emmy-winning PBS mini-series directed by Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer that used actors to re-create historical scenes.PBS, via Associated PressEllen Margerethe Hovde was born on March 9, 1925, in Meadville, Pa. Her father, Brynjolf (known as Bryn), was president of the New School for Social Research from 1945 to 1950, and her mother, Theresse (Arneson) Hovde, was a nurse.Ms. Hovde grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a degree in theater in 1947 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after which she studied for a time at the University of Oslo. In 1950 she married Matthew Huxley, son of the author Aldous L. Huxley. The marriage ended in divorce, but Ms. Hovde’s son said that she and Aldous Huxley remained close until his death in 1963, and that as his eyesight began to fail, she would sometimes read books into a tape recorder for him.Ms. Hovde had hoped for a career as a stage director, but, after not finding work, she took a job as an administrative assistant at a film school. By the early 1950s she was learning editing. Her credits before she began working with the Maysles brothers included editing “Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal” (1968) for the New York public television station WNET and a Simon and Garfunkel television special broadcast on CBS in 1969.Ms. Hovde’s second marriage, to Adam Edward Giffard in 1963, also ended in divorce. In addition to her children, she is survived by two grandchildren.Ms. Meyer said Ms. Hovde’s homes were gathering places for documentarians in the 1970s, and she once helped organize a filmmakers’ cookbook, a photocopied collection of everyone’s favorite recipes.“Most of us still use it,” she said. More

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      Review: ‘The YouTube Effect’ Is a Discursive Documentary

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      Alex Winter offers an overview of the world’s second most popular website in this unfocused tech documentary.The numbing experience of web video surfing is recreated — intentionally, I think — in “The YouTube Effect,” a discursive documentary that assembles a fair amount of information about the impact of YouTube on society, but struggles to find something new to say with it. Directed by Alex Winter, the film charts the rise of the video sharing platform and then attempts to trace its Sasquatch-size footprint on the culture.YouTube, the world’s second most popular site (after Google), is a stimulus machine. The film emulates this quality, finding a formal rhythm by layering a hodgepodge of YouTube clips with voice-over analysis from tech experts. It also spotlights several popular YouTube creators, including the social commentator Natalie Wynn, who is best known for her channel ContraPoints. A cogent speaker, Wynn says that she has declined offers to partner with streamers or cable because she values the “creative control” YouTube offers.Interrupting these success stories are tangents into a number of troubling chapters in the site’s history. We hear from the video game developer Brianna Wu, a target of death threats during Gamergate, as well as Caleb Cain, who describes his tumble into a matrix of far-right videos. These events have already been heavily reported on — “Rabbit Hole,” a New York Times podcast, relays Cain’s experience — and the sections often feel like retreads.The internet moves quickly, perhaps too quickly for an overview this unfocused. Even Winter seems overwhelmed by the task of curating this deluge of white-noise news and memes: His rundown of YouTube’s connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot lasts about as long as the viral video “Charlie Bit My Finger.”The YouTube EffectNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Once Upon a Time in Uganda’ Review: When Ragtag Met Rambo

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      A new documentary tells how a Ugandan filmmaker and an American producer have reshaped African cinema.Wakaliwood is more than a production house; it’s a spirit of ragtag moviemaking born from the pure desire to create. Founded in 2005 by the writer-director Isaac Nabwana and based in Wakaliga, a slum in Kampala, Uganda, the studio produces low-budget, hyperviolent action films inspired by “Rambo” and Chuck Norris but starring African actors.The director Cathryne Czubek’s documentary “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” is as playful as Nabwana’s audacious movies, explaining how the unlikely partnership between the Ugandan filmmaker and the American producer Alan “Ssali” Hofmanis has reshaped African cinema.The documentary is initially told from Hofmanis’s perspective. He explains how a trailer for Nabwana’s “Who Killed Captain Alex?” on YouTube inspired him to travel to Uganda, where he witnessed a pure film culture so unlike the cynical movie business that had burned him out in America that he decided to permanently move to the African country to become a multi-hyphenate creative partner on Nabwana’s Wakaliwood movies.Czubek poses the relationship between Nabwana and Hofmanis as an artistic roller coaster: They’re either gleefully collaborating on script ideas for a cannibal movie or having a falling out over the direction of the studio. Czubek’s strategy means Nabwana’s wife, Harriet, the head of the studio, doesn’t get much attention, and it leaves unexamined Hofmanis’s desire to share his “discovery” of Wakaliwood, through his white gaze, with the world.The film is strongest when capturing Nabwana’s resourcefulness, the exuberance of the local volunteers who serve as his actors and crew, and the joy his films bring to a Ugandan audience hungry for movies. “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” reminds you how the art of moviemaking can make dreams real.Once Upon a Time in UgandaNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More