Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time is an intoxicating cinematic collage-compilation that embraces social history – in microcosm, via its story of the titular Canadian mining town – as well as the history of film itself.
A picture is worth more than a thousand words, never more so than with the photographs of Don McCullin. The octogenarian photographer’s black-and-white imagery made the Sunday Times colour supplement the talk of international media in the 1970s.
When they were children the interviewees in this film – the last survivors – were taken away in incomprehensible circumstances, on their way to be murdered for who they were, in Germany and places further east.
In September 2014, after three months of captivity, Nadia Murad escaped ISIS control in Mosul, Iraq. Since then, she has dedicated her life to travelling the world and telling everyone who will listen about the plight suffered by her Yazidi people, then and now still.
Nadia Murad caught the world’s attention when she spoke at the United Nations Security Council. She spoke of living under ISIS, daily assaults, escaping, and the current plight of the Yazidi people, in refugee camps and still under ISIS control. It was a heart-breaking plea for support to the world’s silent nations. But in a rapidly changing news landscape, it’s easy to stay silent and wait for the next story come to come along.
How does an unassuming 36-year-old with a terrifyingly sensible haircut and a mildly flamboyant taste in jumpers become the political playwright par excellence of his generation?
A cannily crafted biographical docudrama about the Lakota Sioux broncobuster and horse trainer Brady Jandreau – playing himself as Brady Blackburn – The Rider will resonate with anyone whose dreams have gone up in smoke. Jandreau was 20 when, on April 1, 2016, a horse stomped on his skull, fracturing it in three places, severely damaging two regions of his brain, and penetrating it with bone fragments caked in manure and sand. Defying doctors’ orders, he walked out of hospital shortly after having life-saving brain surgery. Six weeks after returning home he began training horses again. The video footage of Jandreau/Blackburn pulling staples out of his head is real.
The Chinese-American filmmaker Chloe Zhao got to know Jandreau when she was making her promising 2015 debut feature Songs My Brothers Taught Me about life on the impoverished Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Seeking a way to build a new movie around Jandreau, she was inspired by his recovery from his catastrophic accident, only five months after which filming began. Jandreau gives an affectingly low-key performance as the melancholy, laconic Brady Blackburn.
At the heart of The Rider is the sombre recognition that, for many poor young men in the West, not least Native Americans, becoming a rodeo rider is the only way of escaping a hand-to-mouth existence. With a metal plate holding his head together, Brady dare not enter the arena on horseback again though, at one point, temptation proves too much.
Zhao’s direction is cool and objective, scarcely lyrical. Jandreau’s affectionate, learning-impaired teenage sister Lilly plays herself movingly; their father Tim portrays himself as a gambler, harsh and selfish. Jandreau’s childhood friend Lane Scott, a one-time bull-rider who was paralysed in a car accident, also appears. Brady twice visits Lane in his care facility and helps him with rehabilitation exercises, such as rocking on a saddle – haunting scenes that are testament to the human spirit but also indicate Jandreau’s comparative good fortune. Correlative to Brady’’s recuperation – and perhaps to Lane’s – is his tender breaking and training of a volatile wild horse that heartbreakingly comes to grief.
One extra only accompanies The Rider's DVD release – and it’s riveting. Jandreau participates, with British psychologist Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell, in a 45-mimute post-screening on-stage interview that reveals his charisma as a smart, optimistic young cowboy more truthful than Hollywood would ever allow. Happily, he wants to act again.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Rider
Very few could have predicted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg becoming a cultural icon, least of all herself. A quiet, studious, first-generation American girl who broke down boundaries, not with force, but with a reasoned reproach and a calm demeanour. From being one of the first women at Harvard Law School to sitting on the highest court in the land, her achievements always shouted louder than she did.
The movie musical: money making or true art – or both? This was a programme to sing along to, in the company of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard.
It was when he was on holiday at his agreeable estate in the Algarve in August 2014 that Cliff Richard got a phone call telling him his Berkshire home was being raided by the South Yorkshire Police. It was the beginning of a four-year ordeal in which accusations of “historical sexual offences” threatened to crush the veteran entertainer, formerly believed to be indestructible.