Science Fair review - big on ambition, light on rigour

Engaging but somewhat slight doc on the world's biggest youth science contest

More than 1,700 teenage finalists representing 78 countries take part in the annual International Science and Engineering Fair, virtually the Oscars for exceptional young biologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, doctors and more.

If they’re selected for ISEF, these young brainboxes get to show the fair’s forbidding judges what contributions they’re planning to make to our futures – and compete with each other to be named best in show. It’s a remarkable (and, as the contestants point out, very American) event, and an even more remarkable gathering of young people – certainly as pictured filling a cavernous Los Angeles conference centre in this engaging, affectionate documentary from Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster.

Science FairThe directors focus on a clutch of aspiring young international hopefuls, each covered in a brief thumbnail portrait. Outgoing Anjali from Kentucky, who has a project for detecting arsenic in drinking water, is aware that personality and presentation skills are just as important as scientific insight at ISEF. From the same school, the laid-back trio of Ryan, Harsha and Abraham are working on an AI project to collate stethoscope data online. German teenager Ivo has come up with a prototype flying wing aircraft, and slacker Robbie from West Virginia – who taught a computer to rap like Kanye West – has a head-spinning scheme to track how machine learning actually works, using (what else?) machine leaning. Coming from an impoverished background in rural Brazil, Myllena and Gabriel (pictured above) provide a striking contrast with their US and European co-competitors, and their project aims to prevent the spread of the Zika virus.

That much we learn in Science Fair’s lengthy first act. The film then follows a well-trodden route: to take us through the teenagers’ struggles to be selected for the fair, then the tribulations of ISEF’s rigorous judging, and ultimately, the big reveal of the competition’s all-important results.

Parallels with the 2002 movie Spellbound – which follows the fortunes of eight young competitors at the 1999 US National Spelling Bee – are inevitable, and indeed the directors specifically namecheck Jeffrey Blitz’s earlier film as an inspiration. But there’s a big difference here. Almost anyone can grasp what goes into spelling a word correctly, but few of us will readily understand the complexities of these kids’ sometimes esoteric scientific research. (One of the contestants even jokes that the more incomprehensible your fair’s submission title, the more hardcore the work must be.) Even the fair’s own set-up hardly lends itself to film treatment, not least because the all-important final judging takes place behind firmly locked doors.

So bringing ISEF alive is a tricky prospect – one that Costantini and Foster achieve marvellously in terms of personality and ambition, but less so in hardcore scientific detail. Even with their lively subjects, however, there are simply too many for us to feel like we get to know them in much depth. When the fair’s overall winner is announced – and yes, spoiler alert, it’s one of the kids Costantini and Foster feature – we hardly know them, nor, more importantly, properly understand the significance of their project.

Science Fair is an inspirational portrait of young ambition, commitment and resilience, and its directors gain remarkably close access to the kids featured, following them closely across several months. But by not properly understanding these budding scientists’ projects, it feels like the audience is kept at quite a distance. It’s rather ironic – and frustrating – that while celebrating the unapologetically complex insights of these youngsters, Science Fair itself seems content skate on the surface of their achievements.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Science Fair

DVD: Generation Wealth

★★★ GENERATION WEALTH Documentary ramble through greed, money and vicarious excess

An intriguing documentary ramble through greed, money and vicarious displays of excess

“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with is that a psychopathology which currently dominates to a morbid degree is our obsession with being rich and, as much, with the public signifiers of wealth.

Kusama - Infinity review - amazing tale of survival against the odds

A journey from exotic outsider to world-famous artist

Wearing a red dress covered in black polka dots and a bright red wig, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sits drawing, a look of intense concentration on her face. It takes her three days, she says, to finish one of these huge repeating patterns (main picture) and ideas pour out faster than she can realise them, even though she works all day, six days a week. 

Queen of the World, ITV review - born to run and run

★★★ QUEEN OF THE WORLD, ITV Born to run and run

A year in the life of the Queen and her Commonwealth

Awesome numbers: over a million miles, the equivalent of 42 times around the globe, have been traversed by Her Majesty the Queen, enabling visits over the past seven decades or so to 117 different countries. No one has reigned longer nor travelled further.

Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. review - not your average popstar

★★★★ MATANGI/MAYA/M.L.A. From asylum-seeker to Grammy-winner

From asylum-seeker to Grammy-winner, documentary reveals the activist behind the music

Why is M.I.A. such a problematic pop star? Why can't she just shut up and release a hit? Tellingly, this is the very question the singer poses at the start of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A - a question she's been asked throughout her career, from interviewers to management.

Faces Places review - Agnès Varda's enchanted journey

★★★★★ FACES PLACES Agnès Varda journeys through her homeland with photographer JR

With photographer JR, the great French documentarist travels through her homeland

On the eve of her tenth decade, the marvellous Agnès Varda embarked on the enchanted journey that we see in Faces Places. For admirers of the great French director – of whom there are a great many: indeed, it is hard not to be won over by her resolutely independent, profoundly humanistic substance and style – its spirit will recall her two earlier documentary films of the century, The Gleaners & I (2000) and the more autobiographical The Beaches of Agnès (2008), though the mélange between personal and social is here complete. This is a journey that celebrates a life richly lived as well as the human interaction, the delight in the sheer richness of humanity, that has always been inseparable from that existence.

The difference from those previous films is that in Faces Places Varda does not travel alone, her companion here the vivacious photographer JR, a half century her junior: she has seen “88 springtimes”, he is 33. (Quite how they met is shrouded in a whimsical series of opening episodes charting how they didn't meet, including an irresistible disco scene with the veteran Varda gamely bopping the dance floor.) JR’s speciality is large-scale photo portraiture, created in the most democratic style possible: he drives a special photo-camion, designed to resemble a camera, complete with photo booth and equipment which produces, directly out of the side of the truck, huge prints for pasting on walls,. Or any other suitable surface, since his speciality (aided by a team of assistants) is plastering his images – which can be anything up to ten times human scale – on anything, from gasometers to train wagons. Portraits in landscape, as never before.Faces PlacesIt’s their shared interest in their subjects – hardly the right word, when collaboration is so close – that makes this pairing ideal; these are not artists working on their own, but creators of events. “To meet new faces,” is how Varda expresses the resolve behind their road trip, its destinations better caught by the film’s French title, Visages Villages. No big city monotony here, rather an exploration of rural France, its singularities and personalities relished to the full.

Was there a guiding concept behind their journey, as they travel from the declining mining communities of the North to the villages of the South, where a sense of profound permanence seems to reign? Hard to say, when chance (“We enlist it as an assistant!”) so clearly played a role. In each location, JR and his team create small monuments to individuality, putting the sitters in a spotlight that nevertheless seems a natural part of their environment: they range from Jeanine, the last remaining resident in a whole row of miners’ dwellings (pictured above), through portraits of the wives of three Le Havre dockers that are emblazoned, almost 100 meters in height, across the sides of shipping containers, to the collectif of a Provence chemical factory (pictured below, with Varda and JR).

Change is a recurring motif, a level of dehumanisation noted in working life 

That last detail brings home that the Varda-JR tandem does not consciously seek out any sort of rustic idyll; modernity is a natural element in these worlds, even if politics remains distant (notwithstanding any reflections we may have that some of the communities visited would surely have voted for Le Pen). And change is a recurring motif, a level of dehumanisation noted in working life: where once whole communities would have brought in the harvest, now a single farmer attends to 2,000 acres on his own, sitting atop a tractor/harvester that is fully controlled by computer.

“What is the subject, actually?” Varda muses at one point. For her, perhaps, it is in the conviction that whatever activity a human being may engage with, it should not dwarf the humanity of the individual(s) involved. Faces Places teaches us quite a lot on matters caprine, including that today’s goats often have their horns removed (burnt away, or “disbudded”, at an early age). That’s ostensibly to reduce damage when they fight, but Varda is affronted: how she rejoices when she finds a smallholder who resists all that, a place where milking by hand rather than machine is seen as the natural process. To treat someone or something as mere “product” is the worst thing of all.Faces PlacesBy loose extension, art becomes a catalyst that can transform the everyday. Asked by one railwayman why JR has pasted images of Varda’s eyes (and toes, too) onto the sides of chemical-storage train tankers, she replies that it is to endorse the “power of imagination”. We may perhaps wonder whether there is nevertheless an elitist concept involved somewhere, in this conscious idea that “art is for everyone”, especially when promulgated by France’s generous funding regime. But Varda’s film brings home how that can never be the case when everyone is involved (the film’s crowdfunding element is surely as appropriate here as the concept has ever been).

Faces Places is also a picaresque story of bonding between two individuals, their symbiosis of engagement with those whom they encounter reinforced by the gentlest of teasing. Both look with such curiosity at the world around them, that issue of vision associated both with Agnès’s failing sight and JR’s reluctance to take off his dark glasses. That latter strand harks back naturally to Varda’s 1961 burlesque film-within-a-film, Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires (Beware of dark glasses), in which Jean-Luc Godard, no less, starred with a Keatonesque charm, a quality singularly lacking in his behaviour in the final scene of Faces Places. It proves a rare moment of sadness in a work where these two presences, perfectly accompanied by Matthieu Chedid’s string score, are so entrancingly life-affirming. If ever a film could promise you une bonne journée, it’s Faces Places.

Overleaf: watch the preview for Faces Places

'I saw that death is beautiful, unspeakable and strange': on filming 'Island'

Filmmaker Steven Eastwood introduces his documentary about the last moments of life

Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. Dying remains taboo. We don’t talk about dying, we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as natural and everyday as birth. Having been one of the central subjects for art for a millennium or more, death has come to be one of the least broached. The images we have are medicalised or euphemistic. All of the beauty, grace and candour of death visible in classical painting is gone.

Under the Wire review - risking everything to tell the world the truth

★★★★★ UNDER THE WIRE Marie Colvin died for believing she could make a difference

A brave woman died for believing she could make a difference

She was “the most important war correspondent of her generation”, says Sean Ryan, her editor at The Sunday Times. And her colleague Paul Conroy describes her as “a complete and utter one-off – exceptionally driven, with a real sense of purpose”. These tributes are for Marie Colvin, who was killed by President Assad’s forces on February 22 2012.

Conroy was on assignment with her when she died. He was badly wounded in the attack, but escaped from Syria to write the book which forms the basis for Under the Wire. Speaking directly to camera, he tells the gripping story of their illegal entry into the country to cover the siege of Homs. His account of events over the following days is so vivid that you feel as if you were there with him, experiencing all the excitement, fear, noise and confusion.

She felt she had betrayed the people of Homs by agreeing to leave

Most foreign correspondents considered the war in Syria too dangerous to cover; but Colvin and Conroy (main picture) had other ideas. Denied a visa, they smuggled themselves over the border from Lebanon. “Being a war correspondent is about what people are going through,” Colvin had said, and she was determined to report on the carnage being wreaked on the hapless civilians trapped in Homs by the Syrian army.

Director Chris Martin has recreated their perilous journey from Beirut. After several nights of “being passed from one shadow to another”, it ended with a hike through a mile-long storm drain. This was the only way into Baba Amr, a poor suburb of Homs where 28,000 civilians were being subjected to constant bombardment. “It wasn’t war, it was slaughter,” recalls Conroy. “It was impossible to go out in the street because it was raining shells and missiles. And Assad’s snipers were on all the tall buildings.”

They managed to visit “the Widow’s Basement”, a dank cellar where dozens of women and children had taken refuge from the bombs. We see Colvin interviewing them for an article that featured with Conroy’s photographs on the front page of The Sunday Times on February 19. By then the journalists had already left – forced to go by rumours that a ground offensive was imminent. When the rumour proved false, Colvin was distraught. She felt she had betrayed the people of Homs by agreeing to leave (pictured below: Colvin taking notes in a bombed house in Homs).Under the WireFlashback to 1999 in East Timor, where foreign correspondents were advised to quit a UN compound, when it was surrounded by murderous militiamen. Colvin refused to go and her presence deterred the attack long enough for the 1,000 refugees inside to be rescued. Afterwards she summed up what she learned from the experience: “I thought that journalism can make a difference. It is not in vain.” 

She had a reputation for falling out with colleagues who were less driven than herself and so were reluctant to take as many risks. Even the loss of an eye from shrapnel in Sri Lanka failed to dampen her sense of purpose. She simply covered the socket with an eyepatch and carried on, wearing it like a badge of honour. And for parties, she sported a black patch decorated with rhinestones. One photographer described her as “scarier than the war they were covering”. But Conroy was a former soldier, used to combat, and during a stint in Libya reporting on the Siege of Misrata in 2011, the pair formed a deep bond of mutual respect. 

Without an exit stratagem, their chances of escaping the hell hole were not good

Unknown to their editor, they decided to return to Homs, even though Conroy had “a bad feeling” about the possible outcome. He was right, of course. Without an exit stratagem, their chances of escaping the hell hole were not good especially as, according to Conroy, conditions there were “the worst we’d ever seen”.

Back in Baba Amr, we see them at a makeshift medical centre where Dr Mohammed “works miracles” without any drugs or anaesthetic. He can only watch helplessly, though, as a baby dies from shrapnel wounds. ‘I felt rage,” recalls Conroy, “and I knew that, for Marie, this was her story and she was going to go for it whatever the cost. She decided to do as many broadcasts as possible as a plea to the world.” In that final broadcast the newscaster asks her: “Why is it important to see these images... Why is it important for you to be there?” She replies: “I feel very strongly that they should be shown. That’s the reality. That little baby probably will move more people to think ‘Why is no-one stopping this murder that is happening every day?’ Every civilian house on this street has been hit. There are no military targets here... the Syrian army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”

The next day the shelling resumed at 5am; the building where the journalists were staying was hit. Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik were both killed and the French correspondent Edith Bouvier was badly wounded. As he watches the footage, Conroy murmurs: “May God bless your soul, dear Marie. My life will never be the same again.” Under the WireShrapnel had also torn a hole the size of a fist in his thigh (pictured above: Conroy recaling his ordeal). He was taken to the medical centre and operated on with only cigarettes to dull the pain. The building, meanwhile, took 10 direct hits. Assad, it seems, was determined to finish them off. They put out an SOS on social media, which was answered by a ceasefire and the arrival of a Syrian Red Crescent ambulance (not the Red Cross that they were hoping for). And prompted by a whispered warning from the accompanying medic, they declined to leave in the regime’s vehicle. 

On the fourth night, a convoy of cars took them on a mad dash through deserted streets to the storm drain. They came under heavy fire and 20 Syrians were killed helping their escape. A motorbike drove Conroy along the tunnel to a wall of mud that blocked the way. “Tell the world,” said the biker as he shoved him towards a small opening at the top. Dragging himself up, Conroy got impaled on a metal spike. “I thought I was going to die, but I had Marie on my shoulder and the people of Baba Amr who sacrificed everything to get me to that point. So I just ripped the staples out and all the flesh and muscle, and fell into a pool of water and some guys carried me on a piece of plastic to the end of the tunnel.” 

Next he had to crawl across a field to a waiting van. “It was snatching life from the jaws of death,” he recalls. “That’s where my life began again, in the back of that van. I wanted to tell Marie’s and Rémi’s story. And those beautiful people who were being slaughtered, I wanted to tell their story. To this very day I carry the weight and responsibility of what I promised. And I’m still doing it; its never going to stop.”

One of the most moving moments of this dramatic documentary is watching Conroy’s reaction as he sees, for the first time, a film on YouTube of the residents of Homs braving the bullets to demonstrate their thanks to the fallen journalists. Placards reading “We Will Not Forget You” are held high alongside others bearing the names of Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik. 

The saddest aspect of this story is that Colvin’s determination to tell the world what she had seen cost her her life, yet no-one responded to her plea by coming to the aid of the people of Homs. Her bravery and commitment were in vain. This time journalism did not make a difference.

Overfleaf: watch the trailer for Under the Wire

Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage, Channnel 4 review - making meaning in death

★★ GRAYSON PERRY: RITES OF PASSAGE, CHANNEL 4 Making meaning of death

Home and away: the artist observes rituals in Sulawesi, then creates them in Hounslow

Grayson Perry is at it again. The Turner Prize winner, Reith lecturer, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, curator, writer, British Museum trustee, CBE, RA – plus Britain's and the art world’s favourite transvestite – is trying to find sense in things and events, or, as he has put it, invent meaning in a meaningless world.

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