I found these (documentaries).
Come See Me in the Good Light
If I were to describe this documentary in one word it would be emotion. It’s about dying, cancer, love, gender identity.
Andrea Gibson is the poet laureate of Colorado. They (Gibson’s preferred pronoun) would perform at poetry slams and readings to sold out houses at venues usually used for rock music. In 2021 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. After some initial treatments it was deemed incurable. The movie, while showing glimpses of Gibson throughout their life, is primarily focused on their life after that diagnosis.
Parts of this movie will bring you at least to the edge of tears. It’s what cancer patients go through, famous poet or not. The tests, the treatments, the choices that have to be made and for Gibson, the escalating series of bad news. Where does the good light shine? Pretty consistently on Gibson’s relationship with their partner Megan Falley. Also on Gibson’s pursuit and eventual realization of a last performance.
Along the way we do get to hear a lot of Gibson’s poetry which I found to be both accessible and brilliant. The movie is intimate and heartfelt. I know it has been described as uplifting, but it just made me want to cry.
(Available on Apple TV)
Natchez
As a lifelong Northeasterner, this is what I think of as the old South. Big old plantation houses with white columns and big porches. Inside there’s fancy table settings and ornate couches. In this documentary they claim that Natchez was once the richest town in America. That wealth was based on cotton. The boll weevil ate that.
So it seems the next best bet was tourism. Run by a group of Southern ladies and wearing hoop dresses, the tourism involved guided tours of these antebellum mansions. The folks coming to town for the tours? White, old and mostly Southern. And it seems like there’s fewer of them each year. The souvenir shop closes up because selling Confederate hats and knick knacks is apparently no longer a viable business plan.
Natchez’ historic wealth was based on one other thing. Slave labor. The movie looks at how the tour guides and the ladies in hoop dresses deal with the social history that goes along with the historic homes. We see both ends of the spectrum. There’s a passionate, articulate black tour guide who includes a stop at the site of one of the South’s largest slave markets. It is now a national park that they are trying to build into a slave market museum (please don’t tell Trump). And we also see a decked-out white geezer who with a smile on his face pukes out vile racist comments.
But it’s not like Natchez never changes. We even get a glimpse of a drag show, complete with rednecks outside protesting.
(Available to rent on Apple, Prime or YouTube)
Cutting Through Rocks
Cutting Through Rocks is probably easier than this. This being a divorced Iranian woman on a motorcycle trying to convince girls not to let their families marry them off at a young age.
This documentary follows Sara Sahverdi. She becomes the first female ever to be elected to the town council in the remote Northern Iran village where she lives. As a council person, she talks to girls about staying in school and going to university, she teaches them to ride motorcycles, she tries to talk to their parents and her brothers. Not all these conversations go well.
There is a backlash. The worst of which involves some sort of charge that requires her to go to court where a judge is to decide if she will be required to have gender change surgery. Fortunately the judge says no. He offers Sara this advice: lay low and try to find a husband. Unless things have changed since this was filmed, she does neither.
As a film this is education not entertainment. We hear stories about this type of suppression of women, but it’s a whole different thing to see it happening before your eyes with real people. I don’t imagine movie cameras have made their way into this village often. There are moments of inspiration and there are moments of desperation as well. But pretty sure these aren’t problems that will be solved by bombing the country.
Wild Inside
The star of the show is Flaco. He’s a Eurasian eagle owl. That’s a big owl that doesn’t normally exist here. Flaco was bred for captivity and spent the entire 13 years of his life at the Central Park Zoo, That is until someone cut the mesh enclosure of his too small habitat. Flaco literally flew the coup.
No one really knew if Flaco could fly. Or if he could hunt food. He figured it out, Flaco made himself at home in Central Park then moved to the East Village and later the Upper West Side. He had an entourage of followers, folks who called themselves “owlers.” And people all over the city were thrilled by Flaco sightings. They all had cameras and that footage found its way into this documentary.
Flaco was something of a New York celebrity. His bright-eyed image appeared on t-shirts and tote bags. We even meet a couple getting his and hers Flaco tattoos.
The film does raise some serious questions. Should every effort have been made to capture him to save him from the many potentially fatal hazards of city life? Or as one commenter observed, is it unethical to trap a self-sufficient animal? Speaking of ethics, there’s the issue of breeding animals for captivity. And maybe the biggest question, is a short life ‘free as a bird’ better than a long life in captivity?
Flaco had his own answer. He never revisited his old home and wouldn’t touch the zoo food (lab rats) they tried to bait him with. Along the way he won the hearts of New Yorkers from all walks of life. Maybe they liked the choices the big bird made.
(Available on Amazon Prime)
off the leash 