David R. Walker

Archive for the ‘Encounters Documentary Film Festival’ Category

The Shadow Scholars

Director: Eloise King

Cast: Patricia Kingori

Running Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

Film Rating: 8 out of 10

Festival: Encounters Documentary Film Festival, Tribeca, Thessalonki Documentary Film Festival, London Film Festival

Please note this film is a documentary

With Oscar nominated director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) as an executive producer, documentary film maker Eloise King creates a fascinating documentary called Shadow Scholars and poses a very interesting question. What if all the academic writing at colleges and prestigious universities like Harvard and Oxford, was not done by the research scholars but by a group of shadow scholars not based in England or America but in Nairobi, Kenya?

Shadow Scholars follows the fascinating story of the first black female professor at Oxford, Professor of sociology Patricia Kingori, a Kenyan born academic now living in the UK.

Professor Patricia Kingori explores the power dynamic made possible by increasing technological advancements that allowed undergraduates and graduates in British and American universities to use the services of thousands of unemployed yet educated young Kenyans living in Nairobi who write the essays for these graduates and then the European or American graduates take the academic credit for work that isn’t even there. This is known as the Kenyan essay mill which allows a system of contract cheating to exist at universities in which undergraduates at institutions like the University of San Diego, Harvard and others to employ the services of Kenyan ghost writers who would work tirelessly to get academic papers submitted in time for essay deadlines.

Obviously the credibility of these universities is at stake but what makes this documentary so interesting is that Professor Kingori travels to Nairobi to interview these essay writers who are making good money by posting fake European profiles online advertising ghost writing.

Many of these ghost writers, mostly young cannot find jobs in an over-educated yet unemployed Kenyan population so this becomes their livelihood in which not only do they make money but also as a means to support their families.

While documentary film maker Eloise King does veer off the main narrative focusing on British colonialism, post-colonial Kenya including an interview with recently deceased writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and looks at the history of slavery in the American deep South, her film Shadow Scholars highlights an academic flaw in a global industry in which technology has allowed these scholars to flourish and serve the wishes of first world academia.

Then artificial intelligence also starts threatening the livelihood of these Kenyan essay writers along with countries like Australia and America trying to ban ghost writing completely. The University of San Diego even had an international day of action against contract cheating.

Ghost writing as a topic for a documentary feature becomes a three dimensional issue in which Professor Kingori explores the ethical and economic implications of Western university students employing the services of African ghost writers and Kenya allowing this system to flourish without proper interventions. It’s not so much the Kenyan government’s fault as it is more the loopholes of an intricate global digital world in which 24 hour online work can benefit people in several countries simultaneously.

Shadow Scholars is primarily aimed at the academic world and despite its tangential storyline does pose some interesting ethical considerations. From Nairobi to London to San Diego, Shadow Scholars is an important documentary which should be seen. Shadow Scholars gets a film rating of 8 out of 10 and is highly recommended viewing.

References: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – Famous Kenyan Post-Colonial Writer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C5%A9g%C4%A9_wa_Thiong%27o

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story

Director: Sinead O’Shea

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Gabriel Byrne

Running Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

Film Rating: 8 out of 10

Please note this film is a documentary.

Oscar nominated Irish actress Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter) serves as the competent narrator with her clear and quirky commentary on life of Irish novelist Edna O’Brien in Sinead O’Shea’s riveting documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story which is a must see film.

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story tells the scandalous story of writer Edna O’Brien who was a gifted novelist but got married very young to a much older Irish writer Ernest Gebler and had two small children in 1954. At a time of non-existent women writers that were telling tales of the sexual frankness and desires of young Irish women, Edna O’Brien’s early novels The Country Girls, Girls in their Married Bliss and August is a Wicked Month caused a major stir and were immediately banned in the conservative Ireland of the early 1960’s.

What made her initial fame even more precarious was that her husband took all her royalty checks from the publication of her first couple of novels and kept them himself. He gave Edna an allowance for groceries.

Then Edna O’Brien as a novelist who by 1964 was earning enough money from her writing to become independent made the bold decision to leave her husband and move into a house in the fashionable Carlyle Square in SW1 in London. Edna and her dreadful husband were divorced in 1968 after a four year separation.

Edna O’Brien as a controversial novelist who challenged the patriarchy in Anglo-Irish society and also expertly exposed the sexual desires of young women in her ground breaking novels became a cause celeb and was the centre of a bohemian social whirl in the 1960’s that included film stars and celebrities like Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, Joan Plowright and even Jackie Onassis.

O’Brien’s popularity as a novelist was cemented in America after the endorsement by prestigious writers like Philip Roth, John Updike and J. D. Salinger in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Heavily influenced by Irish modernist writer James Joyce, Edna O’Brien’s fame as a novelist was firmly established.

Irish documentary film maker Sinead O’Shea creates an impressive and elegant story of the life of Edna O’Brien in her brilliant documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story which had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Unfortunately Edna O’Brien passed away in July 2024 just three months before the release of this fascinating story of her provocative life.

Featuring interviews with famous Irish actor Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects, Vanity Fair, Siesta) Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is an interesting documentary on a female writer whose sexual frankness initially shocked conservative Anglo-Irish society and left a literary legacy which any avid reader should explore more thoroughly.

Documentaries on the lives of writers can be difficult to make but ably assisted with the tantalizing commentary provided by Jessie Buckley, director Sinead O’Shea brings to the cinema the life of a bold independent woman of letters whose novels scandalized the English speaking world and earned Edna O’Brien the moniker Playgirl of the Western World.

If audiences love literary documentaries then Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien story is highly recommended viewing and gets a film rating of 8 out of 10. An insightful film both politically and socially.

Anselm

Director: Wim Wenders

Cast: Anselm Kiefer

Running Time: 1 hour and 33 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Language: German with English Subtitles

Festival: Encounters Documentary Film Festival – Johannesburg, Cape Town

Please note this film is a documentary.

Oscar nominated German film maker Wim Wenders who directed the critically acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club in 1999 returns to the documentary format in his new avant-garde film simply titled Anselm focusing in an unusual way on the work of Neo-Expressionist contemporary German artist and sculptor Anselm Kiefer who will not be very well known in the English Speaking world.

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 just as the Third Reich came crashing down and grew up in a post war Germany which was divided and mistrusted by the rest of Europe. His fame grew in the art world when he created these massive mixed media paintings featuring oil, lead, woodcut, shellac and other materials with names like The Brandenburg March 1974 and Painting the Burnt Earth also created in 1974. The artist also produced the beautiful wood carving in 1978 entitled The Way of the World’s Wisdom: The Battle of Tuetoburg Forest.

Becoming extremely famous in Germany in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Anselm Kiefer also represented Germany at the Venice Biennale art fair in 1980 through his Neo-expressionistic works.

What better film director to create a vivid and fascinating documentary about Anselm’s life than Wim Wenders.

Wenders started off his film career making art house classic films like 1984’s Paris, Texas starring Harry Dean Stanton and the fabulous Natassja Kinski and 1987’s Wings of Desire with Bruno Ganz.

After the 1997 film The End of Violence starring Andie Macdowell and Gabriel Byrne, Wenders made the ground breaking Oscar nominated documentary The Buena Vista Social Club and effortlessly switched to documentaries.

In Anselm, Wenders creates a complex portrait of an artist who is now 80 years old and living within his own art installation in Barjac, South of France after initially producing his work in Waldurn in Germany.

Anselm’s preoccupation with Germany’s own post World War II recovery as a country and of restoring a sense of national pride amidst a sense of anger and blame is evident in his conceptually ambitious paintings which all speak to a protest against forgetting. This artist went around Europe and photographed himself doing the Heil Hitler salute in various key European sites. Very brave and contentious.

As a documentary, Anselm is an intriguing post-modern approach to a complicated artist whose life as a young boy, as an emerging artist and now as an established artist is expertly told through the lens of Wim Wenders who creates an elegant tribute to a contemporary German art legend, whose works feature in major galleries around the world from Venice to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Anselm is a beautiful and thought-provoking documentary which is recommended viewing for contemporary art lovers. Anselm gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10 and is worth seeing although I would suggest that potential viewers read up about this artist’s life and work.

As usual auteur director Wim Wenders never disappoints.

Ella Blumenthal: I am Here

Director: Jordy Sank

This is a Feature Length Documentary and is available online at the Encounters: South African International Documentary Film Festival from Thursday 10^th June until Sunday 20th June 2021 – https://www.encounters.co.za/ #Virtuallyeverywhere – https://www.encounters.co.za/film/i-am-here/ and at select physical venues in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

After his South African Film and Television Award (SAFTA) nomination for best short documentary The Locket in 2017, SA documentary film director Jordy Sank tackles a fascinating subject, the horrific memories of a still living holocaust survivor Ella Blumenthal in his directorial debut feature length documentary Ella Blumenthal: I am Here, which was part of the official selection at the 2021 Miami Jewish Film Festival https://miamijewishfilmfestival.org/ and winning the Audience Award at the 2021 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival https://www.ajff.org/film/i-am-here and now is available to watch online at the Encounters South African Documentary Film Festival.

In a plush apartment in Seapoint in Cape Town, South Africa, Holocaust survivor Ella Blumenthal celebrates her 98^th birthday surrounded by her children and grandchildren. During this auspicious occasion, Ella Blumenthal reveals the secret of her horrific past as a Holocaust survivor.

Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1921, Ella Blumenthal was 18 when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 igniting World War II. Her and her family were immediately transferred to the Warsaw ghetto until it burnt down. Ella and her niece Roma were then transferred to various concentration camps , while her survival skills were paramount she went onto survive both Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz concentration camp where eventually n 1945, World War II ended and the Holocaust survivors were freed by the Allied troops.

Director Jordy Sank films his subject matter with a compassionate gaze from Ella walking briskly on the Seapoint promenade to her emotional retelling of her horrific experiences of being a prisoner of some of the most notorious concentration camps of World War II at her 98^th birthday celebration in 2019, surrounded by friends, children and grandchildren, educating them about the past.

Perceptively and rather cleverly, the flashbacks to the concentration camp horrors are told in a strategic combination of documentary news reel and beautiful animation provided by Greg Bakker, giving the documentary a palatable and heart-warming tone.

Impressively it is the shot of the 98 year old great grandmother swimming in a heated pool with the magnificent skyline of Cape Town in the background as her voice over describes the relief at being rescued by the allied troops and being brought to a camp with well-made up beds and running water, basic necessities which we nowadays take for granted.

Ella Blumenthal: I am Here is a captivating and brilliantly shot documentary about an extraordinary woman, a 98 year old Jewish woman who came to South Africa to make a new life and it offers a message of hope and forgiveness as she recalls how her and her grandson visited Auschwitz in 2004 to make peace with the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Ella’s message is simple, love everyone and be grateful to be alive.

This is an amazing documentary, skilfully educating a new generation about the survivors of the Holocaust and a formidable woman who has learnt to live life through memories as most of her family from Poland were killed during World War II. With the exception of her niece who now lives in New York, Ella Blumenthal is one of the few survivors of a generation that got brutally obliterated by pure hatred and rampant Anti-Semitism.  

Highly recommended viewing and an important documentary to watch, Ella Blumenthal: I am Here gets a documentary film rating of 8 out of 10. Catch this insightful documentary online at the Encounters Film Festival –