Tag Archives: S. Leo Chiang director

“Our Time Machine” Documentary Film Review

by HelenHighly

H.G. Wells said, “We all have our time machines. Those that take us back are memories, and those that carry us forward are dreams.” The new documentary film, Our Time Machine, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival this year, manages to do both, and more. Using a kind of Chinese magic-realism, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun and editor Bob Lee, along with artist Maleonn, take the viewer to a world that not only interweaves dreams and memories, but also mixes transcendent allegory and deeply-rooted personal reality as part of one amazingly cohesive story, told with both power and grace. The extraordinary work of new director Yang Sun was acknowledged with the TFF Award for Best Cinematography in a Documentary.

Our Time Machine poster
Our Time Machine poster

Our Time Machine is a profound and poetic film that is achingly uplifting as it tells a universal tale of father and son, love and loss, and the exquisite sadness and joy of life – with puppets! If that seems like too many concepts or too grandiose an endeavor, I can only say that it likely would be in the hands of any other directors. But the deft artistry and grounded wisdom of these filmmakers treat life’s most abstract paradoxes in a way that feels like the life-blood of this movie is shot straight into your veins, as pure, essential truth.

It seems nearly impossible for an entirely factual documentary to be such a perfectly formed narrative tale. Can it also be a brilliant piece of poetry? It’s a rare thing, but here it is. Through an entirely unconventional use of mechanics (with a fresh take on puppetry and cinematography), these filmmakers have taken society’s collective pain and re-engineered it into beauty.

Shaken by news of his father’s dementia, Chinese artist Maleonn decides to build an intricately-designed time-machine puppet that will unite him and his father as it transports them to the memories his father has forgotten. If you don’t understand how puppetry can be a true art form, this film will show you. Originally conceived to be a collaborative theatrical project between father and son, an idea thwarted by the quickly advancing illness of his father, Maleonn must reimagine his production to be a parting gift to his father, and when even that fails due to his father’s inability to understand, Maleonn is left talking to the puppet he built, as if it were his own son: “Dear son, I want to try something impossible  – to love another person. There is no practical purpose, because love is like art. There is no reason. We do it because we can’t help ourselves.”

Our Time Machine rehearsal photo by Maleonn
Our Time Machine rehearsal photo by Maleonn

Maleonn follows in the artistic footsteps of his parents; his mother was an actress and his father, Ma Ke, was a long-time director of the Peking Opera Theater. Through the lens of a father-son relationship, Our Time Machine explores what it means to be an artist in China in the 20th century and today. From the condemnations of the Cultural Revolution to contemporary financial and social challenges of putting on a complex and wholly original hybrid art performance, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun probe the artistic impulse across generations. Mixing haunting imagery with real-life moments, Our Time Machine conveys the mystery and consolation of art against the ravages of time.

Maleonn in Our Time Machine
Maleonn in Our Time Machine

There are several puppets in the movie – both people and machines. In addition to the time machine puppet, there is an airplane, which the elderly-father puppet senses circling above him. Director Chiang explained to me that the plane is symbolic of a bird – a crane, and in China there is an ancient belief that when you die, you ride a crane to heaven. In the film, the father puppet repeatedly says he sees or hears an airplane coming, and the grown-son-puppet reassures him, “No, there is no plane.” Even if you don’t know about the Chinese crane metaphor, it is clear this plane represents the thing both father and son want to avoid – death. The time machine not only takes the father back to the lost memories in his past, it becomes the instrument that his son uses to avoid the future he fears for his father and himself. But will it work in real life?

Our Time Machine, Maleonn builds a large puppet
Our Time Machine, Maleonn builds a large puppet

Helen Highly Analytical does not cry easily during movies. And I did not cry in this one. But it was quite a surprise to feel myself tear up when I was only speaking about this movie as I interviewed its filmmakers. I want so much to tell you, my readers, the pair of beautifully symmetrical repetitive sentences that frame this story, but I don’t want to cheat you of the experience of revelation that will come when you hear them in context. And it does feel like a genuine revelation.

Out Time Machine, "Son, can you float on water?"
Out Time Machine, “Son, can you float on water?”

As the Baby Boomer generation ages, we are met with an increasing number of emotionally grueling stories, told in films and in books, about the horrors of illness, the challenges of eldercare, and the miseries of troubled relationships between adult-children and their flawed or failing parents. At the same time, so many of us are suffering through those experiences in our real lives. The prospect of going to the movies to relive it on the big screen seems to me unappealing at best. I find myself avoiding films on these subjects, despite often being assured they are excellent or insightful. I feel I already have too much insight to bear. But this film is something different.

Especially in America, convention dictates that every story – even the saddest ones – must end with some sort of redemption, something learned, some problem resolved, and that expectation too often results in a contrived happy ending being slapped onto the conclusion of a story. Endings are hard – perhaps the most important and difficult part of any story. And if the writer resists the phony and simplistic happily-ever-after, then we often are left with an unsatisfying bitterness at the end – a bad taste in our mouths. In the film world, I call those “Life Sucks and Then You Die Movies” – not highly recommended.

With true stories, we often hear the justification, “That’s what really happened. You can’t change the facts.” But a real artist, a dedicated artist, will mine that real-life ending for a moment that is as unequivocally accurate and honest as it is transformative. It’s the sign of a true master – to be able to craft a beautiful ending without a whiff of anything artificial or the feel of anything forced. When we see that happen… it’s like a miracle. That’s what this documentary is. It is truth at its best – miraculous.

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Interested in another smart, well-made Asian-American film? (This one is in English.) Winner of the Tribeca Film Institute and AT&T Untold Stories award, Lucky Grandma is a dark comedy about immigrant life, the vulnerabilities of aging, and the primacy of family. Mostly it’s hilarious with a knock-out performance by Tsai Chin. Click here to read about it and another Untold Stories film.

Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival 2019 Curtain Raiser: What to See / Part 2

by HelenHighly

Following up on my previous What-to-See article, which focused on Archival Movies at Tribeca Film Festival, I am listing a few more Top Picks that I could not exclude. There is really SO MUCH great stuff at Tribeca2019 (including Tribeca Television Festival and Tribeca Immersive, which I won’t even touch but are worthy of exploring), that it’s tough to pull out a short list. But here are some films that grabbed my attention during the pre-festival screenings, and which you cannot fail in seeing. I am recommending two Magic Realism films that are beautiful and dramatic, and two Activism films that are urgently important. Plus, one of the several Music Documentaries that I haven’t seen but is sure to be a winner.

Compelling, Artfully Told Stories (Magic Realism)

Our Time Machine (Feature Documentary)

How can a documentary be so gorgeous and tell such a perfectly formed narrative? It doesn’t seem possible; it’s a rare thing. Our Time Machine is a profound and poetic film that is achingly uplifting as it tells a universal story about the exquisite sadness and joy of life. Shaken by news of his father’s dementia, Chinese artist Maleonn sets off to build an intricately-designed time-machine puppet that will unite him and his father as it transports them to the memories his father has forgotten. (If you don’t understand how puppetry can be a true art form, this film will show you.)

Our Time Machine, at Tribeca
Our Time Machine, at Tribeca

This Chinese-language film is full of tableaus that blend the real and the surreal as Maleonn follows in the artistic footsteps of his parents; his mother was an actress and his father, Ma Ke, was a long-time director of the Peking Opera Theater. Through the lens of a father-son relationship, Our Time Machine explores what it means to be an artist in China in the 20th century and today. From the condemnations of the Cultural Revolution to contemporary financial and social challenges of putting on a complex and wholly original hybrid art performance, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun probe the artistic impulse across generations. Mixing haunting imagery with real-life moments, Our Time Machine conveys the mystery and consolation of art against the ravages of time.

Click here to see the Time Machine trailer.

Click here to see the full review of Our Time Machine.

Goldie (Viewpoints, Feature Narrative)

I put this movie on my Pick List because of its evocative use of animation and graphic elements (by Smith and Lee), which seem to lift the vibrancy and energy of this film off the screen and make the entire experience feel palpable and enthralling. The depressive grittiness of the story layered with the magical storytelling mechanism make for a rich film that stays with you after you’ve left the theater. Plus there is the electric actress, Slick Woods, who plays Goldie; when she is on the screen, it is impossible to look away.

Goldie, at TFF2019
Slick Woods as Goldie, at TFF2019

Goldie is a street-wise, 18-year-old dancer with big dreams of big fame, even as she is stuck at home minding her two sisters while their mother is in jail. When an opportunity to audition for a real music video comes her way, Goldie feels the time has finally come for her star to rise. All she needs is the perfect canary yellow fur coat she has had her eye on in a local vintage store window. But with the day of the shoot rapidly approaching, and Goldie’s pockets still empty of the cash needed to purchase the coat, her desire for it—and its perceived promise of transformation—becomes an all-consuming obsession.

Sam De Jong’s second feature is a stylish coming-of-age fable, anchored by a magnetic debut performance from Woods. Against the background of the vibrant Bronx streets in the summer, viewers are invited to keep up with Goldie’s breakneck race to realize her dreams or lose it all.

Activism Films That Matter Right Now

Slay the Dragon (Feature Documentary)

After the 2008 election, a secretive, well-funded partisan initiative poured money into state legislative races in key swing states to gain control of their redistricting processes and used high-tech analytics to dramatically skew voting maps based on demographic data. The result is one of the greatest electoral manipulations in U.S. history, one that poses a fundamental threat to our democracy and exacerbates the already polarized atmosphere in Congress and state houses across the country.

Slay the Dragon documentary
Slay the Dragon documentary

Gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing electoral maps to serve the party in power, has been around for centuries. But in today’s hyper-partisan political environment it has been taken to unprecedented extremes, fueled by the elimination of corporate campaign contribution limits and the availability of vast amounts of personal information. The effects of this audacious plan have continued to bear fruit through the 2018 midterms. But voters, fed up with cynical efforts to sidestep the will of the majority, have begun fighting back. In one example, a grassroots movement led by a young woman with no political experience gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to put an anti-gerrymandering initiative on the ballot in Michigan.

The new documentary Slay the Dragon shines a light on this timely issue, and follows a handful of citizens’ groups, outraged by what they see as an attack on the core democratic principle that every person’s vote should count equally, as they battle party operatives and an entrenched political establishment to fix a broken system.

Katie Fahey, in Slay the Dragon
Katie Fahey, in Slay the Dragon

In this film, we learn about “packing” and “cracking” and witness creative redistricting lines full of twists, curves, and squiggles to guarantee a certain majority. But we also experience hope in the form of Katie Fahey, a Michigander who forms the group Voters Not Politicians working to bring a measure onto the state’s ballot to require an independent group—not the legislature—to draw the lines. And in Wisconsin, an activist group challenges the state’s redistricting in a case that makes its way to the US Supreme Court. Directors Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance craft a detailed, infuriating, ultimately inspiring look—deftly balancing the facts and maps with the tireless work of people like Fahey to get us to act to ensure that democracy will survive. But the battle isn’t over yet; you need to be informed and vigilant.

Note: Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance have directed several films together, including Clinton for PBS’s American Experience, and the six-part series Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies. Separately and together, they have won numerous Peabody, Emmy®, and Writers Guild Awards, and an Academy Award® nomination. Barak is also the director of another film at TFF this year, which I also recommend — Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, detailed below.

Watson (Feature Documentary)

Watson documentary
Watson documentary

Captain Paul Watson has dedicated his life to fighting for one thing – to end the slaughter of the ocean’s wildlife and the destruction of its ecosystems. Without the ocean’s ecosystems, Watson contends that life on earth itself will not survive, and he makes a surprisingly convincing case for the urgency and necessity of his mission. Co-founder of GreenPeace and founder of Sea Shepard, Watson is part pirate, part philosopher, in this provocative film about a man who will stop at nothing to protect what lies beneath. Like a crime-fighting superhero of the high seas, Watson and his crews confront illegal whaling vessels from Europe to the Southern Ocean, seal hunters in Canada, and shark finners in Central America. Impervious to threats, with more than one nation issuing warrants for his arrest, Watson continues to intervene on behalf of the endangered ocean creatures and ultimately life on this planet.

Captain Watson documentary
Captain Watson, at Tribeca

Braiding contemporary interviews with Watson, archival footage from decades of Watson’s ferocious activism, and spectacular underwater nature footage, award-winning documentarian Lesley Chilcott (An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman) tells a story that is shockingly informative, magnificent, and deeply disturbing. Watson is a must-see for anyone concerned about the future of our planet.

Just Go See It: Music and Culture

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation (Spotlight Documentary)

When business partners John Roberts and Joel Rosenman floated the idea of hosting an opening day party with live music to celebrate their new recording studio in Woodstock, New York, they had no idea what it would eventually become: a pilgrimage of 500,000 like-minded radicals and hippies to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, where they would find spiritual reassurance and release in a celebration of freedom.

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation
Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation

50 years later, Barak Goodman’s retelling of the three-day music festival captures the zeitgeist of the time. Structured faithfully around audio testimony from attendees, Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation focuses not just on how it all came to be, despite enormous challenges, but how it felt for it to happen: an endless traffic backup was elevated to a communal experience, and a food shortage became a collaboration rather than a disaster. Historic musical performances spotlighted in the film, from Jimi Hendrix to Joan Baez to Crosby, Stills, and Nash, form the backdrop to what is fundamentally the audience’s story. Woodstock takes us all back to a time and a place now captured in a time capsule, but also reminds us of the immediacy that love, music and shared experience can elicit.

Also see my Tribeca Film Festival 2019 Curtain Raiser article Part 1, which points to a surprising theme at this year’s festival.