Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s documentary The American Sector announces its intentions from the very beginning, starting with its first three juxtaposed images. The first is of what appears to be a nondescript block of concrete, with splattered paint and a caterpillar crawling upon it; the second reveals the block to be a segment of the Berlin Wall in a large forest–specified in the chyrons as unincorporated land in Western Pennsylvania–with the sound of chainsaws off-camera; the third suddenly jumps to a much different, more sterile setting: the Hilton Hotel in Dallas, Texas, where two sections of the Wall have been installed. Aside from brief interviews, a few instances of archival footage, and an epigraph from “The Monument” by poet Elizabeth Bishop, this deliberate foregrounding of incongruity in both specific and relative location created by editing is all the contextualization that the documentary provides, or needs.
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- 2/29/2020
- by Ryan Swen
- The Film Stage
This year’s Berlin International Film Festival brought a lot of anticipation. The first edition assembled by artistic director Carlo Chatrian and executive director Mariette Rissenbeek required the team to push back on several years of backlash to lackluster programming while competing with a busy festival circuit.
The Berlinale isn’t Cannes or Sundance, but it turns out it didn’t need to chase either mold: In its 70th year, Berlin provided a range of international offerings large and small, more than enough to make the selection worth following across the 10-day event. Here are 10 highlights.
“The American Sector” (Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez)
Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s “The American Sector” may not have time to visit every section of the Berlin Wall that’s been imported to the country (the film runs a breezy 65 minutes without credits), but this light and thoughtful documentary road trip still manages...
The Berlinale isn’t Cannes or Sundance, but it turns out it didn’t need to chase either mold: In its 70th year, Berlin provided a range of international offerings large and small, more than enough to make the selection worth following across the 10-day event. Here are 10 highlights.
“The American Sector” (Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez)
Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s “The American Sector” may not have time to visit every section of the Berlin Wall that’s been imported to the country (the film runs a breezy 65 minutes without credits), but this light and thoughtful documentary road trip still manages...
- 2/29/2020
- by Eric Kohn, Anne Thompson and David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
Three key films at the Berlinale take the form of landscape documentaries made in the Americas, and as such make the unavoidable point that you cannot film the land without engaging in a nation’s politics. This is most clear in the direct accusation made by Jonathan Perel’s vividly unsettling Corporate Accountability. The director films through his car window the exteriors of various companies, flourishing or defunct, across Argentina that had deep ties to the country’s dictatorship. As we watch the images of company plants, gates, and signage, all seemingly shot in the dusk or dawn, with a sinister, insomniac color palette and framing that suggest an imminent need to flee the scene, we hear Perel in voiceover recount details from a report put together by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights.His voice tells us of union repression, military collaboration, torture, and disappearances. The term “victims...
- 2/28/2020
- MUBI
The Berlin Wall may have “fallen” in November 1989, but it was never destroyed — only dismantled. More than 30 years later, fragments of the concrete border that once separated East and West Germany are now scattered around the world; these lonely slabs of rock stick out of the ground like cold, gray monoliths, and radiate with the knowledge of another time. Dozens and dozens can be found in the United States alone. One hides in the verdant forests of Pennsylvania’s Unincorporated Land. Another is on display at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. A Hilton Hotel in Dallas keeps a fragment in the lobby, where people walk by without looking twice. There’s even one at Universal Studios in Florida — right behind the Hard Rock Cafe.
Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s “The American Sector” may not have time to visit every section of the Berlin Wall that...
Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s “The American Sector” may not have time to visit every section of the Berlin Wall that...
- 2/28/2020
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
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