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Critics Notebook
by Vadim Rizov
You Are All Captains is a hard movie to synopsize: it"s not confusing, but the component parts initially sound boringly familiar. A director-playing a jokey version of "himself"-helps refugee children in Tangiers make their movies, in a series of scenes that repeatedly blur the line between what"s "real" and fake, the children"s vision and his own. This isn"t just meta-reflexive game-playing: You Are All Captains is a movie arguing for the importance and pleasures of a very particular strain of art-house filmmaking that also happens to be an outstanding example of it.
That tradition isn"t necessarily the kind of hybridized, artful documentaries Dennis Lim wrote about recently. Despite its presence at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, MO this year (a fest devoted solely to documentaries, which just finished its eighth annual run; this was my second time attending), director Oliver Laxe cautioned during an introduction that everything here is, in fact, false. Laxe"s film was mentioned in Lim"s piece, as was Abbas Kiarostami, whose frequently exposes its own artifice. Taste of Cherry ends by exposing the set, and all of Close-Up plays with overtly blurring the line between reenactment, staged reality and actual trial footage.