Hot Docs 2019: Midnight Family

Luke Lorentzen’s doc Midnight Family takes a complex look at the morally thorny world of privatized healthcare in Mexico City. And the perfectly charming set of protagonists makes a lot of it feel rather… fun, which is surprising considering some of the territory covered.

We follow the Ochoa family, a team of a father and two troublingly young sons who run their own semi-legal private ambulance business in Mexico City (a metropolis, the opening titles tell us, woefully underserved by public ambulances). They race from accident to accident (sometimes literally careening past their competitors on the way), helping people while also looking to make some cash along the way.

The specifics of the legality and morality are a bit murky (and only become more complicated as Midnight Family goes on), but the film makes it clear that the Ochoas genuinely want to help and strive to provide good care to their patients. And Lorentzen does an excellent job capturing the energy of the situations they find themselves in. At times, Midnight Family feels more like a narrative than a documentary, thanks to its fast pace and often eye-popping cinematography.

In terms of how the story is told, this is “fly on the wall” style through and through. Which helps heighten the tension, as everything unfolds in real time and in the moment. However, I do wish the film had taken a breath and gotten into some of the specifics about who these people are and how they got there. We do glean information about their lives from contextual clues in the quieter moments (when we see them at home, when we see Juan speaking to his older girlfriend on the phone), but a bit more exploration of the rest of their lives would have made it an even more emotionally gripping watch.

As it stands, though, Lorentzen has created a film that is empathetic, illuminating, funny, and heartbreaking all at once. In some ways it’s hard to believe that this family’s life is real yet it’s also, sadly, not surprising at all.

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Review: All These Sleepless Nights

It’s tempting to spend this entire review pondering whether All These Sleepless Nights is really a documentary or not. Of course, there’s much more to Michal Marczak’s film than questions of form. But those questions also turn out to be pretty compelling.

Low on story and heavy on style, All These Sleepless Nights provides a slightly voyeuristic look at a group of mostly directionless young adults living in Warsaw, Poland. We spend a lot of time wandering the city streets with them, witnessing their often mundane encounters. We also watch as they use a combination of sex and drugs to lull themselves in a passive state of detachment, adding an even more meditative tone to the movie.

The film’s two main subjects are Kris and Michal, two quasi-handsome, vaguely charismatic friends whose hedonistic and egotistical behaviour unsurprisingly puts some tension on their interpersonal relationships. There are love triangles and some conflict throughout, but All These Sleepless Nights is more about conveying a mood and capturing a mindset, rather than telling any sort of conventional narrative.

It may seem like a pedantic distinction, but going into All These Sleepless Nights thinking of it as a documentary or as a narrative will affect the way you experience it. There’s room for grey areas and blurred lines, yes, but the film’s heavy stylization complicates things. Is this meant to be an accurate document of youth, or a constructed interpretation of it? The answer is undeniably somewhere in the middle. And while it may sound like that formal non-commitment would obscure the film’s impact, it actually increases it, adding to its already hazy, dream-like aura.

All These Sleepless nights has played at documentary film festivals such as True/False and Hot Docs, yet on IMDB it’s classified as a drama rather than a documentary. In viewing it, I found it difficult to view its subjects as anything other than “characters”. The way the scenarios play out (some of which feel quite obviously staged), the subjects’ sometimes less-than-natural reactions, the reliance on the musical soundtrack, and the impeccably lit cinematography all really prevent the film from feeling like something that was captured on the fly and in real time. But again, that isn’t really a knock against it. Marczak (who has been upfront about the fact that aspects of the film were manipulated, re-shot, and improvised, rather than simply “documented”) has crafted something that feels authentic, if not completely grounded in reality. If a film involves real people and strives to represent the authentic feelings they experience (but uses unconventional means to do so) who’s to say it’s not still non-fiction?

Ultimately, though, these questions fade to the background as you’re watching All These Sleepless Nights. You get lulled into the film’s hazy tone, basking in the beautiful visuals. Marczak, also a cinematographer, cultivates one striking image after another. The film is absolutely worth seeing just for that, though don’t go into it looking for any real narrative thrust.

Atmospheric and distinct, All These Sleepless Nights captures the strife, power, and mundane feelings of youth all in one arty little package. It may not appear to say much on the surface, but its impact lingers.

Review: O.J.: Made in America

Prior to watching O.J.: Made in America, I believed I had a general understanding of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. I was a very young child when it all played out, so I hadn’t experienced it as it was happening, but I’d since gleaned the necessary information through pop culture and references that came up in conversation. Or so I thought.

As I quickly found out after starting Ezra Edelman’s nearly 8-hour documentary, I knew only the very faintest outline of the major events surrounding the case. And every time I’d heard the trial and verdict mentioned, it was usually cloaked in the assumption that O.J. was guilty. Now, after completing O.J.: Made in America, I do still believe that he committed the murder. However, the path that I took to come to that conclusion is now both far better-informed and a hell of a lot murkier.

So that’s where I was at going in to O.J. Admittedly, I think my ignorance on the subject made the viewing experience more “exciting”. For someone who knows the ins and outs of the case or who followed the trial through its excruciatingly long duration, there obviously aren’t going to be as many surprises. Yet, I found that the most interesting part of O.J. was not following every twist and turn in the narrative (and, indeed, I’m sure everyone watching at the very least knows the ultimate outcome of the story) but in discovering the context that surrounded it all and contributed to the result.

Edelman does a fantastic job of providing background both in regards to O.J.’s life and to the social climate in Los Angeles at the time. The murder isn’t even addressed until a full three hours into the movie, and Edelman spends the time leading up to that essentially setting the scene for how and why things happened like they did He delves into the extreme racial tension plaguing L.A., which was still fresh off the heels of Rodney King and questions of ongoing police brutality. And while much of this might not be new information to the viewer, it is illuminating to see it all laid out at once, and it makes the ultimate trajectory of the trial a lot more comprehensible.

The film’s rich cast of interview subjects also greatly enhance the story, providing perspective from just about every angle imaginable. Yes, there are a few key players missing – most notably, Simpson himself – but Edelman more than makes up for that by speaking at length to the people who knew the ultimately unknowable O.J. the best; childhood friends, teammates, business associates, reporters, prosecutors, defense lawyers, jurors, and family members of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman all weigh in. Their responses to O.J. are as diverse as the public’s, ultimately offering no easy answers but making the story all the more fascinating and complex. And Edelman clearly has a knack for interviews, highlighting the more colourful side of more than a few of his subjects and drawing out a few tidbits in regards to O.J. that are truly damning, if true. (Which, as the film silently suggests throughout, sometimes may not actually be the case.)

Among the film’s many other rich themes, that question of truth and obfuscation permeates the narrative at every turn. In seamlessly pieced-together archival footage, we see many different sides of O.J., some of them downright charming. The whole first segment of the film (if you choose to watch it in its more easily digestible five-part format) presents O.J.’s college days and his early pro football career, and it’s easy to get swept up in that story and almost completely forget what is to come.

To that end, Edelman brings such a sense of empathy to the film that none of the subjects are portrayed as truly unlikeable or unsympathetic, even as some of them seem to uncontrollably offer up questionable views or speak of their involvement in the more unsavoury aspects of O.J.’s past. For example, O.J.’s longtime agent, Mike Gilbert (one of the film’s most fascinating and candid subjects), provides information that paints himself in questionable light as much as it does O.J. At one point, somewhat bafflingly, Gilbert admits that he always thought O.J. was guilty yet remained close with him. He seems to suggest that he would have been fine with the idea of O.J. committing second-degree murder, but his realization that it may have been premeditated was apparently the thing that was a bridge too far. It’s revelations like this – all tied into people’s murky motivations, self-interest, and damage – that complicate the story, even if you’re operating under the assumption that O.J. is indeed guilty.

Edelman knows how to craft a documentary that rises far above standard true crime fare, weaving in endless nuance to subject matter that you’d expect to be too well-worn to offer much interest. 467 minutes may sound long, but rather than feeling drawn-out, O.J.: Made in America feels like the perfect length for Edelman’s expansive scope. As the title suggests, Simpson was indeed the product of that fabled “American dream”, and without ever feeling heavy-handed, Edelman understatedly crafts perhaps a truly perfect argument to why that promised “dream” may ultimately be false.

Amanda Knox (2016)

Even if you don’t know all the details of the Amanda Knox trial, you undoubtedly know the name, and there’s a good chance you also have an opinion as to whether or not Knox was guilty. But while Amanda Knox the person tends to incite strong, declarative feelings in people, Amanda Knox the documentary aims to temper those convictions, shying away from the binary, knee-jerk sensationalism that largely surrounded the case itself, instead opting to take a more even-keeled approach.

This new documentary from Brian McGinn and Rod Blackhurst delves into the years-long legal journey of Amanda Knox, who in 2007 was a 20-year-old student living abroad in Italy when her roommate, Meredith Kercher, was brutally murdered in the house the two young women shared. Knox and her then boyfriend became suspects in the case and were initially convicted and later acquitted during a lengthy court battle. McGinn and Blackhurst take the viewer through each step of the process, combining archival footage with moodily shot B-roll and present-day talking head interviews with key figures in the trial, including Knox herself.

It must be said, the construction of this film is incredibly slick. At a slight 92 minutes, it manages to give an impressively fulsome view of the case, covering not just the legal facts, but also many of the grey areas that ultimately shaped how things played out. Perhaps most notably this includes some sobering exploration of the media’s relentless search for tabloid fodder (relayed gleefully by Nick Pisa, an almost cartoonishly slimy Daily Mail journalist who covered the Knox case). It also tackles the unavoidable topic of how Amanda’s looks, sexuality, and status as a young woman played into the public’s perception of the case, and may have ultimately impacted the verdict. And perhaps most arrestingly, Amanda Knox even manages to shed some light on who Amanda is as a person, showing us her modest life back in Seattle and allowing Amanda to share the very mixed emotions she holds about the ordeal.

Considering how complicated and often frustratingly ambiguous the trial turned out to be, this is all a hell of a lot to pack into 92 minutes. And for the most part, it goes down smoothly, zipping along at a good clip while also filling in the blanks for viewers (like me) who previously knew little about the case beyond the basic facts. But while it covers all of its bases in a propulsive way, the pace of the film makes Amanda Knox sometimes feel more like an overview than a completely comprehensive look at the story. As a result – and this is a criticism I rarely give – I think the film could have benefitted from being longer. If they’d included another 20-30 minutes, there would have been more room to delve into some of the many interesting aspects of the story that the film touches on, but never gets to fully explore. For example, I would have been interested to see more about the repercussions the ordeal had on Knox’s personal life, a very human element of the story which is present in the film, but largely saved for the last five minutes of its run time.

And indeed, the film does feel a bit like it’s racing towards an inevitable conclusion during its final third. For the first hour, the filmmakers carefully set up the opposing perspectives on the case (i.e. “she’s guilty” vs. “she’s innocent”) and outline the evidence that supports both stances. By revealing information the way they do, McGinn and Blackhurst very effectively outline the twists in the trial and the way that public perception was heavily affected by media coverage. As more information is revealed, the viewer may find their own biases coming into question. However, after the point of Amanda Knox where the forensic evidence experts discuss how investigators likely bungled the DNA evidence, it’s almost the film says, “I’ve just proved my thesis” and switches a little bit into autopilot. It becomes less even-handed at that point, instead breezing through all the necessary steps leading to Knox’s eventual exoneration, but doing so with considerably less narrative flair.

No matter your stance on Knox, though, Amanda Knox is a fascinating portrait of a person who lived through a true media circus and came out the other side. It may not offer a lot of new information to those who closely followed the trial, but it does offer some fascinating new insight from Knox herself. Whether or not you believe her is another story.