Love, Harold, NFB
John Lennard from the film Love, Harold.National Film Board of Canada/Supplied
In 2019, documentary filmmaker Alan Zweig’s friend Jim took his own life. Love, Harold, added this week to the NFB app and YouTube channel, is a collection of snippets of conversations that Zweig has since had with survivors of suicide loss. He talks to a wife who lost her husband 20 years earlier; a son who lost his father 40 years before; a brother who lost his brother after his second attempt during the pandemic.
The unflinching film is mostly composed of shots of the emotional interview subjects in medium close-up. But the strongest presence is Zweig’s, who is generally off camera, saying little. You can sense him really listening, grappling with, and seeking guidance through, his own grief.
At one point, Zweig wonders if he’s upsetting survivors with his questions about a subject often kept in the silence. “As hard as it is to talk about, ask me about it,” says the brotherless brother. “Say his name and ask me about it.”
The Dark Wizard, Crave
The HBO docuseries is about Dean Potter, one of the world’s most influential and controversial climbers, BASE jumpers, and highline walkers.Dean Fidelman/Supplied
American rock climber Alex Honnold has had plenty of screen time, from the 2018 Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo to the recent live broadcast of his ascension of the Taipei 101 skyscraper on Netflix. The Dark Wizard, a new four-part HBO docuseries, explores the life and death of one of his less media-friendly former rivals, Dean Potter.
The first episode, now on Crave, explores how Potter came up in an anti-consumerist climbing community in the 1990s, before he and his then-wife, Steph Davis, landed lucrative deals with the Patagonia clothing company. Blowback from an ill-advised climb up the Delicate Arch (as seen on the Utah licence plate) in 2006 led Potter to go off his (prescription) meds and lose most of what truly tethered him. He then embarked on a decade that was even more extreme. The footage – there’s plenty – is hair-raising. New episodes Tuesday.
The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes, Knowledge Network
Ed Hughes holding a painting in his yard circa 1950.Knowledge Network/Supplied
To slow your racing heart after watching The Dark Wizard, try this calming, chronological biography of E.J. Hughes (1913-2007), whose painting Entrance to Howe Sound sold at auction for $4.8-million last fall, a record for a B.C. artist.
Director and writer Jenn Strom doesn’t try to deconstruct the painter’s works or psychoanalyze him; she prioritizes immersing her audience in the images created by the socially anxious recluse (who was also caregiver to his wife).
Hughes’s postwar work inspired by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera is still his most sought after. But Strom is equally curious about the early pictures he made as a struggling commercial artist/fisherman in the Depression and what he documented as a war artist during the Second World War. His deep connection to B.C.’s landscapes and small towns are emphasized through then-and-now juxtapositions of his paintings with the same places today. The film is on Knowledge Network’s website and app April 16 from 9 p.m. PT.
The Theft, TVO
The Theft is about art taken during conflict in Afghanistan and where it’s ended up.TVO/Supplied
The whole world remembers when the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, but the destruction and pillage of cultural heritage in Afghanistan has been constant in the war-torn country since the late 1970s.
This new doc from Toronto director Aisha Jamal follows Afghan historian Jawan Shir Rasikh as he returns to his country in 2023 after 16 years abroad, touring historic sites while working for one of the only NGOs a returned-to-power Taliban allows to operate. He walks through the hollows left behind by the Buddhas and finds riches in the rubble.
Simultaneously, The Theft explores the journeys of looted Afghan artifacts by visiting German museums, antiquities dealers in Pakistan and a Toronto artist who imagines how Western museums might creatively fill holes left by returned plunder. But the issue of repatriation is sidetracked by political reality and the fact that many heritage-loving Afghans are in exile – including, by the end of the film, Rasikh once more. On TVO’s digital platforms Sunday from 9 a.m. ET.
My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, MUBI
An Oscar long-listed documentary about the twilight of independent media in Russia.MUBI/Supplied
Shortlisted for best documentary feature at the Oscars this year, the long title and running time (over five hours) of this terrific, terrifying film about the twilight of independent media in Vladimir Putin’s Russia probably didn’t help it land a nomination. It’s now on streaming service MUBI, where it can be more comfortably consumed as a docuseries.
Four months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian-American filmmaker Julia Loktev went to Moscow to document her friend Anya Nemzer’s work at a channel called TV Rain under the pressure of escalating authoritarianism.
As Loktev arrives in the country, reporters and activists are regularly designated “foreign agents” – only allowed to appear in the media as long as they are identified as such. Nemzer tries to keep a sense of humour, but the growing cost is apparent in Loktev’s intimate iPhone footage shot in bedrooms and kitchens of mostly young female journalists.
Nemzer, a lifelong Muscovite, starts to ask: “How will I choose between criminal prosecution and emigration?”
The second part, which will premiere on MUBI later, gives the answer in its subtitle: Exile.