306 Hollywood feels like a whole new way of tackling documentaries
Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
When filmmakers turn their cameras on themselves and their families, the results are rarely as fascinating to the viewers as they are to the participants. Family documentaries come with a lot of emotional baggage that the audience doesn’t get to share, and while it’s possible to get a broad overview of a family’s dynamics, the full background and context is always going to elude outsiders. There are exceptions to the rule, like Sarah Polley’s unfolding-mystery doc Stories We Tell, or Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s animated personal history Persepolis....