I had written a bunch of reviews before Nate Hood jumped into do some longer pieces last year at DOC NYC. Here are the short reviews I had come up with.
LURE
Very good look at the quest for treasure in a small town. Forrest Fenn announced that he has converted his fortune into old coins, gold and other things that could be put into a 10 by 10 inch box. He said that if you read a book of stories he had published and used the clues in the stories to solve the location riddle in the poem that closes the book you could have the treasure. Tens of thousands of people then descended on the small community to try and work out where it is.
Nifty little look at the people who bury and the people who search for treasure is kind of like a long magazine piece read on a long train ride. Utterly entrancing and the sort of thing that will set you on the course for adventure. A wonderful little film.
SACRED
Shot by 40 teams of camera men across the globe looking at the things that people find and consider sacred.
Sorry. I like the pieces but to me things never tied together and it just seemed like a collection of bits not a whole film.
THE ROAD
Filmed over four years THE ROAD charts the construction of a road in the Hunan Province where Chairman Mao was born. Its a chronicle of the abuses of the construction company and goes a long way to explaining why so much goes wrong with their infrastructure like a record number of new bridges collapsing.
Bewildering images and behavior will have you shaking your head. People can't really be this greedy, this malevolent and uncaring... Yup. These guys make the robber barons of America look like angels. The most amazing thing is that the officials are proud or their misdeeds and since they let director Zhang Zanbo film for years.
I'm flabbergasted. One of the best films at DOC NYC.
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