Giving a new meaning to coming from the land of ice and snow, At the Edge of Russia journeys to the very place its title promises: a Russian border outpost located in farthest reaches of that massive country. Though the focal point is initially a young recruit, Aleksey, the other guards soon become equally fascinating (if not more so) characters as the film develops into a larger meditation on the concept of nationhood.
One of the most striking features of Michal Marczak’s film is that there is no engagement with the camera. This is assuredly partly achieved through deft editing but also evokes films such as Ulrich Seidl’s Models (though here without the blow, gratuitous nudity and, well, models). How did they do it? In an extremely small and enclosed space, not only Aleksey but all the men ignore the camera, going on about their routines (both military and personal), eventually opening up and exposing their personalities.
But the most poignant scene in the film is the only one that is scored. As the men prepare to salute Russia on Victory Day (by busily cleaning the outpost, polishing their boots, and shaving for some unseen audience) they line up outside in the cold to salute the flag. The sound of the Russian national anthem swells from a tinny tune playing on a cassette player within the shot to a full blown orchestra—Russia, as a nation and as a nationality, fills the scene. Yet, we never once see its borders, buried beneath the snow and remaining intangible.
Quiet, yet at times effortlessly funny and touching, At the Edge of Russia manages to not only take its audience to a far off place, but asks them to think about just what the concept and meaning of this place might be.

In People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am, Filmmaker Boris Gerrets heads into the streets of London armed with a cellphone camera and a preoccupation with the question “what would it be like to enter into the life of a complete stranger?” Gerrets chances on two characters: Sandrine, a beautiful Brazilian woman who has come to London to snag a husband and find a better life for herself and her five-year-old son, and Steve, a one-legged drug addict living and begging on the streets. Sandrine and Steve are both eerily comfortable in front of Gerret’s cell-phone-camera-lens, and both draw him so far into their lives that the boundary between filmer and filmed dissolves. Gerret is soon sleeping with Sandrine (who is juggling seven potential husbands already), and filming Steve naked and post-coital with his new girlfriend Precious (a drunk, washed up poet).
There are a lot of ways in which People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am is a really beautiful and compelling film. Gerrets’s subject matter chimes nicely with the grainy, poor quality of the cellphone camera, and the film navigates a fine balance between documenting loneliness and betraying the filmmaker’s own apparent hunger for life. Where the film begins to parody itself is in its captions: statements (not always grammatically sound ones) periodically unfolding across the screen in white text on a black background. These sometimes divulge factual information (which is useful) but other times offer a running commentary from the directory telling us how to feel about what we are seeing (which is obnoxious).
If you’re looking for a typical documentary, People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am probably isn’t for you. If you’re looking to spend 50-some-odd minutes treading some arty, European waters while thinking about loneliness and beauty, this might be your bag.

Film owes a lot to the locust. Well, this might be a stretch. But there are some fascinating early 16mm prints of corporate propaganda films on how the locust plague of Genesis was nothing compared to what would happen if you didn’t dust your crops with DDT. This fear is where Robert Nugent’s Memoirs of a Plague begins. Incorporating archival footage from his youth, Nugent travels to the front lines on the war against the locust—a journey which takes him from his native Australia to Egypt, Ethiopia, and Rome. Nugent, however, increasingly finds himself on the side of the locust, and takes the audience along with him.
Memoirs of a Plague is a hybrid, non-linear memoir loosely narrated by a mumbling Nugent, mixed with Planet Earth–like shots of locusts, all tied together by a philosophical reflection on the nature of control. Nugent sets the surreal tone of the documentary from the outset, opening with a nameless person (none of the interviewees is named) getting a locust tattoo as the buzz of the needle and the classic score are overpowered by naturalistic locust sounds. Nugent clearly is exploring our relationship to the locust in the context of the plague that we are continually warned is coming. Yet, it never arrives. Rather, we wait. We wait for the clouds of locust to descend and even when they do Nugent subverts their mass power with incredible microscope shots of individual locusts. Like most things, when taken out of the mob and examined as individuals, it turns out that locust exoskeleton “faces” can become oddly endearing. And if this doesn’t win one over to the locust, watching one’s vivisection will. (Man: the cruelest animal of all).
Memoirs of a Plague is not a typical nature documentary. Die hard fans of Blue Planet and other such primo BBC television might find this anthropomorphic approach bizarre. Though the documentary certainly isn’t for everyone, some might be delighted to discover the locust lover within.

Melissa-Mom and Me documents the friendship of two women who reunite years after working together at a Tokyo strip club. Yael, an Israeli photographer, sets out to find Melissa, who lives in North Carolina and is just getting her life together after a long stretch as a drug addict, stripper, and absentee parent.
The film’s name comes from the way Melissa’s abandoned teenage son has listed her in his cellphone directory—“Melissa-Mom”—and symbolizes the general sappiness of this film. It’s very much a personal story, and one that can be hard to empathize with at times for its lack of putting issues of sex work, drug addiction, and sexual abuse into a broader context.
The best parts of the film are videos Yael shot while the two were in Tokyo, strikingly honest portraits of the two friends at one of the most vulnerable times in their lives, fighting the isolation of working on the margins of a society they are not part of. Unfortunately, they aren’t enough to redeem the rest of the film.

This is My Picture When I Was Dead doesn’t feel like a documentary, and it isn’t trying to. An unstructured, meandering profile of Bashir Mraish, the son of an assassinated Palestine Liberation Organization leader, the film conveys his feeling of dislocation by creating it in its viewers as well.
Mraish was four when his father was killed by the Mossad, and as an adult he tries to piece together an understanding of his father’s life through photos, old news clippings, and especially the stories shared by his friends. Mahmoud Al Massad understands that the first rule of story-telling—especially when your subject carries historical and symbolic weight—is specificity, and lets Mraish’s search unfold in all its particulars and idiosyncrasies, without forcing it into some pat political narrative. It’s a window into larger struggles faced by many Palestinians—violent trauma, fissures in family, and sense of place—but Mraish remains entirely his own man.
This is My Picture suffers from its own structural experiments, which feel more like clever afterthoughts than necessary to the story, and from a pace so slow that the film sometimes sinks under its own pensiveness. We never get a fully rounded sense of Mraish, who speaks less than just about everyone around him—but then again, that’s what Mraish is looking for, too.

What’s better than one Billy Elliot? Eight Billy Elliots. For those who think this might be an attempt at a shortcut to review a film called Boy Cheerleaders, be assured the film invokes this parallel itself. Originally broadcast on the BBC, director James Newton captures the all-boys cheer squad, the DAZL Diamonds from South Leeds, on their journey to the top of the competitive cheerleading pyramid—the first and only boy’s team to do so.
The DAZL Diamonds are a motley crew of young boys, ranging from about eight to 13 in age, who really love to dance. Some boys joined since they were bullied out of rugby, others split their time between pom-poms and the pitch, while some are genuine Billy Elliots, trying out at the Northern Ballet Academy. But unlike Billy Elliot, Boy Cheerleaders doesn’t only focus on the individual. While the documentary does centre around Harvey (the most Billy-esque of all the boys) as we follow him to his auditions, it is also invested in two other members of the team, Elliot and Josh. Further, these individual stories are tightly woven into the broader group dynamic as they train for the annual national cheerleading competition. While the boys may be the stars their mothers (all the families featured were single mums) and the head coach Ian Rodley (the most unsuspecting of role models in a tough South Leeds estate) round out the documentary.
Unlike that dancing boy who has been previously cited numerous times, Boy Cheerleaders doesn’t suggest dance as means of escape from poverty, but rather as a means of expression. As Ian says at the end: “We just proved boys can do whatever they want.” That statement, like the film, isn’t revolutionary but it’s certainly touching.

It’s too tempting to describe Phnom Penh Lullaby as a “portrait of life on the fringes” or something. Because really, any interesting doc is about life on the fringes. Nobody would make a film about some white guy who wakes up and goes to work and watches Mike and Molly and falls asleep. But there’s “life on the fringes” and then there’s being an Israeli-expat working as a fortune teller in Cambodia, whose girlfriend may be killing your baby with her poisoned breast milk.
Against a backdrop of child prostitution, gun shots, glue-huffing, and thematically apropos consuming darkness, Pawel Kloc’s first feature tails Ilan, a tarot card reader who left Israel to start a new life in Cambodia. His alcoholic girlfriend, Saran, pressures him to get married and move back to Israel. (“Where’s Hollywood?” she asks earnestly, when Ian shows her his homeland on a map.) Saran has a baby with Ilan, one from a father living in Singapore, a couple more who have been adopted by Canadians—and there are intimations of others whose fates remain unknown. With this hanging in the background, it’s the lot of Ilan and Saran’s daughter that rests at Lullaby‘s emotional core.
No doubt, Kloc has crafted a complex, riveting, and monumentally despairing film. But it almost feels like emotional porn, especially as it sinks towards its climactic domestic blowout. But tricky though it may be to parse its ethics, Kloc’s film is doubtlessly powerful: a problematic portrait on life way, way, way, way on the fringes.

There are dicks. And then there’s Richard Kuchera. A Midwestern insurance salesman by trade, and grade-A asshole by reputation, Kuchera’s the kind of callous prick who would make a pass at his brother-in-law’s wife. Or spend a week in bed with a new girlfriend only to roll over and marry the fiancee she had no idea about, whom he’d then leave a day later. But after a lifetime of boozing, womanizing, and casual drug use, Kuchera sets about making amends with all the people he’s wronged in his life as part of his twelve-step program. His goal, as he puts it, is to be a bit more of a Richard and a bit less of a Dick.
Kuchera’s My Name Is Earl-ish stagger towards personal salvation is consistently beset by just how big of a dick he was. His first wife wishes she’d never met him. Former business partners sit there, fuming silently, as Kuchera tries to apologize for the money he stole from them. And his new girlfriend’s teenage son thinks he’s still nothing but a huckster. Their hesitation is understandable—Kuchera wavers between sincerity and guile. For a guy who has spent so much of his life ruining others’, Kuchera still seems to possess the urge to emotionally monopolize those around him.
This conflict, and the difficulty of gauging just how “sorry” Kuchera is, just enlivens Despicable Dick. Neale puts us in the position of someone wronged by Kuchera, forced to wince and grimace and evaluate just how frank he really is. Bona fide or not, the film compellingly traces both the exploits of a life-long asshole and the candour (real or affected) that marks his attempts to make up for his depthless misanthropy.

Josh “Skreech” Sandoval has a modest following on the international skateboarding circuit, but he’s no star. Tristan Patterson’s debut documentary follows Sandoval as he skates empty swimming pools in Orange Country, struggles to take care of his six-month-old son, gets high, bums smokes, teeters on the verge of poverty, and generally does “skateboard shit.”
Part Larry Clark flick (with a heart), part skate video (without all the skating), Dragonslayer brings the bonds between self-identifying “scumbag” skaters to the fore. As its star, the 23-year-old Skreech proves a complex protagonist, at once charming in a scraggly, bleary eyed way, and vastly unlikable in his sheer childishness and irresponsibility.
Dragonslayer is refreshingly placid, letting Skreech grow on the audience as he slowly careens towards responsibility and buttoned-down domesticity. As a portrait of skate punk culture, it’s tender. But like its subject, Dragonslayer just kind of hangs there, inert. It’s intermittently interesting as a piece of social anthropology, or something. But if you already know what drinking a beer looks like, you probably won’t learn much.

In a way it’s still kind of astonishing that the Beat generation remains so present in the American imagination. You’d think at this stage of capitalism, it’d be impossible to entertain the dream of escaping, fleet-footed, across America, effectively dropping out of civilization. But as if they’re trying to reassert the fantasy itself, pics about Burroughs, Ginsberg, and all those other scruffy ne’er-do-wells keep rolling out.
And there’s Love Always, Carolyn, a film about the later life of Neal Cassady’s widow and Jack Kerouac’s lover. There are some really great, bitterly funny moments here, as when a collector of first editions of beat novels comes scampering in her door to inspect an inscription in a book and fawns about its value as Carolyn grumbles in the background. For years, she’s been at odds with all the warm-fuzzy swooning about the beats in her life, whose myths rarely fit the real men. Kerouac depicted her husband as a loose canon buzzing with energy and authenticity; she thought he was a deadbeat dad for taking off on her and her children to go road-tripping down to Mexico with his buddies.
In this sense, Love Always, Carolyn attempts to undermine the self-printed legends of the beat generation. But at the end of the day, it only ends up recertifying them. After all, if they weren’t important, would we otherwise be interested in watching a movie about Neal Cassady’s widow? Or seeing Neal Cassady’s son speak at beat conventions? That said, if you’re a real beat-head, Love Always, Carolyn should tide you over until that film about Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s uncle’s barber’s cat secures a release.