[REVIEWS]
All These Wonderful Things (edendale.typepad.com)
- April 05, 2008
Full Frame 2008: Two Katrina Films Provide Stark
Contrast
of Methods and Ethics of Nonfiction Filmmaking.
By AJ Schnack
DURHAM, NC -- Friday at the 11th Full Frame Film Festival in Durham,
North Carolina has come to a close, with perhaps the most interesting
contrast provided by two very different films about Hurricane Katrina
and its aftermath - Ed Pincus and Lucia Small's THE AXE IN THE
ATTIC and Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's TROUBLE THE WATER, which previously
this year took the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival....
Having seen AXE earlier in the day, I was struck by other differences
in approach between the two films. Whereas nearly every survivor
in AXE is scarred and on the verge of tears, the subjects of TROUBLE
are portrayed as hearty survivors, wrong-pathed young adults who
are made right by the tragedy. As Roberts claims in TROUBLE
THE WATER, Katrina was a blessing. It's a sentiment not readily
shared by the numerous subjects of AXE.
This disconnected conclusion could lead some - but certainly not
all - viewers of TROUBLE to ask whether the film is not in some
ways a balm for the guilt of those American's not affected by the
tragedy. Whereas
THE AXE IN THE ATTIC filmmakers actively and openly grapple with
issues one's of own culpability (either direct or indirect), TROUBLE
soothes the conscience by portraying a trio of survivors comparatively
unsinged by what has just occurred.
Read full review
Boston Globe - January 16, 2008
Humanity among Katrina's destruction
By Ty Burr
The title of "The Axe in the Attic," the documentary
that launches the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival
at the Museum of Fine Arts tonight, refers to a peculiar habit
many New Orleans residents picked up over the years. They would
keep a hatchet up on the top floor of their house, along with a
barrel of fresh water and provisions, so that when the levees broke
and the floods came they could chop their way onto their roof and
await rescue.
Read full review
Boston Phoenix - January 8, 2008
Casting ballots:
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival
on the campaign trail
By Peter Keough
At first, THE AXE IN THE ATTIC seems self-indulgent, dwelling
on the filmmakers’ own feelings as they descend deeper into
the nightmare. But their awkwardness and their repartee before
the unexpected, overwhelming, and downright weird experiences they
encounter amuse, move, and arouse sympathy. Soon it becomes clear
that their helplessness before the ruthlessness of both nature
and politicians mirrors that of the viewers, and it is depicted
with a touching, funny honesty and genuine humility. This is the
festival’s best film.
Read full review
NEWENGLANDFILM.COM - January 2008
Never-Ending Storm
By Lynn Tryba
Some people think the Hurricane Katrina story has been told already.
Lucia Small and Ed Pincus’s latest documentary, The Axe in
the Attic, screening this month at the Human Rights Watch International
Film Festival in Boston, reminds viewers the story is far from
over...
Read full article
CINEMA SCOPE Magazine - December, 2007
THE AXE IN THE ATTIC (Ed Pincus and Lucia
Small, US)
By Livia Bloom
A living-room sofa balanced on the roof of a truck; a school bus
stopped by a massive barge; a pair of ranch-style homes entwined.
Startling physical juxtapositions abound in THE AXE IN THE ATTIC,
the new documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by
Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, contributing to what is one of the most
challenging and unsettling American films of the year. Though the
chaos can make rebuilding seem impossible, the film introduces
people struggling gamely to reconstruct their lives against devastating
odds. They welcome the filmmakers with open arms, open homes, and
open tears...
Read full review
BOSTON GLOBE - October 6, 2007
Refocused
Pioneering filmmaker Ed Pincus returns to the field
By Joanna Weiss
The story sounds like fiction from a screenwriter's imagination:
Groundbreaking filmmaker abandons his career to protect his family
from a madman, reinvents himself as a farmer in a remote Vermont
village, doesn't make a movie for a quarter century. And then comes
back.
That this has happened in real life - and happened to a man who
helped to pioneer the art of autobiographical filmmaking - seems
especially fitting. As a Cambridge documentary filmmaker in the
1960s and '70s, Ed Pincus philosophized...
Read full article
BURLINGTON FREE PRESS - October 4, 2007
Capturing the tale of the hurricane's aftermath
By Susan Green
Vermont filmmaker Ed Pincus is periodically drawn to a region
of the U.S. that both frightens and fascinates him.
"I only could see the dark side of the South," explains
the 69-year-old Roxbury resident, who shot his first documentary, "Black
Natchez," more than four decades ago in Mississippi.
Pincus, a Brooklyn native who's lived in New England for most
of his adult life...
Read
full review
THE VILLAGE VOICE - October 2, 2007
New Orleans or Bust:
Two directors looking
for a meaty project found it on the road to Katrina
by Julia Wallace
Ed Pincus and Lucia Small are clearly not accustomed to being
on the other side of the camera. The day they finished editing
their first film together, The Axe in the Attic—a raw examination
of misery and hope in post-Katrina New Orleans—the exhausted
directors and I met...
Read full article
THE REELER - September 28, 2007
Axe to Grind
By Lisa Rosman
Directors Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, whose new Hurricane Katrina
aftermath doc The Axe in the Attic screens at this year's New York
Film Festival, harken back to another era of documentary-making;
when long shots were invariably accompanied by NPR-style acoustic
guitar strumming and not much else, when topics were as worthy
and staid as a Nation article and when the widest audience exposure
they...
Read full review
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