"June Bride: Redemption of a Yakuza" presents an international alternative to the Scared Straight programs that have become a fascination here in the United States. No, not this one (though enjoy a quick laugh), but prison initiatives like those chronicled in A&E's popular "Beyond Scared Straight: Success Stories. Rather than bombard subjects and audiences with fear, one man in Japan finds faith to be the greater answer.
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Filmmaker Asif Kapadia captures the bracing and startling rise and fall of the late jazz singer Amy Winehouse in "Amy." Accessing an enormous wealth of old videos from friends and family, self-read letters of lyrics and songwriting, archived phone conversations, backstage footage, media appearances, and unreleased performances, "Amy" weaves a masterful and compelling narrative. It is on the 2016 Oscar short-list for Best Documentary Feature and is available now for home viewing.
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Picture your personal influences, either worshiped or admired, and imagine being granted the opportunity to have a conversation with them. What would you talk about? What would you ask them? How would it change you? In the world of cinema, such a conversation happened between a then-neophyte auteur Francois Truffaut and the aging master Alfred Hitchock in 1962. Their documented meeting has gone on to inspire generations of future filmmakers and cinephiles.
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51st Chicago International Film Festival special presentation
In this writer's opinion, documentary films are at their strongest when they merge two symbiotic pairs of traits. A good documentary and its human interest story merges truth with its narrative. Secondly, a good documentary merges its overarching message with art. Any of those four ingredients alone are not enough. In the documentary genre, a narrative without truth defeats its nonfiction purpose and the central message being delivered needs the artistic touch requisite to its chosen medium of cinema. As long as it can achieve those two mergers, a successful documentary can take any subject and give it proper focus.
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