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June 08, 2005
Another Road Home (2004) ****
My eyes have been aching. I love documentaries. I love watching them, I love meeting filmmakers, I love shooting documentaries. But this winter and spring’s micro-evolutions in film distribution have been parachuting whole bunches of them into town, on subjects micro and macro. In late May, the New York Times’ Caryn James uncorked some fine whine, assuming the mantle of cultural gatekeeper and arbiter of acceptable visual style: "Digital technology has made filmmaking so cheap and easy that now almost anyone can point a camera at a difficult father or a wicked stepmother and call it a movie." The reward through sitting through the less-intriguing stuff, though, is a real movie like “Another Road Home” comes along. Danae Elon’s search Musa Obeidallah, the Palestinian man who helped raise her from the time she was a six-month-old until she joined the Israeli army makes for a magnificent, powerful, deeply emotional yet unsentimental gem of personal documentary. It’s not the medium that counts, it’s the story and storyteller. Elon, the daughter of noted Israeli writer Amos Elon, has an unsentimental and searching eye, and the acuity of her observations in her risky travels from New York and an Arab-American community in New Jersey to the occupied territories and her Jerusalem birthplace bespeaks much love, passion and hope. How much had this man made her the woman she is today? The personal and political, Elon never forgets, are inextricably twined. 79m.
Posted by Ray Pride at June 8, 2005 03:06 AM
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