HRWIFF + Manufactured Landscapes.

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival rolls on in New York through June 28, while one of its selections, Manufactured Landscapes, carries on playing at Film Forum through July 3.

"The screening of the New Visions program at this year's HRWIFF marks the inauguration of the series showcasing upcoming documentaries that were made in collaboration with the Sundance Documentary Film Program." Acquarello samples two previews. As for Manufactured Landscapes, "Inevitably, what emerges from [Edward] Burtynsky's sublime, yet implicitly ignoble transformed landscapes is an uneasy self-reflection that exposes our own implication in perpetuating these insatiable cycles of consumption and (non)disposal, a reminder that the price of industrialization is not a finite measure, but a fulcrum point in a zero sum ecological balance."

"Our Daily Bread discovers otherworldly environments and depersonalized regiments behind the curtain of modern agricultural processes; Manufactured Landscapes investigates those of the entire world," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for indieWIRE.

"Manufactured Landscapes may tell you more about how the 21st century world actually works than you really want to know, but it's a heartbreaking, beautiful, awful and awesome film," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

"When put into a broader social context—specifically, when [director Jennifer] Baichwal explores the origins and consequences of all the waste Burtynsky finds—the movie becomes yet another 'isn't it a pity' doc, where the damnable inequity of globalization provides an occasion for muted, impotent rage," writes the AV Club's Noel Murray. "There have been good documentaries made in that mold, but they all explored the subject in more depth."

"Its attention to visual style, rare for a contemporary documentary, pays off," writes Steve Erickson at Nerve. "Like some of the best recent Chinese films (Still Life, West of the Tracks), Manufactured Landscapes offers a unique perspective on the country's industrial revolution."

Recently: Manohla Dargis (New York Times), Gerald Peary (Boston Phoenix), Jason Bogdaneris (L Magazine) and Jim Ridley (Village Voice).

Earlier: Brian Darr at Sundance.

Posted by dwhudson at June 23, 2007 7:58 AM