Ghosts of Cité Soleil.

"The almost complete eschewal of social and political contextualization aside, there are occasions when the film comes through on the level of pure visceral experience - as a portrait of jumbled, sordid life in the lower depths wracked by cataracts of senseless violence, a human hell to recall Stephen Crane's slum stories," writes Nick Pinkerton, reviewing Ghosts of Cité Soleil for indieWIRE.

"[T]he real story is real life," director Asger Leth tells Annaliese Griffin in the Reeler. Nick Dawson talks with him as well for Filmmaker: "The strangest thing was doing The Five Obstructions, because I wrote part of it and shot most of it, and [it was] doing a film where you really didn't have any clue where the fuck the film was going, and the only one who knew was Lars von Trier. That was kind of weird, because it was three years where we had no idea where this thing was going. That was three strange years."

Updated through 6/28.

Earlier: Robert Keser at Slant.

Update: "Startling in its immediacy (just how did a filmmaker get that close to these guys, anyway?), it's a scary but compelling nonfiction look at the kind of violent, charismatic characters who often populate narrative films," writes Bryant Frazer.

Updates, 6/27: "The glimpse afforded into their world is impressive in its intimacy," agrees AO Scott, writing in the New York Times. "But Mr Leth also seems to have been seduced by 2pac and Bily, the sometimes rivalrous brothers whose words and actions dominate the film. And while they are certainly charismatic figures, the absence of critical distance adds an uncomfortable dimension of myth-making and romanticism to Mr Leth's chronicle of their violent lives."

J Hoberman in the Voice: "One citizen of Cité Soleil stares dispassionately into the lens and tells the filmmaker, 'I feel like killing you to take the camera.' It's not difficult to believe he would. Every documentary has its own process; in this case, that backstory might overwhelm the film."

Update, 6/28: "Leth's film takes no overt position on the contentious question of Aristide and his unfinished Haitian revolution, nor on the coup - perhaps supported by the United States - that forced him from office," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It's a shocking, fatalistic, street-Shakespearean drama that happens to be true, about two brothers on opposite sides of Haiti's civil war, with a woman between them.... What some leftists may have a tough time absorbing is that Ghosts of Cité Soleil casts all of Haiti's grim situation in the same stark, amoral light." Leth "suggests that Haitian politics - perhaps all politics, period - always boils down to brutal, territorial gangsterism, and that in this respect Aristide was no better or worse than his enemies."

Posted by dwhudson at June 26, 2007 7:17 AM