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Reviews
Chris & Don: A Love Story (2007)
A beautiful portrait
It looks like we will finally be able to watch this masterpiece documentary in theaters as distributor Zeitgeist has picked up the Miami Festival winner for a limited release. Produced by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, a team of longtime documentary authors whose "Mandala" revealed a few years ago a very sophisticated talent in visual storytelling, "Chris & Don" is the love story between famous playwright Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy in the golden years of Hollywood, with exclusive interviews and footage with actors and other personalities. Although Isherwood and Bachardy's was a homosexual love during a time when these relationships were looked at with criticism even in the more liberal California, the movie is somehow capable of setting the sexual factor aside and focus instead on the depth of the protagonists' personality. By the end of the movie you feel so intimate with both, that it is almost natural to want to know more about them and their art. A refined, well directed portrait and an opportunity for exemplary film-making that should easily captivate audiences.
The Sleep of Reason (2007)
Tantalizing thriller newscast, ideal for mobile phone viewing
This series first appeared later last year in festival circuits (presented sometimes as a horror, other times as a thriller or documentary), then it showed up as a special news report on a number of local television channels before starting its official run as a pod cast. A British journalist begins detailing the facts leading to the murder of an unknown psychiatrist whom, we shall learn later, uses her patients as guinea pigs for certain strange experiments in regressive hypnosis. When the psychiatrist ends up becoming a victim of her own shortcomings a number of people, including her husband, start concocting theories about her murder that the journalist in his turn uses as a grid for one of the most intricate story lines you can imagine. Specialists in mind altering drugs, forensic experts, doctors from any areas of practice and former patients, all seem to have something useful to say about why it happened and who could have done it. Short and streamlined, each episode is a little gem of narrative inventiveness.