Ernest Hardy

Mama Africa

Pan African Film Festival 2012

Ernest Hardy
The mission of the Pan African Film and Arts Festival puts it between the rock and hard place of being both a film festival and a cultural booster, two tacks that don't always sync up smoothly. Its organizers want to bring you the best film fare from across the African......
Pariah director Dee Rees; Credit: PHOTO BY KEVIN SCANLON

Dee Rees, Director of Pariah, Interviewed

Ernest Hardy
One of the biggest success stories of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival was writer-director Dee Rees' film Pariah, about 17-year-old black lesbian Alike (pronounced Ah-lee-kay, played by Adepero Oduye) and her struggles to forge an identity from the constricting butch/femme palette. Her best friend, Laura (a scene-stealing Pernell Walker), has......
Kinyarwanda

Kinyarwanda Review

Ernest Hardy
One of the goals of writer-director Alrick Brown's Kinyarwanda, set in the midst of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, is to remind us that ordinary human dramas continue unfolding against the backdrop of unthinkable horrors. So as machete-wielding madmen are slaughtering their countrymen and -women, teenagers are falling in love (even......

Dzi Croquettes review

Ernest Hardy
There's a wonderful moment in the documentary DZI Croquettes in which footage of half-nude androgynous men dancing up a storm onstage—faces slathered in makeup—is superimposed over grim-faced soldiers marching down the street, serving as muscle for the dictatorship then running Brazil. Merged, the images underscore the fact that both the......

The Big Fix review

Ernest Hardy
Josh Tickell, a Louisiana native, had two questions he wanted answered when he set out to make his documentary: What were we not told by the media in the days and weeks immediately following the April 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and what haven't we......

Under Fire: Journalists in Combat review

Ernest Hardy
One of the first things explained in director Martyn Burke's documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat is that war correspondents and photojournalists only wear clothing made of wool or cotton; if they're caught in a fire or explosion, synthetic fabrics would melt into their skin and have to be scraped......

An African Election Review

Ernest Hardy
  “None of the parties are offering a paradigm shift,” says a Ghanaian political analyst on the eve of the nation’s 2008 presidential election. “All of the parties promise to do the same thing, but some promise…better than others.” Jarreth Merz’s documentary on the election starts entertainingly but conventionally. We’re......

Silenced Review

Ernest Hardy
Often brutal to watch, director Hwang Dong-Hyuk’s Silenced is based on a news story that shocked Korea in 2005, when it was revealed that students in a school for deaf children had been abused for years. In the film, the abuse comes to light when Kang In-Ho (Gong Yoo), a......
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Oranges and Sunshine Review

Ernest Hardy
Based on the true story of the collusion between British and Australian governments to illegally ship tens of thousands of children from the U.K. to Australia for more than a century, well into the late 1960s, Oranges and Sunshine is thrillingly efficient filmmaking. That's not the "damning with faint praise"......
Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone; Credit: PHOTO BY CHRISTIAN PITOT

Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone Review

Ernest Hardy
"They should have been the band that went way beyond any of us who were influenced by them," says Primus' Les Claypool about groundbreaking African-American band Fishbone in the documentary Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone. The film, co-directed by Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler, is a love letter to......