Most of the time when you review things you maintain a certain level of detachment that allows you to keep your critical faculties intact. You take a step back from whatever it is and ask did they do this well or did that work within the context of what they were working on? However, there are occasions when all of that flies out the window, when whatever it is strikes such a chord, resonates so strongly, that you can't help but get caught up in the material and all of sudden all those intellectual reasons, the whys and wherefores, just don't matter.
Like the other occasions when this has happened to me, the piece I'm reviewing is a documentary movie. I suppose it says something about how well a documentary has been made if it is able to elicit an emotional response instead of an intellectual one. Based on previous experiences watching documentaries I know that the subject of the film matters less to the way I react than does the way the film was made. Far too many documentaries these days seem to be about the filmmakers and not about the people whose story they are supposedly telling.
There are only so many films you can see that purport to be about starving orphans in Africa, but in reality are about the good works now being done by the people who made the film, without becoming a tad cynical. It's easy to start to wonder about the work's integrity when it's so obviously being used to solicit donations. There's lots of competition out there these days, so you need some slick packaging if you want people to cough up money for your cause. Nothing helps convince them to part with their hard earned cash better than a moving documentary about plucky privileged people enduring the hardships of the developing world in order to save the people living there from themselves.
Desert Rebel: Ishumars, The Forgotten Rockers Of The Desert, a documentary about how French and Tuareg musicians came together to form the group Desert Rebel, and the history of the Tuareg people over the last forty years, was able to do what so many other documentaries have failed to do in recent years — make me care — because of the matter of fact manner in which the material is presented. Part of the movie is spent following the musicians as the traveled across the Sahara desert in a small convoy of Toyota four-wheel drive vehicles and into recording studios both in Africa and France, and the rest of the movie is spent recounting the history of the region through interviews, voice overs, and film footage from news reports.
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