The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content.
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Youssou N’dour: I Bring What I Love was shown at SXSW in a 35mm print. Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi announced she’d brought it with her having last shown it in Burkina Faso three weeks ago, and it showed the wear-and-tear of having only one print to go around for a year: it was scratchy during the reel changes. But it was worth it: the doc had slow-burning visual texture and a sense of contextual place I don’t really look for in documentaries anymore. I expect this to be the last time in my life I see a documentary screened in a print at a festival, and it was a good note to go out on. As the story of a controversy, N’Dour takes its time: the first half gives you Senegalese musician superstar N’Dour’s normal routine, the second the fracas around his 2004 album Egypt. Vasarhelyi’s obviously a fan, and she has enough concert footage to show why she was drawn to N’Dour before the drama started, but N’Dour morphs into one of the more nuanced documentaries on modern Islam around.
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