Voices of Bam
6 May 2006, early afternoon
Voices of Bam was far too art-house, even for someone who loves movies as much as myself. It was a very well done film, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s very hard for documentaries to be as uninformative as Voices of Bam was, and still work. This was the first film I’ve seen at Hotdocs, and I have seen around 15 now between the 2 years I have been going, that I have seen people walk out of — a fair number of people. The movie was very similar to Elephant, Battle in Heaven and “The Forsaken Land“/blog/the-forsaken-land in its style: long drawn out scenes; very few cuts; very little dialog. What dialog there is in the film is mostly survivors speaking to their dead relatives. It struck me as very unnatural. The film has a few touching moments, but for the most part just doesn’t work — at least in my humble moving-going opinion. I understand what the director was going for, but it really felt far too forced to me. Shima and her mom also disliked the film. The movie is interesting if only because it is so different than the other documentaries i’ve seen this year. Still, it’s not really enough to make the film worth watching in my opinion; it’s far too slow.