At times, it plays like Veep - if the characters in Veep were actually kind, compassionate, and oriented toward what best serves the public’s interest. Hadid is beloved in the city, a true public servant, and also one who has to grapple with matters that few mayors encounter - dealing with sewage and cemetery issues that stem from stonewalling by the Israelis receiving the British royal family for a visit experiencing the repercussions of international politics that directly affect your constituents’ daily life suddenly discovering there are active gunmen on the ground in your city.īut he also just has to do normal mayor things, many of which are faintly ridiculous, and that makes Mayor a very funny film. How to watch it: Dick Johnson Is Dead is streaming on Netflix.ĭavid Osit’s hilarious and moving documentary Mayor follows Musa Hadid, who is mayor of Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital that is surrounded on all sides by Israeli settlements. In some ways, Dick Johnson Is Dead is a model for facing the future head-on and maybe, just maybe, finding a way to smile and cry and get a grip on what we truly are: tied to our bodies and minds, which eventually fall apart, but also tied to one another. Deep connection and abiding love are evident in every frame, and imagining the possibilities gives the pair a way to picture the unspeakable, live through the inevitable, and tentatively step into the future without surrendering to it quite yet. The result is of course moving, but it’s also strangely joyful. They decided to “reenact” the different ways he could die, and in their pursuit of that endeavor, they contemplated the meaning of life. The only way she could imagine making the road ahead more bearable was to collaborate with him in imagining what his death and afterlife would be like. When Kirsten Johnson’s father Dick was diagnosed with dementia, the pair decided to make a movie together. How to watch it: Collective is available to digitally rent on platforms including iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, and Vudu. In its second half, the film focuses on a new, young minister of health - Vlad Voiculescu, who’s trying to effect change - while also showing the uphill battle and eventual fruitlessness of his fight. Documentarian Alexander Nanau captures the lies told by government officials during the fallout from the fire eventually their actions resulted in the government’s downfall, though that was short-lived.Ĭollective plays out like a chilling, slow-moving train wreck, a study in how a government gaslights its citizens into accepting conditions that would be avoidable but for greed and corruption. Collective, named in part for the nightclub, is an observational documentary that traces the conditions and exposes huge deficiencies in the Romanian health care system as a whole, which led directly to that additional loss of life. In 2015, a fire in a Bucharest nightclub killed 27 people - and, in the weeks that followed, 37 more, due to shockingly inadequate hospital conditions that led to infections in the survivors. How to watch it: City Hall is available to digitally rent at this site. Refreshingly - and maybe even a little surprisingly - it’s a portrait of a government that actually seems to be working for its citizens. The result is not a portrait of a city, really. Periodically, the filmmaker floats away from Walsh to watch a wedding being performed, observe a budget presentation, or listen in as a committee dedicated to public housing reform debates how to prevent people from becoming unhoused. His camera mostly follows Mayor Marty Walsh as Walsh crisscrosses the town to meet senior citizens in a church basement, veterans in a community hall, real estate developers in a hotel boardroom, and citizens at open-air rallies. Frederick Wiseman is a legendary chronicler of American institutions ( here’s a guide to his films) who’s spent more than five decades making lengthy, intimate portraits of everything from high schools to welfare offices to the New York Public Library for his latest film, Wiseman spent weeks in Boston, anchored at City Hall.
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