Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 2016


The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park

Buy The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park now from Amazon

First, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.

Wikipedia article




'The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park' is a 2016 Mexican documentary film by Juan Manuel Seplveda. It chronicles the lives of several First Nations people occupying Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. They rest, recreate, perform, and protest in the park, on land that belonged to their ancestors. Throughout, they tease the filmmaker, who spent two years filming in the park, and use performance to ridicule stereotypical representations of their identities. The film is experimental in its narrative structure and plays with Western genre tropes.

Reception



The film premiered at FICCI in 2016 and received the Riviera Maya Film Festival's and Zanate Film Festival's Grand Prizes, the Mlaga Film Festival's Best Documentary Award, and Special Mentions at the Cinma du Rel, DocsMX (Mexico City International Documentary Film Festival), and FIDOCS. It received a Best Documentary nomination at the 59th Ariel Awards.

Critics have praised the film for its humor and intensity and for Seplveda's closeness to those who appear in it. 'Le Monde's Jacques Mandelbaum wrote that it "evokes the most shocking and poignant images imaginable." 'The Hollywood Reporter' noted that "some could accuse the director of making 'poverty porn' by focusing on so much debauchery and idleness, but as 'The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park' progresses, the socio-political implications of the people and place depicted become increasingly clear." According to 'The Georgia Straight', the film "captured camaraderie in hard times, dark humour in the face of oppression, and, more than anything else, simple community."

References




Buy The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park now from Amazon

<-- Return to movies from 2016



This work is released under CC-BY-SA. Some or all of this content attributed to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1102091818.