Revisionist views
Three new documentaries to make you look again
Remember Cecil the lion? He was the handsome fellow shot by a dentist from Minneapolis, whose death sparked an expose of the “canned hunting” industry, where wealthy tourists fly to Africa to shoot big game that have been especially bred for their bullets. Only when you watch Trophy (1), the fascinating new film from Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau (out 17 November) you realise that it isn’t so simple, and that the hunting and conservation industries are knottily entwined. The fact that hunting animals produces profit means breeding programmes can be properly funded: the “if it pays it stays” model. So does the motive matter?
Your sympathies may flow in unexpected directions, though watching the last gasps of a young bull elephant, they will go just one way.
Out already this month is No Stone Unturned (2) from director Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief ; Client 9 : The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer; and Taxi to the Dark Side). Like Trophy, it takes a supposedly known story, the murder of six innocent men by loyalist gunmen in a pub in County Down in 1994 — and probes again. Was it simply police incompetence that meant no one was ever charged, or were there higher, and darker, machinations at work? Gibney, a fearless film-maker, eventually dares to do what no official review had: name names.
One name you might possibly know is Cesar Chavez, the Mexican-American activist who helped guarantee basic rights to fruit and vegetable pickers in the early Sixties. But what about his union co-founder Dolores Huerta (3)? Often described as Chavez’s right-hand woman or, wrongly, as his girlfriend, this determined mother of 11 — 11! — finally gets recognition for her contribution, and what it cost her, in Peter Bratt’s Dolores (out 1 December), which should put her name into the history books.