Inhalte(1)
A children's film about the largest mass suicide of the 20th century reconstructs the 1978 event. The Reverend Jim Jones forced nearly a thousand followers of his People's Temple sect to drink poison in the settlement of Jonestown, Guyana, South America. A third of them were children. Jan Bušta gives sadists, voyeurs, and necrophiliacs one minute to leave the cinema. His self-reflective documentary, which is the result of ten years of time-lapse filming, does not depict dramatic scenes. To the sound of an audio recording from that fateful day, we see a collage of child ghosts preaching about escaping the corruption of the world. (Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival)
(mehr)Kritiken (2)
I acknowledge the power of the ideas in the intro, in the repetition of lines in front of the camera, in the challenge for the viewers, which is bold and objectively not very emphatic. What comes after that is just a repetitive game with patience and expectations, which is ruined by dubbing, visual noise, and unfortunately, also the approach of the artist himself, whose priorities before and after a viewing is how many people he can offend and how many will leave. At that moment, the boundaries of creative trolling pass from boldness to deluded intoxication with one's own abilities and makes us forget how much work it must have taken to make Jonestown look like this (ugly).
()
Before the screening began, director Jan Bušta said that the film would make us uncomfortable. And it really did. I was uncomfortable with how incredibly slow the film was, I was uncomfortable with how double-voiced the monologue was and how the whole film was not interesting at all. Experimental films can be interesting and make sense, but this one did neither. I recommend the filmmakers to make a podcast or radio play next time if they want to do a similar project again, because the visuals were not worth it at all with this project. I believe the script could have been interesting, but the execution just absolutely failed. Dear State Cinematography Fund - please support good films that make sense, not films of this type that filmmakers make because they just want to. [LFŠ 2023]
()