Documentary film

Two 'Documentary film' stories July 2014 - March 2015

‘Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine’ documentary debuts at SXSW today

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7hP47HogmY]

Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s documentary about Steve Jobs. The film debuts at SXSW this month.

Sometimes I lose count of the movies about Steve Jobs but I’m pretty sure this one wasn’t on my radar until recently. Premiering at SXSW today is “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine”, a documentary funded by CNN and directed by Alex Gibney, who is just off releasing a controversial Scientology exposé “Going Clear”.

Alex Gibney is one of America’s pre-eminent filmmakers. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side and was nominated for Enron:The Smartest Guys in the Room. Most recently Mea Maxima Culpa:Silence in the House of God won three Emmys and a Peabody. This spring Going Clear:Scientology and the Prison of Belief and a Sinatra doc miniseries airs on HBO.

Reading the Q&As at Variety and Hollywood Reporter, it appears that this isn’t going to be a love-fest like the new book. Still, given the subject matter and the brief clip above, I’m intrigued…

Steve Jobs- The Man in the Machine

Update: notes from the film, which we can now confirm doesn’t cast a good light on the Apple founder follow. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Apple Employees who attended the film walked out:

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Changing the lives of people with Alzheimer’s, one iPod and one playlist at a time

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVkrI1R0XjA]

Alive Inside, a documentary film being shown in selected theaters across the U.S., tells the story of a social worker using iPods and personalized playlists to bring new life to nursing home residents with Alzheimer’s.

Dan Cohen puts together playlists of music from when the patients were young, transfers them to an iPod and then plays them to patients who had been unresponsive to conversation, generating dramatic transformations, reports Re/code.

Audiences first encounter Henry hunched over in his wheelchair, head down, hands clasped firmly together, unresponsive to the world around him.

As soon as a pair of headphones are placed on his head, the 94-year-old dementia patient opens his eyes, sits up straight and begins swaying and humming along with the music. Henry speaks animatedly about his favorite band leader, Cab Calloway, and even begins to emulate the jazz artist’s style of scat singing — at one point launching into a rendition of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

Cohen discovered that music tapped into parts of the brain that could not be reached in other ways, and could revitalize people even in late-stage dementia, “demonstrating music’s ability to combat memory loss and restore a deep sense of self to those suffering from it.”

Described as “a joyous cinematic exploration of music’s capacity to reawaken our souls and uncover the deepest parts of our humanity,” Alive Inside won the Audience Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Apple is reportedly helping to promote the film, and a list of theaters where the film can be seen is available here.