Human Flow (2017)

This film was about taking a dive into the lives of refugees, we visit countries like Iraq, Germany, Mexico, Turkey and many others. We see the struggles of them as they struggle for survival and await the opening of borders. As the film begins it pulls you in. The brilliant blue sea and birds eye shot come across as peaceful, like how many films should begin. The audio picks up as you see refugees being rescued from a small boat. This creates an equilibrium and a disruption and we as the viewer yearn to see what will happen next and we wish to follow the interviewed refugees and venture through their lives for a while. But our wish is ignored as we move onto the country of Iraq.

As the viewer this need to know what happens to the refugees we see, grows and grows and this soon turns into being disconnected from the film due to the fact that there is no continuity in the entire film. Like a video game a film must have a feeling of progression so that we stay for the end result. This loss of continuity could be ignored if the film was shorter as the feeling of disconnection would not build up.

Though the film was not engaging some of the drone shots and cinematography was beautiful. The colors were rich and pleasing to the eye and the mixture of shot sizes, pans, tilts and zooms made the scenes flow and weave together nicely. One argument with this is that the director seems to pause on some shots and drag out their duration on way too many of the shots and this slows the film even more. It feels like a slow trudge to the end and it enhances this feeling of disconnection. Some of the establishing shots worked to a better extent with this prolonged duration but this did not have as positive as an effect on all of the shots.

Unlike other documentary films this ones meaning was slightly hidden, waiting to be interpreted. It gives you the realization of how our lives are so rich and how we take them for granted but it leaves a hole in this realization for us to put that into our own context as the documentary does not directly give us the true meaning of itself. This is how documentaries should be and it makes the film more memorable but for me though this powerful film had an impact on the way i see the world i felt distant from it. Following someones storing would of been more beneficial as I would reflect on their whole life and not just the shown images of it and i wouldn't of felt closer to them.

Overall, i rate this three stars out of five because it was great to watch and very educational but it wasn't as engaging as i would of liked.