Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: ALL LIGHT EVERYWHERE [Sundance Film Festival 2021 - Virtual]

Certain documentaries have a specific approach to an endgame of a certain sort but then backtracks to accommodate what it learned. "All Light Everywhere" [US Documentary Competition] has some big ideas and is able to correlate some of its thoughts but, for the most part, meanders through a general space of what it wants to say. The inset focuses on body cam technology for the company Axon but it looks like the interview and shooting was set up much more as a product presentation instead of a doc. It is interesting at parts when it tries to subvert in a slight way what it is saying about perspective and perception but it comes across stilted. This section, in turn, leads into a more archival and granular aspect of how motion is seen from the blind spot in the optic nerve to the traversing of Venus across the sun to the aspect of a man doing frames of progression in terms of science years before the Lumiere Brothers. This aspect is fascinating especially when people of 150 years ago or more staring at the camera in a created motion.

Throughout the film there is also a controlled perception case study as well as a focus on a drone surveillance program in Baltimore that was unknown to the public. The discussions include a heated argument by local residents about the perspective of surveillance and oversight especially in lower income communities, which is a realism. However the other side shows new police officers being shown how body cams can work and how some criminals know how to manipulate the system as far as knowing what can be seen. Yet beyond that, the film comes back to a shoot at Axom showing how the body cam view, even though timestamped, has a slightly different view (even though it shows what happens). It doesn't tell the story. It helps create the story.

Writer/Director/Editor Theo Anthony has big ambitions but his approach seems disjointed. From showing behind-the-scenes in an almost meta-solution based context, there is a method but, at times, it feels too much like scissors and tape saying "look at the structure". This is reflected at the end of the film i saying a whole bit of the documentary was cut out in the final cut. That tends to show the edges more than necessary and not for the betterment of the structure. At 1 hour 45 minutes, it is long for a documentary that is not based in a series form or at least tightened up a bit in many places. The film itself could have been trimmed a lot more but as with all filmmakers that is dependent on time. Again the themes are big and some ironies and textures are quite riveting but "All Light Everywhere" tries to be too many places at once without find its true through line. C-

By Tim Wassberg