Author: Greggory Morris

TO CALM THE PIG INSIDE (Originally ANG PAGPAKALMA SA UNOS) Film Review

by Greggory Morris • November 29, 2020

Eighten-plus-minutes of exquisite black and white imagery of the gruesome and the horrific rendered beautifully in a narrative using folklore about the ungodly desolation caused by Super Typhoon Yolanda AKA Super Typhoon Haiyan, a Category 5 mega-monster that started laying siege to the Philippines Visayas group of islands, the country’s central region, population 17 million people, November 26, 2013. It shook the Philippines to its roots.
This stunning film short is winning one award after another.
By Gregg W. Morris

Review in the works
TO CALM THE PIG INSIDE – Nominated for Best Short Documentary Award by the International Documentary Association

by Greggory Morris • November 26, 2020

Filmmaker Joanna Vasquez Arong weaves together myths to tell how a small town in the Philippines copes with devastation and trauma in the aftermath of a typhoon. A girl’s voice divulges bits and pieces of her own memory of her grandmother and mother to tie in the experiences she felt visiting this ravaged town. Premiered at the 2020 Slamdance Film Festival.

2020 DOC NYC Review
BLUE CODE OF SILENCE-

by Greggory Morris • November 16, 2020

Filmmakers Magnus Skatvold and Greg Mallozzi exquisitely and tellingly profile former NYC police officer Bob Leuci, who in the 1960s was a member of the NYPD’s Special Investigative Unit AKA SUI, a major undercover narcotics operation. BLUE CODE of SILENCE’s 74 minutes of virtuosic cinematic story telling, nevertheless, caused this reviewer to navigate swells of ambivalence. There is obviously more to this movie than just a profile of a rogue cop who was treated as a prince of the city even though he had a mega-measure of antagonists who considered him a rat.

DOC NYC 2020 Film Review
BARE

by Greggory Morris • November 10, 2020

Director Aleksandr M. Vinogradov’s visually stunning 91-minute film about the Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits’s creating his new visually stunning contemporary dance piece, Anima Ardens – stirring up this reviewer’s collective unconsciousness and consciousness to a feverish pitch. The athleticism of 11 men, naked, whirling, pirouetting, dashing around huge alabaster stage as well as enmeshing and scrumming with arms and legs and heads and torsos going this way and that, rhythmically and synchronously and kinetically, forming and reforming edificial shapes and collages with human building blocks that expand and melt away into other forms and entities was transfixing.