Simply Perfect

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

CITY OF GHOSTS is a documentary that truly opens the eyes of the viewer and teaches them something about a little-known, little-reported situation. It's a story that follows citizen journalists at work in the besieged streets of Raqqa, Syria, after ISIS invade the city and put it under their control. Oppression and barbarity are the order of the day, shown through unflinching documentary detail. This frightening story follows a bunch of hero journalists, both in Raqqa and abroad, as they seek to raise awareness of the plight of their home city. It's thoroughly watchable and moving, although the material is a little stretched.

Having won a national award for journalism, I was feeling really pumped about me until I saw the journalists in City of Ghosts. Here are heroes who leave me breathless in awe of their courage fighting Isis in its home, Raqqa. A formerly docile town, it changed with the emergence of ISIS tanks in 2014 after the remarkable Arab Spring of 2012. The citizen journalists, RBSS (Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently), begin fighting in earnest when they realize ISIS has taken control because of the vacuum of power after that Spring. This doc is almost exclusively a chronicle of their struggle to remain viable after ISIS zeroed in on them and began torturing and beheading relatives and friends.So the heroism is much more personal than fighting ISIS; it is about good people combating an implacable foe at the expense of their families and themselves. When the doc shows a fighter watching a video of his father being assassinated and when at the end of the film a fighter shakes in guilt and fear over having survived and his friends didn't because he escaped from Raqqa, the audience is witnessing a reality show like no other our poor commercial fluff gives us in that name.The depressing element of this is how successful ISIS has been because of the Hollywood production type elements in these gruesome and seductive promos. Assassinations are edited with the expertise of your garden-variety super-hero blockbuster.City of Ghosts features fighters who are ghosts of their former happy lives, but they are heroes the likes of which we have long forgotten.

"City of Ghosts" (2017 release; 93 min.) is a documentary about the city of Raqqa under the dictatorship of ISIS, and a group of citizen journalists determined to expose the atrocities to the world. As the movie opens, we see one of the citizen journalists of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) getting ready to accept the 2015 CPJ International Press Freedom Award in New York. We then go back in time, to the Arab Spring events, when Raqqa ran the Assad regime out of town, only to then get overrun by ISIS. A small group of citizen journalists puts clandestine footage on the internet, showing what ISIS really is doing. Fearing for their lives, some of them flee Raqqa (to Turkey and Germany), "and that's when the real war between us and ISI began", says one of them. At this point we're 15 min. into the documentary.Couple of comments: this is the latest documentary from producer-writer-director Matthew Heineman, whose previous documentary, the outstanding "Cartel Land" got an Oscar nomination (and should've won, but that's just me). As soon as I saw his name associated with this, I knew we would be in for one riveting film. And I was right. Filmed mostly in 2014-15, it gives a chilling account of what the ISIS regime truly is like. Beware: there is gruesome and shocking footage (much of which was shown blurred in US mainstream media) so this is not for the faint of heart. But it is so important that the world becomes better aware what really is going on there. The real heroes of this film are of course the RBSS journalists who are secretly filming the events in Raqqa and then transmit the footage to the RBSS journalists in Turkey and Germany. Each and every one of them somehow needs to deal with living each day knowing that ISIS would like to do nothing better than to kill every single one of them. I cannot even begin to imagine what that must feel like."City of Ghosts" premiered to universal critical acclaim at this year's Sundance Film Festival. No idea why it's taken so long for this to get released in theaters, but the film finally opened this weekend at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati. The Sunday early afternoon screening where I saw this at turned out to be a private screening. I literally was the only person there, sad to say. I happen to love a good documentary, and when it is about a topic as important as this one, that only makes it better. If you have any interest in understanding what is going on in Raqqa, Syria, by all means make sure to catch this movie, be it in the theater, on VD, or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray.

City of Ghosts is a documentary independent film about ISIS terrorists in Raqqa, Syria, the citizen journalists exposing them, and the power of media used by both. In 2014, ISIS took over Raqqa by force and recruited more soldiers to their cause by distributing CDs. These CDs were poor in quality, looked amateur, and were not producing the results they wanted. A group of 17 correspondents inside Raqqa filmed the actions of ISIS and transmitted their footage to another group of citizen activists outside of Raqqa who would then publish their footage online for the world to see. ISIS caught on and stepped up their game, smartly, viciously, successfully.For 40 years, Assad ruled Syria. Slowly, Syrians had enough and rebelled. A group of high school students sprayed graffiti demanding Assad leave and free Syria. The government arrested those students, tortured them and killed them to send a message. Their message failed and a full revolt arose, successfully toppling the regime. Unfortunately for the Syrians, there was not a succession plan in place to set up a government to rule once Assad had been overthrown. A militant group of Muslims named ISIS took Raqqa and they were even worse than Assad.ISIS launched a three-pronged attack. First, they attacked by force. Then, they attacked by upping the quality of their videos used to recruit soldiers. They utilized Hollywood style filming techniques and special effects to entice Syrians to join their "paradise". Finally, they found out who was working against them and used intimidation to scare them off. They would publicly execute their family members, they would post pictures of those working against them and their addresses encouraging their soldiers and followers to kill them. They demanded that all satellites be removed and destroyed so they could be in complete control of any media entering or leaving Raqqa. They drove around in vans detecting internet signals and killing violators. But a few brave resisters would not be deterred realizing that either they would successfully share the truth, or they would be killed.This is a documentary that uses actual footage of the atrocities being committed by ISIS in Syria. These are not Hollywood actors, there are no special effects or makeup tricks. What you see is real. And that makes this film brutal and painful but necessary to watch. The preview showed that you would be given front-line access to the daily terror to which Syrians are subjected, and that's what the film delivered. It was hard to give this a typical star rating because it's not meant to entertain, it's not meant to thrill and take you to a make believe place. Even movies that are based on actual events are a little easier to handle because they are a step removed. They are recreations of things that happened and the viewer can take some solace knowing it's still a Hollywood movie. I'm not often squeamish at horror films with gore and blood. I'm more curious at how the special effects team pulled it off. With City of Ghosts, what you see is actually happening and cannot be brushed off as a trick. I honestly was not sure what exactly to expect. I didn't know how much would be shown in the movie and in how much detail. The movie is graphic, but restrained. You do see executions. You do see children being brainwashed and threatened with no choice but to follow ISIS. You do see the aftermath of public beheadings. But you are spared some of the brutality as the camera will film the reactions of the Syrians who had to witness their fellow Syrians, their fellow journalists, their friends and families being killed. But their goal is to spread the graphic truth of what is going on and their lives are at stake. I gave City of Ghosts an anticipatory 4 Star prediction. I am going to stand by my 4 Star Rating, even though it breaks my own rating scale because this will not be a movie I'll be owning. I'm giving this a higher rating because I think it is an important film that we all need to see. Not in spite of how uncomfortable it may make us, but rather because of how uncomfortable it should make us. marksmoviemind.blogspot.com