Speaking Is Difficult (2016)
Harrowing police scanner audios are set against placid landscapes in this urgent treatise on an American epidemic.
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Reviews
What a beautiful movie!
Fantastic!
Blistering performances.
The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.
The title of this film comes from part of a speech given by Gabrielle Giffords, a congresswoman who was a victim of a shooting. The use of her words about violence being a problem is really the only point where the film is clearly political because otherwise it sits back from adding more words to the debate and instead just lets events speak for themselves. For the duration of the film, we see regular footage of the scenes of mass shootings, while at the same time the original 911 communications are played back as audio.The effect is to focus the mind on the reality of what is happening, while at the same time seeing the mundane nature of where they occurred. I mean no offence to any of the places, but they are just regular places and offer nothing special where one could say 'well of course' etc. The film doesn't do anything other than this, and it is a hard sell as a film because it is repetitive in its approach. However at the same time it is hard not to be taken into the flow of the film, and be impacted by just how frequent these events are, and how they can happen seemingly anywhere.It is worth the effort to watch it, and (in my liberal mind) it does try to unify the debate by not making it about gun control per se, but rather allowing it to be clean and factual in presentation so that it is impossible to argue that there is not a problem needing solved here, even if the topic is very politically charged.