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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
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Finding Vivian Maier I lost count of the number people who told me I must see “Finding Vivian Maier”. Finally, I found it on Netflix and viewed it immediately.
I knew nothing but the title, and became instantly captivated with Vivian Maier and the documentary John Maloof and Charlie Siskel crafted about her life and work.
Maier spent her adult life as a nanny, moving from household to household. Her eccentricities and wounded character propelled those many moves.
She had a hobby. She took pictures, street pictures, and ended up with somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 negatives—mostly black and white. She never showed her work. Maloof discovered these negatives, and dedicated a significant portion of his life to unearthing and showing Maier’s work, as well as telling her life story.
It took only a few images of Maier and a few bits of information about her life to figure she must have been deeply wounded in childhood. The evidence is primarily circumstantial, though. In any case, that probable abuse is the likely source of her eccentricities and her own perpetration of abuse.
Thanks to Maloof’s heroic work, the world can now see this tragic character’s brilliant photography, and discover her biography that reveals stories which, in turn, provoke countless unanswerable questions. One of mine: How did she finance a lengthy tour of the world?
Distributed by IFC Films. “Finding Vivian Maier” is a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking. My friends were absolutely right. This is an inspiring, gratifying, touching film.