Doc Watch: In Harm's Way

FOR SAMA (B+) - Waad Al-Khateab produces a video chronicle of her life in Aleppo, Syria, running a hospital with her doctor husband, Hamza, and their newborn child, Sama. This diary, filmed amid the civil war that has raged since 2011, is harrowing but hopeful.

Be warned: The violence is explicit. Dead bodies litter the screen, including those of children. The camerawork is urgent and compelling. The main drawback is the family intimacy she shares with the viewer. The love story is heartening, and little Sama is adorable, but, in the end, family videos are family videos. However, this is an invaluable display of life during wartime.

WASTE LAND (2010) (B) - This might have been a perfect one-hour TV news special, but at 99 minutes, this profile of photographer/artist Vik Muniz and his celebration of garbage-dump workers in Brazil drags too often. The characters, though, are memorable. They pick through trash for recyclables at Jardim Gramacho on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, living in horrific slum conditions.

Muniz, a successful artist who escaped the favelas, decides to return to his homeland and create grand portraits of the workers, based on his photographs of them, enhanced with trash as garnish in the frame. After a slow start, we delve into the various characters, including those leading the fight for the workers' rights. Filmmaker Lucy Walker employs an awkward framing device at the beginning and end of the film, but she takes care to let these personalities take root. And her camera does not shy away from the destitution that marks these workers' lives. 

SURFWISE (2008) (A-minus) - Doug Pray ("Hype!" "Art & Copy") digs into the alt-lifestyle of surfing enthusiast Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz and the family he raised off the grid. In the '60s and '70s, he and his third wife, Juliette, raised nine children (only one girl) in a winnebago that they mostly drove up and down the Pacific coast, shunning modern conveniences and common social interactions, like public schooling.

Paskowitz was a spry health fanatic, still going strong in his late '80s at the time of the movie's release. But he wreaked some psychological havoc on most of those children (who claimed that the parents had sex daily in the front of the mobile home and did not muffle their noises), and Pray spends time with each of them to explore the family dynamics. Each child displays unique qualities, and they have complicated relationships with their father and with each other. Several became top surfing competitors. Pray's exploration is a case study in family psychology, alternative lifestyles and nutrition.