Shot, directed, and narrated by Iván Granovsky, The Territories is a documentary exploration of his own travels to meet various journalists across the globe. Often using his father’s money without permission or for unstated purposes, Granovsky finds himself taking work abroad to pay his father back. He directs videography for journalists and documentaries but finds this work lacking. Unable to complete any of his personal film projects and fascinated by the events surrounding the bombing of the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, Granovsky decides to follow in his father’s footsteps by attempting to be a journalist and capturing the tragedies of our time.
This film is less a documentary and more a self-congratulatory Twitter feed set to video footage. The content provided often sounds like an Instagram post. Beyond that, it is dry, disjointed, and rambling. For something called ‘humorous’ and ‘insightful’ by so many critics, I can’t believe how bored and frustrated throughout the film. The interviews aren’t interesting and have no real thread between them besides some unspoken, unwritten international brotherhood of journalists. The tragedies that Granovsky is supposedly seeking to document aren’t documented in any new way, just interviews with people who documented them or events like them.
There is such a needless focus on the women who were in his life and ultimately left him; entire movements of the film just talk about different women and Granovsky considers the possibilities of why she left or why he was sad that she left. Why was this included in a film about international politics? The number of times Granovsky admits to stealing money from his father to fund his little vacations makes me wonder if he only made this film to pay an outstanding debt to the man who raised him. This self-centered work of an extremely privileged news junkie is a poor addition to documentary and political collections and is not recommended.
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