SBIFF Day 4 | Cinema of Conscience on the Hill

From Government Misdeeds to Musical Musings, A Slew of Films Give Food for Thought

Nick Kelly at SBIFF 2025 | Credit: Peggy Grossman

Sometimes, in the thicket of your SBIFF fest-going daily plan, themes can seemingly pop up serendipitously. Early on Friday, some of us encountered that situation at the Riviera Theater, where two successive films dealt persuasively with subjects involving governmental misdeeds and brutal crackdowns from radically different points in history and geography.

Waves is a clean and well-crafted Czech drama chronicling the Soviet military action responding with tanks and bloody siege to the Prague Spring in 1968. Errol Morris’s fine new film Separation is a ground level investigation and indictment of the Trump-ian family separation tragedy at our southern border during his first term. It’s not a leap to find common narrative threads between these two films. A certain f-word, “fascism,” hovers overhead.

Separation qualifies as a must watch film, regardless of political bent — assuming the viewer has a fundamental empathy for children. Morris once again proves his mastery as a documentary stylist, deftly blending objective reportage, storytelling instincts, and cinematic flair. He inserts himself subtly into the process, in sharp contrast to another American documentary virtuoso, Frederick Wiseman (who, incidentally, had a surprise cameo in the SBIFF’s opening film, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life).

The lucid and startling power of Separated, exposing the barbaric “zero tolerance policy of Trump,” relies on a tightly woven fabric of incisive interviews, especially with news clips and archival footage and, for a more personal humanizing touch, an initially questionable but ultimately impressive dramatization of a Guatemalan mother and son making the perilous trek to the U.S. border. Once there, they are subjected to the draconian separation policy allegedly designed by Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan, the current “bad hombre” ICE-man. Adding an extra layer of drama inside the machine Intel, unclassified emails and texts are typed out and suggest the evil scheming unfolding in real time.

Familiar Morris elements are in place, including a calculatedly bland but coolly emotive music score from Philip Glass and Morris’s signature use of the “Interrotron” camera setup in interviews, but these artistic touches can seem a bit slick and distracting in the face of the dire subject at hand, a subject which could once again become valid in the next four years. Consider Separated a piece of historical record but also a kind of cautionary horror story.

In writer-director Jiří Mádl’s Waves, we get a long arc of a narrative leading up to the “thawing” of Czech government and the heady “Prague Spring,” building up from roots in 1967 and clamped down by the arrival of Soviet bloc military in the streets of Prague in 1968. The story is told through the prism of brave media coverage of Czech Radio. Student revolts are met with bloody police response and censorship rears its ugly head, but the radio freedom soldiers on. Giving a more flesh-and-blood angle to the larger story, a radio engineer (Vojtěch Vodochodský, looking like David Bowie’s straighter brother) is tempted into service as a mole on the radio team, to stave off secret police threats to his younger brother. At some point, the solidarity-building radio airwaves are forced to function from underground.

Waves is an engaging and entertaining historical-political thriller, with some of the usual genre cliches and manipulative tactics, reminiscent of the East Germany Stasi–related Lives of Others. But the film also serves the valuable function of filling in historical blanks in knowledge of the Prague Spring and its sobering aftermath, especially among westerners.

Biking to Work

For something completely more innocent — or relatively so — a packed and rapt crowd filled the Film Center #2 theater later on Friday for the delightful variation on the “rock doc” theme, The Song Cycle, written, directed, starring and all about Nick Kelly. No, this had nothing to do with song cycles of the sort Schubert wrote, but a multi-pronged concept cooked up by veteran Irish musician Nick Kelly, formerly of the band The Fat Lady Sings. His film had its U.S. premiere at SBIFF, and the crowd approved heartily.

Kelly’s idea was to actually book a mini-tour from his home in Dublin on bicycle with an old musician ally, on their way to a humble opening slot at the legendary Glastonbury Festival in Wales, where the first of two gigs was actually on his 60^th birthday.

Kelly and his compact belongings — guitar, tent, ultra-light camera gear, and a few essentials — tooled along country roads and stopped in several stops, pub gigging along the path — sometimes a challengingly hilly path at that. An important underscoring theme of the film and overall project concerned climate change and the awareness of reducing carbon footprints, an issue for touring bands and other living organisms and organizations.

The charismatic, confessional, and witty Irishman showed up for one of the more creative post-screening Q&A sessions, with bicycle and guitar in tow. Before busting out his green acoustic guitar and performing the touching song about his father, “Republic,” Kelly spoke about surprising thematic links in his pet project.

“As you get older,” he said, “as you somehow managed to not become the next U2, and are just demographically unlikely to do that, you can kind of feel ‘is there any point at all to what you do? Are you just fooling yoursel?’

“I started to think that was kind of a parallel about how we feel about climate change and how, even not as artists but as humans as we get older, we feel useless and not able to add much. I don’t believe it and I think it’s really important. There aren’t enough young people to fix this problem. Unfortunately, we’re all going to have to get involved in this and group efforts, people of a certain age are all going to have to get involved as well.

“So I started to think about these things and it all sort of joined up for me.”