Kinematoscope

Time to play a guessing game with Doc short, which I haven't seen and aren't playing near me anytime soon (or ever). Let's go with titles and quick summaries, and then pick the most depressing one!

1. China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province
Watch it on YouTube

Examines the fallout from the 2008 Sichaun earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people. An estimated 7,000 poorly-structured schoolrooms collapsed, and the Chinese government has downplayed and distorted the facts about the exact number of families that lost their only child (due to the one-child policy) because of these so-called "tofu-dregs schoolhouses."

2. The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner

Former Governor of Washington Booth Gardner leads the fight for assisted suicide laws while suffering from Parkinson's. This film doesn't even have a trailer on the web yet...

3. The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant
Trailer on YouTube

Pretty self-explanatory from the title. It looks like it includes plenty of shots of former workers looking at the camera Errol-Morris-style and trying not to cry.

4. Music by Prudence

Prudence Mabhena, an unlikely singer from Zimbabwe born with arthrogryposis- an affliction of the joints and limbs that left her little more than a torso and head.

5. Rabbit à la Berlin
Trailer on YouTube

The story of the rabbits that lived happily in the Death Zone of the Berlin Wall until it fell. It looks like a black and white, live action Watership Down with Soviets.


So to sum up, earthquake victims, euthanasia, job loss, disabled Zimbabwean singer, and Berliner bunnies. If we're talking relevance, it's clearly either Disaster or Last Truck, and I'm willing to bet that the recent disaster in Haiti gives the win to the former.