80
Variety
Virtually an experimental film -- the humanity is rich, but pure image and sensation are what makes it tick.
Iron Crows
Critic Rating
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Every day some 20,000 people in Chittagong, a small port city of Bangladesh risk their lives for 2$US. They dismantle old ships retired from all over the world. An average of 20 workers dies in Chittagong every year. Despite the harsh working environment full of contaminants and toxic gases, the ships are gifts from God. A 21 year old Belal who left home 10 years ago, a Gascutter Rufik who has devoted all his 32 years in the shipbreaking-yards and a 12 year young child laborer Ekramul tell a heart-breaking story of their lives with breathtaking views of the ship-breaking yards.
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What are critics saying?
80
Time Out by Keith Uhlich
The filmmaking is patient and participatory, getting down in the dirt with the workers (in one case the lens is even soaked by a spray of sludge) and allowing several touchingly distinct personalities to emerge.
80
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
A startlingly beautiful documentary by Bong-Nam Park that is also devastatingly sad.
75
NPR by Scott Tobias
Iron Crows isn't the miserablist wallow you might expect. While director Park Bong-Nam observes the hazards of ship-breaking with a thoroughness that borders on fetishization, he also catches the humor and camaraderie of men in the trenches.
75
The A.V. Club by Noel Murray
The movie has no story per se, and there are times when it does seem like Park is hovering, vulture-like, over his subjects' shoulders, waiting for a disaster. But Iron Crows isn't devoid of natural human exuberance, nor is it immune to the awesome spectacle of a dangerous job.
70
Village Voice by Nick Pinkerton
Park's view - clearly inscribed in his well-structured, practically chapter-headed ("After Hours," "Payday," "Back at the Village") documentary - is that the hideous working conditions and low wages are due to man-made avarice; the workers, though, tend toward a fatalism based in religious predestination.
38
Slant Magazine by Joseph Jon Lanthier
A maddeningly blunt and syrupy rendering of a piquant socio-economic configuration, Park Bong-Nam's Iron Crows is ultimately third-world documentary filmmaking at its most exploitatively surface-groping.
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