Tower: NZIFF Review The sight of an animated pregnant woman being felled by an indiscriminate and undetermined sniper atop a building lays out the shocks of this visceral and electrifying documentary that looks at the University of Texas campus shooting (released at the NZIFF nearly 50 years after it made headlines). Pairing rotoscoping animation a la Waking Life with an oral history and interviewees from the shooting, this examination and reconstruction of the day is simultaneously compelling and horrifying, a study in the evil that men do and the way we rise and fall when tested. There's an urgency to director Keith Maitland's story that's sickening and upsetting. Compounded with the honesty of the interviewees, it's real heart in your mouth kind of viewing. But it's the little details which make Tower so viscerally powerful; a student goes to his friend's place with a Spider-man comic wrapped around his books, a sign of a more innocent world that was once li...
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