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SUNDANCE REVIEW: Position Among the Stars

9:43 AM PST 1/22/2011 by Kirk Honeycutt

PARK CITY-- (World Documentary Competition) If the Loud family of Santa Barbara, featured in the landmark PBS documentary, "An American Family," had lived instead in a shantytown in Jakarta, Indonesia, the resulting film would look something like a remarkable trilogy of docs made by Dutch filmmaker Leonard Rentel Helmrich, which concludes with "Position Among the Stars."

Helmrich has observed the Shamshuddin family living in a Jakarta slum for a dozen years to make his cinema verite saga. While the tumultuous changes that have rocked Indonesian society swirl around the family, of course, more than anything Rentel Helmrich has intimately captured a family in transition as they adjust to bewildering gaps in education, outlook, religion and even class among three generations jammed into cramped quarters.

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