a review of 最后的修理店

A beautifully done look at the musical instrument repair department of the LA public school system, which apparently gives every student the chance to learn to play an instrument, regardless of financial hardship. Alrhough the doc shows several current and former students explaining why they love their chosen instruments, the real meat of the film are the profiles of the shop's employees, many of whom were also at risk of falling through society's cracks before making their own personal connections with music and the culture of repairing broken things. Although this might be recency bias talking (since this was the last doc screened of the five nominees) I thought this one did the best job of synthesizing several of the same points of the other docs, around culture and diversity and the embrace of differences and finding commonalities within specificity, and came out of it feeling absolutely upbeat and empowered to think about and discuss the topics presented.