This is a great documentary and I have nothing but respect for the content including the testimonials and the information presented.
However, I'm very sad that this movie as it currently stands is edited in a way that makes it very difficult to watch and to understand at a very basic level.
"Why," you ask? Because there are two different completely unrelated yet concurrent streams of audio taking place almost constantly throughout the entire movie!
The first is of course the vocals, i.e., the main interviews, testimonials, etc. (Sadly, there is no narration which is a separate issue from what I'm writing about here -- narration in this as most documentaries of the time is left to a third track, if you will, which is silent written word overlaid and often missed by the audience...)
The first audio track is almost non-stop. In other words, the monologues are immediately juxtaposed with practically no breaks. But this is not what makes it so hard to understand.
The second audio track is the problem: constantly, with only a few breaks, is an entirely unrelated and unregulated barrage of musical notes that seem to be intended to make the monologue/testimonials more impactful.
But the music serves exactly the opposite function. Partly because it's so dissonant vis-a-vis the vocals, but mostly because it is so LOUD, it drowns the audio and confuses the listener so much that the brain of this viewer was left exhausted and frustrated at the extra cognitive effort required to really parse out and understand what was being said.
I don't understand why this is so hard for filmmakers to understand: as viewers age, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to understand speech that is noisy (captured and/or processed poorly) and accompanied by music (in this case, just another source of noise over top of the spoken audio track).
The result is an overabundance of audio interference patterns, if you will, that scale directly with the volume level. So, whereas the listener would normally be better able to understand the spoken audio track by turning the volume up, when accompanied by music, the track just gets that much harder to understand when the volume is increased.
Please -- out of respect for your viewers and for the good of the world so people can understand this important information -- and for all that is good in the world -- please remix the audio on this and re-release it with all that horrid noise removed or greatly (substantially) reduced in volume!
Please!
Thank you.
