★★★☆☆
Uncle Howard is an earnest documentary portrait of the film-maker Howard Brookner, who died of Aids, aged 34, in 1989. It’s made by Brookner’s nephew and self-declared fan, Aaron, and takes the form of a painstaking archive search for glimpses of the director in off-cuts and B-roll footage from his three completed projects — two documentaries (about the writer William S Burroughs and the theatre director Robert Wilson) and the feature film and early Madonna vehicle Bloodhounds of Broadway.
In the process, and courtesy of contributions from friends, family and Brookner’s contemporaries, including the directors Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, the film gives us a glimpse into a creative life cut short. More intriguingly, however, it also briefly illustrates the zany, messy art world of mid-1980s New York (cue Warhol, Ginsberg et al) and hints at the wider, perhaps more epic, documentary it might have been.
15, 97min