From J. Hoberman's review in The Village Voice
Named for the spot in Christian-fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire is a provocatively beautiful movie on the hottest hot-button issue in American life: a woman's right to an abortion.
17 years in the self-financed making, Lake of Fire may be as daringly aestheticized as any social documentary since Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line. Despite its surface sheen, however, Lake of Fire is hardly detached from the passions it records. This surprisingly fluid and continuously engaging two-and-a-half-hour movie, which Kaye shot himself in luminous black-and-white and almost entirely in 35mm, is at once monumental and ghostly, further dematerialized by Anne Dudley's ethereal score.
Lake of Fire is, in one sense, a travelogue through a battle-scarred terrain contested by religious fundamentalists and beleaguered feminists—none of whom are shy in addressing Kaye's camera or getting in some counterdemonstrator's face. Turf wars are literal. Zealots stake out abortion clinics by buying adjacent property. Faith promotes violence, rhetorical and otherwise. Abortion is repeatedly compared to the Holocaust. Doctors wear bulletproof vests; extremists threaten to use truck bombs.
Kaye is not Michael Moore. Lake of Fire provides no overt overview, only variations on the same conflict. As filmmaking, it's largely noncoercive, allowing viewers ample time to read the faces and study the performances of sundry American types. Everyone thinks that this is—or should be—a free country, but there's no agreement as to what that means. As Kaye draws the lines, the ultimate distinction is not between pro-choice and pro-life, but between those who articulate moral unease and those who speak with absolute conviction.
Kaye is unflinching in showing an abortion's gruesome fetal remains, as well as graphic images of women who died during self-induced abortions. And nothing appears out of context: In the movie's final section, a battered woman named Stacy and the lumpen-looking guy who impregnated her go for an abortion in an empty downtown moonscape. Surveillance cameras track the couple as they enter the building. Stacy is extensively prepped, as are we; the procedure is then documented to its end.
Lake of Fire may be a mirror for the viewer's particular burning convictions, but it has no brief for total certainty. For a movie that shows the unshowable and might well induce a migraine given the pounding conviction with which God's will is invoked, Kaye's jeremiad is remarkably non-judgmental. The movie is shot in black and white, but projects as shades of gray.
http://rapidshare.com/files/154144042/TK-LOF.part01.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/154148703/TK-LOF.part02.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/154190960/TK-LOF.part10.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/154197100/TK-LOF.part11.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/154203426/TK-LOF.part12.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/154209730/TK-LOF.part13.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/154216028/TK-LOF.part14.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/154216659/TK-LOF.part15.rar
no pass
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