Steve Loveridge's long-awaited documentary on M.I.A. charts the controversial artist's “rise” from living on a council estate in London to dominating the international music stage to becoming a maligned political figure in pop culture. Relying on a mixture of media footage and extensive home videos that she shot herself over the past 20 years, Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. makes it clear that the rapper struggles to reconcile her expansive and contradictory history, exploring what happens when a pop star embraces the complexity of what it means to be a person, a woman, an immigrant, a mother, a refugee, and an outsider that the world isn’t quite ready for. If the documentary is unsatisfying, it’s because it gives us no definite answers about identity, about a reconciliation of self, about how to live in this world as many contradictions, belonging everywhere and nowhere. by Jas Keimig