San Francisco International Film Festival 51, part 1
AMERICAN TEEN Directed by Nanette Burstein (USA)
Nanette Burstein's first solo directing effort, after having collaborated twice with Brett Morgen (Chicago 10) on the Kid Stays in the Picture and On the Ropes; is for better or for worse, being marketed as the documentary version of the Breakfast Club. The film observes a princess, a jock, a nerd and an outcast for the length of their senior year of high school in Warsaw, Indiana. And to the surprise of only the people with the iciest of hearts, we learn even high school kids are more complicated than their niche.
As motion graphics, cgi and animation becomes easier and cheaper it's exciting to see how documentary film-makers put them to use. Like Flow: For Love of Water, a documentary on water politics I also saw at the festival and loved, American Teen brings in a lot of great ancillary material via animated sequences. Burstein asked each teenager to describe their greatest fantasy and then uses different animation styles to realize those scenarios. It's a sequence set early in the film that creates an immediate connection between the viewer and the subject.
The story is developed in a fairly straight-forward manner, which might deeply offend the aesthetic demands of film purists. But this is an endearing snapshot of the frustrations for small town kids on the cusp of adulthood. And as someone who works in documentary distribution, I celebrate any docs that widen the base of people who will see documentaries in the theaters and the films that remove the "stodgy, educational" stigma the genre still largely carries.
In a Q&A that followed the screening, Burstein mentioned she chose the Midwest as a location because the people there are less jaded than their coastal or urban counterparts. In a blistering scene where one of the girls decides to send a topless photo to her boyfriend and within a matter of days everyone in town has seen it (including her father and pastor) and ostracized her, the viewer gets a very different idea.
The sold out screening I attended had the audience enthralled, groaning and cheering along with the kids' triumphs and tribulations. The film, purchased at Sundance by Paramount Vantage, opens wide July 25th and is likely to be one of the most popular documentaries of the year.
DUST Directed by Hartmut Bitomsky (Germany) (capsule)
Hartmut Bitomsky's documentary Dust is a delightfully monastic examination of perhaps the most mundane substance on the planet. Bitomsky follows the creation of industrial dust in a factory, a restoration specialist at a museum protecting great works from insidious particles, the rigorous routine a housewife who self-identifies as a clean freak and geologists who study the different dusts of the world. Dust may not sound like a thrill ride but it's compulsively watchable and deeply informative. Recently acquired by First Run/Icarus Films (Operation Filmmaker, I for India, La'Commune Paris 1871) the film will be released theatrically in November 2008.
CHILDREN OF THE SUN Directed by Ran Tal (Israel/USA)
Children of the Sun examines the world of the Israeli commune movement ("kibbutz") from the perspective of the first generation of children who were born into them (of which director Ran Tal was as well). The film is told entirely through super-8 home movies shot between 1930-1970 and narrated with audio roundtable interviews of the kibbutzniks now.
Called "the children of the sun" because they were the first generation of Israelis born after the Revolution of the Sun, the Baby Kibbutzniks were raised in a 100% collective mentality. Primary care was handled by appointed nannies instead of their parents, they were never left alone with their days dedicated to synchronized sports and manual labor. The idea of 70 children sharing a communal bathroom and 'sexual purity' exercises for the girls are mildly horrifying, but Children of the Sun is a fascinating slice of Israeli history. The film will air later this year on the Sundance channel.
Feminine Mystique shorts program
The Ladies - Christina Voros's cinema verite documentary won the Golden Gate documentary short award. Voros follows two sisters who survived the Hungarian revolution (and multiple marriages) who now run a seamstress shop out of their cramped New York apartment.
La Corona - the Oscar-nominated documentary short about the annual beauty pageant in one of Colombia's maximum security prisons. Not unlike Errol Morris's protagonist Lyndie England in Standard Operating Procedure, many of the women interviewed blame their incarceration on their involvement with a man be it through drug-running or joining a political crusade that was condemned by the state. Co-directors Isabel Vega and Amanda Micheli gain total access to these women and put their subjects at tremendous ease.
WING: the Fish that Talked - A touching narrative short, reminiscent of Julia Kwan's Sundance 2007 family dramedy Eve and the Fire Horse (one of my favorite films that year). When a young girl's grandmother passes away she comes to believe her pet goldfish contains the woman's reincarnated soul. Dutch film-maker Ricky Rijneke has a commanding sense of cinematography. Definitely a film-maker to watch.
The Grand Inquisitor - To San Francisco film noir lovers, Eddie Muller is a bit of a local hero as the chief programmer of the annual Noir City film festival (read our coverage of last year's fest here). With the Grand Inquisitor, he makes his debut as a writer/director. The film features noir heroine Marsha Hunt as an elderly woman trying to defend the memory of her husband from a young girl detective who believes he was the Zodiac killer.
Since You've Been Ong - a San Francisco-based narrative short about a couple breaking up as a new relationship is formed. The story and actors are entertaining enough but I could go a very long time without seeing another film with voicemail narration.
For additional SFIFF51 coverage listen to recent episodes of Show Me Your Titles film podcast:
#30
SFIFF preview: Forbidden Lie$, FLOW: For Love of Water, Ballast,
Stranded: I've
come from a plane that crashed on the mountains
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