Steady Diet of Film

Review: The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi

On its face, The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi is a story about the death of 24 year old Afghani Ajmal Naqshbandi. A "fixer" by trade, Naqshbandi made his living translating, driving and navigating cultural considerations for foreign journalists as they tried to obtain interviews with Taliban officials, mullahs and local residents. In early 2007, Naqshbandi and a team of Italian journalists were double-crossed by Mullah Dadullah, who kidnapped and held them for weeks while demanding the release of Dadullah's brother and several other imprisoned Taliban officers. Unfortunately, the Afghanistan government's priorities were so focused on avoiding an international incident that when the Italians were released no one noticed Naqshbandi wasn't among the liberated. His family went on television, pleading to the better nature of their fellow Muslims to let their son go, but negotiations broke down and Naqshbandi was beheaded. The video of his execution sprang up almost immediately on the internet. 

Christian Parenti, a reporter for The Nation, spent months with Naqshbandi prior to his death. Over the course of their work together he grew close to the Naqshbandi family, who are understandably overwrought by his brutal death--yet composed enough to stand up to their president and demand justice. Director Ian Olds (Occupation: Dreamland) follows Parenti as he attempts to maneuver the bureaucracy of justice in a country that is at best slowly descending into chaos and at worst a criminal enterprise loosely being held together with good PR and rampant corruption. The scenes where Parenti attempts to file criminal reports with local police and court officials are practically lifted from a Christopher Guest film. At one point Parenti asks to sit in on a murder trial and the Afghan courts hire actors to play all of the roles of a would-be prosecution. 

As with Werner Herzog's 2005 Grizzly Man, we get to know Naqshbandi via the wealth of footage shot months prior to this death. Since both Ajmal Naqshbandi and Grizzly's Timothy Treadwell worked in highly documented and dangerous fields, pontifications of the many possible circumstances of their potential demises are readily available. Unlike Treadwell, whose arrogance, psychological dysfunction and lack of concern for the safety of the people around him frequently had audiences cheering for the bears, Naqshbandi comes across as thoughtful, sweet and sadly precocious in the way young people are when they grow up in war-torn countries. 

Similar to Pamela Yates' The Reckoning, The Fixer uses its primary subject as a launching pad to pose other, bigger questions. How can people be expected to form a national identity when there is no expectation of justice? Without some sense of nationalism, are these countries doomed to be a playland for violent militias and religious fundamentalism, forever locking the majority of the population into endless poverty and constant fear? It's difficult to watch the story of the charismatic and thoughtful Naqshbandi, who just weeks before his brutal death still expressed belief in hope and change for his country. But while the ethereal concepts of hope and change transformed America's political landscape in 2008, Ajmal Naqshbandi's life was cruelly extinguished, it's difficult to see a much different fate for his homeland.


The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi screened at Hot Docs 2009, airs on HBO this Monday August 17th and will be available on dvd in November 2009.

Why the financial collapse is good for documentary film

Inspired by the recent fury directed at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner we here at Steady Diet of Film have elected to take a brief break from dwelling on the misfortune and anxiety of the present economic climate. Instead, let us examine some of the good news for documentary/independent film-makers within the crisis.

1a. Venture capital removed from the financing process

Back when the economy was (artificially) good and there were millions of dollars in hedge fund proceeds with nowhere to go, many independent film producers found themselves on the receiving end of no- to low-strings attached investments. This money came from people with little to no interest in long-term careers in the film industry but who were excited to see their name listed as an Executive Producer on the big screen and the VIP treatment they received when visiting a film set. Unfortunately the projects that were most likely to attract this kind of investment were the ones generated from the odious and rapidly failing "Sundance model" of attaching A-list actors and actresses to projects imbued (not always legitimately) with credibility due to their lower budgets and quirky subject matter (thereby insulating the actor's reputation when they chose to follow up by doing movies with talking dogs). Films produced under these circumstances were unofficially dubbed the Sundance model because producers hoped their films would springboard from the annual Park City film festival to plush studio distribution deals.

In recent years, the viability of this model weakened. Fewer films were recouping their enormous purchasing prices. A few examples of spectacular Sundance failures are chronicled by the Onion AV Club here. As the Sundance model began losing steam in the narrative film market it was being applied to the documentary form with mixed results. A-list celebrities began doing voiceovers, on-camera appearances and promotional tours for documentaries with which they seemed to have little conceptual involvement.

Distribution is an incredibly lop-sided business tilting towards DVD sales. Very few films recoup their production, print and marketing costs theatrically. Yet they are forced to have some kind of run in theaters in order to garner press attention and avoid the stigma of going straight to DVD. Smaller films work with even tighter margins to ensure successful DVD sales. Ancillary revenues (such as television rights, pay-per-view as well as the embryonic but generally optimistic world of digital streams) pay out a much larger proportion of a film's final proceeds.

In the mid-aughts celebrity involvement was being courted more heavily to bring more immediate attention to documentaries. Theoretically, the hope was to elongate the theatrical runs and create more interest in follow up sales. In practice it proved somewhat effective for Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen's environmental documentary 11th Hour featuring Leonardo DiCaprio which took in just under $1M at the box office. But this strategy fell flat for Nicole Kidman with I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, Don Cheadle with Darfur Now and Joan Allen with The Rape of Europa. While celebrities are human beings, perfectly entitled to personal investments in social and historical causes the present climate of celebrity culture is inextricably enmeshed with crass commercialism. This makes it difficult for the public to distinguish between an endorsement of a social issue and a line of Louis Vuitton handbags.

1b. No new social networks.
According to a recent report from the BBC Facebook's user base is up 25% from last year. The user base of Twitter, the recently en vogue micro-blogging startup is up 1689% (the only services with that kind of growth in this economic climate are food banks). Without venture capital money at the ready to be poured into new and exciting (but completely profit-adverse) social networking ventures, it's safe to say that already exisiting sites are going to continue to be the main online avenues people use to connect with friends, meet people and learn all about your awesome film.

Independent film-makers having been sternly lectured to by distributors, festival panelists and filmmakers from the trenches that their MySpace/YouTube/website presence is the troika of their (necessitated) internet presence. Having a closer relationship with your audience will also give film-makers a greater stake in how the embryonic but generally optimistic world of digital streams will take shape over the coming years.

2. Newspapers are on their way out and people need to get information somewhere.

As print journalism dies a slow and painful death, news consumption is actually soaring in the United States. The Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report earlier this month. They found that not only are audiences gravitating towards individual journalists (and away from institutions of journalism) but that cable news networks have become perfectly acceptable venues for political discourse. Audiences have become too cynical to expect objectivity from reportage, but with increased access to their own universe of fact checking they are willing to give smaller outlets the benefit of the doubt. This creates a climate of receptivity to informative, thoughtful documentary work that critically engages its audience.

3. Audiences still pay to see movies

People are responding to economic uncertainty by cutting back on a lot of non-essential expenses like dining out and elaborate cell phone plans. But they're not willing to be bored no matter how bad it gets. The number of movie tickets sold dropped slightly last year, but it's worth noting that the gross revenues increased because movie-goers were willing to pay higher ticket prices than they had in previous years. The online movie rental giant Netflix hit 10 million subscribers in February 2009. In their 4th quarter for 2008 (when housing, insurance and stock markets hit crisis status), they posted profits up 19% from the previous year. Even Sony's pricey gaming console the Playstation 3 (starting at $400) trounced its top competitor the xBox360 (which starts at $250) in large part due to its built-in BluRay player.

4. Ken Burns is out of a job

No offense to the Emmy-winning documentarian who re-invented the slow pan of the still image, but the news that floundering auto giant General-Motors was ending their 22-year commitment to the film-maker signals great opportunity for film-makers down the food chain. Consider that Burns's previous films (covering the subjects of Jazz, WW2, Baseball, the formation of the West and the Civil War) have a combined runtime of 76.5 hours and have been PBS staples for the last 20 years. After Burns' six-part series on the national parks system airs this fall there will be an enormous gap in public television programming nationwide. Some of the larger PBS affiliates may respond by following in the steps of HBO Documentary and acquire more films from the festival circuits. Smaller affiliates may see this situation as an opportunity to work with more local filmmakers. Which brings us to my final point...

5. Film-makers will be forced to focus on their own backyards.

We do not need more western gonzo filmmakers heading to warzones to make documentaries  about the experience of being a western gonzo documentary film-maker in a warzone. These films are at best shallow, slight works and at worst self-congratulatory. They shamelessly exploiting the suffering of others for the sake of adding more mediocrity to the world. It's the film world's contribution to cultural imperialism and it simply needs to stop.

In a perfect world, these films couldn't get funding. In today's troubled economy, they might not, which might allow for film-makers indigenous to these regions and conflicts to speak for themselves. But really the chief concern needs to be the cessation of crappy gonzo docs.

Far be it for me to make light of events that are causing anyone anxiety or suffering. But in a time of chaos, when the systems we know are quickly eroding, there is opportunity for us to seize upon, adapt and destroy what doesn't work for us.

Rory Kennedy on Hardball aka why the sky is not falling on documentary film-makers.

Combining many of my favorite things, documentary director Rory Kennedy (Ghosts of Abu Ghraib) was a guest on "Hardball" with Chris Matthews this afternoon to discuss her latest film Thank You, Mr President about White House press corp reporter Helen Thomas. 

The film premieres next month as a part of HBO's Documentary Film Series, a program spearheaded by Sheila Nevins to showcase a new documentary film each Monday throughout the summer. The series also includes Susan and Alan Raymond's (the Police Tapes) latest Hard Times at Douglass High and the Black List (produced by film critic extraordinaire Elvis Mitchell) as well as festival darlings like Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and the Recruiter. 

While premiering on television (even a premium channel that was home to critical favorites like "the Sopranos", "Sex and the City" and "Entourage") may be considered a step down for a lot of film-makers one can't help but sense that in a year that has seen the demise of no fewer than five indie distributors and boutique studio branches (with another circling the drain) having a captive audience of 40 million paid subscribers (which also makes their checks less likely to bounce) if cable television may not play a bigger role in the changing distribution system that is presently in total upheaval.

Of course my basic cable package and I will be waiting to these films on dvd, which are slated to be released later this year.

SnagFilms makes hundreds of docs available online.

The above video is a full-length embed is Girl 27, a documentary (directed by David Stenn) that played at Sundance 2007 and I've been a cheerleader for ever since.

The film tells the story of Patricia Douglas a dancer who was raped at an MGM party in 1937 and became the target of a massive cover-up and smear campaign coordinated between the powerful film studio, local media and local government.

The embed is provided by a new start-up called SnagFilms, founded by four AOL alums the site is a sort of Hulu-style model exclusively for documentaries. Providing full-length streaming that is free (ad- and donation-supported) and works on all platforms including ready-made embeds for mobile devices and social networking sites. The site currently has 270 documentaries available with that number expected to be around 800 by the end of the year.

The announcement this morning of Snag's acquisition of indieWIRE (the goto site for coverage, reviews and interviews for independent films, documentaries and film festivals) provides some insight into how Snag views it's future as a destination site for high-information film lovers. In an open letter to their readers indieWIRE's editor-in-chief/co-founder Eugene Hernandez wrote:

We guarantee our commitment to maintaining indieWIRE's integrity, and I also want to focus on what we can do to bolster our own fledgling social network, IndieLoop. More than 10,000 people have joined that site and I am anxious to hear how we should rebuild it into an even more useful set of tools for filmmakers.

However, since Snag's business model is predicated on theatrical releases being less relevant to both audiences and film-makers one has to wonder if there won't be some influence over indieWIRE's content in the coming months and years. Then again, with several independent distributors and "boutique" branches of studios folding, declaring bankruptcy or bouncing payroll checks in recent months, it's likely the site's coverage would be changing anyway. 

And while I still bristle a bit at the language the site uses to talk about supporting film-makers being an act of charity (bloggers posting ad-supported video on their site as an act of "filmanthropy", partnerships with charitable organizations to entice donations, etc.) this is a huge step forward in connecting a wider audience (specifically the demographic with the most disposable income, natch) with deserving and powerful documentary films.

Previously:
Watch Great Documentaries Online Without Incurring the Wrath of the MPAA.

UPDATE: Alright well, the embeds don't seem to be working for me or for other bloggers. But they are linking back to Snag's site and the streams are fine. We'll keep you posted.

Watch great documentaries without incurring the wrath of the MPAA.

Great news, documentary lovers. Frontline and HBO Documentaries are now streaming their full-length programs free online.

PBS's Frontline (possibly taking a page from the creators of South Park) has uploaded the last few years worth of episodes including the recent Bush's War and my personal favorite the Merchants of Cool.

HBO Documentaries (who recently won the bidding war for Jennifer Venditti's documentary Billy the Kid) will be be streaming their new films for short periods of time. Tricia Regan's Autism: the Musical has been streaming since Wednesday and will be available until this Sunday.

There is also a new site FreeDocumentaries.org that indexes all documentaries available on Google's free video streaming site. Their selection includes Barbara Kopple's Shut Up and Sing, the incredible BBC series the Power of Nightmares, Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight and dozens more.

And YouTube competitor DailyMotion has recently launched Cinema Daily Motion, starting out with the festival darling Red Without Blue.

Related: Agnes Varnum reports PBS's POV 2008 line up announcement.   

Gucci/Tribeca will pimp your documentary!

Great news today for documentary film-makers seeking completion funds. Gucci and the Tribeca film festival have announced a series of new grants totaling $80k to feature-length docs "that promote social change and illuminate issues in need of comprehensive coverage currently missing in mainstream media". Here's the skinny:

The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund is seeking feature-length documentaries that are in production or post-production with the intended premiere exhibition in 2009. Eligible films include those which examine or document people who are ignored, ostracized or otherwise marginalized; people fighting for social or political change; or broad social movements. We are looking for films which challenge the status quo not just as pertains to subject matter but also in form. Films should be able to sustain a festival and/or theatrical run and should resonate with a mainstream U.S. audience. Favor will be given to films with a dynamic and creative approach to the use of source material.

Full details here.

Sundance 2008: the Year the Docs Roared.

I'll go ahead and say what anyone who went to the Sundance film festival or followed the coverage is thinking: this year was fairly drab for narrative films. Going into the festival the most buzzed about films were documentaries (American Teen, An American Soldier/the Recruiter), the first sale was a documentary (Up the Yangtze), the most controversial films were documentaries (Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Art Star and the Sudanese Twins) and the most raucous Q&A was at a documentary screening (Stronger, Better, Faster).

Documentaries also covered a much wider breadth of subjects than the narratives' increasingly cliched parameters of "dysfunctional family forced out of their comfort zone and is forced to confront their differences which brings them closer together". There were portraits of artists that took creative license with the concert film form (CSNY: Deja Vu, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, U2 3D), the ecological (Flow: For Love of Water, Fields of Fuel), horrific moments in history coming to roost (the Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Traces of the Trade, Nerakhoon), cannibals (Stranded: I've Come From the Plane that Crashed in the Mountains) and the black helicopter contingency (I.O.U.S.A., Secrecy).

There were also two docs in particular that embodied what I love in scrappy, low-budget documentaries. Be Like the Others about transgender people in Iran (where it's illegal to be gay but not to have a sex change operation) and Slingshot Hip Hop about political Palestinian rap groups (bringing a total of four concepts and themes that make many Americans extremely uncomfortable) tell intimate, personal stories that never could have been on a large scale. Neither film has secured distribution deals yet but I hope to be writing soon about their forthcoming theatrical and dvd releases.

After the jump are the winners of the Sundance documentary awards.

Related: PopMatters, Documentaries Rule at Sundance.

Scaredy Cat, the POV online shorts film festival choice this quarter

 
Starting December 10th until March 10th PBS's Online Short Film Festival (hosted by P.O.V.) will be streaming free online Andy Blubaugh's film Scaredycat. The 15-minute experimental documentary, examining the role fear plays in our daily lives, starts out as somewhat precious picture of the film-maker's OCD. But when Blubaugh delves into his recent mugging and assault as a point of departure (illustrated with animation and his 911 phone call) to look at PTSD, mandatory sentencing laws and emotional closure the film reaches surprising depth.

I caught the film when P.O.V. bumpered it with Frieda Lee Mock's wonderful Tony Kushner documentary Wrestling with Angels and highly recommend them both.

Review: King Corn

After a battery of lab tests two college boys learn that due to their fast food diets their bodies have a higher concentration of fructose, maltrose and dextrose than blood. They embark on a road trip of the cornfields of the heartland to figure out how so much of it got from the cob into their bodies. 

That co-stars Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis coincidentally both have great-grandparents who farmed in Greene, Iowa blunts some of the exhaustion a viewer is legally entitled to when they hear the words "personal documentary".  Director Aaron Woolf sets up King Corn so that when the fish out of water laughs come they are at the (good-natured) expense of the fish and not the water.  Cheney and Ellis learn about subsidies, planting and nutrition by relying talking to local people, farmers and nutritional experts instead of heavy-handed voiceover. 

The duo plants an acre of corn and then attempts to follow where their acre winds up but find out that one acre (approximately 10,000 pounds) is such an insignificant amount in the vast sum of American corn production that it would be impossible to trace.  Using stop animation (to much less hokey effect than it sounds) they demonstrate how little corn grown in this country is directly consumed by humans. Instead massive amounts of low quality corn (genetically engineered beyond recognition and soaked in pesticides, natch) are used to feed cattle, create ethanol and as artifical sweeteners. 

The film does a fine job of illustrating the sheer absurdity of corn production in this country: it depletes soil, it's unhealthy (for both people and animals) and if not for vast government subsidies farmers wouldn't make a profit selling it.  And maybe not so coincidentally, the more large corporations have taken over farming the greater the subsidies have become, creating a system where generational family farms are going belly up while tax payers are subsidizing corporations to make increasingly unhealthy food. 

The scenes where the protagonists retrace their family tree is a bit of a weak point but the film's minor sins are forgiven when Cheney and Ellis track down Earl Butz, the influential economist of the Nixon administration who drafted the farm policies that still exist today. Butz, who was a young man during the Depression, now sees how little Americans spend on food as one of his greatest achievements. He's an economist through and through and Cheney and Ellis opt to not challenge his ideas (he's elderly but still quite sharp) on whether this savings is serving the greater good, no doubt thinking of how terrible Michael Moore came off haranguing a Charlton Heston-beseiged with Alzheimers in the final scene of Bowling for Columbine. 

King Corn is made with intelligence, humor and a sincere respect for people and the work they do.  Aaron Woolf has pulled off the unimagineable, making a documentary about nutrition and government subsidies that contributes to a larger discourse without being didactic or boring. 

King Corn is currently playing at the Red Vic Moviehouse in San Francisco and in limited theatrical release around the US. The film will also broadcast on the PBS "Independent Lens" in April 2008.

See also: Supersize Me, Hybrid, Darwin's Nightmare, Sicko.

Sundance gives out cash money!

indieWIRE is reporting that the Sundance Documentary Institute has selected 25 film-makers who "explore the issues of our time with innovative, compelling storytelling" for large grants.  If this list is at all indicative the next 2-3 years of indie documentary film will be all but dominated by three topics: war, more war and orphans.  Let's rock!