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.

Review: Cooking History

It's rare I get to say this, but there's something to be admired in the brazenly honest marketing materials for Péter Kerekes's documentary Cooking History. With the tagline "6 wars, 10 recipes, 60 million dead," the film explores the world of military chefs during wartime. It is both a brilliantly executed micro-history, providing insight into universal truths about war and combat via a small subset of people, as well as one of the funniest films of the year.

Cooking History traces the history of twentieth century European warfare though the stories of food service people. Those we meet run the gamut from a field cook who worked in the two foot wide kitchen of a nuclear submarine to an elderly Russian woman who was conscripted into the war effort at a young age to a personal chef of Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito. Each new cook is introduced with 'helpful' recipes of hearty, comfort food made in enormous proportions. ("Baked Ziti: 3 quarts oil, 175 pounds ground beef, 150 pounds dried penne pasta, 32 pounds Mozzarella cheese, a pinch of salt. Serves one thousand.") 

Excluding the scenes depicting graphic animal slaughter, this film provides an apolitical, strangely pleasant framework for understanding the mix of honor, obligation and reservation most of the subjects feel about their wartime experiences. For example, we encounter a Jewish breadmaker who survived the concentration camps then moved to Argentina, intent on poisoning former SS officers who escaped Nuremberg justice. While he never states his track record (possibly for legal reasons),  there are reports that indicate many former SS officers have been executed by avenging Jewish death squads. 

Recounted stories are intercut with footage of a wood burning oven being airlifted by helicopter to a military training camp located in a distant, unnamed outpost. The journey of this mass of industrialized steel's heroic, yet unnatural flight through pastoral countryside, knowing it will create a bounty of food for people desperately in need of reassurance and good morale (especially when viewed in a festival setting where chances to eat are few and far between) takes on a nearly mythic proportion.

As an interviewer, Kerekes has an odd hiccup. He occasionally slides into Barbara Walters-mode, asking a rhetorical question clearly designed to elicit an emotional outburst. When the Russian woman is asked "Why do you honor the dead so elaborately?" Kerekes does not manipulate the moment with editing to look like something meaningful happens. He leaves us with her brief, weary glance, filming her as she returns to laying meat blintzes on the snow-covered graves of dead soldiers, politely ignoring the question. These moments haunt, precisely because the rest of the film is so ruthlessly committed to finding the dark bits of humor in human perseverance. At first glance, it seems that the two styles are sullying each other. But the awkward situation is repeated twice, clearly a comment about the ultimately mundane ways in which we are able to sympathize with human tragedy.

Many of the people interviewed have had decades to process their feelings about these experiences and many have long since returned to civilian life. Along with the gregarious nature of professional chefs (a world I only occasionally glimpse through the books, interviews and television appearances of Anthony Bourdain), Cooking History maintains enough detachment and political distance to be hilarious, riveting and edifying. 

See also:

• See the trailer for Cooking History.
• Kerekes interviewed on NPR's Talk of the Nation which includes call-ins from American military cooks.
• Kerekes interviewed by GenevaLunch 

Review: Carmen Meets Borat

Before her soldout screening at Hot Docs 2009, Mercedes Stalenhoef explained that she got the idea to make Carmen Meets Borat while traveling through Spain. She met her soon-to-be-subject Carmen, a Romanian girl who dreams of a more eventful life than working in her father's tavern in a small village. The townsfolk, recently duped by the producers of the film Borat, had been told they were going to be in a documentary. They were asked (and did) sign legally binding contracts in English (which none of them speak) only to be depicted as Kazakhistani abortionists and thieves living in comical poverty in a film that grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.

Stalenhoef introduced the film stating "anyone who saw the film and speaks Romanian would know this was not Kazahstan." Which even with a Canadian audience, this seemed like a tall order. Despite her good intentions and genuine affection for Carmen, it's a bit leery that her film was financed by European broadcasters so infatuated with Sasha Baron Cohen that they will fund projects with the most tenuous connections to him. It's troublesome that in attempting to humanize the Romanian villagers, Stalenhoef's footage isn't all that different from choices director Larry Charles made with Borat. We see children getting drunk on plum brandy and the adults are mostly portrayed as belligerent, paranoid and violent alcoholics.

It could have served the story well to stick with Carmen, showing what life is like for a girl all too much aware of the more exciting world outside her life in a place so easily mocked. Unfortunately, Stalenhoef instead focuses on the legal drama when the villagers decide they are entitled to damages from Team Borat. Now, my legal understanding comes strictly from re-runs of "Law and Order", this nevertheless seems hopeless from the get-go. Even the attorneys (apparently well known for winning restitution payment for Holocaust survivors) come across a bit dubiously. Forthright about their interest in their 30% cut of a potentially huge payoff (which is fair enough), they are never given a chance to to elaborate on any personal identification they might have with the cause. Viewers can only assume they do have some, since they doing quite a bit of work for free. Also absent is any sense of how or why they find it likely to win a defamation suit in a British court against a trans-national film studio.

It's easy to lose sight in the courtroom antics and Carmen's sympathetic struggle that this community has a legitimate grievance. And that it's never acknowledged, apologized for or apparently even superficially explored in a documentary that supposedly focuses on their story. It must be pretty demoralizing when your nation's only film presence on the international cultural stage is 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (an austere drama about a young woman trying to obtain an abortion under Cecesceau's dictatorship) and 13:08 East of Bucharest (a searingly funny black comedy about situational groupthink leading to self-aggrandizement and the erosion of collective memory). Carmen Meets Borat only serves to further obfuscate the legitimate cause of a people already facing an uphill battle.

Hot Docs 2009

 
Inevitably at the end of every big film festival I go through the same parallel Kubler-Ross process of reconciling all of my new experiences, knowledge and feelings. In one week at Hot Docs, the largest documentary film festival in North America, I've been amazed, infuriated, saddened, shocked and ultimately hopeful when I see the incredible drive, determination and creativity in this business we call show. Even as the odds seem to exponentially mount against our industry, film-makers are finding new methods and frontiers for documentary story-telling. The emotional, intellectual and physical reaches film-makers go to tell new and important stories never ceases to amaze.

One film that keeps coming to mind as I watch the screaming talking heads of cable news is Ian Old's (Occupation: Dreamland) Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi. The film recounts the story of the kidnapping of an Italian news team that ended in the negotiated release of a western journalist and the murder (by decapitation that was then broadcast on the internet) of two Afghans including 24-year-old Naqshbandi. Similar to Werner Herzog's 2005 doc Grizzly Man the film relies heavily on a wealth of informally shot footage by an American journalist who partnered with Naqshbandi six months prior. The story encapsulates the seemingly impossible road to forming a national identity facing the Afghan people.

Documentary film has the unique power to take the viewer places they didn't even know they wanted to go. For instance, this year into the dark psyche of convicted rapist/heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson in James Toback's new film Tyson. Entirely comprised of archive footage and a no-frills, staring straight into the camera interview with its subject, the film is an oddly engaging meditation on masculinity, poverty, violence, misogyny and how the insularity of wealth can worsen mental health issues.

Read the rest of my coverage of Hot Docs 2009 at Doc360.

The Hottest of Hot Docs meme

I've been tagged by Pamela Cohn to participate in Danielle DiGiacomo's post-Hot Docs meme. I reckon Pam and I are now even for getting us kicked out of a party that had a strict media blackout.

1. The film that pulled at my heart strings the most: This is a tough call, but part of the Alanis Obomsawin (interviewed by Pamela here) retrospective has haunted me since seeing it my first day at the festival. Incident at Restigouche covers a conflict that occurred in the 1980s between Quebec provincial government and the native population over fishing rights that turned violent. In a scene where Obomsawin (years after the fact) interviews the state official who ordered massive arrests of fishermen becomes so overwhelmed by his cavalier attitude towards the fate of her people she breaks the appropriate "interview tone" and angrily confronts him. It's a shocking scene that completely changes the tone of the film and for ethical reasons, should probably not be duplicated in a lot of work. But for Incident, the standoff ties together the themes of lack of government accountability and cultural understanding in a brilliant, searing way.

2. Strangest cinematic experience: Listening to an audience member complain bitterly about the use of still images in John Lehmann's Man Behind the Log then watching as the entire auditorium turned on him, booing and reassuring Lehmann. Also, every single moment of Cooking History. Peter Kerekes's documentary about the history of war in the 20th century through the stories of people who prepared soldiers' food is surreal, intelligent, thrilling and maddening.

3. Best party: British Drinks at Supermarket, definitely. It was the day the Hot Docs population seemed to increase 10-fold, going from a sleepy little festival to a frenzy of pitches, parties, meetings and schmoozing. Everyone was jet-lagged, exhausted and/or recently robbed but ready to have a good time and so excited to be there. Great job, Charlie!

4. Overall high point: At the risk of getting a little cornball, it was the totally renewed sense of excitement that I left with. I know our business is in enormous transition, but when I see how much creativity and drive there is in the documentary world I can't help but be excited for what comes next.

5. Favorite pitch: Sandra Whipham (producer) informally gave me her pitch for her two documentaries that are in post-production. One about the history of the Khmer Rouge with an on-camera interview with one of the top general's in Pol Pot's army; the other about a homeless family living in Las Vegas whose downward spiral mirrors the larger financial crisis in the States. Both films hold great promise, with films like Afghan Star, Burma VJ and No End in Sight Whipham has demonstrated a great knack for matching talent and story.

TAG: Agnes Varnum, Neil Sieling, AJ Schnack, Charlie Phillips, Alissa Creamer.

Hot Docs 2009, pt. 1

 

Nauru, An Island Adrift / dir: Juliano Ribeiro Salgado / France

Nauru, a tropical island with a population of 14,000 located off the coast of New Zealand, is a fascinating and gruesome cautionary tale. In 1907, its rich phosphate reserves were discovered by British industrialists. Phosphate, an inorganic chemical used for manufacturing, became the nation's chief export and sole source of revenue. The island was quickly strip mined, creating a boom/bust atmosphere that saw its per capita wealth go from one rivaling Dubai to complete and total financial collapse over the course of 60 years. And at a time when one can't open a newspaper without reading about increasing financial disaster, it's difficult to see once middle-class people discuss having their savings wiped out in a nationwide bank collapse and not feel your stomach sink a little.

Predictably, the most adaptable segments of the population are the elderly and the very young. Older people remember the time before the windfall and retained some skills of survival, including, as we see demonstrated, hunting octopuses with a screwdriver. The young people, never having experienced the once great wealth and luxury their parents discuss bitterly, dismiss the stories as silly nostalgia.

 

Remote island populations are fated to be stuck in time, but Nauru's rapid rise and fall has left its national identity in a lurch. Everywhere you look there are remnants of the once immense wealth. Abandoned jetliners from the now long gone Nauru Airlines litter outgrown landing fields, sedimentary run off has killed much of the local marine life and 70% of the population has been diagnosed with diabetes after the immediate intake of rich food prompted abandonment of native diets.

The film could be a little tighter with its explanation of the role colonialism (the sovereignty of Nauru was traded back and forth between six countries) vs. independence played into its undoing. When Nauru achieved full independence in the mid-1960s, phosphate production was ramped up exponentially. But it's hard to imagine that Germany or Britain would have taken much of an interest in maintaining the health and well-being of the Nauru people had the phosphate run out on their watch, regardless of the efficiency of the production.

Director Juliano Ribeiro Salgado has made two choices that could be barriers for some viewers. First, he shot with a consumer-grade digital camera that led to some very grainy images being over-corrected in post-production. Second, the audience has to endure a ponderous twenty minutes before getting enough of an explanation about Nauru to understand what happened. There's an excellent postscript that details dates, facts and figures. Why not use this as the beginning of the film? However, there's something to be said for a director who managed to get to Nauru (a topic that is never discussed). Sadly, these images of a paradise squandered will likely outlive the native population of Nauru.

• See also: This American Life - The Middle of Nowhere a recent story on the current state of Nauru.

Zombie Girl / dir: Justin Johnson, Aaron Marshall, Rick Mauck / United States

Perhaps I was a bit hasty. When I saw in the opening credits that Zombie Girl listed three people as director, I immediately hunkered down for what was sure to be a complete clusterfuck of a story but Justin Johnson, Aaron Marshall and Rick Mauck have created a touching portrait of an aspiring artist and the parents who love her.

Emily Hagins is a 13 year old girl who is making a feature-length zombie film. Growing up in Austin, TX, a hotbed for DIY film-making, she has aww-inspiring parents who, with some mild amusement and exhaustive determination to help her succeed, support her creative endeavors.

As in most film-making ventures, the real antagonist in Emily's story is life itself. The bevy of adult mentors who have advised and tutored her along the way are quick to point out not that she presents any great level of innate talent for film-making but that her determination and enthusiasm (and preternatural gift to network) is hard not to cheer for. But emphasizing the need for organization and preparation and the danger of getting caught up in frustrations is a difficult message to convey to film-makers twice Emily's age. As the obstacles begin to pile up (stars being grounded, falling behind on homework and ceaseless technical problems), we see that the greatest barrier to film-making may be finding the wherewithall to finish a project at all.

 

The directors pay due respect to the spectacle of a 13 year old girl directing a feature-length zombie film. But once the precociousness is established, Zombie Girl becomes a smart, surprisingly emotionally engaging story. It is as much about quixotic film-making ventures as it is about the relationship between a mother and daughter at a time when the child begins to pull away. Viewers are privy to the complicated feelings of pride and despair that can result, especially for the parent of an only child. There's some editing acrobatics done at times to make Emily's mother Megan seem somewhat villainous, but she later speaks with such candor about her love of child-rearing that I found myself getting a little misty as I noticed the girl's growth spurt halfway through the film.

The film is bolstered by an extremely keen eye for visuals (Johnson and Mauck are also listed as cinematographers). As well as a charming and energetic set of titles, which update the viewer on the passage of time by using blood-soaked stuffed animals that gaze helplessly at the viewer. The directors also clearly established an excellent rapport with the actors and crew of Emily's film. Many times child subjects in documentaries can have their raw enthusiasm reduced to naive inarticulateness, but even in their brief screentime, each participant comes across as a strong voice in the process.

 

65 Red Roses / dir: Philip Lyall, Nimisha Mukerji / Canada

65 Red Roses follows Eva Markvoort, a young woman with cystic fibrosis and the relationships she's formed online with two other teenagers battling the disease. Because super-viruses can develop in compromised immune systems, CF patients are forbidden to interact with one another face to face. Yet since they are statistically destined to be dead by the time they're 19 years old, it's hard to imagine who else could provide better emotional support than other people experiencing it. The film at times feels oddly nostalgic for the 90s, when stories about the power of the internet to connect people still seemed hopeful, rather than having a predatory tinge.

The horror of the draconian treatments available to people with this vicious disease has to be seen to be belived. In a hundred years, how will the medical community view practices such as shoving tubes down patients' noses and throats for weekly mucous-suckage, vibrating vests patients are assigned to wear at home or making very sick people run on treadmills until they vomit to test oxygen levels in their lungs? It boggles the mind that these are the best treatments available today.

 

Ultimately, 65 Red Roses is very smart documentary about the medical implications of class that never stoops to activist language like "socio-economic" or "access to healthcare". At a time when the film community is arguing about the Neo-Neo-Realist happenings in independent narrative film, a movement driven by a handful of films depicting life on the margins, I'm grateful someone like working class Meg Moore in Portland, OR (with its state-subsidized healthcare programs falling cruelly short in comparison to middle-class Eva's treatment in Vancouver, BC) get to tell her own story.

Meg is stuck in a cruel, downward cycle. Because she is poor she only has access to lower quality health care. She is poor in part because she has no family in her life. And because she doesn't have a strong emotional support system, she doesn't care enough about her future to put her name on the transplant list. It's a depiction of the psychological scars of poverty that is so unmistakable and intimate it would seem crass in narrative form.

65 Red Roses will likely push a lot of the same buttons as Nanette Burstein's high school documentary American Teen. There are at least two scenes that are incredibly stage-y (if are not outright reenactments), providing only unnecessary melodrama. Leaving aside this largely academic controversy, however, this film matters. It certainly deserves to be picked up for distribution.

San Francisco International Film Festival 52, pt. 1

 

Kimjongilia / N.C. Heikin / USA, S. Korea, France

In the wake of yet another empty exercise of aggression from North Korea, it's difficult not to look at Kimjongilia, the directorial debut from N.C. Heikin, through unfairly expectant eyes. This mentally ill dictator has murdered hundreds of thousands of people, wrecked havoc on Asia's stability and could do untold further damage to the world before he passes on to the next life. But because he is short, has a funny hairstyle and orchestrates propaganda efforts that are patently absurd to outsiders, Kim Jong-il is depicted more like a cartoon character than the very real menace that he is.

Which is what makes a film like Kimjongilia a bit frustrating. Made over the course of 10 years, the first half of the film focuses on cataloging horrific personal stories and then shifts gears, focusing on prison camps where people are held indeterminately for vague or undefined crimes. The two sections are hinged together with a very smart, animated timeline providing an overview of Korean history.

Interesting geopolitical implications abound. North Korea is a country where the majority of people live below the poverty line. Yet its citizens produce countless luxury items, which are then exported to countries who condemn North Korea at G8 conferences while happily buying their leather shoes and paper flower arrangements at bargain prices.

Despite a demonstrated level of research and care, the film struggles to balance seriousness, emotional engagement and a self-conscious need to be artistic. Traditional Korean dance, intercut with personal and historical accounts shared through voiceover, feels like a clumsy attempt at cultural tie-in. B-roll footage of exuberant mourning after the death of Kim il-Song (Jong-il's father), juxtaposed with survivors’ descriptions of state-sponsored lies is also problematic. It suggests that the people of North Korea who have avoided imprisonment or been unable to leave are just foolish believers of a lunatic messiah. 

Heikin employs a smarter, gentler touch than the "gonzo documentary film-makers" who will endure the risks of going to regions of extreme repression but produce narratives that flop around like dead fish. She has clearly put great care into finding her interview subjects and earning enough trust for them to go on-camera with their dangerous and heartbreaking stories. The stories in Kimjongilia makes the film worth seeking out, even if the inexperienced film-making makes it difficult to recommend.

Kimjongilia plays at the San Francisco International Film Festival which runs April 23 - May 7.

Portland International Film Festival 32, pt. 3

Everlasting Moments/Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick

Inspired by the life of his wife's great-aunt, Everlasting Moments plays like Jan Troell's loveletter to family values. Only slight emotionally dysfunction required to relate. Maria, a young Finnish woman, is swept off her feet by the charming Sigge, whose zest for life (and respect for his wife) is quickly ground into dust through the trials of having to support a rapidly growing family as a low-wage dockworker. He descends into full-blown alcoholism, chronic infidelity and violent outbursts that leave his family reeling from embarrassment and uncertainty. With her husband in and out of jail and work and her extended family unsympathetic, Maria is left to raise her children and find small pleasures in their grueling life. She rediscovers a camera won in a raffle and is convinced by a flirtatious camera shop owner to keep and use it as a means of expression.

Troell deftly illustrates the quiet dignity of human kindness with a mercifully light hand. In one scene Maria asks her eldest daughter to prepare a dead pigeon for dinner. Maja is a thoughtful, but sensitive adolescent. She protests, "They have such beautiful eyes, Mama. It's staring at me..." A situation we've seen in turn of the century, desperately poverty-stricken stories before and viewers have been trained to expect a blow up. Yet Maria's reaction is to quietly dismiss her daughter from the gruesome duty. It comes as an enormous relief because it feels like what a mother would actually do, an attempt to preserve what little innocence she can in her child for as long as she can. We see this theme echoed in scene after scene. As we get to know Maria  it's inspiring to see a great nephew-in-law pay such loving homage to a woman whose existence was so much about the utility of life.

Speaking of the utility of life, Everlasting Moments was made for $7 million, a sum that couldn't even get Jessica Alba into your movie in the States. This film, however, is an exquisitely rendered period piece. It spans more than twenty years and looks like it could have easily cost ten times more.

Everlasting Moments is 78 year old Jan Troell's contribution to the unofficial alliance of Medicaid-qualifying working film directors. That class, that this year alone, boasts Andrej Wajda, Agnes Varda, Woody Allen, Manoel de Oliveira and Clint Eastwood's one-two punch of The Changeling and Gran Torino. Plus last year contributed wonderful new efforts by Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Errol Morris and Claude Chabrol. Some of these recent films haven't been perfect but they all lack the cloying self-consciousness that comes from too much exposure to the internet. Perhaps it's time the AARP started hosting its own awards ceremony?

RIYL: After the Wedding, The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio, 16 Years of Alcohol.


See also:

• Martha Polk's (appropriately) effusive review over at What Is This Light and thoughts on photography at The Auters Notebook.
• The Danish Film Institute's interview with the film's producer Thomas Stenderup.

The Beaches of Agnes/Les Plages d’Agnès

Beaches of Agnes joins the ranks of recent films like Of Time and the City and My Winnipeg (and to a lesser extent Waltz with Bashir and Hunger), memoir-style films. The genre of late has been focused on a connection to a place and how that place has shaped a person's life. In contrast to focusing on the time the film-maker chooses to stop experiencing life and start reflecting on the past with some sense of finality.

Starting with her birth in wartime Brussels (just like Jean-Claude Van Damme!) Agnes Varda traces her extensive film-making career in the French New Wave scene. Detours through Los Angeles during the 60s and back again to France as her husband Jacques Demy died a slow, ineffable death from AIDS. Varda fans will recognize the (miraculously unchanged) settings her past films: the village scenes from La Pointe Courte, the woods-y picnic spots from Le Bonheur, the barren off-season vineyards from Vagabond and the Parisian open-air markets from Cleo 5 to 7 and The Gleaners and I. 

Varda's charming narration and bohemian life story are their own reward. Former collaborators like Harrison Ford, Gerard Depardieu, Jane Birkin and Alexander Calder all participate but never as mere talking heads. Birkin, in a full suit of armor, rides a horse down a Paris street playing a modern Joan of Ark. Jim Morrison and Chris Marker also make appearances respectively through archival footage and cardboard cut outs of the artist's signature cat illustrations.

This is remarkable documentation of a remarkable life. Fans of Varda's films who have never had the privilege of seeing her installation work clearly realize that her true heart is in being a visual artist. The film opens with a group of harried assistants trying to find ways to prop up dozens of mirrors in the sand on the beach while Varda walks through them introducing herself to the camera. In another scene she tracks down the villagers whose playful rowboat scenes as children brought some levity to the story of a fracturing marriage in her first feature film, La Pointe Courte. They remember the experience fondly and the town has named a street after her. She convinces the now middle-aged men to push a cart around the town projecting films onto a sheet while discussing the man on the screen who has long since passed away. It's a depiction of how an artist, even one who's made an indelible mark in her field, can still feel like a culmination of her shortcomings. The feeling is playful but honest, a combination I, as a total neophyte, rarely associate with contemporary art.


RIYL: Rivers and Tides, Basquiat, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, Manufactured Landscapes, Persepolis.

 
Snow/Snijeg


The first Bosnian film to win the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival's International Critics Week focuses on six women living in a small village one year after the war has ended. All of the men (including male children) have been rounded up and killed by the Serbian army. The surviving women work hard to keep the village's only industry, jam and sauerkraut production operational. It's grueling work to create a delicate product that the women then transport in handcarts through rough mountainous paths to sell on the roadside. We see the women raise the orphaned children left behind all the while trying to keep each other's spirits up with games and craft projects but the fact remains, the only commonality they have is that their former middle classic lives have been transformed by tragedy. Each of them still holds out secret hope their husbands, sons and fathers somehow survived and will someday return. When two Serbian businessmen representing a commercial real estate developer show up with an offer to buy their land each woman is forced to re-examine the reality of her situation and what her priorities moving forward will be. 



Like many of the wonderful documentaries from this area (some of which my company, A Million Movies a Min ute distributes), the film contrasts of the breathtaking beauty of this area with the horrendous things its people have endured. At the start, the somewhat self-conscious diversity of the group threatens to be something akin to a Slavic United Colors of Benneton ad: a Muslim, a Christian, a bawdy dame, a thrill-seeking younger woman, an elderly woman who spends her time working the loom and a demanding, bed-ridden mother-in-law. But director Aida Begić let's their stories unfold naturally. The film never condescends to think an audience will understand their situation by the end of the film.

Portland International Film Festival also featured works this year from Poland's Andrzej Wajda and Sweden's Jan Troell two film directors who have resisted the siren call of Hollywood and dedicated their massive talents to reflect upon each of their country's complex histories. That the exquisite Snow and Jasmila Zbanic's powerful 2006 film Grbavica: Land of My Dreams were both directorial debuts from Bosnia-Herzegovenia indicates both an exciting new chapter in film-making at large and what Cintra Wilson calls 'the cultural conversation', providing a voice to a group of people who have mostly been spoken for in the past.




RIYL: Secret Life of Words, Backstage, I've Loved You So Long, No Man's Land.







Portland International Film Festival 32, pt. 2

Katyn

The most recent film from Poland's legendary Andrzej Wajda depicts the systematic detention and execution of 20,000 Polish military officers, engineers, scientists and intellectuals. This brutality was part of Soviet Russia’s efforts to undermine Polish attempts at order, progress or independence at the beginning of World War II. The Katyn forest massacres (only acknowledged by the Russian government in 1990) offer a glimpse of the Polish experience during the war. First invaded by Germany in 1939, Poland was then re-annexed by the Soviets, who essentially turned the entire country into a workcamp for their war effort.  In 1943, the country was re-invaded by the Nazis who, discovering discovering the mass graves, used them in an enormous propaganda effort to convince Poles to join the German military effort to defeat the Soviets. All the while, the Nazis continued to bury slaughtered Poles in mass graves of their own creation, knowing they could be blamed on the Soviets. Poland remained occupied until 1989, Katyn has become a catch-all term to describe the ruthlessness and criminality of the Soviets.

Structured similarly to his masterpiece 1957 Kanal, the first two thirds of the film focus on how the beginning of a seemingly endless war (the notion of victory or any kind of cessation of violence is never even mentioned) affect a half dozen loosely connected people. Their situations are almost mundane save for the circumstances in which they transpire. A woman argues with her mother-in-law about whether her stern personality prevented her husband from fleeing a workcamp. A Soviet military officer tries to convince a Polish childhood friend to marry him as German soldiers bang on doors looking for Polish military wives. A young man who defected to the other side attempts to reconcile with a respected professor who will have nothing to do with him. A woman demanding the authentic date of her husband's murder be on his gravestone, is killed for insubordination. An academic steals a diary from military archives so a woman can understand the true nature of her husband's death. All of which leads to the final 20 minutes of the film, an unrelenting reenactment of the actual Katyn massacres.

One quibble could be just American narcissism. A scene where a German officer confronts a room full of erudite Polish academics has vague parallels to the Bush administration's combative relationship with institutions of higher learning. At one point the officer, informing the chancellor the school is being shut down and all who previously criticized Nazi science will soon be in prison, shouts "I have decided! It is final!" practically stomping his feet and giving a yeehaw on his way out the door. It's a moment that feels cheap. Audiences have come to expect more graphic violence from Nazi confrontation scenes. Here it's played almost as a jump scare.

All in all, this was a wonderful film to watch just days after seeing the Bosnian film Snow. Both films are worthy tributes and testaments to the enduring dignity of a people who have been continually stripped of it.

Nominated for an Academy award in 2008 for Best Foreign Language film, Katyn opened the NW Film Center's tribute to Wajda which will be running through March 29th. The film is also now playing in limited release.

Portland International Film Festival 32, pt. 1

Of Time and the City

"We love the place we hate, then hate the place we love. We leave the place we love then spend a lifetime trying to regain it. Between loving and hating the real journey starts."

Similar in spirit to Guy Maddin's recent My Winnipeg, Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives; House of Mirth) presents a visual poem. Dedicated to his hometown of Liverpool, he explores and the complicated feelings he has about loathing it in his youth and developing some resigned affection for it as a grown man. Composed primarily of archive footage of the once fair city, that is now home to incessant industrial blight, the with some recent footage it includes that's been degraded so to match the film quality of the different films match. The narration is provided by Davies himself with a selection of classical poetry and personal observations and confessions.

Of Time and the City's collage approach plays at times like one of the travelogue films of the French New Wave movement but with a great deal more personal catharsis. Described by critic Shawn Levy as "Bela Tarr in triple time" the this film might be difficult viewing for people who don't share Davies' tortured feelings about their own places of origin.

Two sets of images have remained with me weeks after seeing the film. The first set reflects the grandeur of Liverpool: an old piece of footage of dockworkers wearing heavy duty gloves, and unloading enormous steel cables from a boat into a factory juxtaposed with the newer image of the city with its sprawling high-density, low-income housing projects. It's an image reminiscent of Andrea Arnold's gritty 2007 film Red Road, this time with some reverence and wry affection. Second, Davies then mines the mundane, we see an image of a woman from the 1940s on her hands and knees, scrubbing the doorstep to a house. This is set against the modern image of a broken street lamp, reflecting a loss of spirit as Liverpool becomes more modern.

RIYL: Persepolis, the Namesake, True Meaning of Pictures.

Of Time and the City screens February 8th and 12th at the Portland International Film Festival. 

Black Balloon

Black Balloon centers on Thomas (played by Rhys Wakefield), a teenage boy whose family has just moved to a new town. Despite being a military brat, (and one can assume, moved around quite a bit) he seems frustrated by his new surroundings and unable to make new friends. Like a lot of teenage boys, he takes his frustration out in an unproductive, cruel ways and focuses on how much he resents his autistic older brother Charlie. Charlie demands all of his parents' (played by the wonderful team of Toni Collette and Erik Thomson) time while attracting too much the scrutiny from of a group of bullies at school. He befriends a beautiful classmate (Gemma Ward, a model-actress putting together a very interesting resume after last year's great slasher flick The Strangers) and becomes smitten with her. After a violent confrontation at a birthday party gone awry there are tears, allocutions and eventually even a group sing-a-long (would that I could say I was joking). It all that serves to tell us that everything will be turn out just fine for this whacky family.

There are effective scenes in the first act showing us the day day-to to-day struggles for of a family with an Autistic child, but the film waffles a bit in setting up its own premise. We see Thomas do terrible things to his brother (and by proxy his 8-month pregnant mother) but the director tempers this with ridiculously sentimental scenes of Thomas gazing lovingly at Charlie while the emo soundtrack swells. These softer scenes are just not believable, what makes teenagers compelling protagonists is their all-consuming self-centeredness. Without some recognition of that, Thomas's eventual emotional growth feels unearned.

Like its American counterparts, Black Balloon is a film that will elicit one of two reactions from viewers: sniffles and snickers. The audience I saw it with seemed evenly divided down the middle. Which by my count means this film will have great word of mouth and I will probably wind up watching it again on DVD with my mom.

RIYL: Little Miss Sunshine, Sweetie, Juno.

Black Balloon screens February 6th and 9th at the Portland International Film Festival.