Steady Diet of Film

Sundance 2011: !WAR Women Art Revolution / We Were Here

!WAR Women Art Revolution
Lynn Hershman-Leeson / United States

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s follows up her 2007 hybrid-documentary/narrative Strange Culture with a hybrid-documentary/autobiography. !WAR Women Art Revolution marries her experiences as an artist at the cutting edge of the second wave women’s movement with an intensive history lesson about the use of art as a tool for social change.

Using interviews with artists recorded in her home over the course of 40+ years, Hershman weaves archival footage of performances, protests and consciousness-raising groups to celebrate and draw lessons from the movement. While paying direct tribute to their work, she articulates the angst they experienced at the hands of condescending art teachers and the indifferent (when not outright hostile) gatekeepers of the mainstream art scene. At the time, the leading trend for contemporary art was hyper-minimal painting and not the loud, brash work that occassionally involved body fluids that the women were doing.

Hershman also highlights the difficulty in forming collectives on the basis of identity politics because once the common enemy is lost the group can lose its focus. But for the time being, many of the women thrived existing with both outsider status and a community to come back to. They created new forums and channels for artists to present to, publicize and educate the public and Hershman has access to an exhaustive collection of photographs, video footage and handmade zines to re-create the heady experience.

!WAR follows a similar trajectory as many band documentaries -- the excitement of being weirdos having fun and doing something new, the delight in shocking the establishment and the incremental successes that were managed with varying degrees of certainty. Eventually in-fighting led to resentments, splintering and even the possible murder of one artist. In a music documentary this would serve as the low-point of the story and anything that came after would need to be framed as a comeback. But art critic B. Ruby Rich is quick to point out that the culture only benefits from a chaotic marketplace of ideas and that it’s the constant dialogue about feminist art that continues to make it one of the most vital arenas of expression.

Hershman’s own professional life as a performance, visual and film artist is framed as a similar three-act success story. She was rasied a nice Jewish girl in the suburbs, radicalized by her experiences at Berkeley in the 1960s and moved to New York. For over 20 years she received very little recognition from the art world until when in the late 90s she found a gallery owner who believed in her and sold her entire collection for a massive (undisclosed) sum of money.

Similarly !WAR treats younger artists like Miranda July (whose second feature film also screens at Sundance this year) and MacArthur Genius Janine Antoni as existing on a continuum rather than the people for who ‘the torch was passed down’. The music for the film is entirely made up of post-1990’s indie rock mainstays like Le Tigre and The Gossip with an original score by an early iteration of the Carrie Brownstein/Mary Timony supergroup Wild Flag -- creating a historical document that continues to live and breathe.

At the heart of !WAR is the desire to see feminist artists included in the broader institutions (many of the artists included are now professors and historians at major universities). The film ends with the bold message that there are no outtakes, only archives -- available in full as part of the Stanford Digital Collection.

 

We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco
David Weissman and Bill Weber / United States

There are films that take on a mythic levels of importance in their community, the gravity of their reception often owes more to timing and necessity than merit. Some stories reflect so much pain, regret or shame that any mention of the subject in a public way immediately transforms the casual film-going experience into a cathartic purge that in all likelihood has little to do even with filmmakers' intentions. These works still serve a purpose: they give voice to those under-represented in mainstream culture, they open people up to human experiences they may not have even known existed and they spread that much ballyhooed disinfectant -- sunlight -- into places that desperately need it. But they don't typically reflect a great deal of craft and rarely hold up to repeat viewings (anyone revisit Torch Song Trilogy recently? Yeesh.) They are films that serve an important function, but are largely disposable. But co-directors David Weissman and Bill Weber (The Cockettes) have made a thoughtful, firsthand account of what it was like to be at ground zero during a widely misunderstood epidemic and the beautiful, ugly and ultimately mundane human impulses that natural disasters lay bare.

We Were Here paints life San Francisco in the late 1970s as what probably wasn't, but will still be thought of as a utopic paradise. Far from the violent, hard-edged legacy of the Stonewall riots in New York City, San Francisco, bathed in the golden California sun, with all precepts of the 1950s WASP-y perfection already demolished by the Haight-Ashbury hippies and diverse immigrant populace, was the Promise Land to queer kids escaping hateful or hate-inducingly dull Midwestern burgs looking for a taste of the hedonistic, good life.

The story relies solely on five interview subjects strategically placed to cover much of the breadth of the crisis: a hospice nurse, an artist who dated a clinical biologist, a budding politician, a flower shop owner based in the Castro and a young journalist.

There are some harrowing images drawn by the film, a stubborn lover arguing about whether to be taken to the emergency room over a low temperature then dying during the short car ride to the hospital, a room full of doctors at a national conference to discuss AIDS drug trials breaking down sobbing over how badly they were failing their patients and the dread every person faced having to choose between which sick friends to attend to and which to shut out as a matter of self-preservation.

The film deftly avoids too much blame-shifting or rearview mirror grandstanding in lieu of underscoring the personal experiences in total chaos and uncertainty. At the apex of anxiety President Ronald Reagan appears. The oft invoked Republican icon of kinder, gentler (whiter, straighter, wealthier) days -- is typically portrayed in documentaries about this time as having been at best a clueless dolt and at worse a cruel dilletante who laughed off a genocide as it was happening on American soil. Here he's given a pass for being insulated by closeted gay staff members before focus is quickly shifted back to a young, overwhelmed community organizer who is trying to deal with the sudden upsurge of people starving to death in their apartments because they became too sick too quickly to feed themselves.

Weissman and Weber understand that cruelty and destruction hardens some, vulcanizes others but leaves most simply baffled. There's nothing extraordinary about the people who survived the early years of AIDS. And a lucky combination of chance, privilege and clear-headed thinking in times of pandemonium does not make for a happy ending to any cognizant human being. Still, it's a cliche for a reason, out of the wreckage and despair came real medical breakthroughs, a new respect between gay men and lesbian women and a generation of queers who had too much to be proud of (and too much to lose) to consider a life in the closet.

Sundance 2011: A Family Portrait in Black and White/The Green Wave

A Family Portait in Black and White
Julia Ivanova / Ukraine
Between her (now grown) biological offspring and the dozens of kids she’s taken in from the foster care system, Olga Nenya is now the mother to 27 children. Most of the kids are biracial, their parents were African immigrants who have disappeared, been deported or lost their custody rights within the cruel bureacracies of a post-Soviet burg. Many of them were put into the system at an old enough age to dimly recall their biological parents and for the most part seem to have adjusted to their new family structure.

The film opens depicting the multi-culti clan like a bucolic Bennetton ad -- children playing with goats, harvesting fresh vegetables and always smiling all the while being effusive and adorable. A town magistrate even presents an award to the group for Olga’s Promethean efforts towards improving the lives of disadvantaged children.

But quickly something more sinister is revealed. Olga's need for control and her personal racial biases, filtered through lingering affections for the old Soviet culture of discipline and conformity -- is slamming hard against some of the adolescents’ ideas and expectations for their own future. Instead of seeing her rundown home (purchased with money from a British charity which years later still has no hot water or indoor plumbing) as a launching point, she views her it as a means for rebuilding a new society. In Olga’s vision they live simply, celebrating cooperative work and diversity. But from the children’s more modern take on things, this life represents constant menial labor and arbitrary governance which renders many of them fundamentally joyless and unable to imagine an autonomous life outside of Olga’s strict control.

Using the lack of oversight in the foster care system and the virulent racism of smalltown Ukraine as a shield from criticism, Olga blocks potential adoptions for three of the children, constantly belittles anyone who exerts a sense of independence, openly chooses favorites and even institutionalizes one boy who requires too much discipline, telling him he’s too slow a reader to live at home.

Filmed over the course of three years, first-time filmmaker Julia Ivanova deftly creates and subverts expectations for the viewer while drawing out complicated emotional processes from Olga’s children as they sit at the crossroad between a (truncated) childhood and limited adulthood.



The Green Wave
Ali Samadi Ahadi / Iran

In Iran’s 2009 election for prime minister reformist candidate (and former president) Mir-Hossein Mousavi squared off against the five-term incumbent Mamoud Ahmadinejad. The internationally reviled Ahmadinejad has long been criticized for political corruption and cow-towing to arch conservative religious clerics within Iran paving the way for Mousavi to run on a simple platform of “respect for different cultural groups, equal rights for women and more democracy”.

Subjects in two different Sundance selections this year, The Green Wave and An African Election cite the international wave of optimism created by the election of Barack Obama in the United States. In the days leading up to the election, people who describe themselves as apolitical or completely disenchanted with the democratic process talk about the joyful reinvigoration they felt for the future of their country. And even elderly people began to feel rays of hope break though years of well-earned cycnicism about a fair and open democratic process.

Despite a state-controlled press and heavily censored internet acccess, the enthusiasm gap began to swell as the election drew closer. In the days leading up to voting there was an unprecedented outpouring of support for Mousavi. Thousands of young people turned perfunctory public endorsement exercises into massive rallies, volunteered at polling locations and adorned themselves with the green armbands that would come to name their movement “the green wave”. This identification with the color green (which represents vitality and progress in the Iranian flag) also become an internet meme when non-Iranians tinted their Twitter avatars to show support for the heinous fallout of the election.

Immediately the election returns didn’t pass the smell test for Mousavi supporters. The official results were far off from what exit polls had indicated and in some cases didn't even accurately reflect basic population data about certain districts. Young people once again took to the streets, this time with shock, grief and rage. And as they did Foreign reporters were forcibly removed (including Iraq in Fragments director and MacArthur Genius fellow James Longley), cell phone communications were shut down and private militia groups (commonly used as auxilliary police forces)  were dispatched to beat, apprehend and eventually gun down protestors.

A recent United Nations Development Programme study reported that over 60% of Iran's population is under the age of thirty and reflective of its youth and vigor their street protests are massive, energetic and immediate. It's fitting that  depictions of their struggle would be told with a mix of old and new techniques. The Green Wave uses standard interviews with journalists, diplomats, clerics and lawyers and intercuts it with animated footage of the surreptitious blog and Twitter posts made during the protests. There is also a patchwork of cell phone video footage that had to be physically smuggled out of the country after all internet communication had been shut down.   

Most people have grown somewhat inured to massive human rights violations as a matter of being able to function in our current reality. There are more conflicts than ever and our ability to quickly transmit images, video and raw data worldwide hasn't had the antiseptic impact we'd like to believe it's capable of. Animation is so strongly associated with children's entertainment, there's a sense in watching the footage that nothing too terrible could happen and it helps the viewers resist the urge to look away.

The haphazard cell phone footage (which appears to have been often shot from neighboring apartment windows but often also from a groundview) of police beating (badges removed) beating unarmed protestors is reminiscent of the 1991 Rodney King beatings that led to violent riots in Los Angeles and has remained a touchstone of racial animosity in America ever since. Many of the heinous acts committed by the Iranian government now exist in the permamenent record of the internet, The Green Wave (and hopefully many more like it to come) weave together personal narratives that provide more understanding of both the tumult and the stakes for people living under a repressive regime.

Review: Puppet

Long-time political media consultant David Soll’s documentary debut, presents a brief history of and insight into the renaissance of the puppet arts. Following a vaunted puppeteer as he brings his latest full-scale production together, Soll builds a larger narrative about the trials faced by artists whose work exists on the fringes of acceptable art.

Similar to what Amir Bar Lev’s My Kid Could Paint That did for modern art, Puppet provides an excellent primer on the history of puppetry, its key players and the pushes and pulls within their peculiar community. Puppet attempts to understand what it is about expressing themselves through intricate blocks of wood that puppeteers find so appealing.

Around the world and throughout history, puppet theater has been revered as high art (allegedly, in Indonesia puppeteers are considered prophets). But in the United States, the grind of capitalism and the insularity of professional art has banished it to the realm of children’s entertainment. As a result of never being taken seriously, struggling puppet artists can have trouble differentiating between when to stay true to their vision and when to absorb valid criticism.  

Puppet follows Dan Hurlin, a leader in the field of puppetry, over the course of two years as he produces his new show “Disfarmer”. For Hurlin the stakes are high; his last effort, “Hiroshima Maiden,” told the story of two young women who survived the bombings and were later pressured into appearing on an American talk show in exchange for corrective plastic surgery. At the live taping they were presented with the "surprise guests" -- two pilots of Enola Gay who had dropped the atomic bomb on their country. Hurlin spent years adapting the story for stage and opening ticket sales were strong. But when an extremely negative review ran in the New York Times, the production was shuttered within a week and the blow to Hurlin’s pride is one that clearly still haunts him.

Hurlin’s latest work is based on another true story about Mike Disfarmer, an eccentric portrait artist who documented rural communities in Arkansas in the 1950s. The play takes place the last week of Disfarmer’s life, as he wastes away from old age alone, reflecting upon his life and work.

The vitriolic (and utterly delightful) theater critic David Sefton makes the diagnosis that many fringe artforms are dominated by craftsmen and lack enough storytellers. He goes on to explain that if artists are too in love with the process of their chosen field, then the results are inevitably something esoteric and/or precious.

Soll clearly agrees with this description for what’s missing in Hurlin’s work; he shows us a lot of moments of Hurlin hemming and hawing over minor details while joking about how threadbare the actual content of the story is. The puppeteer desperately trys to force ill-defined ‘collaboration’ out of his puppet operators who would clearly prefer simpler, stronger direction. If Hurlin is, as one of his key funders suggests, the most vital voice in puppeteering today, he probably should be able to better express his emotional connection to the work he’s doing. But instead he cocoons himself in details. No “spoilers” here about how the show goes or how it’s received, but it probably provides a good learning experience for participants and viewers alike.

As a whole, Puppet is a thoughtful exploration about the the artistic process that also captures some of the nuances about how we relate (and react) to human experiences being conveyed in unfamiliar ways.


Puppet makes its world premiere at DOC NYC November 6th and 9th.

Review: Armadillo

Janus Metz’s directorial debut, Armadillo centers on a Danish Army platoon stationed for six months in rural Afghanistan. As an ally to the United States in Afghanistan, their missions focus on traveling around the hardened countryside and appealing to farmers to inform on Taliban members who may be hiding in the region. Their limited interaction with the local population is not heartening, as locals express fear they will be killed if they are known to be assisting the soldiers. And the constant shell campaigns and forced clearing of their poppy fields do nothing to endear the soldiers to them.

It’s intriguing to see what motivates young people from a country without a long or romanticized military history to join the forces. In a fantastic opening scene, the commanding field officer gives newly arrived soldiers their first debriefing. “You might be asking yourself, why do I belong here?” he begins, and goes on to elaborate that they must continue the work their countrymen have started and try not to get too caught up in the details. In later conversation, soldiers mention that prior to enlisting they thought (hoped) they’d be stationed in the Balkans and simply oversee a mostly peaceful situation. They’re not optimistic about intangible victories in a warzone furhter mired by a hopeless political situation.

 

There’s an interesting comparison to be made here with Sebastian Junger’s and Tim Heatherington’s film Restrepo (review to come). On the surface, they exist at opposite ends of the filmmaking spectrum. Armadillo is beautifully shot (the film was apparently a test campaign for a new model of HD cameras to see how they handled in the worst possible field conditions), cinema-verite style with no talking head interviews or voiceover. Restrepo has a much gritter look and relies on Junger’s direct conversations with soldiers on the ground and after the fact. Despite differences in technique, both films rely on a strong, three act narrative thrust and recognizable tropes from the war film canon.

Additionally, Armadillo and Restrepo were both released this year with extremely prestigious festival runs. Armadillo opened in the Critics Week section of Cannes (a rare honor for a documentary, also bestowed this year on Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job). Restrepo premiered in January at the Sundance film festival.

Both films show soldiers playfully wrestling with each another to substitute for the physical comfort of home. Each film takes care to highlight the extreme Otherness of the soldiers’ situation; dressed like camouflaged spacemen, they try to negotiate agreements with extremely poor Afghan farmers. The two films’ final act hinges on an unfortunate miscommunication that causes things to get very bloody. Restrepo builds towards a particularly gruesome and chaotic gunfight that stemmed from a double-dealing village elder. In Armadillo, a misconstrued phone call home leads to an internal investigation, making everyone in the unit suspicious of one another and revealing a great deal of rancor between the commanding field officers and generals back home.

This past year, Scandinavian documentary filmmakers have created intense work pluming their sense of national and masculine identity. But where films like Steam of Life, The Regretters and Freetime Machos drew men out about their very intimate experiences and connected them with more universal truths. Despite the Afghanistan war being an American-led enterprise with spotty international support, Metz has clearly made a film for the homeland. The bloodshed he captures is gruesome, but fairly standard practice for wartime conflict and will be of little shock to an American audience. In fact, most American reviews have focused mainly on how beautiful Armadillo is to look at. But the civilian casualties in particular have captured the Danish imagination. Armadillo has dwarfed Hollywood fare at the box office, received reams of press coverage and evoked so much public outcry that every elected official has been forced to comment.

Even The Tillman Story, which unearthed a deliberate campaign of lies and misdirection that traces all the way to Donald Rumsfeld (and also benefitted from an extremely prestigious festival push), barely made a dent in the box office or public discourse about the war. I write this on voting day of a heated mid-term election where candidates have made serious hay on issues like taxes, healthcare, deficits and the media while Afghanistan has gone wholly unmentioned. Armadillo is a thoughtful reflection on how the Afghan war has impacted the young lives of soldiers from our allied countries and could represent a tipping point in where those allies will stand as we move forward in a war that has all but left our collective conscience.


Armadillo makes its US debut at the inaugural DOC NYC film festival November 4th.

Review: Space Tourists

Swiss documentary filmmaker Christian Frei's (The Giant Buddas, The War Photographer) third film follows the odd ghost of the Russian space program which became fully privatized in 1991. Originally sequestered in the Kazakhstan hinterland for national security purposes, the program has been cut to the bone and the surrounding townspeople have either shifted to a more agrarian lifestyle, left for bigger cities or created their own cottage industries around for-profit rocket launches. The once great emblem of strength and promise of Soviet power, has been drained of all romantic fervor and now serves as an abundantly ironic icon for how quickly life can change in an empire -- this bizarrely over-reaching, yet somehow self-sustaining capitalist apparatus has become the ultimate fetish object of wealthy and aspirational foreigners.

Our host through this excursion is Jonas Bendiksen a Norwegian photographer of Ukrainian descent whose intrigue with faded Soviet prestige has led to hundreds of beautiful images of the sadly growing, universal experience of small town thrift and ingenuity that springs up in the wake of industrial collapse.

Some of the Kazakh people see the shuttle launches as good business and enjoy the simple riches it bestows on their lives. Scrap metal collectors spend weeks chasing discarded rocket chunks. They set up camp waiting for the pieces to cool, dismantle it, then sell the bits to Chinese manufacturers (take a moment to imagine the geopolitical ramifications the next time you take home leftovers in a tinfoil swan). Farmers forge new sheds and tools out of space debris. And a once heavily guarded military compound has been retro-fitted into an ad hoc Space Disneyland with hourly tours are given and teams of scientists in the basement work out new cost-cutting measures.

Though the wonder and glory of space isn't dead to everyone. The two Americans Frei documents making the trek are full of platitudes about working towards dreams, and dreaming of the stars and stars in your work or whatever. Count me in the crowd of people who when listening to a software billionaire talk about the limitless potential of a borderless world can only hear the ticking off of an imaginary list of all the things that could have been accomplished with the $20M spent on their 6-day space vacation.

Luckily, Frei appears to share at least a little of this animosity. And people who enjoy reality tv shows of the "Celebrities Do the Darndest Things" variety, will be delighted to learn that when in space, billionaires have to do chores. Lots and lots of chores. You had no idea there were so many things to vacuum on a spacecraft. And seeing the delight Anousheh Ansari, the first female space tourist to visit the International Space Station, experiences in rolling a ping pong ball around a metal tube in zero-gravity while her voiceover describes that she would've happily sacrificed her life for this experience, one might deduce that outerspace is probably some kind of psychological roadblock for a certain type of person who will never feel accomplished.

The third act follows the race to create a rocket alternative to space launch. Ansari's investment firm (along with many others) is fronting a $100M reward to the first team to successfully launch a new, tourism-focused method of space travel. A plucky Romanian aerospace engineer seems to be well on his way to blowing up many hot air balloons in pursuit of his own starry-themed dream.

Frei shot Space Tourists on 16mm film giving his images a gritty beauty that when paired with Jan Garbarek's synth-heavy score is oddly reminiscent of William Friedkin's morally dour Sorcerer. A scene where space scrap metal collectors bounce along the off-road backcountry while electric bees seem to buzz around their head in particular. But as an inspiration point, it's merely an aesthetic similarity. As skeptical as Frei may be about the benefits of space travel, Space Tourists accomplishes what the Soviet empire itself could not. Equalizing the ambitions of the millionaire who dreams of stars and the villagers whose contributions to the outlying details and bureaucracies make those dreams go, the film gives ingenuity and hard work of all stripes its due respect.

Space Tourists screened at Hot Docs International Film Festival and is currently playing at various festivals including SilverDocs and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Review: GasLand

In 2006 director Josh Fox received a letter from a natural gas company offering him a hefty rental fee in exchange for drilling on his family's acreage in the Catskills Mountains. Set in the bucolic parts of Pennsylvania that James Carville once lovingly referred to as the "Alabama" in between the state's major metropolitan areas, natural gas companies have been using a controversial drilling process called hydraulic fracturing ("fracking" for fun) with disastrous results. Chemical leaks and sloppy drilling practices have led to polluted rivers, thousands of dead animals and drinking water so contaminated that it's flammable right out of the faucet.

Fox's background in theater serves GasLand well. He is a pathologically likeable host through an emotionally arduous journey of collecting water samples and brutally sad stories from people across the nation who had no idea their land or water had been compromised until their families became violently ill. With excessive permissions granted by local governments indemnifying the energy companies from any liability, most people affected have very little recourse -- even in cases where the local news media has picked up on the extremely telegenic disaster of flames shooting out of people's kitchen sinks. With no one on the hook and damaged ground water making their homes uninhabitable, most affected people have had to simply abandon their homes, making the quest for "clean and safe" energy sources feel like a modern day, profit-inflicted Dust Bowl.

What emerges in GasLand is an old-fashioned oral history of people blighted by corporations and twice sold out by their government -- first by regulators and then by representatives. Now more than happy to run the risk of upsetting the powers that be in their small towns and sharing their stories (and water samples) with Team GasLand. And while their fate seems fairly close to sealed at this point, it's thrilling to see people who live extremely secluded lives working collectively to take on giants.

Winner of the Special Jury prize at Sundance earlier this year, GasLand is also a thrilling marvel to behold in editing. When sitting with a rancher discussing his rapidly disintegrating way of life, the film stays very still and contemplates the beautiful rolling buttes of Utah that will soon be too toxic to be within 100 miles of. But the film also employs an army of statistical data, legal documents and scientific research -- relying on graphs, fonts and beat-perfect cutting to boil down intimidatingly, large concepts into talking points that serve to galvanize its audience.

GasLand is not an environmental film per se, it's uninterested in taking a stand on which method of energy collection will provide future generations with the most pleasing ratio of doom to comfort. It's an expose on how invisible people (in this case, rural and/or poor) will always be the first to bear the brunt of faulty, short-term decision-making.

GasLand airs on HBO Monday June 21st and screened at the 2010 HotDocs International Film Festival.

Review: RUSH Beyond the Lighted Stage

There was a certain 'no duh' quality to the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book "Outliers" -- people who have accomplished great feats of discovery and achievement are both born with some innate talent and in their early stages of development given the opportunity to hone their craft over for at least 1,000 hours. It's a method for success that worked for Beethoven, Bill Gates and the Beatles. And in Sam Dunn's and Scot McFadyen's painstakingly detailed and intimate portrait of a few Canadian guys cursed to "skate on their ankles" -- it worked for prog-rock legends Rush.

Formed by Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee in the late 60s and completed with the addition of Neil Peart in the late 70s, Rush started out, as most great bands have, with a couple of nerds who couldn't play sports or talk to girls. When the drinking age in Canada was lowered to 19 leading to an outcropping of clubs  geared towards a younger audience. So while their suburbanite peers were all playing hockey, Rush was playing up to five gigs a night, affording them the resources to record their first single, "Working Man". The 7-minute grimy epic was perfect for what disc jockeys were constantly seeking at the time, "bathroom songs", tracks that were long enough for the staff to freshen up but weird enough to hold listeners' attention. Rush then landed an opening gig with Kiss, a band with zero song craft but an extremely cohesive concept and presentation. The paradox of this pairing is only briefly commented upon, Lifeson speaks with great admiration about how much Kiss tour and how formative that was for Rush to see firsthand early on. Kiss frontman (and professional sleazeball) Gene Simmons recalls that Rush were a bunch of weird kids that would go back to their hotel rooms and practice rather than get raucous or ahem, spend time with female fans. This last bit truly delighted the sold out, immensely proud Toronto crowd I saw the film with. 

Made with the full cooperation of the band and ipso facto, their legions of devoted fans (Rush's own outliers are quite obsessive collectors), including a bevy of interviews with "respectable" rock musicians trotted out that range from merely establishing Rush's industry-wide influence (Primus's Les Claypool, Metallica's Kirk Hammett, Dream Theater's Mike Portnoy and Pantera's Vinnie Paul) to deep, philosophical engagement on what it means to be a creative genius who the public deems terminally uncool (Billy Corgan, Jack Black, Trent Reznor, Rage Against the Machine's Tim Commerford and "South Park" co-creator Trey Parker). 

Beyond the Lighted Stage documents many of the turning points in Rush's sound and personal lives. Nineteen albums over the course of thirty-five years lends itself to a great deal of introspection, and the group has experienced enough success to maintain a comfortable lifestyle though not enough to let them relax into any sense of their own place in the rock'n'roll pantheon. Similar to last year's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, we see that at a certain point, commercial success becomes a blur and the random metrics of prestige take on a monstrous level of importance in the creators' mind. For Spector, it's being depicted on a stamp, for Rush it's being in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. For most of us, a stamp is a mundane office supply and the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame is a place you might go if your car broke down in Cleveland. The better music documentaries will break through the noise and self-pity and get to the psychological roots of people who are expected to remain fresh and creative while being constantly criticized and compared to people whose work may have only a dim similarity. 

It's immediately apparent Rush's longevity hinges on their mutual respect for one another and a monk-like worth ethic, beyond that anything goes. They've delight in experimenting with instrumentation throughout their career, the 1980s were a particularly harrowing time for Rushies who weren't fans of synthesizers and Peart's drumkit has grown so much over the years that at their concerts he looks like he's been exiled to a fortress of percussive accoutrement. Style of dress and stage presentation have also drastically changed with passing trends, at one point the band looks back over their "Japanese silk robe uniform phase" with pained delight. The bandmates also have extremely divergent views on how to interact with fans, Lee will shake every hand and sign every autograph while Peart is known to (politely) have even the most famous Rushies removed by security to avoid interacting with his admirers. These ancillary details are what break up most bands, but they don't even seem to irritate the members of Rush.

Far more appealing to a prog-rock neophyte is the traditional immigrant story at the heart of Rush. Lifeson's and Lee's parents both fled warzones and persecution to go to a foreign place with the hopes of giving their children a better life. A kitchen table discussion captured on super8 of a teenage Lifeson explaining to his teary-eyed parents that he wants to drop out of high school to pursue his music career seems like a sentimental, unnecessary detail until you see that behind their perfectionism and drive is a fear of failure has much higher emotional stakes than it ever did for the members of Kiss or Led Zeppelin. 

Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage screened at Hot Docs 2010 and will be in Portland at Cinema 21 June 10th-12th. 

Interview: Heather Haynes, Hot Docs Associate Programmer

Photo by Rannie Turingan

As an Associate Programmer at Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, Heather Haynes lends her curatorial skills to North America’s largest documentary events. The fest screens more than 170 films from around the world, many of them world and North American premieres and the 2010 iteration broke all previous attendance records with 136,000 tickets sold to the 10 day event. In the midst of this flurry of activity (and an on-coming, freakish early Spring hailstorm) Haynes sat down with us for a quick chat about the inner workings of this powerhouse event.

In addition to being an Associate Programmer at Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, Heather Haynes is also the producer of three award winning documentaries: Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary, Super Amigos, and City Idol.

ED: Can you tell me a bit about your process here at the festival?

HH: We start looking at films probably in mid-December and we screen anywhere from like 250 to 300 films each. So we have, I think we have like seven on the international programming side and then there's three on the Canadian side so it usually takes us about three months to go through all the films. And we give all the films "three looks" so we know them well and there's a lot of respect for the filmmakers and the whole process.

ED: Wow, can you explain "the three look process"?

HH: The three look process is we bring in, we see the film, and if we feel that it's just not ready to be screened yet and maybe needs some more work we let it go. But that's for very, very few films that that happens. And then for the other ones, if we're not sure maybe it wasn't for us but we feel like there's something in the film and someone else wants to take a look at it we'll give it to another programmer. And then there are some that we just say "Wow, this is the film" and so we push them forward to the international programmers. 

ED: Are those all submissions or do you do any recruiting?

HH: I don't do any recruiting, Sean Farnel does most of that. He travels to festivals around the world and he'll invite films. But a lot of the films do come from submissions. We have a lot of young filmmakers that do come here which is great. And also, in the programming we want to have a unique line up so we really pull from the submissions.

ED: Which films really dazzled you instantly?

HH: One of the films that I found, two of them actually. Daddy's Girls which is a feature by Lily Sheffy and she follows her father from Israel to Germany as she's discovering that he has multiple families going on simultaneously and not all the families are aware that this is happening. And that screened with a short by Amy Grapell who is a Texas filmmaker and that film is called Quadrangle and it's wonderful, I love it. She lived in a polyamorous situation and both her family and the other family lived together in the same house. I love that.

ED: So those are the two that came in together and you were like "these are so meant for each other"?

HH: Yea, well they came in separately but they were paired together and they're... they are perfect.

ED: How do programmers deal with disagreements about how people feel about particular films?

HH: I think occasionally there are disagreements but if you can really fight for the film and make your case it gets in, people will support your decision. And programmers are also different in their taste and that reflects our audience. So it's good that you have a kind of diversity across the board in likes and dislikes. And I think the audience is responsive to that.

ED: It seems so harmonious.

HH: It is pretty harmonious! I have to say, I mean at least at the level that I'm programming on, the associate programmer level it's pretty harmonious. So yea. And there's something for everyone and I think that that makes a good line up in programming.

ED: And can you speak about what your life is like during the actual festival?

HH: It's crazy. I wake up in the morning and I'll watch the films maybe a second time, do research on the directors, get their bio together, get all my questions ready and then kind of run around. This year has been a little more intense than previous years, the head programmer Shannon Abel had a baby, so she's not here so everyone is picking up additional films. And so we're doing four to five screenings a day. So we kind of run around the city and then we host all the filmmakers. And I know that when I was a filmmaker and I came here I found that this festival was very good for taking care of the filmmakers, introducing them to other filmmakers, and kind of networking them and making them feel really welcome and cared for. So you know, now I'm on the other side in programming and I get to do that and I love it, and it's great. So it's kind of like a start at 7am and end at 2am and it goes on for ten days.

ED: And you all look like fashion models running around!

HH: Oh god, that's hilarious.

ED: You had a very elaborate hair do yesterday I noticed I was just like "I'm so tired and I know I'm keeping about half the hours that they are."

HH: Well you know what, at this program this is the only time I really dress up. Because the rest of the time I'm just like running around in my jeans and boots and half the time I'm installing at the gallery and I have grubby t-shirts on like my rain boots, so it's nice. You get to kind of dress up and feel a little fancy.

ED: What goes into the hosting of the filmmakers, what do you guys kind of plan out in advance or what does that entail during the festival?

HH: Well we take people out to dinner, and it's really important to us at the festival that we link the filmmakers together. That's kind of our role, and also hook them up with different sales agents or distributors and people that they want to meet because coming to a festival, especially as a first time filmmaker, it can be pretty daunting and if the festival doesn't really make a great effort to create these social spaces for the filmmakers it can be really lonely, and kind of scary. How do you sell a film if you've never made a film or...

ED: ..Or English isn't your first language.

HH: Or English is not your first language! And you know as you know we have a lot of filmmakers that are coming from other countries. It's really the dinners, and the drinks, and the parties that are being held throughout the festival are really important for that.

ED: What is your life like through the rest of the year?

HH: The rest of the year I run an art gallery called Toronto Free Gallery. It's a non profit space that supports work that deals with social justice, cultural issues, issues of sustainability both in urban and rural settings. And I also publish an art magazine called Fuse that covers art, culture, and politics. My whole life is like art and politics.

ED: And you're an American, right?

HH: Yes.

ED: How is it like moving to another country for an incredible set of jobs that you're doing?

HH: Yea, I'm really happy. I feel like Toronto has been a good city for me. But I initially came, I initially moved to Amsterdam and was there for three and a half years doing Masters studies, and I moved to Toronto after that and I've been here for about eight years. So it's been a long time since I've lived in the US, like thirteen-fourteen years so I do feel kind of, a little bit of a disconnect. I go back and definitely I miss it. I miss Texas where I grew up and California where I lived for a really long time but I think Canada is my home. I'm very happy here.

ED: Can I ask you a very random Toronto based question?  I've noticed a very amped up hostility towards people using cell phones during screenings. Has that been a major problem in the past?

HH: It has been a problem at this festival for some reason. There has been an increase in texting in the theater...

ED: During films?

HH: During films, and I guess people don't realize that when they turn their cell phone on it's like this giant beacon of light. 

ED: Oh my god.

HH: Yea.

ED: Well, the very stern warning at the beginning of the film scared the living daylights out of me, I check three times. Alright well I won't keep you anymore, I'm sure you have 500 things to go run around and take care of. Thank you so much for sitting with us Heather.

HH: Thank you!

Review: Steam of Life

Every filmmaker you meet will tell you the same thing: Their film must be seen in a theater. It needs to be seen on the big screen, it needs to be seen with a crowd, it needs to be seen at night, it needs to be seen with a great sound system. As a firm believer in the possibilities (and economics) of digital, as well as a long-legged grump who usually carries a large purse, I tend to think most filmmakers are wrong.

I met Joonas Berghäll, one of the directors of Steam of Life, my first night in Toronto for the 2010 Hot Docs International Film Festival. And when I told him I was very excited to see his film.. on a dvd that his distributor had given me, preferably on my laptop in the comfort of my hotel bed, his eyes began to well up with tears and he pleaded with me to make time for one of the film's two screenings over the course of the next week. Seeing as how the Steam of Life trailer was one of my favorites on the Hot Docs' YouTube preview page, not to mention that he was standing between me and the bar, I was hardly in a position to argue.

It turns out Steam of Life would be one of just two films I saw over the course of the week that was actually shot on film (scrappy 16mm, no less) and really did warrant the tearful pleas to see it projected on a large screen. Berghäll and his co-director Mika Hotakainen interviewed a dozen Finnish men as they sat in saunas and steam rooms, opening up to each other and the filmmaker team (a total of five extra naked men in each room when you factor in co-directors, cinematographer, sound recordist and camera operator) about hardships they've faced in life. Their stories range from harrowing to merely reflecting the complexities and frustrations modern men face trying to remain stoic and resilient despite being occasionally overwhelmed with the tragedy and beauty of life. The few moments of levity, a sardonic splash of water onto hot coals, a synchronized beer gulp and the gleeful reveal that one man keeps a grizzly bear as a pet, give relief when it's needed. 

What is revealed in Steam is that in moments of emotional turmoil and crisis, people benefit the most merely by being heard. No one in the room tries to soothe the person speaking or provide a greater context for their experiences. They stand back and give them the space to talk and with that comes an immediate, visible sense of catharsis. The filmmakers match the experience by keeping the shots simple, applying zero voice-over narration and the cutting in elegant, long takes.

Sitting in a sold out theater watching these stories unfold, it was easy to forget that my legs were cramped and that I was hungry and that the theater was cold and that I had dozens of e-mails to return. Instead I just felt temporarily comforted to be in the presence of hundreds of other people intermittently crying, giggling and sighing with agreement. But please nobody tell that pesky filmmaker that I was wrong, because I really do enjoy watching movies in bed.

Steam of Life screened as part of the HotDocs 2010 program.

See also:

• Moving Pictures Magazine's interview with Joonas Berghäll

Review: The Kids Grow Up

Doug Block's second film in his 'memoir trilogy' (preceded by 51 Birch Street, a heart-wrenching dismantling of his parents' idealized marriage beginning after his mother's death) follows Block's and his wife's struggle with the looming specter of an empty nest as their youngest child Lucy prepares to leave their cozy Brooklyn apartment for a west coast college experience. 

Block relies on a wealth of footage shot over Lucy's lifetime to gracefully draw connections and contrasts between the things Lucy says now and ideas she's had about growing up in the past. Any qualms one might have about seeing a child made the center of a film she has little control over is quashed upon seeing how confident and satisfied with her choices Lucy is. At a time when cable broadcast deals are sought after as one of the last cash crops for documentary filmmakers, Lucy emerges as a fantastic anti-pageant child of sorts.

But what is for her parents a cataclysmic upheaval, is an obvious and welcome transition period for teenage Lucy. She laughs off her dad's line of questions about what it means to be an adult, or a child, or what she wants to be when she grows up. She knows she cannot reasonable possess these answers but treats her father's obsessive documentation with good humor and ease. When asked if her prom night was a "dream come true" she rolls her eyes that such a thing even exists. When her father presses her for details on how the extended long distance will affect her relationship with her French boyfriend, she demurs from fairytale notions of 'true love conquering all' and simply states "it's difficult".

Where 51 Birch Street was a fascinating snapshot of clashing generational views on marriage, The Kids Grow Up provides, in intimate detail, the way their daughter's departure impacts Block and his wife Marjorie in hugely different ways. She remains fairly even keeled until entering a severe depressive state that lasts for months, then emerges with a renewed understanding of the differences between loving someone and being overly attached to them. Doug is constantly teased about (and indulges in) a 'Peter Pan complex' which leaves him searching for indefinable details at every point. He eventually turns to his own father, whose loss of mobility and deteriorating health provides a visual milieu Block readily identifies with. The grandfather admits to being so hamstrung by societal expectations that he avoided all opportunities to get to know his children until they were well into adulthood. And in this declaration it's made clear that Doug has no imprint to understand what parents of his more hands-on generation are to do once there aren't children to take care of (and document). 

There's such a startling contrast between Lucy's sense of the limitless possibilities of life against her grandfather's sense of obligation and regret that it at times feel like they exist in two separate universes and not a quick Amtrak jaunt down to Florida. It's little wonder her departure has put her father into a tailspin of mid-life angst. Concerned that he is too much like his father and not enough like his daughter (while somewhat oblivious to the fact he is largely responsible for the wonderful person she has become) in the third chapter of this trilogy the focus on his own, transitional generation will be a fascinating grace note.

The Kids Grow Up screened as part of the HotDocs 2010 program and will be in select cities soon.