Take One Action! #TOAFF19

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documentaries, nablopomo, take one action

The Take One Action Film Festival returned to Inverness, once again falling on a weekend that I’m working so I could only squeeze in two films again this year. Handily, I’m once again managing to add to my documentary feature film tally with these films even if I wasn’t able to lean quite as much towards the environmental films as I would like. Though Ghost Fleet is secondarily about environmental issues because it is over-fishing of waters close to Thailand that caused the boats to have to go out further and further out for longer and longer periods in the first place.

Facing the Dragon

Facing the Dragon follows the parallel stories of politician Nilofar and broadcast journalist Shakila, in post-US-withdrawal Afghanistan as they struggle to balance the responsibility they feel to the people they represent against the need to keep their children safe from harm. Both threads of the film really underline the fragility of democracy and the position of women in Afghanistan, alongside the constant danger that all politicians and journalists in the country face but which is even more intense for women in public life.

Director Sedika Majadidi is an Afghani woman herself, so understands intimately the pressures both her subjects face as women in public life. (This creates a certain solidarity and trust between director and subject that makes for a much more intimate portrait of both women.) Having spent a substantial part of her childhood and youth in the US she also has enough of an outside view to allow her to step back from the details of these lives and show how they fit into the bigger picture of life in Afghanistan.

My only real criticism of this film was that the copy that was screened in Inverness had terrible audio quality. There was a coating of hiss and crackle over almost the entire film that hung over it like an aural cloud of dust.

Ghostfleet

Ghost Fleet follows the work of the Thai NGO Labour Defence Network whose work started in trying to protect children from being drawn into sweatshop labour, and has evolved through helping men who’ve escaped from slavery in the fishing industry – mostly getting compensation for horrible industrial injuries – into straight-up rescuing people. We mostly follow Patima Tungpuchayakul one of the organisation’s co-founders, as she travels to various islands in Indonesia to try and bring home formerly enslaved fishermen home. Patima has this really calm presence – perhaps born of her certainty that this is the work she’s meant to do – that makes her a very reassuring presence, both to the former fishermen and to us as viewers. One of the strengths of her work is the trust built with the communities of those islands, the people who live around the predatory companies bases, who know how dangerous they are, often disapprove of them but feel helpless to stop them.

There something utterly heart-breaking about those men who’ve escaped from enslavement only to be stranded in Indonesia for decades, who’ve built lives and made families, yet remain desperately home sick. Their longing for home is almost palpable, but having lost most of their native tongue, many of them feel that they cannot possibly go. The question that comes up time and again is ‘do you want to go home?’ The three men they bring back from one island demonstrate the range of reactions to that question, the first man seems resigned as though he has nothing to lose either way, the second man is conflicted – reluctant to abandon the family he has made there, desperately longing for the home he left behind – while the third man is eager and delighted – literally jumping at the chance to return home.

The director of the Take One Action film festival does little introductions before all the films and she was careful to warn us that this film would be distressing and that we might find it hard-going. As a film about modern slavery it was indeed a distressing topic, and a deeply moving film, but I also found it to be an intensely hopeful film. I’ve had quite an intense couple of months documentary wise and while I’ve seen a lot of very good films many of them left me feeling sad, angry or both at once. This film however, left me feeling inspired and empowered, which I guess is the whole point of this film festival in the first place.

IFF19 @EdenCourt – Documentaries

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documentaries, iff, italy, scotland, syria, usa

This year’s film festival was a rather more spread out affair than it usually is, which for me had one main impact: it meant that although there were more than double the number of documentaries showing than there were last year, I could see almost all of them! Despite being minorly thwarted by a screening copy not turning up in time, I still managed to see a pretty varied selection of documentaries this year. If this year’s documentaries had a theme, it was telling stories that were more complex than they initially appeared. Documentaries that let you think you knew where they were going – that you knew these stories or recognised these archetypes – and then turned around and showed you that they were much messier and complex then they at first appeared.

The Cave

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve seen too many documentaries about Syria in the last few years. This one is about an underground hospital in Ghouta – near Damascus – and the film follows hospital manager (and mostly trained paediatrician) Dr Amani and her mostly female staff as they fight against the odds to tend to their patients and avoid getting blown up. It’s a fascinating concept – the full blown engineering works going on underground in the early parts of the film does more to demonstrate the organisation and extent of the rebellion than any claims or stats could – with likeable protagonists that you can really get behind and emphasise with, told in a compelling way.

I’ve seen dramatic, beautifully shot, drone footage of destroyed cities – of Raqqa, Homs, Aleppo and now Damascus – and the question that fills my head afterwards is no longer, how can the people possibly survive this? Nor even if the rebels still think the uprising was worth it. Instead I have to ask: what on earth Assad thinks he’s going to win at the end of this? Sure, he may win the war but at what cost, what will be left for him to rule over at the end of all this?

Scheme Birds

Often in a film like this the synopsis would say that Gemma dreams of something more than her estate, but Gemma doesn’t. Gemma is happy, Gemma belongs, Gemma loves and is loved, and she can’t imagine leaving this place. Gemma is fundamentally really young, barely more than a kid when she has her own baby. Yet in a way it is that same baby that makes her grow up and look beyond the world she’s always known. We learn early on that her own mother was a drug addict and hasn’t been part of her life since she was about 18 months old. Oddly enough having the baby makes her less, rather than more, empathetic towards her mother because she can’t imagine walking away from him. It’s wanting more for that little boy – more than fighting and drinking and prison and teen parenthood – that motivates her to change things.

(As a side note, there’s something about Amy that unnerves me. I recognise her, not her specifically – her mum’s probably my age – but she looks like someone else, someone I knew years ago. Someone I was at school with, or worked a summer job with, or a friend of a friend. There’s something about the structure of her face, the mannerisms, we never see her cry on screen but I can picture just how she’d look when she does.)

Be Natural

‘Be Natural’ was the instruction that pioneering film director Alice Guy-Blanche gave to her actors so often that she had it put on a sign on the wall of her studio in two foot high letters. Naturalism is in fact the thread that ties all her films together, despite being one of the first filmmakers to use film to tell stories rather than simply documenting activities, there is none of the stage-y overacting we now associate with early films. Her films exemplify the experimental and daring nature of early filmmaking along with the demonstrating the opportunities available to women in cinema before it was taken seriously as an art form.

The film is a systematic and detailed attempt to re-insert Guy-Blache back into the narrative that she has been systematically removed from. The film does an excellent job of illustrating a story that is by its very nature mostly about dusty archives and long-distance phone-calls in a compelling manner. The use of map graphics to fill in the gaps, really helps illustrate how often both the researchers (and Guy-Blache herself) criss-crossed the US and Europe trying to track down her films. The film has clearly been a labour of love for it’s own director, but the finished object is a compelling and convincing argument in it’s own right.

Shooting the Mafia

This was by far my favourite documentary of all those shown at this year’s festival. Photographer Letizia Battaglia is such a compelling presence that the viewer is drawn further and further into the story of her life and work. Having come to photography later in life – she took it up at the age of 40 in the midst of getting a divorce – her life experience straddles considerable political and social change in Italy and in Sicily in particular. Despite being in her eighties, Battaglia remains an intensely charismatic person – with such passion and rage lurking just under the surface – that it is no surprise that she still draws people to her with a fierce devotion. Through both her words and her pictures, she paints a vivid picture of what it was like to live in Palermo under Mafia rule.

The photos themselves have a stark and compelling beauty to them. They confront the viewer with the impact of the Mafia’s crimes. Not only in the photographs of crime scenes but also in the faces of the people around the bodies. The pictures of poverty, deprivation and grief tell their own story too. This is no Hollywood glamourized view of the Mafia, but a messy story of a messy world. One thing that Battaglia seems at pains to point out is that it is a mistake to think of her work as merely a historical artefact. Certainly things are much better in Palermo, but the fight against the Mafia goes on.

IFF19 @EdenCourt – Down The Rabbit Hole

Tags

documentaries, iff, nablopomo, scottish

Down the Rabbit Hole (Webster, 2019) is one of the many documentaries showing as part of this year’s Inverness Film Festival, but despite being one of the shorter documentaries I feel it deserves a post of it’s own. Partly due to it having an accompanying photography exhibition but also due to it being so very different from all the rest of it’s compatriots.

First of all, the photography exhibition – which will be lurking around on the 2nd Floor of Eden Court for the rest of the month – which I saw and enjoyed for the first time before seeing the film, but gained a whole new level of appreciation for after having seen the film. For some reason, until I saw this exhibition, I had no real conception that stalactites being wet. Given how they’re formed it makes sense that they would be, but I guess I also thought of them as being wet previously but not currently. I didn’t really think of them as being still-growing, fragile works in progress. Both beautiful and alien, they were created on a timescale beyond human comprehension, like so many things underground they defy so much of what we imagine to be true about the world.

It exhibition location seems unlikely, being up on the first circle where casual visitors are unlikely to pass by, but in fact the location is thematically perfect. Due to the unusual shape of the building, the roof space over the exhibition area forms a sort of cave, especially once the sun has set, placing you in a carefully lit space that only adds to the atmospheric nature of the photographs. If you can, I recommend heading to the middle of the balcony and sitting on the floor with your back to glass wall, looking up at the photographs. It really helps to make you feel like you’re there in the cave with them.

On to the documentary itself, which started as a short about caving and mental health and evolved as the director realised he couldn’t do the subject justice to the subject in such a short run time. The subject of the film – wildlife photographer James Roddie – is refreshingly open and practical, both when he talks about the risks and rewards of both climbing and caving, and especially when he talks about his own struggles with an eating disorder. Particularly when he talks about the way that climbing went from being a respite from his mental health issues to being an enabler of the condition and how he’s recently been able to claim the activity back as something he enjoys and can do for fun rather than in a constant consuming quest for ‘better’.

(Being mildly claustrophobic myself, I’m fascinated by these underground worlds, but would absolutely not cope with going down there myself. That Swiss Cheese crawl is literally the stuff of nightmares! I do love the idea of being a daring adventurer, but I’m definitely not cut out for it.)

The film provoked a lot of the same feelings in me that Free Solo did when I saw it at the start of this year. Although I did always have the reassurance that I’d seen both Roddie and Webster, alive and well introducing the film, those vertigo inducing moments where you genuinely fear for their lives are somehow worse for them being people I’ve actually met. (The creative arts scene in Inverness is pretty small, so there’s a lot of crossover in people you meet and work with over the years.) In a sense it feels like something of a companion piece, bookending a year of documentaries for me. That moment in Uamh nam Fior Iongantais (Cave of True Wonders) where they decide to turn back, feels like a more emotionally honest reflection of the moment in Free Solo when Honnold comes back down off El Capitan. Sometimes you need a friend to give you permission to make the sensible decision.

IFF19 @EdenCourt – Bridging The Gap: Opportunities

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documentaries, nablopomo, short films

Tonight is the official start of the Inverness Film Festival, so I kicked off my film viewing with my traditional attendance of a short film screening. Bridging the Gap is in many ways the perfect confluence of my film festival interests combining short films and documentaries. (The only real complaint I have about this year’s scheduling choices – given that this year it will allow me to see six out of the seven documentaries showing – is that there a lot of short film screenings scheduled across from documentaries so I’ll be seeing less short films that I would otherwise.) I always look forward to the Bridging the Gap screenings because the quality is always so high, even the ones that I personally consider to be duds are usually well made. As much as I think that five to ten minutes is the perfect duration for a short film, I do give a bit more leeway to documentaries and the ten to fifteen minutes that these span was pretty much spot on. Leaving the audience wanting more time with the more compelling protagonists and not out staying their welcome for the less compelling ones. I’d go so far as to call this a vintage year for BTG documentaries.

Altsasu

Altsasu is a Basque town where during the annual festival, several youths and a couple of off-duty civil guards had a contretemps that ended up with seven youths in prison for terms between two and sixteen years, on terrorism charges. The case is widely considered a miscarriage of justice – and the imprisoned as political prisoners – with sizeable annual protest coinciding with the local festival that marks the anniversary of the events. The film largely follows one of the mothers as she faces the anniversary and campaigns to free her son and his compatriots. The segments shot during the festival give everything else and strange and slightly unsettling quality, underlining in it’s own way the cultural differences between Basque country and surrounding Spain.

Hydebank

This was my favourite of all the films in this year’s screening. It’s set in HMYOC Hydebank, which has, for reasons that were never explained, a flock of sheep that prisoners care for as part of their rehabilitation. Our protagonist Ryan is clearly a violent and damaged young man, but the care and tenderness he shows the animals in his care is just as obvious. He’s by far at his most articulate when talking about the sheep. It seems that its as much a revelation to him as to anyone else that he’s capable of something other than destruction. (I suppose, in a way, working with sheep must be oddly cathartic for someone like him, they couldn’t care less about who he is and what he’s done, and screaming and posturing will have pretty much no effect on them.) The scene where he’s working away in the dark, with only a headlamp for company, fellow prisoners shouting abuse down at him from the cells above, that feels terribly metaphorical for the other work he’s carrying out. Learning to control himself in the face of provocation, and equally to face the demon of the crime that put him there in the first place.

My Name is Anik

My Name is Anik is a very sweet and compelling film about a Kurdish woman living in Istanbul and the arrival of her granddaughter from Scotland to stay with her and learn Kurdish. Grandmother and granddaughter are performing a dance throughout the film negotiating the differences between what the younger woman wants and needs from her grandmother, and what Anik wants and needs to pass on to Bircan. What is most obvious in their arguments and stubborn silences, and the quiet tenderness of hair-care is how fundamentally alike they are, however different their opinions and perspectives may be.

There is a great deal unspoken in this film, so much of the politics of being a minority language speaker, of cultural and linguistic preservation and inheritance, plays out in their discussions and arguments without really being discussed head on. There’s also a great deal said obliquely about what it means to be an immigrant and what it means to go home, whether a meaningful going home is possible for either of them.

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

This film was nominated for a BAFTA and I can kind of see why, without agreeing with the decision. On the surface it’s a charming and whimsical film about a man with a traumatic brain injury and his slightly eccentric but warm and cheerful wife, but underneath, it’s a deeply sad film about what love can endure and survive, and the toll that his condition takes on both of them. The slow isolation that is settling around them as the quirks of his condition gradually drive friends and family away, placing more and more of the strain on Lindsay alone.

If comedy is tragedy plus time then this is the opposite, with what at first seems like a funny side effect of Paul’s injury becomes increasingly sad as it reveals how little remains of the man he was before.

Vivir Bailando

The summary of this film makes it seem much more grim and bleak than the actual film turns out to be. It’s a joyful and hopeful film about getting a second chance at love and finding joy in unexpected places. Widowed Cari and her new beau Vincente are the last inhabitants of their village, but instead of this being a source of sorrow or loneliness for them, it’s an opportunity and an excuse to be as eccentric as they like. To play loud pasodobles in the street and dance in the middle of the road, treating their village like their own playground and living life to the full. Dancing their lives away indeed.

I suspect that this is the first time I’ve seen one of these screenings without being handed an explanatory blurb sheet, but as I only tend to read those during screenings if I don’t like the films – a sneaky peak at the duration to see how much longer I need to endure – I really can’t complain that I didn’t notice until I came to write them up afterwards. I did have fun trying to guess this year’s theme – perhaps absence or displacement, there are a lot of people who aren’t where they’re meant to be in these films – but it turned out to be opportunities. Initially I thought didn’t really fit – though the other tag that they have ‘red’ fits even less – but the more I think about it the more it works. To a greater or lesser extent, all the films are about second chances, the needing of them or the getting of them.

Trailers for all of this year’s films are available to watch online on the Scottish Documentary Institute’s website.

Oct Docs

Tags

documentaries, macedonia, uk, usa

It’s Autumn and that means one thing round these here parts. It’s time to binge watch documentaries. New documentaries, old documentaries, popular documentaries, obscure documentaries, it is officially documentary season both here on the blog and in cinemas in general. Although most of the documentaries I saw this month were in fact from this year, they were fairly diverse in terms of subject matter and stylistics. From the making of seminal horror movie, through the varied works of the New York Public Library system, across to Beekeeping in rural Macedonia and through the siege of Aleppo, these documentaries take the audience to places they’d never expect to go.

Ex Libris

I saw the trailer for this when it was showing at the Inverness Film Festival a couple of years ago. It looked a bit ‘Oscar-bait-y’ but interesting, so even though scheduling clashes meant I didn’t end up seeing it, I’ve kept an eye out for it coming back. Finally it came back as part of the Ness Book Festival, and even better it was a free screening. And thank goodness it was free.

This film is long. Three and a half hours long. And it feels every minute of it.

There’s probably a good film hidden in there somewhere – in fact if you gave me a copy of the film and let me take a run at it with Avid, I’m fairly confident that I could cut at least an hour from the film without you loosing anything of great import from this film. It feels like a rough cut, before the voiceover has been added, in fact before the script for the voiceover has been written. Individual sequences are interesting or compelling, but it really doesn’t hang together as a complete film. I haven’t the faintest idea what the film was trying to say. Everything is observational, so there’s not even any straight to camera interviews to provide context or explanation for events. It hops around between libraries and aspects of the library system’s work as though the filmmakers couldn’t decide which threads to pick and follow. I learned a lot of random – fascinating – stuff about the NYPL but in a completely scattershot fashion that left me completely dissatisfied.

The only theory I have about this film that makes sense is that they were shooting some kind of fly on the wall television series about the New York Public Library, the series got cancelled and they tried to salvage a documentary from it.

Memory: The Origins of Alien

At just over an hour and half, this film was the polar opposite of the above film and I probably enjoyed it more for how much of a palate cleanser it was. For a start, it’s something of a master-class in how to tell a story/present a thesis through your interviewees words, without using voiceover. I really liked the conceit they used for handling the archive interviews with all three of the central characters of the film – making it a feature rather than an absence. The way it incorporated archive footage in general, along with the voice-only interviews was really deftly done.

Much like 2017’s 78/52, this is a film student’s film – more than that a film nerd’s film – something of a love letter to a film. However, as I’m considerably more of a fan of the Alien films than I am of Psycho I personally got a lot more out of this film than I did from 78/52.

I didn’t always agree with the thesis that the film was arguing but at least it had something to say and said it clearly and concisely. (Though I admit to having no idea what was going with the Furies at the start, but just bear with it if you watch it. It get’s a lot less off the wall quite quickly.)

Honeyland

I picked up Sight and Sound magazine the other week with the intent of doing some research on films that might show up at the upcoming film festival. I didn’t end up finding any tips for that, but I did read an article about this documentary that made me want to track it down and there it was in the cinema listings for the following week. It was most definitely worth tracking down.

This is fly-on-the-wall (I guess ‘bee on the wall’ would be the better term here) documentary making at it’s best, where the camera acts less like a peeping tom and more like a nosy neighbour, watching everything unfold, asking awkward questions but avoiding interfering. Much like Ex Libris there are no conventional interviews – though there are certainly times when our protagonist is clearly speaking directly to camera – and no voiceover, yet there is a clear narrative structure to the film. This film has a lot to say about people living on the margins of society and they ways in which poverty, desperation and greed can interact, but it says it quietly and gently in a circular fashion. This is to a certain extent a film about cycles, the life cycles of bees and humans, the turning of the years, and the crushing cycles of poverty, alongside intergenerational tensions. It’s compelling and oddly soothing film.

For Sama

This was also a discovery from last month’s Sight and Sound, though I think I’d originally heard an interview with the directors of this documentary on the Film Programme a couple of months ago, though I think that was before it went on general release. By chance I saw that it was screening on Channel 4 and ended up watching it slightly time-shifted on 4oD – or whatever they’re calling it now, I confess I’m not a fan of not being able to pause the stream if you’re watching it like that. However For Sama was definitely worth wrestling with the stream.

This is a very different documentary from the rest of this month’s viewings and not just because it’s the only one with a voiceover. For Sama is a film with a very clear narrative voice, that of co-director Waad al-Kateab, being composed almost entirely of footage that she shot herself, both as a journalist and as a witness to and participant in the uprising and subsequent siege of Aleppo. This is film that makes no pretence at impartiality; it wears its partisan nature on its sleeve, a badge of honour. Our narrator starts out reporting on a popular uprising – fighting to give an alternative narrative to that of the regime – and ends up documenting the siege of her own city. From the joyful cross-communality of the uprising’s early days, through the creeping presence of ISIS – and the circular debates around whether what help they can offer to the uprising is worth the price the caliphate will demand in return – to the whole-scale devastation of the Russian bombardment. This is in many ways a film about hope – that lovely phrase of Obama’s the audacity of hope – about reckless hope, hope in the darkness and the slow grinding of the crushing of hope under bombardment.

Despite the darkness and despair that we follow her into, despite the way the film ends with them fleeing an almost entirely destroyed Aleppo into exile it remains a defiantly hopeful film. For all that this film is dedicated – right there in the title – to her daughter who we watch grow through the film, it is an explanation not an apology. This is why we fought, says the film, this is why we stayed and why we had to leave, this is the price we paid, and I would do it all again. It defiantly insists that they were right to fight for a better life for their children, that even though they lost, it remains something worth fighting for.

After all, where there is exile, there remains the hope of return one day, if not for them, for their children.

3. Free Solo

Tags

12 films, documentaries, usa

Free Solo is a climbing documentary that is really something special.

Oddly enough, I’ve actually seen quite a few climbing documentaries over the years – despite being the kind of person who gets vertigo at the top of a set of stepladders – and one of the commonalities among a lot of them is the focus on one extraordinary climber who is pushing the boundaries of mountaineering or climbing in general. This film is sort of that kind of film – Alex Honnold is definitely that kind of character for good and ill – and at the same time it absolutely isn’t that kind of film.

What the film does different that, for me, is at the heart of what makes it such a compelling film and why it lingers in the thoughts for days after watching, is that it puts Alex and his climb in context. Not just in terms of climbing El Capitan, or even in terms of free soloing – essentially climbing alone with no ropes or other safety equipment – as impressive as those things are, but as a member of a community. Throughout the film the camera pulls back to reveal the team around him, both the film crew – all experienced climbers in their own right – and the other climbers he trains with in the run up to his climb. He may be a bit of a loner living in a van and preferring to climb alone, but he is not alone, he has a mum and a girlfriend, friends and mentors in climbing and while climbing is his life, there’s more to him and his life than just climbing.

Co-director Jimmy Chin has some very frank discussions about responsibility and safety throughout the film, along with his acknowledged fear of seeing Alex falling through the frame and knowing that will mean that he’s falling to his death. (The flip side of this is shown in Alex’s admission before his first attempt that he’s made his peace with the fact that he may well fall to his death doing this, but that he can’t yet make his peace with the crew, his friends having to watch him fall to his death. Given the state of his ankle at the time of his first attempt, I genuinely believe it is that thought that causes him to abort the attempt and in doing so likely saves his life.) That sentiment is repeated throughout the film by both the crew and fellow climber – he’s going to do this whether I help him or not, and I don’t want him to die so I’m going to do everything in my power to help him be as best prepared as he can possibly be.

I really wasn’t prepared for how emotionally invested I was going to get in this film, or the sudden heart-stopping realisation I had during his first solo climb that I didn’t know if he’d made it, if he was still alive.

The film slowly builds that emotional investment throughout, by way of situating him a person who is cared about by those around him. We see the building relationship he has with his girlfriend Sanni, the place he has in the community of climbers – eating and playing with their families – and with the film crew. It would be easy for a film of this kind to feel voyeuristic but the film has a nice line in the power of looking and looking away. There’s some really effective use of graphics throughout his second attempt that both give an effective sense of the scale of the climb while also giving the viewer a much-needed release from the building tension. Tense is definitely the operative word during that climb, giving us both gorgeous vistas that emphasise the scale of the task and the achievement of it and tight close-ups that lay out the sheer skill and tenacity of Alex as a climber. Counter-intuitively though, some of the tensest moments are when we are pulled right back from the action, watching instead the impact that the climb is having on the film crew, on the way that one of them in particular (Mikey Schaefer) is so overcome with fear and concern for Alex that he can barely look through his own viewfinder. His pained looking and looking away is both deeply effective in its own right and strangely cathartic for the viewer, as though given permission to look away, to feel our own fear and acknowledge that we have come to care – and fear – for our protagonist too. It also – spoiler alert – allows us to share in the equally visceral joy in his victory, to cry and cheer along with the crew that he’s achieved his dream.

Docs of 2018

Tags

documentaries

It’s late January, which means it’s high time I got round to doing my annual review of the year’s documentaries.

2018 was a seventeen documentary year. One year I may make it to 24 documentaries in a year – two documentaries a month isn’t that hard a target – but the nature of documentary release schedules over here creates a feast or famine situation – I saw six documentaries in the cinema during November. However, overall, I must confess that I found a lot of the documentaries that I saw during 2018 to be…underwhelming. There were some good and compelling documentaries, but there were very few that blew me away, or even made me want to enthuse about them to fellow film buff friends and colleagues. There were definitely some gems – Nae Pasaran, City of Ghosts, Rebels on Pointe, RBG, The Devil We Know and Story Telling for Earthly Survival stood out for me – but I don’t think I saw anything that made me actively annoyed, as I was watching Roller Dreams last year, that more people weren’t there to see it.

Despite having actually watched a decent number of eligible documentaries during 2017, only one – An Inconvenient Sequel – was nominated for either a BAFTA or an Oscar. (Though it turns out that one of the films I watched this year was BAFTA nominated last year.) Likewise in 2018 only one film that could have been eligible is up for either an Oscar or a BAFTA – the admittedly excellent RBG. Though I do note that I had at least heard of most of the documentaries nominated for BAFTA this year, whereas most of the Oscar nominations I hadn’t even heard about, which likely means they’re not out here yet.

Oddly enough, all the documentaries I saw this year were fairly recent documentaries, nothing made longer ago than five years ago. I’m not sure what that says about my documentary viewing in general. Well, I do know what it says to a certain extent, it says that I’ve watched almost all the documentaries that I had been collecting on DVD over the previous few years, which is definitely a good thing. However, I think this year I’ll try and mix things up a bit more, try and see some more classics so I can focus my contemporary documentary watching on films on topics that really excite my enthusiasm.

IFF18 @EdenCourt – Documentaries

Tags

documentaries, iff, kenya, usa

There are far less documentaries showing at the Inverness Film Festival this year, which on one hand is disappointing – because I love documentaries – but on the other hand is a bit of a relief – I can actually see them all this year! All of this year’s documentaries are political, if only with a small p, because they all feature people trying, in very different ways to build a better, kinder world for the future.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor

Won’t You Be My Neighbor, is the only documentary I knew anything about before going in. It’s a documentary about Fred Rogers, or as he was known simply to a couple of generations of children in the US, Mr Rogers. I know enough Americans who grew up watching his programmes to have an awareness of him as a cultural landmark, though unlike that other PBS stalwart of US children’s programming Sesame Street I’d never actually seen an episode myself.

It’s utterly fascinating watching him interact with children and the surprising amount of sincerity that seems to have permeated everything he did. (And interestingly, how that sincerity allowed him to communicate really effectively with children, yet that didn’t really work with adults.) That sense that the whole team working on the show appreciated the responsibility that they had to their young viewers. Also in the face of the criticism that I’ve been hearing all my life about children’s television, they seem to have had this radical notion that you needed to teach children the difference between fantasy and reality, rather than expecting them to understand it unaided.

It’s a warm and affectionate portrait of a man and his work.

RBG

Speaking of warm and affectionate portraits, RBG is an informative and enlightening documentary about both US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and about the legal history of woman’s rights in the United States. It’s partly an explanation of how Ginsberg has become an unlikely hero/idol for young Americans, but it’s as much a history of how and why she – and the wider political landscape – got to where she is now. (One of the interesting contrasts with the above documentary is that the Saturday Night Live sketches of Ginsberg are notably funnier and more affectionate than those about Rogers.) It certainly helps that Ginsberg is a living presence in the film, more compelling than charismatic, but always with the sense of great passions carefully constrained.

More than all of that, this felt like a quietly important, timely and necessary documentary. In these troubled and divided times in the states, it feels important to remember how recent and hard won so many things we take for granted in society actually are. How much has changed in the lifetime of one woman and how fragile that progress is in truth. Perhaps there is no metaphor more apt for the position of civil rights in today’s America than the image of one tiny, elderly Jewish woman, still standing firm against those who would turn back the clock on progress.

Sidney and Friends

At the opposite end of the scale, this is a documentary about an all but invisible community; that of transgender and intersex people in Kenya. Shot in beautiful black and white that gives the images a clarity and a starkness that fits the subject matter perfectly. Sidney in particular is a luminous presence, despite the grief and horror of their life-story, their resilience and strength of character, along with their continuing determination to build a life of their own and help others like themselves makes them a particularly compelling presence.

One of the issues raised within the film that I would have liked to have seen more about, was the issue of language. One of the interviewees made reference to the difficulty in helping people in their community arriving in Nairobi who don’t speak either English or Swahili. The extra layer of difficulty faced by those people trying to figure out who they are when they literally don’t have words for those things. Nonetheless it’s a beautiful and thought-provoking film, ultimately hopeful about this group of people as they build their lives and community together.

Summer Documentaries

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canadian, documentaries

We’ve steamed straight past the half-way point of the year, which means it’s high time for another documentary review post. I started off the year quite well seeing a documentary a month, but that somehow fell by the wayside, so with the return of the Storyville strand, this summer has been all about catching up with the backlog.

Over the Limit
There’s something about certain types of sports documentaries that I find strangely compelling. Something about the kind of person who pushes their body to such extremes that makes for a compelling protagonist. Rita (Margarita Mamun, main representative of the Russian Olympic Gymnastic Team and gold medal winner at Sochi) is no exception.

Her main coach Irina Viner, makes much play about Rita’s eyes, about her sad eyes working in her favour, and they really do. For a documentary in which the protagonist almost never speaks directly to camera, she tells us a great deal with only her eyes. She has trained the muscles in her face not to give her away just as strictly as she has trained the muscles in the rest of her body. But her eyes always give her away, which both makes her training harder, and makes it far easier for the viewer to empathise with her. We can never forget how young she is, how much of her young life has been devoted to this work, and how much of an emotional and physical toll that has taken on her. That she is not a robot to be programmed to perfection, but a person with thoughts and feelings, desires and fears and ambitions.

There’s something about the mixture of care and cruelty in the way her coaches treat her, that is at once utterly compelling and deeply disquieting. There’s something quietly triumphant about the end title that tells us that she’s retired from rhythmic gymnastics, a satisfying feeling of closure knowing that she got out on her own terms. That she was truly working towards the end of her career and that whatever she goes on to become is in her own hands.

City of Ghosts
At the end of last year, I talked about changing my focus on documentaries from the Oscar winners and nominees to the Bafta equivalents. So this was the first of this year’s nominees – other than An Inconvenient Sequel which I saw on its release – I’ve managed to track down. I’m glad that I did. It’s not an easy film to watch, but it is an important one. It follows the work of the young citizen journalists behind the website Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered. Originally started to counter the narrative coming out of Raqqa after ISIS invaded in 2014, it has transformed into the major focus of internal attempts to resist within the city. Almost all of the original members are either dead or in exile, but the continuing determination of Daesh to try to hunt them down even in Germany, speaks to the impact and importance of their continuing work.

The film makes a fascinating comparison to Rouge Parole about the many other untold stories that have unfolded from the Arab Spring. (It’s so strange to be back there at the start of the film. It all feels so long ago, yet less than a decade has passed, there seemed so much more hope in the world back then.) But the most deeply unnerving part of the film for me is watching the propaganda war unfold in Raqqa. The evolution not only of a bunch of rebellious students, from citizen journalists into what is essentially the main alternative news media for their city, but also watching ISIS learn the value and power of propaganda, and the terrifying slickness and professionalism of their own media output. (Not just recruitment videos shot with all the slickness and budget of an actual country’s military, but also execution videos shot like Hollywood blockbusters.) Working in news media, I’ve grown accustomed to their triumphalist propaganda, its uses and dangers, but this was something else entirely.

Rumble: The Indians that Rocked the World
This one wasn’t a Storyville documentary, instead it happened to be screening at my local arts centre last month as part of a ‘new Canadian cinema’ strand. (Despite being a music documentary and, based on the blurbs, the film I would have most expected to be well-attended out of the whole strand, I was one of a whole two people in the audience. I blame the weather.) It’s a documentary on the role and influence of Native Americans on the wider North American musical culture.

It’s a lovingly detailed documentary about the role and influence of various musicians, both those whose native ancestry was known and those were it wasn’t. The contrasting approaches of those who hid their identity in order to get work and those whose identities were erased for political reasons. (One Canadian musician puts it best when he talks about being taught from a young age to ‘be proud of who you are, but be careful who you tell’ which I think sums up the experience of being part of any ‘minority’ culture even today.) A story of forgotten, hidden and erased histories, and some really good tunes.

One Deadly Weekend in America
Is a documentary about gun crime in the US, focusing in tightly on gun crimes that took place over the course of just one weekend, and the impact of those crimes on both victims and perpetrators. The variety of crimes considered – from self-defence to cold-blooded murder, attempted suicide, police violence and one awful accident – and the uneven and seemingly arbitrary application of justice, is quite the eye-opener.

(There is something terribly, unarguably damning about listening to the testimony of one of the victims, one failed suicide attempt behind him, attempting suicide by cop. This is America, if I’m armed they’ll kill me. Made worse by the knowledge that its not the cops that shot him that are doing twenty years in prison, but him for ‘attacking’ them.)

I think the most effective part of the documentary is the way it flips the perspectives back and forth, aligning the viewer with different parts of the stories, so that everyone involved becomes a person to be empathised with, rather than an outline to be judged. The repeated sentiment that the presence of guns had accelerated situations, to make bad decisions worse – arguments that might have been settled with a fist-fight, ending in death. It’s a remarkably un-polemical film, determinedly non-judgemental in its narrative voice, giving its subjects space and a voice to give their testimony. A gentle rebuttal if you will, to the polemical and fear-mongering voices objecting to any revision of gun laws in the states, with the reminder that where there are rights, there need to be responsibilities too.

Docs of 2017

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documentaries

It’s the last day of the year, so arguably the best time to make a review of the year’s documentaries. This year’s documentary watching target was twenty documentaries and in the end I made it to eighteen. (I could, perhaps, have squeezed in another today as part of my time-honoured Hogmanay tradition of documentary watching but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.) So near and yet so far! However given that I only watched 34 films in total that I hadn’t previously seen, 18 documentaries was reasonably impressive.

For a change, a decent number of the documentaries – eight of them – were actually from this year, so I’ll be interested, when the awards season nominations roll in at the start of 2018, which of them – if any – show up in the documentary categories. For once, I’ll be able to have an informed opinion.

I didn’t see any ‘classic’ or even just old documentaries this year. All of this year’s documentaries were from the 21st century with the earliest instalment being 2001’s Oscar winning Murder on a Sunday Morning. On which note I saw three Oscar winning documentaries this year – the film that I almost watched today would have made it four, as it was Bowling for Columbine – but I don’t think I’m any closer to figuring out what makes a documentary award-winning than I was two years ago. Over the last few years, I’ve been quite successful in my quest to see more documentaries and while I tend to see documentaries a bit behind the curve, I usually see a fair survey of the previous year’s documentary films each year, and yet looking at the Oscar winning and nominated films for the last three years I’ve only seen two of them – Citizen Four and Last Days in Vietnam, winner and nominee respectively – and while I’ve heard of a few of the rest of them, most of them I never even heard of, let alone saw a review of, much less got a release here. The documentaries that did get a wide release here, or proved popular/influential on a wider stage are almost entirely absent from the listings. Is it purely a sign of the inevitably US-centric nature of the Academy’s voting or simply a matter of taste? For example, I think that Roller Dreams was far and away the best documentary I saw this year, but I’ll be truly amazed if it shows up on any awards nominations lists in the new year. Whereas I suspect that 78/52 will do, as too I suspect will Ex Libris, which I missed, so can only go by the trailer – which was a little Oscar-baity. Perhaps fundamentally, the BAFTAs documentary award is a better metric for my viewing.

If this year’s documentary watching had a theme it was systematic injustice and corruption. It wasn’t intentional, but that seems to have been the theme that emerged, perhaps also the lies that we tell ourselves: about ourselves, about each other and about the world in which we live. Obviously not all of them fitted into the theme – one of the most recent instalments, The Furthest (about the Voyager probes) and Lost in La Mancha and 78/52 really don’t – but overall that would appear to be the thread that wound itself through this year’s documentaries.