Category Archives: Documentary

Indie Documentaries Star

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Iceland, sheep pen, rettir

Waiting for the Sheep (photo: Hansueli Krapf, creative commons license)

Last night at the Trenton Film Festival 2016, saw three short documentaries under the heading Ageless Friends.  Over a period of five days, the festival shows 55 films from 16 countries—live action, documentary, animation, and new media. Films submitted for consideration are selected by a panel of jurors (who must have been very busy!) and the festival culminates in an awards ceremony for “bests” in various categories, including audience favorite.

First up was a 7-minute film from the U.K., North Coast 500, which follows three cyclists on a tour through the beautiful Scottish Highlands. The scenery is magnificent.

A Thousand-Year-Old Tradition

It was the second and third films that competed on my ballot for “audience favorite.” The second, A Thousand Autumns, is a 17-minute U.S. film directed by Bob Krist. It follows the efforts on one of several groups of Icelandic farmers who each fall use ponies and dogs to herd their sheep from remote highland pastures to winter grazing lands closer to their farms and the coast. This is a tradition (called the “réttir”) that has been maintained, as the title implies, for ten centuries.

It’s a massive effort, involving the whole community, and family members who’ve moved to the city return for it. Over the summer, the sheep from various farms become all mixed up together, and the farmers have created a the clever method of separating hundreds of animals into individual herds. A round pen is surrounded by pie-shaped wedges, one for each farmer. The sheep are let into the central pen where people await, ready to sort them and push them into the correct farm’s wedge.

Filmmaker Krist first became committed to documenting this herculean effort in the mid-1980s, when on a photography assignment for National Geographic. He knew the separating pen would be a strong visual, which he calls a “sheep pizza.” In those days, he would have had to film it with an expensive and scary (for the sheep) helicopter; for this film, he used a drone.

A Full Measure of Devotion

The hour-long third film, Ageless Friends (trailer), opening in the U.S. in June, is from Netherlands documentarian Marijn Poels. As a teenager, Maarten Vossen adopted the grave of U.S. soldier Private First Class James E. Wickline, one of 8301 U.S. soldiers buried in the Netherlands American Cemetery. Wickline participated in Operation Market Garden, an unsuccessful Allied effort to overtake Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr Valley. Vossen became determined to learn more about “his” soldier, a young man who died to restore his and his country’s freedom.

Cinecrowd003_converted

Ultimately, he learns that Wickline was one of some 1200 new recruits brought into the 82d airborne’s 508th Parachute Infantry Division to replace soldiers lost at Normandy, only 800 of whom survived. Evidence (Wickline’s documented injuries) led the military to conclude his parachute did not open, and he was killed on the first day of the operation, on his first jump into battle.

For Wickline to have died without ever having actually participated in the war dismays Vossen, who traces Wickline’s roots and connections in West Virginia and, working with a county commissioner there, succeeds in having a bridge named for him. That this young Dutchman, 70 years later and living thousands of miles away, cares so much about one of our forgotten fallen is extraordinarily moving, an ultimate expression of unselfish love.

Landfill Harmonic

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music, instrumentIn the early 20th Century, Marcel Duchamp transformed everyday objects into art he called “ready-mades.” The documentary Landfill Harmonic (trailer) shows how garbage from a Paraguayan landfill can be made into musical instruments.

The full-length film focuses on the residents of Cateura, near Asunción, Paraguay’s capital. They live next to a large landfill, where workers scavenge and sell recyclable detritus to make a living. Despite the dispiriting surroundings—ramshackle houses, dismal landscape—the people have a burgeoning enthusiasm for students’ music education. But they are too poor to buy enough instruments.

Musical director Favio Chávez turns to a garbage picker, Nicolás (Colá) Goméz, who begins to fashion instruments from curated debris—flutes made from water pipes, oil and paint cans for violins and cellos, and discarded X-rays for drum skins.

“The world sends us garbage…we send back music,” says Chávez.

Slowly, the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura hones its skills and sound. Then, a random social media connection catapults them into world view. The students pose with the Paraguayan flag decorated with the logo of the heavy metal group Megadeth, whose music they discovered on old cassettes found in the landfill. A Megadeth member sees the post and decides to visit the students. In 2014, he invites the Recycled Orchestra to join the band members on tour in Denver and accompany them on a song. This event propels more media coverage (Wired, Mother Jones, NPR, 60 Minutes) and invitations from across the globe to perform, including at Phoenix’s Musical Instrument Museum in 2013.

Now, most of these music makers are committed to careers in music education and performance.

According to the film’s website, “the Orchestra has grown from just a few musicians to over 35. Their recent fame has piqued the interest of the families and children of the community in such a way that many children are now enrolling for music classes. The music school of Cateura does not have its own building yet, but teaches music and how to build recycled instruments to more than 200 kids of the landfill.”

The documentary, which benefitted from a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $200,000, has earned acclaim at independent and children’s film festivals around the world. Most recently, it won a 2016 Director’s Choice Award at the Sedona International Film Festival.

This review is by Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings and is bringing us the best from the recent Sedona IFF.

Still Dreaming

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Bottom, Misummer Night's Dream

Harold Cherry as Bottom in “Still Dreaming”

In the documentary film Still Dreaming, a dozen residents of an assisted living residence take on a very challenging six-week task—to learn and perform Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most are Broadway stage veterans—actors, dancers and musicians—who reside at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey. Despite frailties such as decreased vision, dementia, and depression, they eagerly take on demanding roles.

Filmmakers Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller say they “discovered a group of people who have spent their whole lives following their dreams, some wildly successful, and some hardly at all. And here they are, retired, supposedly having given it all up. What we witnessed was an awakening, and it was truly profound and most certainly inspiring.”

Several of the performers are particularly engaging. Charlotte Fairchild, who plays Puck, had leading roles in Damn Yankees and 42nd Street and was the understudy to Angela Lansbury in Mame. She has Alzheimer’s disease and cannot retain much, but she still has a strong, clear soprano voice and finds joy in her portrayal. Dimo Condos, who plays Theseus/Oberon, is an eccentric, solitary man who studied with Uta Hagen, Elia Kazan, and Harold Klurman at the renowned Actors Studio. He is a bully, impatient with cast members who don’t remember their lines or lose their place. But he retains the ability to immerse himself in character and involve the audience.

Joan Stein, the production’s pianist, is literally bent over the piano stool, but adds punch and panache to the show. She was a pianist on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, among other credits. Her playing becomes more vigorous and emphatic as the rehearsals progress. Aideen O’Kelly bows out of the production because she cannot see the script well enough to learn her lines. During her Broadway career, she appeared in Othello with James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer (a production your website host Vicki Weisfeld saw in Washington, D.C.). Now she must watch from the sidelines.

In Midsummer, as in real life, “people live in colliding worlds of reality, illusion, and delusion” and they also may “age into some degree of dementia in which memories blur and the present becomes a slippery slope,” suggested Eric Minton in a review of the film on Shakespeareances.com. This turn of mind is why the setting for Still Dreaming, which at first seems so odd, turns out to be so right.

The full-length feature film is currently doing well on the festival circuit, most recently screening at the Sedona Independent Film Festival. The filmmakers hope that this exposure brings opportunity for wider distribution. Learn more at the Still Dreaming website. Reportedly, it will become available on DVD in April.

This review is by Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings and is gearing up for a new baseball season!

 

Run-up to the Oscars: Documentary Short Films

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Ebola workers, Liberia

Ebola Workers in Liberia (photo: WHO in PPE, wikimedia)

Again this year, the Trenton Film Society is presenting the three categories of short films nominated for Academy Awards. Thursday night, I saw the documentary shorts, five films culled from 74 entries. Tomorrow I’ll see the animated shorts and live action (fiction) nominees. Many of the documentary shorts have been well received at film festivals in the United States and worldwide. Here’s a quick rundown (the links include trailers):

  • Body Team 12 – this entry from Liberia, directed by David Darg, shows the work of people whose job was to collect the bodies of Ebola victims at the height of the 2014 outbreak in West Africa. Their work, described by Garmai Sumo, the team’s only female member, was heartbreaking, but essential in attempts to protect the health of family members and the community. (13 minutes)
  • Chau, Beyond the Lines – a joint U.S. and Vietnam production, directed by Courtney Marsh, about a teen growing up in a Vietnamese center that cares for children affected by Agent Orange who wants to become an artist and clothing designer. Marsh follows the profoundly disabled Chau into his 20s, when he receives vocational school certificates, gets a job painting pictures for a design firm and supports himself in his own apartment. Uplifting, but he is undoubtedly an outlier in spirit and success. (34 minutes)
  • A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness – directed by Sharmen Obaid-Chonoy, this film explores the “honor” killings of Pakistani women, which occur at a rate of more than a thousand per year. 18-year-old Saba fell in love and eloped, but her uncle and father found and shot her and threw her body into a river. Miraculously, Saba survived, scarred, and her father and uncle were jailed. Now, if she only “forgives” them, the court will pardon them. Her lawyer and the police don’t want her to do it, but community pressure and the society’s intransigent views about “respect” are powerful. (40 minutes)
  • Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah –this biopic from British filmmaker and journalist Adam Benzine describes French director Lanzmann’s challenges in creating his massive, nine-and-a-half hour 1985 documentary Shoah. This film includes some footage never seen before, as Lanzmann talks about how he went about trying to describe the Holocaust from the inside. That took a toll. (40 minutes)
  • Last Day of Freedom – a remarkable animated documentary from U.S. directors Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman: the story of a man’s agonizing experience when he reports suspicion that his younger brother—who has serious PTSD and bouts of homelessness—has committed a terrible crime. Since there is no film of Manny, the accused brother, animation lets him be represented, as a soldier, walking down the street, and was an interesting and effective choice. (32 minutes)

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

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Peggy Guggenheim, Alexander Calder

Guggenheim with an Alexander Calder mobile (photo: JR, creative commons license)

The new documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (trailer) tells the story of Guggenheim’s remarkable role in preserving and presenting modern art. The niece of Solomon Guggenheim, whose New York City museum is a fixture in the contemporary art scene, she immersed herself in art while living in Paris and London in the 1920s and 1930s.

The film was directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland (interview), whose first award-winning film focused on another larger-than-life woman, Diana Vreeland. In Guggenheim, the filmmaker saw a woman who was courageous, strong, and had the “ability to believe in underdogs. These artists were not mainstream, yet she had the vision to believe in them and create a new place in history for them and for herself.”

In 1937, she opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London, which showcased artists such as Jean Cocteau and Vasily Kandinsky. As World War II began in Europe, she purchased treasured works by artists such as Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí and Piet Mondrian, and as the war escalated, she arranged for over 150 paintings and sculpture to be shipped as “household goods” to New York, thereby saving seminal works from being confiscated or destroyed.

She conducted notorious love affairs with numerous artists, including Max Ernst, whom she married briefly after helping him leave Europe. Ernst has one of the best quips in the film saying, “I had a Guggenheim, and it wasn’t a fellowship!”

The documentary uses extensive interviews with art historians and curators to describe how Guggenheim became the protector and promoter of postwar art. As The Hollywood Reporter’s John Defore says, when she settled down in Venice, she would “throw great parties, tend to dozens of dogs, and watch the world grasp the scope of what she’d done.” Her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal is now home of The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, one of the most important showcases in Italy for the works of early 20th century American and European artists.

While the documentary has been making the film festival circuit, reportedly it will have a limited distribution in theaters beginning November 6.

UPDATE, 11/13: Los Angeles Times Credits Guggenheim’s perspicacity!

This review is by Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Piazza Venier dei Leoni, Venice

Piazza Venier dei Leoni (photo: wikipedia)

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Seymour: An Introduction

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Seymour Bernstein

Seymour Bernstein

This documentary (trailer), filled with beautiful music, is an étude of acclaimed concert pianist Seymour Bernstein and a joy, start to finish. Bernstein retired so he could pour his musical ideas into the vessels of his students. And not just musical ideas; his philosophy is that having access to emotion in music encourages access to emotion and satisfaction in other aspects of life. We see him providing pianists of all ages with just the right amount of subtle guidance to dramatically elevate their performances, encourage them to compose as well as play, and, apparently, achieve harmony in life in general.

Scenes take place in the one-room apartment he’s had for 40 years on the upper East Side of Manhattan, near Central Park, in various venues where former students interviewed him, NYU Master Classes, in the piano testing room of Steinway New York, and finally, its main floor rotunda, where he plays a concert to an audience of former students, colleagues, and fans. The interactions with students, former students, and other musicians are revealing, and none more so than his conversations with the film’s director, actor Ethan Hawke.

Hawke met Bernstein serendipitously at a dinner and discovered in him a person with whom he could discuss the anxieties of performance, and the disconnect between good work and success and Bernstein, with what seems to be characteristic generosity, shared his insights. He certainly did not reach his current eminence without his own challenges. When he was young, his father would say, “I have three daughters and a pianist,” which felt like a rejection of him as a son and pained him mightily.

As a young man, he served in the U.S. Army in Korea and teamed up with a talented violinist and a tenor and, despite their commanding officer’s skepticism, put on a concert for the troops—most of whom had never heard “serious” or classical music before. “They wouldn’t let us off the stage,” Bernstein says with glee, even 60 years later. The concert was so successful a tour of front-line camps was arranged. The memory is also bitter, because Bernstein remembers the war dead, and the pain of seeing those body bags has hardly faded.

Except for these memories, the movie is strongly up-beat, with a man doing what he loves and people (students, audiences, moviegoers) responding to his skill and passion. As Detroit News critic Tom Long says, “The great joy of the film, whether you know piano or not, is watching Bernstein teach.” This is a man you will be glad you got to know. The film ends with a typically modest and inspiring Bernstein statement: “I never thought that, with my two hands, I could touch the sky.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics give it a 100% rating and audiences 89%.

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It’s Tso Good

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Chinese food, General Tso's chicken

General Tso’s chicken (photo by Jason Lam, Creative Commons license)

The Search for General Tso (trailer) is an engaging chronicle of cultural assimilation told “with the verve of a good detective story” by writer-director Ian Cheney and producers Amanda Murray and Jennifer 8. Lee, based on a ubiquitous restaurant menu item adapted to Americans’ palate. (A recipe is included on the film website, above.)

Shown during the recent Sedona International Film Festival, at other film festivals around the country, and available for viewing through the link above, this popular, humor-laced documentary also traces the history of the real General Tso, a fearsome warrior from the late 19th Century.

The dish was inspired by President Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 and was introduced at the venerable Shun Lee Palace, near Lincoln Center in New York City. But the dish’s history predates its American introduction. Its originator was a Hunan chef named Peng Chang-kuei, who fled Communist China and settled in Taipei, Taiwan. He created General Tso’s chicken in 1955 for Chiang Kai-shek.

Now 90 years old, Chef Peng frowns when shown a picture of the dish, noting he would never use scallions or decorate the plate with broccoli! To achieve a sweet-and-sour taste, the American version adds sugar—another touch unheard of in traditional Chinese cooking.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 94%.

By Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings. It made me hungry just to post this!

Get Ready for Oscar! The Documentary Shorts

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Oscar, Academy Awards

(photo by Rachel Jackson, Creative Commons license)

Two theaters in our area are showing the Oscar-nominated short films this year, and last night I watched the five documentary short nominees, ranging from 20 to 40 minutes long and in total almost three hours’ worth of powerful—and pretty depressing—filmmaking. The nominees are:

  • Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 – A timelier topic is hard to imagine. It’s the story of a crisis hotline in Canandaigua, New York, which receives some 22,000 calls a month from struggling veterans (trailer). These hotline workers are invisible front-line heroes in the battle against suicide, one that a U.S. veteran, somewhere, loses every 80 minutes. An HBO film by award-winning Ellen Goosenberg Kent and Dana Perry, it is my pick for the Oscar.[YES!! The Winner]
  • Joanna – a Polish documentary (trailer) by Aneta Kopacz, nominated for innumerable awards. The film tells the story of Joanna Sałyga, who used her diagnosis of terminal cancer to inspire a blog about her daily life, to leave her son something of her after she’s gone. The blog became popular, and perhaps people familiar with it gained more from the snippets of insight in the subtitles than I did. Bottom line: well-intended, but over-long, with a muddled story arc, because it was not chronological, so the viewer cannot tell whether and how her views develop.
  • Our Curse – another Polish film, this one by film student Tomasz Śliwiński and Maciej Slesicki, about how Śliwiński and his wife came to terms with the life-threatening medical condition of their infant son, who must wear a respirator at night to be sure he continues breathing. (He has a rare, lifelong genetic disease called Ondine’s Curse.) Bottom line: At least there’s a tiny story arc, with the parents progressing from anxiety, guilt, and fear to some measure of happiness with their baby, but again, chronological presentation would make more sense to viewers.
  • The Reaper (La Parka), by Nicaraguan filmmaker Gabriel Serra Arguello (not the current horror movie directed by Wen-Han Shih), is based on interviews with Efraín Jiménez García, who has worked in a Mexico City slaughterhouse for a quarter-century. The story, in the filmmaker’s words is about “the way (García) connects with death.” And he does connect with it, killing approximately 500 bulls a day, six days a week, for 25 years. Bottom line: A good argument for vegetarianism
  • White Earth – by J. Christian Jensen (see it here) documents the conditions for workers and their families drawn to North Dakota’s oil boom, as seen through the “unexpected eyes” and differing perspectives of three children and an immigrant mother: The American Dream, c. 2014. In a word: bleak. North Dakota oil fields at night make for some eerie scenery.

Sunday morning: the dramatic shorts!

The Unknown Known & The Fog of War

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White House, snow

(photo: wikimedia.org)

The Errol Morris documentary The Unknown Known (2013)(trailer) grew from 34 hours of interviews with former White House chief of staff, ambassador to NATO, head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, special Mid-East envoy, and twice Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “Rumsfeld—in case you’ve forgotten his prominent public persona as a star of Bush-era press conferences—” Slate reviewer Dana Stevens reminds us, “tends to express himself in koan-like platitudes that hover in midair somewhere over the divide between timeless wisdom and obfuscatory bullshit.”

The film’s title is based on one of his better-known riffs, the evasive and insufficiently serious response to a reporter’s question in 2002 about the evidence for Iraq’s link to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld responded that there are “known knowns” (stuff we know that we know), “known unknowns” (stuff we know that we don’t know), and unknown unknowns (stuff we don’t know that we don’t know). The premise of The Unknown Known is there also was stuff Rumsfeld thought he knew, and didn’t. Which sums up the whole stated justification for the Iraq war.

It’s hard to watch this movie without being distracted by one’s own political views, as Rumsfeld, ever the cagey communicator, genially evades and stonewalls where he has to, especially regarding the use of torture. Yet he is capable of showing uncertainty—and would that he’d done so a dozen years ago. The interviews are interspersed with news clips, excerpts from news conferences, and on-the-ground footage of the time, so you do see some misremembering. His then-conviction about whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction is quite a contrast to his “I guess time will tell” shrug regarding whether the Iraq war was a good idea or not.

His evasions degrade political language, Forbes reviewer Tim Reuter suggests, and by constantly redefining difficult issues, Rumsfeld erases their meaning, rather than clarifies. In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott says Morris gives Rumsfeld “plenty of rope, but rather than hang himself, Mr. Rumsfeld tries to fashion a ladder and escape through the window.” One problem he couldn’t slip out of was Abu Ghraib, because shocked Americans had seen the terrible pictures. As head of the Department of Defense, he offered President Bush his resignation—twice. But Bush didn’t accept it.

Rumsfeld’s many memos were called “snowflakes,” and he blanketed the Department and his fellow Cabinet members with some 20,000 of them during his six years in the Bush Administration. In the film, he reads from a number of them, now declassified. Yet the viewer, like the recipients of that blizzard of memos sees only the Don Rumsfeld he want us to see. Given his penchant for verbal legerdemain, he must have enjoyed the idea of snowflakes. Of snow. And of snow-jobs. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 84%; audiences, 69%.

UPDATE: In January 2015, I saw Morris’s other documentary on a former Secretary of Defense, The Fog of War, created from interviews with Robert McNamara. While, like Rumsfeld, he sees history from his own particular vantage-point, unlike Rumsfeld, McNamara seemed to have learned some significant intellectual and emotional truths from the experience. The film in fact is organized around 11 “lessons.” The difference in affect between the two men is remarkable. Although there were questions (mostly personal) McNamara declined to answer, he wasn’t trying to obfuscate and he wasn’t insufferably smug.

With Age Comes Apparel

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Advanced Style

The Stars of “Advanced Style”

Take New York Times street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, add some Joan Rivers, Oprah, and Dr. Oz, and you’ve got the formula for the documentary Advanced Style (trailer here).

Photographer Ari Seth Cohen profiles seven fashionable ladies “of a certain age” (60s through 90s) whose sense of color, textures, and bold accessories (clunky cuff bracelets, enormous earrings, and oversize rings and eyewear) he discovered on the streets of Manhattan. Amazing photos of one of them—Tziporah Salamon—are included in this 40+ Style interview.

The women all have a back story, and not everything in their lives is ideal, but they are at ease with who they are. As one woman remarks, “I do a portrait with clothing. I build; I construct.”

Through Cohen’s blog and book, also titled Advanced Style, the women have been noticed by the advertising world in campaigns for Lanvin, and, oddly enough, KMart.

While engaging and entertaining, the documentary devolves into one-line tropes about aging, such as, “Everything I have two of, one hurts.” But overall, it’s worth trying on.

Guest Blogger Jodi Goalstone writes the highly entertaining blog: Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings, currently showcasing the great writing coming out of the unexpected victories by Kansas City and San Francisco.