Aftermath and Missing Dad

Aftermath and Missing Dad

March 1, 2012

O.K., I was wrong.  The feature film documentary winner for the Oscars was  Undefeated, the football movie.  Should have guessed, I guess.  Underdogs.  The easy sympathy for the African-American team.   A settled nonissue

But here’s the deal, the straight skinny, though it’s not anything critics will like to admit.

Once you’ve written positively about a film, you do get invested in it one way or another.  First lesson in non-attachment, but then the Buddha never had to come up with an opinion on deadline.

And once you do, you’re hanging out there forever.  You just gotta be right.   So I wrote about Pina, I wrote about Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.   And when you do that, you’re hanging out there for the world/internet to see.  Your dog is in the fight.

But I had no dog in the fight of the winners of the documentary short contest, and would have been theoretically pleased to have any of those fine sounding films win, though it would have definitely been a trip to see former star Dorothy Hart who gave up her Hollywood career in order to enter a nunnery fly up the stairs in her habit, should God is the Bigger Elvis have won.  She sure was impressive on the Red Carpet; dignified and the lovely blue eyes the same.  Plus, you can’t beat black and white for a formal event.

Nor can you really find much more of a noble cause than to have a film about “Saving Face” i.e. the eponymous title for the short film about Pakistani women permanently scarred by deliberate acid throwing.  I heard Daniel Junge, the film’s director, speaking by Skype in New York before the awards  were announced, and he said he had heard about the work of Dr. Muhammad Jawad on the BBC, the plastic surgeon who treated high profile model Katie Piper when she was attacked with acid by a disgruntled boyfriend.  Jawed, who is from Pakistan, voluntarily started to treat Pakistani women who were  victims of similar crimes and who had acid thrown at them out of anger, revenge, or simply to tether them to their husbands or families.    Yes, by now all know of the “accidental” kerosene oil burnings and deaths in India primarily in order to get ride of some brides so get another, and her dowry.   But the deliberate acid throwing was not as well known.

If you had to choose, in some ways the deliberate disfigurement seems even more cruel, a kind of living death of the face.    Still, of this terrible practice,  Junge said, “We (including his producer Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a Pakistani Canadian) managed to find a redemptive story within.” He also observed that over one hundred such acid attacks in Pakistan are reported every year.

The image I remember most from this film is that it is one of the victims who looks ashamed as we first see her wrapped, covering her disfigurement, to protect the viewer from looking at her.  And when Dr. Jawad gently takes her wrappings/bandages off  (much more needed than just a protective veil) she looks more worried for us, than for herself.  It is quite shocking, and also quite moving to see the gentle humanity of the doctor, as he asks in the most humane way possible, “so you were never treated for this at all at the time?”

Another has successfully brought a lawsuit case against her husband, but too many of the damages remain.

26-year-old Rukhsana Yasir, the pivotal character of Academy award-winning

documentary

As Lucy Walker said when starting to speak about her film The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom in a the pre-Oscar event at the Paley Center,  “This is a tough act to follow.”   She or rather they did though.  It was perhaps her partner-producer, Kira Carstensen, however who had the most surprising thing to say, when I asked her the standard women in documentaries question: If there is a difference in the way women make documentaries, she said, it may be because they are better at listening and are therefore a natural for the form.

Interesting.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, left, and Daniel Junge pose with their Oscars for best documentary short for Saving Face,  airing on PBS March 8.  

 

Still, one of the most piercing comments about the possibilities of winning an Oscar came from James Spione, the director of Incident in New Baghdad, the only documentarian at the event who was “self-funded.”   If you start to think you might win an Oscar, he said, you will most likely never get your film going.  But after awhile, you do start to daydream a bit about and . . . .  . . .

And before leaving entirely the topic of the Oscars, for this year anyway, you have to think about acceptance speeches, and giving thanks.  I slipped up on that one myself, in not giving credit and thanks to director-photographer Jay Rappoport, who generously and professionally filmed my interview with Lise Birk Pederson, the director of Putin’s Kiss (see my first blog entry).

Speaking of daydreaming, it is a strong component in Boy, the second feature from New Zealand director Taika Waititi, using his own hometown of Waihau Bay as the setting for a movie about the indigenous culture as it is now, for Maoris (Waititi is himself a Maori).  The plot centers on the return from jail of a missing Dad, to his two boys, one of which is the “star” of the film, James Rolleston.   He is a Boy, but he has to be mother to a passel of kids he must look after while his aunt and grandmother are either working five jobs to make ends meet, or are not around.

I saw the film at a sneak screening at the Museum of American Indian in downtown Manhattan, and it’s easy to see why the film’s promoters chose this as a venue: the windswept desolate and dirt poor elements are parallels not to be ignored, as well as the propensity of the male members of the indigenous peoples to be on the dole, to use drugs (in New Zealand apparently it’s marijuana), to have depressingly lost all direction in life.

See for instance the image below which looks like it could have been filmed by Dorothea Lange, if Lange got to take a crack at the Maori culture.

James Rolleston, looking after his charges, and also waiting for his father to come home, in the movie Boy

The bits showing the mancave of a dad who has lived a hardscrabble yet self-indulgent life are realistic to the nth degree, also the family’s  run-down house, and most memorably and humorously, a one-stop general store/post office run by Boy’s aunt.

This picture of the Maori culture gone, cut off from its spiritual roots though still juxtaposed and shot against the spectacular New Zealand coastline and natural setting, is just about as effective in making the point about native cultures and their suppression as any doc on the History Channel.

Oscar Hopes and Hype

Oscar Hopes and Hype

So now that Joan Collins has confirmed what everyone knew all along, that The Artist is going to win best picture at the Academy Awards (and no doubt trailing a number of other awards along with it, if not the special canine ward that’s been called for), the only contest—in this blogger/critic’s mind anyway–seems to be in the contest between Pina and Paradise Lost 3 for best feature length documentary.

 

Until recently, I was sure that Pina was going to be the winner, for the extraordinary use of 3-D in an art film.  The other three nominees are Hell and Back Again, about a wounded American soldier who comes home from Afghanistan,  Undefeated, about an African-American football team football team with a white upper middle-class coach, and If a Tree Falls: The Story of the Earth Liberation Front, as described, and a favorite among some critics.  One of its directors, Marshall Curry, was nominated once before in this category but did not win, and this is generally is considered a plus in voting consideration.

 

Yet the buzz is that the winner will be Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.

 

Whether or not he heard this, it didn’t seem to stop Wim Wenders from dashing through Manhattan or anyway the West Side, mid-week, as he first introduced his film at Lincoln Center at 6:30 in the evening,  then downtown to the IFC at 10:00 p.m., still happy to explain the inspiration for his film and its great success:  that he worried so hard about how to present dance until using space in 3-D came to him, an obvious idea in retrospect he says, after having seen the concert film U-2 3D.    And of course that it is a tribute to his friend Pina Bausch who died while the movie was just being pondered.

 

If there is a sentiment against Pina, it may be because it is not a documentary in the traditional sense.  Even those who love the film admit that the dance sequences are purposefully non-chronological, and that there is no social or political “point” to the movie.   The medium is the message perhaps—the fantastic rendering of the dance sequences, the devotion of Pina’s troupe.  Too, Pina is a German film.  If The Artist, a French production, will sweep, will the Academy go for another “import”?

 

Other entries are incredibly strong, which makes documentaries the most exciting race of the evening.  No doubt Undefeated will make a strong pitch to fans of sports underdog films; especially those who don’t make too strong a comparison with Hoop Dreams, or Fordson,  a doc from last year about a mainly Muslin football team in the Midwest.  

 

I didn’t see Undefeated, but my reviews of Pina and Paradise Lost 3 are in, respectively,  Film Journal International:

 

www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/reviews/specialty-releases/

 

www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/esearch/e3ib505cbd155d46632…

 

Wenders was once before passed over in this Documentary Award category when he lost for Buena Social Club, which was the favorite that year, 2006, in favor of The Last King of Scotland.  So he too is in the category of having once been left at the altar.

Assuming that the buzz is correct, why is it that Paradise Lost is the front-runner?

 

Well, it did do what documentaries are traditionally supposed to—right a wrong.

Documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory may not be the first film to force the release of the falsely imprisoned (that credit goes to Errol Morris and The Thin Blue Line). But they are unique in obsessively making three films over a 15-year time span to right a perceived wrong, adjusting their interpretation of events during the filmmaking process, and maintaining artistic integrity while still helping to keep the case alive.

Three young boys were murdered in 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas, with the resulting incarceration of three teen “suspects”—Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr.  After serving 18 years in prison, the trio was released in August 2011 after negotiating an “Alford Plea,” a deal struck by the State of Arkansas to avoid a retrial.

 

 

 

 

And the “story” seems to have its own life—a fourth film has been made about the topic:  directed by Amy Berg, and produced by Echol’s wife, Lorri Davis, an attorney who worked on the case of the Memphis Three, which is how she met Echols.  So it’s a film triad which has spawned another:  voting members, like all of us, like a good gossip and an industry tale.  At the Lincoln Center Film Festival screening in the fall, Sinofsky said he hoped that the prisoners would now be “left in peace,” to live their lives, so perhaps he and his partner are not that happy about the fourth film, with which they’re not associated.   If nothing else, the West Memphis Three will always win in the category of the most spin-offs per topic.

Yet for Best Feature Documentary this year, whether it will be a war wound, football as a means up and out of poverty,  improperly incarcerated young men,  the place of radicalism in environmental causes, or a paean to art and mortality, we’ll (I’ll) only have to wait another eight hours to find out.

 

Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts + Putin’s Kiss

“Somebody better film this.  Because otherwise some bastard is going to come along someday and say it never happened.”

. . . .Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower entering the Nazi War Camps at the end of World War II.

“If everyone is blogging, who’s reading?” asked a well-intentioned friend.

Good question, and the answer is . . . you.  That is, anyone who’s seriously interested in the most exciting and uncompromised form out there these days: the documentary film.

This is not to say that documentaries are easy to get made, funded, promoted or seen.   But they are definitely easy to watch.

As a film reviewer (for Film Journal International), and former staff critic at a large metropolitan daily (The Arizona Republic), a lot of material is available to me.  This is both fortunate and unfortunate, for it’s frustrating to not always be able to get all the films and events covered that I would like to.  Hence this blog.

For instance, last week I had the great opportunity to meet a number of the makers of the Academy Award nominated short documentaries for this year.  In fact, this may be the primo moment to meet them, for they’re like horses at the gate—no one has won yet, and no one has lost.  All eager, hopeful and just a bit jumpy (and all nice, even to each other), and all the makers of some wonderful films, to judge by the bits shown.  The documentarians made themselves available at an event at the Paley Center for Media in New York, ready and willing to talk about and show their films, just a week before the Academy Awards.    This includes Julie Anderson with God is the Bigger Elvis, James Spione with Incident in New Baghdad,  Daniel Junge (by Skype) with Saving Face, and Lucy Walker (and her producer Kira Carstensen) with The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom.  Plus last year’s winner, Kirk Simon.  (This listing is in no particular order, and this blogger surely has no secret knowledge on the vote “trending” in any case.)

A scene from The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, and the film’s director, Lucy Walker 

I’ve long ago given up on predicting, but it’s easy to have an opinion.   For instance, what position to take on the new rules for documentary nomination, promoted by the new eminence grise (and former bad boy) of the doc world, Michael Moore?   Too, it’s really funny that Moore, who on more than one occasion has been overlooked for his documentaries, now has the clout to “encourage” mandates.

Here is a brief summation of those rules, which Moore was instrumental in getting instituted.

In the new set-up, not just some but all members of the Academy will be able to vote on the best docs.   It’s clear that this means the form is now considered so major that everyone feels the imperative, or wants, to ring in.   Now screeners can be used to view a film (for probably private) screening rooms.  Used to be that I hated the idea of a screener—I was a visual purist–but it certainly is practical and useful, and insures “no excuses” for not having seen a film.

There is a hitch, of course. Any documentary must have been reviewed in the New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times.  (This replaces the earlier qualifying rule that a film have a week-long theatrical release at very least before the year’s end.)  What?  To my way of thinking that gives with one hand and takes away with the other.

It’s good to have cheap equipment.  It’s nice that some kid in the outskirts of Urbana, Illinois, for instance, or Westchester, or Orange County, now feels that if inspired a doc is possible.  True, it may still be possible, but it sounds like a spirit squelcher for filmmakers who suspect they would probably never get reviewed in either of those big town newspapers.   And for other documentarians, practicing a form which has some claim to being democratic, it seems to me to be an elitist slap in the face, and looks like another roadblock.

Some of this may get stirred up again on February 26, when the Oscars are handed out.   I do know that Bruce Sinofsky (Brothers Keeper, all the Paradise Lost documentaries, the most recent of which is nominated for a feature-length documentary) said that it now means he and his filmmaker partner Joe Berlinger will have to hire a publicist to get a movie reviewed.  It was bad enough, he indicated, to have to get a theatrical distribution deal for a theatrical release.  And of course they can afford it more than most.

Bruce Sinofsky

With the exception of Sinofsky, I thought mine was a minority opinion.  But when I  spoke to Kirk Simon briefly after the panel presentation (it was, after all, advertised as “Meet the Filmmakers”) he reiterated his opinion expressed on the stage that the “New rules are helpful only to those who already have  a large name as a filmmaker.   No one is saying anything about it, but I don’t care.  I will.”

This was the only negative note in his otherwise anecdote-filled and ebullient presentation, particularly as he recounted what it is like to be at the “loser’s bar” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  After all, he reminded the audience, 80% & of those nominated might end up there.  He himself has been a frequenter of the loser’s bar many times, he said, though he finally won an Oscar last year for his documentary short Strangers No More.

More on this panel later, but now to something more time-connected, which I’ve been told is the purpose of a blog (anyway, people always excuse themselves from any potential stylistic errors by pointing out blog-urgency).

Yesterday I had the chance to talk with Lise Birk Pedersen, the director of Putin’s Kiss, a documentary about a young Russian woman and her relationship with and de-yoking from the Nashi, a Kremlin-friendly youth-oriented wing of Vladimir Putin’s party.  The movie couldn’t be more timely as it turns out, with Putin’s sinking popularity in the news, his re-election (or not) imminent, and the documentary the recipient of a number of awards and honors at the Sundance Film Festival.  Plus, the movie—just now opening at the Quad Cinema in the East Village in Manhattan this snowless President’s Day Weekend—is set to platform across the country.

My review of Putin’s Kiss is below, as is the filmed interview with Pedersen.

So who am I to ask, review, proclaim about documentaries? You may very well wonder.   I did do a book on documentary filmmakers – Documentary Filmmakers: How Today’s Filmmakers are Reinventing the Form—a few years back.   That book took up some of the aesthetic and structural “issues” shown to good advantage in Putin’s Kiss:  the creative use of narrative, intercutting color with black and white, the personalization of core concepts by using a likable character as a “star”– in this film even in a modified doc-born Q & A format.

But let director Pedersen give her grounds-up view of those issues, and also read and let me know what you think of my take on the film.

A quick caveat:  no fancy borders, memorabilia or mementoes, at least not this time around.   There’s always a deadline, and you’ve got to figure it’s more important to get the word out.

IDEOLOGICAL PUPPY LOVE GONE WRONG

Putin’s Kiss is not a soft-core porn film about him (that might be better news for Vladmir Putin, these days).  But Putin is in the movie—for a bit—and yes, he is bussed.   But in an adoring, schoolgirl sort of way, by the then 19 year old Masha Drovoka, one of the leaders of Nashi, his youth organization.

In this documentary by Danish filmmaker Lise Birk Pedersen, a personal crisis of confidence in the ingratiating, Rubenesque Drokova mirrors the growing discontentment of the Russian population with their sometimes dictatorial if charming Prime Minister.

Putin’s Kiss, which won a World Cinema Cinematography Award for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, and is now an official Sundance Selects film, gives one  answer to poet Muriel Ruykeyser’s famous question, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?  The world would split open.”   That may be overstating the case a bit, yet it is certainly not good news for Putin that Putin’s Kiss will premiere in Moscow on the eve of the election there, on March 4.   Putin’s world already has some cracks; and  Russia is in the midst of the largest wave of political protests in 20 years.

Plus, sometimes it’s the little things that really get you, like an unprepossessing documentary, and the point of view of one person. If it’s not a blue dress with DNA stains, it may be a movie featuring a disillusioned one-time admirer: it helps that she herself has been a kind of mini-media star, a talk show host.

Masha also seems to stand for the “New” Russia of material pleasures.  She was born in 1989 and the movie implies that her pleasant disposition may have something to do with not having endured some of the bitter struggles of Russians in the past, a cheery kind of belief that all good (sometimes worldly) things will be at her disposal.  But as we see in the easy-to-sit-through, 85 minute film, her world view is challenged.  For while Nashi hopes to create a future elite among Russian teens who will be loyal to the Kremlin (and the attractive young woman was obviously a prize conquest for their team), it becomes clear to Masha and to us, as the film goes on, that another goal is to quash opposing viewpoints.

Putin’s Kiss mixes narrative with a kind of extended Q & A as Masha herself is interviewed on occasion—by her sister, friends and colleagues.  Sometimes she simply talks to the camera.  There is the to-be-expected use of archived family photos which do in fact show a brighter Russia than we’re used to seeing.  It also has some smashingly sun and fun-filled sequences of shots of the summer youth camp of Nashi—you can see why people join up: if nothing else, the exercises would be worth it.

But there is a secondary framework in the documentary:  Oleg Kashin, a journalist-friend of Masha’s who is on the other, the liberal, side is briefly seen in the beginning of the film: “I want to tell you a story.  It’s a story that changed my life,” he says.  His somewhat ominous demeanor, full of gallows humor, presages the story of an attack on him—a very physical one—that puts him in the hospital when a gang pommels him into what they hope will be submission (though that turns out to be only temporary).  This event, intersecting with Masha’s own defeat in an internal election, triggers her change-of-heart and -head.   Though Nashi forbids contact with those who oppose their views, Masha does go to the hospital to visit Oleg, and is surprised that the crowd there lets her through. She chooses the personal over the doctrinal:  “I didn’t feel any discord within myself.  A friend has been attacked.”

Journalist and blogger Oleg Kashin after being brutalized.

We also get a view of Nashi’s darker internal organization:  there is the idealistic wing, yes, but there are the thugs.  Surveillance cameras catch some devilishly distasteful pranks such as defecating on the hoods of cars of political opponents (we are even treated to a close-up—a questionable editorial choice–of one of the admirably healthy looking “products.”   At least Dr. Oz would be pleased.)

Yet Putin’s Kiss can only imply it was Nashi responsible for the attack on Oleg (the case has never been conclusively proven one way or another; even Oleg says it is just a 50-50 chance it was Nashi forces).   In one time-honored doc tradition, it might have been useful to have at least one representative of Putin’s forces interviewed so the illusion of “fairness” is maintained throughout.

As well as being a highly personal documentary, Putin’s Kiss contains stirring footage of Nashi marching and ritualistically stomping on posters featuring faces of those they wish to destroy.   It’s scarcely Triumph of the Will, but you get the idea.

Nashi on the move

In Russian, with English subtitles, some of the dialogue still seems essentially Russian in its passionate, earthy response to even the world of politics.  One critic of Nashi says, “You can not have a fish of second rate freshness. Either it’s fresh or it’s not.  You can not have a second rate democracy”

When Putin’s bid for re-election comes up in a couple weeks, we will find out if this assessment was on the mark.

—-Marsha McCreadie

Please see my filmed interview with Lise Birk Pedersen, on February 17, 2012.

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