Women In World Cinema

Bagdad High–HBO Tonight

2008-08-04T21:50:00.000-07:00

Speaking of war and capitalism… for Baghdad High, directors Laura Winter and Ivan O’Mahoney gave four Iraqi high school seniors digital cameras and basic instruction in filmmaking. The result is a wrenching look inside a country tormented and destroyed by a war–not of their making, which has produced four million refugees. Each of the boys–all friends–belongs to a different religion or sect, including a Christian who must hide his affiliation. In-between bomb explosions, electrical outages and military-enforced curfews they listen to American popular music, talk on their cell phones, like ordinary teenagers, and do their best to prepare for their final exams, even as they must adapt to a daily world of “no good news.” But when two of the boys and their families (and half the students at their high school) flee north from Baghdad, it marks the end of their filming and the continuation of an uncertain future.

Behind the Curtain of American Elections: Nov. 2008

2008-07-31T23:09:00.000-07:00

"We have every reason to believe that the 2008 election is going to be manipulated."

––Jonathan Simon, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance, a
national election integrity nonprofit
"Stealing America: Vote by Vote"

Everyone I know lugs around a low-grade dread, like an undetected virus invisible until the obvious outbreak, about the upcoming presidential election. Many of us (including a surprising number of non-partisans and Republicans) stoically retain the knowledge that something terrible happened during the 2000 and 2004 elections. And then there are others, myself included, who feel that nothing short of election-fraud occurred during both elections. But what exactly happened (okay, aside from a Court of five in 2000 throwing a victory party for GWB)? How can it be righted? And who’s going to do it? I mean, where’s the “Deep Throat” for “electiongate”? We are exporting democratic “ideals” to other countries, like Iraq and the Ukraine (with its Orange Revolution), yet they have a better voting system than ours. How can this be?

As increasingly they are wont to do, documentary filmmakers rush in where the media fears to tread. "Documentary" set out to discover as many election-fraud-related docs as we could find. By telephone, we interviewed two directors and an executive producer of the two most prominent efforts: "Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections" (dir., David Earnhardt) and "Stealing America: Vote by Vote" (dir., Dorothy Fadiman; exec. prod., Mitchell Block).

Personally, after screening these films, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to throw up my hands in despair and never vote again, or run out and organize a 21st century Weather Underground. One can be mad as hell, and swear she won’t take it anymore, but, realistically speaking, what can one person do? As frustrating and enraging as the revelations in these films are, fortunately, they also provide specific and practical plans of action for individuals and activist groups to increase vigilance and ensure election integrity. For, as Earnhardt, Fadiman and Block concur: it’s all about grassroots organization.

After the 2004 presidential election and the first comprehensive use of electronic voting machines, Earnhardt, a Nashville-based filmmaker, set out to unravel the mystery of why the election results were inconsistent with the exit polls. After three years of hearing “the election was stolen,” he said, “I wanted to find out how it was done.” Three years later, the answer is Uncounted, which systematically catalogs “the myriad of different ways the election was manipulated. It’s never just one thing,” Earnhardt told me. He has “linked the dots” of information seemingly randomly gathered by the media. The film makes a compelling case for election fraud by examining in depth the following issues:
• Exit Poll Discrepancies (“Nearly all the experts are in agreement that the exit polls could not have been so far off that they gave such distorted results. It’s far more rational that the voting process was compromised.” Rep. John Conyers, Chair, House Judiciary Committee)
• Systematic Purging or “Caging” of Voters (Purging of voters from the records before the election: 309,000 in Ohio in 2004. Bush’s winning margin in Ohio was 119,000 votes.)
• “Jim Crow” Voter Suppression in the 21st Century (According to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., blacks waited on average, 3.5 hrs to vote, while whites waited less than 18 minutes.)
• Undervoting (“When you see 42%, 70% and 80% undervotes in a precinct in this election, you know that’s not real. There’s something desperately not right.”  Marybeth Kuznik, Pennsylvania poll worker)
• Vote Switching (Concentrated in certain areas, like–suprise!–Florida.)
• Illegal Behavior by a Major Voting Machine Manufacturer (Walden O’Dell, the CEO of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fundraiser for GWB. In a letter to potential donors, he wrote: “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president…” NYT Nov. 9, 2003)
• Electronic Voting  (“With all these [electronic] machines, you can alter the outcome of a national election in a way that is just unprecedented.”  Andrew Gumbel, Journalist & author, Steal This Vote)
• Privatization of Our Election Process (“The further you go into privatizing this activity of running elections, the more you lose control over the very core of our democracy.”  Lowell Finley, Deputy Secretary of State, California)
• Provisional Ballots

In addition to fine production values (especially the lack of the too-often-used invasive voice-over: when I mentioned this to Earnhardt, he said that he wanted to “let the story tell itself, unencumbered by narrative”) and a powerful investigative journalism approach, Uncounted–unrepentantly partisan–tackles the two voting machine companies–ES&S and Diebold–that electronically counted 80% of the votes in the 2004 presidential election. Both private, for-profit companies have extensive ties to the Republican Party. But, dig this, Diebold’s primary business is manufacturing ATM machines, which provide a paper receipt for transactions and has an audit trail. So why wouldn’t it supply the same paper trail for voting machines? Well, you probably don’t need three guesses.

But Earnhardt’s perspective extends beyond the relatively recent election debacles: “Historically,” he points out, “over the 230 years of this country’s past, [election manipulation] has been done both ways [by Republicans and Democrats]. But in recent years, it’s been in one direction–favoring Republicans.”

On this thrust, Dorothy Fadiman’s "Stealing America"–which highlights many of the same points and talking heads–adds an enlightening piece of information as expressed by Lynn Landes, Journalist/Political Scientist and former BBC Correspondent: “Even though the Republicans seem to control the voting technology and the corporations that count the votes, the Democrats have not exhibited a keen interest in addressing the situation.”

"Stealing America" hopes to appeal to a large college-age audience, and they’ve all but insured its popularity with these first-time voters by including segments from the zeitgeist conscience and mouthpiece: "The Daily Show" and "Colbert Report." "Stealing" bends over backwards to communicate a non-partisan viewpoint by including interviews with “the bad guys”–people who unashamedly admit to redirecting an election that favored George Bush over John Kerry–and “would/will do it again.”

One of those is Allen Raymond, author of the appropriately titled How to Rig an Election, who reveals how he was hired by the RNC to “jam phone lines.” “Almost a prank,” he said smiling, on "The Daily Show." “A prank on democracy,” responds the quick-witted Jon Stewart. “In politics, there’s right and wrong; then there’s what happens in a campaign,” Raymond says, still smiling, in an attempt to justify his actions.

With regard to documentaries, one of the most hotly discussed topics these days speculates about how much “good” they do, if their only audience is the “choir.” At "Documentary" we were especially interested in the plans Earnhardt, Fadiman and Block had to distribute their films to a wider audience.

Earnhardt’s “grassroots approach” has included traveling to 36 cities since mid-Jan, where he rents out theatres and screens the film for local integrity voter groups, and moderates lively after-film discussions: “People show up, who empathize, or have a sense that, something’s wrong, but haven’t got the info; the film really fires people up,” he says. Their alliance provides the groups a “platform” and a means of then continuing to share the information on their own, a DVD of "Uncounted" in hand. He calls this a “non-traditional approach, with a geometric factor.” For example, earlier this spring, 203 “house parties” were organized in 23 states and the District of Columbia. On this evening–Feb. 13, which happened to be Earnhardt’s birthday (“Yes, it was the best possible present”)–he participated in a 40-minute conference call among all 203 sites.

In addition to the public events in theatres, churches, community centers and even individual house parties, blogs are providing a great deal of notice and “buzz” about both the film and the topic of election fraud. And the film’s website www.uncountedthemovie.com provides ideas of actions people can take. The DVD is doing well far beyond their expectations and, through the website alone, has sold units to people in 20 countries as well as in every state of the Union. Eranhardt also gives credit to bloggers, who, he says, have significantly helped spread awareness of election issues. He’s now taking “a more retail market approach” by aligning with the distributor Disinformation Company and making the DVD available through both Amazon and Netflix.

His approach has worked and Earnhardt admits that the process has “affirmed my belief in the power of what one person can do. When things change, it usually starts with one person and evolves into citizen activism. Then the leadership has to listen.” But the “number one defense,” he advises, is to vote: “If you don’t vote, it definitely won’t be counted.”

Dorothy Fadiman, director, and Mitchell Block, executive producer, of "Stealing America," decided to approach the distribution issue through a “vision of college campuses.” As such, they have set up 1,000 screenings on campuses across the nation. There are two primary reasons for this, as Fadiman points out: to inform and educate (“it’s important to give college students a perspective on history”) and to increase the number of voters, “so the results are clearer. There’s a generation coming up who are not registered,” reasoned Fadiman. “The only way to head off a suspicious election before the votes are certified is to have a large lead going in.” Because younger voters tend to vote more liberally, she worries that her motivation may not be necessarily “a nonpartisan act.” But, in our conversations, both she and Block stressed the importance of “reaching out to people in a nonpartisan way to make them aware of voting issues.” As Block put it, “It’s important to understand that if you are making a film about something as important as voting, you’ll turn off half the audience [if it’s approached in a partisan manner]. On an issue as basic as voting, you don’t serve any purpose in speaking to only one party.” Their goal is for viewers to see the film, “not as an attack, but as a plea to protect our votes.”

The team is working with publicists in LA and NY and in Santa Fe and other cities, “so it gets high visibility,” Block explained. They are screening the film at 100 theatres and, like Earnhardt, working with field people to do outreach and activities groups, to build grassroots, and to help those groups. “It’s a good mix of not-for-profit and nonpartisan,” he continues, “mixed with traditional for-profit marketing.” Block also credits the blogoshere with advancing notice of the film. (www.stealingamericathemovie.org)

Fadiman spoke at length about Matthew Segal, a recent college graduate and the founder and executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE), a student-led, non-profit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to removing access barriers and increasing civic education for young people; he is also a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute–the nation’s first student-run think-tank. Segal’s vision for what he will be doing with "Stealing America" on college campuses and with related activities includes 12-point program. Segal hopes to:
provide a college tour of film screenings at SAVE’s 35 (and growing) college chapters (inviting a panel of speakers for discussion afterwards when possible)
disseminate an election reform package at each screening focusing on issues to protect student voting rights such as: voter ID reform, registration access, proportional voting machine allocation, voter verification, absentee ballot access
organize screenings throughout Ohio and other states with the help of Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the NAACP
provide access to many politicians, coordinate lobbying efforts, political meetings in state legislatures and on Capitol Hill
blog about SAVE on Huffington Post and on SAVE’s own blog
use new media such as Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Stumbleupon and Youtube to create more hits for the SAVE website as well as spread more info about the film
create a website for young people to report their question/concerns/stories about registering and casting their votes
reach out to political science and government professors to screen films and hold class discussions.

Segal’s fine ideas fit Fadiman’s objective, which is “to make people alert and aware that the election systems we have in place, are not secure, and not be afraid or shy to raise our voices.”

Admittedly, this is an uphill battle, as David Earnhardt cautions: “Election manipulation rarely even makes a top ten issues list. But think about it–if your vote doesn’t count, then nothing else really matters.”

Other DVDs available on the topic of Election Integrity

"American Blackout" (Ian Inaba, director; Anastasia King, producer; GNN Productions)

"Free For All" (John Wellington Ennis, director; www.FreeForAll.tv)

"Recount Democracy" (Danny Schecter, director; Faye Anderson, producer; Pathfinder Pictures; www.pathfinderpictures.com)

An excerpt of this article was first published in the Fall 2008 issue of DOCUMENTARY Magazine.

Interview w/ Marina Zenovich, Director

2008-06-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

In 1977, eight years after the brutal slaying of his actress wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child by the Manson “Family,” Roman Polanski (the Polish-born Holocaust survivor and internationally renowned director of Repulsion, Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown), was convicted of drugging and raping 13-year-old Samantha Gailey (now Geimer), an aspiring young model (driven to the rendezvous by her own mother who arranged the tryst). Rather than face certain further imprisonment, Polanski (with a loan from producer Dino De Laurentiis) fled the U.S. for France, where he still lives day.

Fast-forward to 2001 when the industry buzz prominently favored an Oscar nod to the long-exiled Polanski for his direction of The Pianist. Synchronistically, documentary filmmaker Marina Zenovich, in search of her next film project, caught Samantha Geimer and her lawyer on Larry King. When she heard the lawyer say, "The day Roman Polanski fled was a sad day for the American judicial system," Zenovich, who had been only 14 during Polanski’s trial, wondered what he meant and knew she “had to find out.”

What she uncovered, through interviews with most of the primary figures in the case (including Geimer’s lawyer, the DA in the case, and, eventually, Polanski’s own attorney), was the little-known fact that the hunger of the presiding judge, Laurence Rittenband, for a share of his 15-minutes of media celebrity, swayed him to rule unfairly and unjustly against Polanski’s admitted unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

In addition to Rittenband (who died in 1993), the most important character of course was Polanski himself, who is “wanted” in the U.S. as a criminal, and “desired” in Europe as an artist and survivor. Zenovich’s initial fax to him remained unanswered, but she forged ahead until, close to the film’s completion, she wrote a letter asking if he would be willing to meet with her. After several weeks without a response, on her way to a directing job in Italy, she booked a ticket through Paris, hoping for an encounter with the elusive one. Polanski’s attorney apologized on his behalf saying that he feared his appearance in the film might look like self-promotion. Disappointed but undaunted, she decided to call him anyway. He agreed to meet –– off the record. “I think he was quite appreciative of the work I had done to bring the legal story to light,” she says. “He apologized for declining the interview. He seemed more vulnerable in person. He had been living in my head -- through archive -- for many years, so it was satisfying to meet him.”

Making a documentary about a living person without his involvement can be a complicated procedure. In fact, Zenovich had already made a film about someone who declined participation. In her sometimes comical, often self-revealing, always entertaining 2001 doc Who is Bernard Tapie?, Zenovich (as compelling an onscreen personality as her subject) obsessively pursues (“I’m not a stalker!” she shouts at the camera) the object of her curiosity and craving –– the titular French iconic politician, soccer team manager, actor/entertainer, businessman, talk show host, and ex-con –– with the abandon of an adolescent school girl. (Her next film, part of her “French trilogy,” focuses on yet another inaccessible individual: Nicolas Sarkozy.)

Zenovich’s dense psychological portrait of Polanski is less the standard bio-doc than her attempt to understand the particular historical moment of the late-1970s, which has always intrigued her. The level of her sophisticated filmmaking is a good match for her subject and even reflects the style, intelligence and humor of Polanski’s work through clips of his films.

What were some of the more important stylistic decisions she made, I wanted to know. “Stylistically I wanted a lot of archive and the look and feel of a dream,” she recalls. Very early on, she cut together the airplane shot of Polanski landing in France (after fleeing certain imprisonment in the States) with the voiceover of Polanski’s friend Pierre Andre Boutang: “I think he has a dark side, a sad side, a veiled side. Given his childhood he has a relationship to life and death he can’t talk about. It’s impossible. He has a strong vision of death and sadness inside him but since he has such energy, such working power, such desire to do extraordinary things, he prevails.”

Originally published in Documentary Magazine, Summer Issue, 2008

Interview w/ Lisa Jackson, Director: "Silence in the Congo The Greatest Silence"

2008-04-04T01:39:00.000-07:00

From Lisa Jackson's The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, which airs April 8 on HBO. Photos courtesy of Sundance Film Festival
“Why use sex to humiliate and defeat someone?” asks Dr. Denis Mukwege, who specializes in treating hundreds of female victims of sexual violence at an understaffed eastern Congo hospital in Bukavu. That question serves as the subtext of Lisa F. Jackson’s "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo" as she encounters face-to-face the physically brutalized, soul-wounded survivors of a dark force that has assaulted 250,000 women and girls. Jackson’s approach is political and humanist and at the same time profoundly personal, given her own survival of a gang-rape in Washington, D.C., when she was 25 years old. This personal/political confluence serves her well in building up a sense of trust among the women she meets and interviews, especially given her willingness to share her story with photographs and newspaper clippings with the film’s participants. But, perhaps the most chilling aspect of the film is Jackson’s interviews with members of the Congolese army in the bush, who unabashedly admit to raping and torturing women. Jackson performed all the production functions (producer, director, DP, sound, and editor) on "The Greatest Silence," which won a Special Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance this year and premieres Tuesday, April 8, on HBO at 10 PM. I sat down with Jackson in Park City’s Yarrow Hotel during the Sundance Film Festival.

Cathleen Rountree: First of all, I want to commend you on your courage in addressing this horrific issue. How did you decide to include yourself and your own experience with rape in the film?

Lisa Jackson: This was a difficult decision and it didn’t happen, I’d say, until halfway through the edit. In fact, I shot for two months in May and June in ’06, then I went back in November to film the rapists. In between I’d assembled some cuts, and people who saw it, kept asking, “How did you get these women to open up to you?” and “What did you tell them about yourself?” I had intentionally gone over my story with the women, using the photographs, the newspaper articles and all the background information about myself. When I told people this, they said, “Well, why don’t you put that in the film? And why don’t you put yourself in the film? You have this incredible journey.”

Then it occurred to me that it was also a way of making these amazing stories I was getting a lot less voyeuristic. So I shot some recreations of me showing the photographs to women and, actually, those reaction shots of the women (when they’re looking at me kind of baffled early on) are when I was telling them what was going on and the translator was relaying it to them. So there were some very authentic moments and, obviously, they could see that my photographs were real.

So, it wasn’t a conscious thing from the beginning, but it seemed to me as an appropriate narrative device. And also a way of making the film more accessible, because the whole point of the film is that these women are not “other.” That we [in this country] experience the same things they do. Within the gradation of human experience, the overlap is a lot more profound than you might think.

CR: How do you feel when you see yourself in the film?

LJ: It still makes me a little squeamish to see myself on the screen, but in the end I think my friends persuaded me in the right direction.

CR: The sections of you do have an organic feel to them.

How frightened were you when you were traveling in these dangerous war zones, especially when you confronted the rapists? I guess there was a period when it was just you and the translator?

LJ: Oh, I was alone the entire time. I mean Bernard [Kalume, a Congolese man who works with the UN peacekeepers as a translator and liaison] came with me for my first trip into the bush, but for the second one, I was pretty much on my own, because the U.N. was completely preoccupied with the election and the count. And … how frightened was I …. You know I’ve done a lot of traveling in the third world and you get into this zone where you’re just so into the moment, you’re not really thinking about what’s going on around you. People have asked me at the screenings, “Weren’t you afraid of getting attacked? Well, people get attacked on the streets of Manhattan, so you can’t not leave your apartment because you might be attacked.

CR: Yes, but you were in the midst of known rapists.

LJ: Yes, that’s true, and there was a moment when I was heading up into the mountain when I went Holy crap, what have I gotten myself into? And suddenly I was just drenched in sweat. Again, it was just putting one foot in front of the other. And then it occurred to me that these guys were such narcissistic, preening, arrogant assholes that they really wanted to be filmed, and that my camera really was in effect a weapon. If anything were to happen to me, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to brag about their accomplishments.

CR: I’m sure that you had already dealt with it in depth, but I’m wondering if making this film had any kind of healing effect on you?

LJ: Well, I’d dealt with it pretty thoroughly, and I’ve made other films about women and sexual violence, and I’ve told my story and written about it. But what was poignant to me is that I had been able to move on, and I’ve actually been able to use that experience to inform a lot of what I do. But the majority of women I met will never be able to move on, they will be stuck in that place.

CR: They’ve also suffered severe lasting physical effects and many of them have children produced from the rape, which leads me to the question: How are the women dealing with their offspring. Is there any resentment toward them or have they transcended their anger?

LJ: No, there’s something about the women I met … I had an interesting question at the Q&A last night: Have I heard anything about these women committing suicide because their lives are at a dead end? There is still an incredible love among these women and a commitment to family and their children. They have such resilience and a grace and strength that shine through. Even that young Immaculate, who had a child by rape, you know she’s going to stick with that child. She may resent her and she may remind her of the rapist, but the maternal instinct trumps everything.

CR: Did you come away with any sense of forgiveness or compassion for these men, who themselves are products of a horrendous culture of violence.

LJ: Pretty much zippo. If I had seen any sign from them that showed the least bit of contrition or even an understanding of what they had done, I might have been able to see them as something other than callous assholes of the first magnitude. They actually seem kind of familiar to me, you know, I see them on the A-train everyday –– and they can be white, too.

I found myself –– in the interviews with them –– being extremely polite with them, and not pressing them on questions they didn’t understand, so I was obviously intimidated by them. I mean I did feel sympathy for them in the sense that they are part of the culture and were raised in the same cycle of violence. They were probably raised in conflict zones as kids and saw a lot of violence. And you wonder, did these guys ever respect a woman? Maybe that’s the source of their contempt for women.

CR: The level of atrocities perpetrated on those women is unimaginable. I mean, some of the torturous acts are things I’ve never heard of. It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around them, like the men forcing a pregnant woman’s child to trample on his or her mother’s stomach to kill the fetus.

LJ: Yeah, well, there was a lot that I just had to edit out. One woman talks about being forced to eat her own feces that was mixed with the flesh of her child who the men had murdered. Acts that you really cannot imagine.

CR: My god . . .

LJ: It’s on a Nazi level.

CR: It’s beyond that –– it’s pure evil.

LJ: Yes, it’s pure evil.

CR: I mean the Nazis were a calculated machine, but this is raw and primal.

You know, I can’t help but wonder how documentary filmmakers, such as yourself, who encounter these atrocities (last year’s "The Devil Came on Horseback" also comes to mind) –– how does Lisa maintain the filmmaker’s point of view and maintain a human presence, an emotional equilibrium, without being entirely overwhelmed by what you’re hearing and seeing? How do you walk that line?

LJ: Well, as a documentarian, part of your job is to probe the soul, if you will. And, I’ve had –– I can’t tell you –– countless, countless interviews where my job is to get that person to return to that dark place, to remember it and to feel it and to share it.

CR: How do you do that?

LJ: How do I do that? [Hesitates] I don’t know how I do it. Well, I don’t just sit down and start talking to them, first of all. There’s always that long, slow approach so that we know each other and trust each other. And I let them take their time. And, of course, so much of it was in another language. I had a female translator for the majority of the time, but for the rest of it, I didn’t have a translator at all. And these stories didn’t come out until later. Like in the church group, for instance, Bernard was there for the very beginning, and when the old woman started telling the story about being raped by the seven soldiers, you know, he couldn’t take it anymore. He fled, and spent the rest of the three hours sitting outside, while I was inside. I had a sense of this incredible passion and this truth-telling, and also felt this incredible privilege. That was just a spontaneous moment and I kept filming.

CR: You must have been a wreck by the end of each day.

LJ: Yes, in terms of the interviews, by the end of the day, I would just be shaken, just destroyed, particularly out in the bush. At night I would just weep. I still find it hard to watch. I feel such an incredible responsibility to these women. You know, they said to me: “We’re telling you, so that you will tell other people.”

CR: What do you hope this film will accomplish?

LJ: Well, that’s what’s been so gratifying about these screenings [at Sundance]. After the second screening, I was overwhelmed with people wanting to know what they can do. So we cobbled together a one-pager with a website of where they could go for further information [www.thegreatestsilence.org/links]. Also we’re building a huge outreach campaign for when the film airs on HBO.

CR: So did you pre-sell the film to HBO?

LJ: Yes, they bought it on second rough-cut, back in the spring.

CR: Is there anything else that you’d like people to know about your film, Lisa?

LJ: Well, yesterday we were up skiing and a couple of women who’d been at the screening the day before came up to me and said, “We’re a group of six women from Phoenix and we all had tickets to your film, but at the last minute, four of the women said, ‘I can’t take it; I don’t want to see those stories this early in the morning.’” But people, I think, have a moral obligation to listen. Particularly because there’s a certain complicity the first-world has in the destruction of a lot of third-world countries; and the Congo is very much an economic war. You know, our cell phones literally have the blood of Congolese women on them.

I just hope that people aren’t turned off by the title, and that they’re driven by a sense of compassion and by a sense of our common humanity, and also by a sense of curiosity about an invisible war and the invisible victims of this invisible war, and that they will want to know, and that knowing, they will do something.

CR: Do you have any sense of hope about the condition of our world?

LJ: In general, not much, but in the specific … I’ve started shooting a film in Columbia, kind of on the same subject, where the war has been going on for almost 60 years, when the presidential candidate was assassinated by the CIA –– very much like Lumumba in the Congo.

CR: And Allende.

LJ: Yeah, and Allende. They say that at least half the women in the country have been personally affected by the sexual violence –– either through rape or physical assault. One 11-year-old was raped by the para-military, and when her mother denounced them, the threats began. They have all left their homes because of the violence and have found each other. So, I’m just going to follow them over the next year. When you look at the aggregate of Columbian women, you just think, How has this country kept going? That country is our [the US government’s] personal embarrassment; it’s a disaster.

But when you talk to the individuals and you see that, despite it all, they want to start a beauty salon or they want to get their daughter back to being the champion rollerblader that she was before she was raped, you know, they have hope and they keep going. They’re living in slums with no running water, but they still have this dignity. And it’s the same with the women in the Congo. It’s the women who are going to save that country, and we have to save them.

[This interview was first published in the IDA e-Newsletter on 4/3/08 with permission to reprint.]

"Iron Ladies of Liberia" airs on PBS "Independent Lens" on Tuesday, 18 March 2008

2008-03-17T12:15:00.000-07:00

"We have had many governments here in the recent past that have relied upon brute force, instilling fear into people. We say that you can still exercise leadership without repression. As far as I’m concerned, so far in this administration it’s working better than the use of force."
—Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia

A Liberian-born, Harvard-educated grandmother of eight, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been jailed, charged with treason, exiled to Nigeria and the U.S. and has held positions at Citibank, the World Bank and the United Nations.

Now, as the first elected woman president of Africa, the “Iron Lady” and the many other powerful women she has appointed to leadership positions are not only changing the face of Liberia, but also making history worldwide.

After nearly two decades of brutal civil war, Liberia is a nation ready for change. On January 16, 2006, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was inaugurated the country’s first elected female president and Africa’s first freely elected female head of state. A Harvard-educated economist and grandmother of eight who had been exiled to Nigeria and nicknamed the Iron Lady, Johnson Sirleaf won a run-off election with 59 percent of the vote, but faces enormous obstacles in rebuilding a war-torn country.

Despite massive support both in Liberia and abroad, Johnson Sirleaf must not only find ways to reform a corrupt authoritarian government saddled by astronomical debts, but must also confront opponents loyal to former President Charles Taylor—all without alienating her voter base.

Since taking office, Johnson Sirleaf has appointed an unprecedented number of women to leadership positions in all areas in the Liberian government. With the exclusive cooperation of President Sirleaf, IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA goes behind the scenes of this groundbreaking administration during its first year, as it works to prevent a post-conflict nation from returning to civil war.

IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA follows leaders in the Johnson Sirleaf administration such as Beatrice Munah Sieh, the newly appointed national police chief. A former deputy chief in Liberia’s police force, Sieh survived an assassination attempt allegedly ordered by her boss and worked as a special education teacher in New Jersey for 10 years. As the national police chief, Sieh must maintain order while heading an institution known more for its corruption and repressive tactics than public service.

The film also follows Dr. Antoinette Sayeh, the minister of finance, as she battles a crippling national debt of over five billion dollars and a notoriously corrupt staff. As Dr. Sayeh says, “Women have not been, to the same extent as men, party to all of the bad things of the past. They certainly were very strong voices against the atrocities in Liberia in the war, and they fought very, very hard to make sure that the democratic process worked this time around. And so, this is our biggest opportunity to change Liberia.”

Other “iron ladies” seen throughout the film include Minister of Justice Francis Johnson-Morris, Commerce Minister Olubanke King Akerele and Minister of Gender Vabah Kazaku Gayflor. How would the world be different if women were in the seat of power? As IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA illustrates, they already are.

Ellen Johnson was born in Monrovia, Liberia in 1938. She attended high school at the College of West Africa. After marrying James Sirleaf, she traveled to the U.S. to study. Johnson Sirleaf received a B.A. in accounting from the University of Wisconsin in 1964, a diploma at the University of Colorado in economics and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University in 1971.

After Harvard, Johnson Sirleaf returned to Liberia and became the assistant minister of finance in William Tolbert’s administration. In 1979, she became the first female minister of finance. In 1980, Samuel Doe assumed power in the country following a military coup. Johnson Sirleaf went into exile to Kenya, where she worked in the Nairobi office of Citibank.

In 1985, Johnson Sirleaf returned to Liberia to run for the Senate. She was briefly imprisoned for criticizing the Doe regime and initially supported rebel leader Charles Taylor. During 1989 to 1996, when Liberia was entrenched in a civil war, Johnson Sirleaf lived in Washington, D.C. and worked as an economist for the World Bank and as the director of the United Nations Development Program Regional Bureau for Africa.

Johnson Sirleaf returned to Liberia in 1996 and ran against Charles Taylor in the 1997 presidential election under the Unity Party, coming in a distant second. Taylor charged her with treason. She campaigned for his removal from office, serving as the head of the Governance Reform Commission and assuming a leadership role in the transitional government after the second Liberian civil war ended in 2003.

In the private sector, Johnson Sirleaf has served on the advisory boards of the Modern Africa Growth and Investment Company (MAGIC), the Hong Kong Bank Group, the International Crisis Group, Songhai Financial Holdings, Women Waging Peace and the Center for Africa’s International Relations. She was an initial member of the World Bank Council of African Advisors and a founder of Kormah Development and Investment Corporation. She is the mother of four sons and has eight grandchildren.

After winning a run-off election against former soccer star George Weah in 2005, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected president of Liberia. But despite a long career in both national and international politics, her ascendancy to the presidency was not free of controversy.

Some critics are wary of her because of her previous support for former President Charles Taylor, whom Johnson Sirleaf later campaigned against. As of January 2008, Taylor is on trial in the International Criminal Court in the Hague, charged with war crimes for his alleged ties to the rebel insurgency in neighboring Sierra Leone. The Johnson Sirleaf administration has launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights abuses and claims of war crimes during Liberia’s 14 years of civil war.

Since taking office Johnson Sirleaf’s administration has faced monumental challenges. After decades of war and corrupt leadership, Liberia’s infrastructure and economy were in ruins. The country had an unemployment rate of 85 percent and owed billions of dollars in debt. Monrovia had been without electricity and running water for nearly 10 years. During her first year in office Johnson Sirleaf opened a large investigation into corruption, including members of the Taylor administration. Many Taylor supporters remain in Liberia, including his former wife, Jewel Howard Taylor, who is a member of the Senate.

Perhaps Johnson Sirleaf’s most significant accomplishment to date as president has been her successful appeal towards debt relief. The cancellations of more than a billion dollars of debt from creditors including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States government, much of which was accumulated illegitimately under the Doe regime, allows Liberia to concentrate on reconstruction and development. Recent efforts by the Johnson Sirleaf administration include fostering foreign investment opportunities with countries such as China and providing free, compulsory primary education for all elementary-school-aged Liberian children.

Director’s Statement from Daniel Junge:

When producer Henry Ansbacher and I look back on how, weeks before her inauguration, we learned we might have access to the first days of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s term in office as Liberia’s president, it’s funny to think how, at the time, we thought this might make for an interesting short film. One year and 500 taped hours later, IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA proved to be more than just an interesting short film.

This indeed was appetizing subject matter for a filmmaker—a chance not only to see the inner workings of government at the highest level, but also an opportunity to explore the resonant subjects of female leadership, post-conflict re-development and democracy in the developing world. Perhaps most importantly, it offered an opportunity to witness—as our other producer Jonathan Stack calls it—“the most unabashedly positive story to come out of Africa since Nelson Mandela.” This comes from a producer whose last experience in Liberia was dodging bullets during the country’s brutal civil war.

The door cracked open for us to film the president’s inauguration for two weeks, and we firmly wedged our foot in that door, ultimately filming for a year with our Liberian crew. Often filming IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA proved to be an exercise in self-discipline. The task of simply keeping the camera steady and in focus, while remaining neutral to the significance of what we were shooting, was, to say the least, difficult. Not only were we privy to the inner workings of government at a level allowed to few in film history, and witnessing history being made by Africa’s first female president, we were also fortunate to be present at critical and possibly history-changing moments in President Sirleaf’s first dramatic year. So it was with difficulty that we had to anesthetize ourselves to these realizations just to keep the camera in focus.

As much as this proved a difficult task for our non-Liberian crew, for our Liberian co-director Siatta Johnson it was an even greater challenge. Here is a woman who, like most Liberians, lost everything during the country’s wars. Now, in Sirleaf’s presidency, she sees her first prospect for a “normal” life (a very low bar, measured by Western standards). “I’m not a partisan,” she often said, but we would catch her smiling when filming the president.

Like the best of politicians, President Sirleaf is adept at constantly reacting to her environment, and yet she was able to disregard our presence, even at moments in which her leadership may have appeared fragile. While, for the most part, she ignored our cameras (a blessing for filmmakers), producer Jonathan Stack told me that there would come a time when the president would give us “a conspiratorial look”—when she would be willing not only to let us film, but also bring us into her process. “Then,” Jonathan said, “then we’ll know we’ve got a film.”

That moment came towards the end of production, in a heated conversation between the president and representatives of the World Bank regarding Liberia’s debt relief. At a particularly rancorous moment the president looked my way. It was at a moment like this when typically we would be invited to leave the meeting. But this look was different. This look was to make sure we were rolling—a conspiratorial look —before she leveled into the men.

Indeed, we knew then we had a film.

Personally I’m honored to have been a witness and, hopefully, to have appropriately documented this critical chapter in African history, thus helping to open a wider dialogue on the themes mentioned above. While it’s easy to become a cheerleader for Ellen as she confronts her Herculean tasks, I don’t want the film to be agitprop for her nor against the dominant model in African politics, but rather for viewers to appreciate the complexity of the situation, including our complicity as Westerners. That viewers ask their own questions, not the least of which would be: Are women intrinsically better leaders than men? I have my answer to that one, but I expect audiences will come up with their own.

A Walk to Beautiful: Interview w/Mary Olive Smith and Amy Bucher

2008-02-07T19:31:00.000-08:00

In December, A Walk to Beautiful won IDA’s award for the Best Documentary of 2007. Directed by Mary Olive Smith and co-directed by Amy Bucher, Walk chronicles the stories of five Ethiopian women who suffer from devastating childbirth injuries and their subsequent healing journeys at the obstetric Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, where remarkable doctors devote their lives to repairing these women’s bodies and hearts.

Obstetric fistula is a rupture that develops between the vagina and the bladder, and sometimes between the vagina and the rectum during obstructed labor. According to U.N. figures, three million girls and women in developing countries suffer from this chronic condition. In addition to the embarrassment and shame of incontinence, these women are often rejected by their families and driven from their villages because they cannot hold jobs, take public transportation or, due to the fetid odor, even walk in public.

This noteworthy, lovingly rendered film has won audience awards at the San Francisco, Denver, and St. Louis International Film Festivals. Cathleen interviewed directors Smith and Bucher in April 2007 during the San Francisco International Film Festival.

(A Walk to Beautiful opens on February 8 in New York City and February 29 in Los Angeles and will air on PBS' Nova in May.)

Cathleen Rountree: What provoked the idea for A Walk to Beautiful?

Mary Olive Smith: We read a column in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof about obstetric fistula. He was the inspiration for this film. It was the first time he’d written about the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. He writes a lot about women’s health issues now. It was a beautiful column, written three years ago. Someone in our office read it. We knew it would be a difficult film to make, but we started talking with the Fistula Foundation, which was very small at that time and recently founded.

CR: Where is the Foundation located?

MOS: In New York City. The hospital had been supported for 30 or 40 years by foundations in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, but there had never been a foundation in the US. So it was new and they were supportive of the idea. Then Steve Engel [a producer] asked me to direct it because I’d had previous interest in human rights in Africa.

CR: When did you first travel to Africa?

MOS: I went to Ethiopia about three years ago on a scouting trip and visited the hospital and met with Dr. Hamlin and Ruth Kennedy. I wooed them and told them how much we loved their hospital and how much we wanted to do this project. And they said okay! I think that was our biggest success, just getting their approval, because they’re very protective of the women . . .

Amy Bucher: They’d had some not so good experiences.

MOS: in fact, when we first arrived, Amy started shooting in the hospital, while I went out to the countryside to find women –– we weren’t sure we’d find women who would agree to being filmed –– so we thought we’d better shoot in the hospital to be safe. But right before we arrived, another film crew had been thrown out.

CR: what had happened in that situation?

AB: I think they weren’t as sensitive to the women. They may have filmed before asking permission. I think there was an assumption that they could just go where they wanted to go. And that certainly wasn’t the way we handled it. I don’t think I had known they had been given the boot until we’d been there a couple of days. And then Ruth Kennedy said, “Oh, you guys are such a delight to work with.” Then she told me what had happened before we arrived. That was a relief to me that we were so welcomed there.

CR: Who is Ruth Kennedy and how did she get connected with the hospital?

Well, Dr. Catherine Hamlin and her husband went to Ethiopia from Australia –– I was doing the math –– about 47 years ago. They went, not necessarily to do fistula repair, but to do gynecological obstetric care. You pick this up, Mary, because you’re more familiar with it.

MOS: They were working at a hospital when Haile Sellassie was in power, and they came across fistula patients and, as she says in the film, they were so moved by these women (particularly her husband, who would single them out) who were often pushed to the end of the line waiting to get into the hospital, because people pushed them there and complained that they “smelled; those wretched women, get them away.” So both doctors began specializing in operating on fistulas, and eventually decided to found their own hospital. They’ve survived through the monarchy, the communist era and now the attempt at democracy. The hospital is still being supported by the government, or tolerated, at least.

AB: And it’s growing like crazy. They recently added on a new wing. And Dr. Hamlin appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show about two years ago, and within days, several million dollars had been raised and they were able to expand. Now their goal is to open five more hospitals in the outlying areas of Ethiopia. Two have already opened. So, that’s a big change just since from when we were there.

CR: Who works in the hospitals?

MOS: That’s something that’s very important, Catherine and her husband Reginald immediately began training Ethiopians. So the hospitals are primarily staffed by Ethiopians and they are outstanding surgeons. Catherine’s goal is for this work to continue after she passes away. She’s 83 now, so she can’t be here forever.

CR: This is a worldwide problem, right?

MOS: Yes, in the poorest countries in the world, so there is a direct correlation with endemic poverty. But the highest rates are in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Africa –– Nigeria, I believe, has the highest rate in the world. And then Southeast Asia –– Bangladesh, Pakistan. Latin America has a lower prevalence and they think that’s because there are more roads! So the hospital may be far away, but you can get there, probably just better infrastructure, period.

So Ethiopia has one of the highest rates and they think that’s because of geography as well. It’s mountainous and very diverse geographically, so it’s all the harder to get roads in for women to get places.

CR: Who is affected by this condition? Is it particularly very young women?

MOS: Of all pregnancies, whether in the US or Ethiopia or Sweden or Nigeria, five-percent of all pregnant women will have obstructed labor. If they don’t get a caesarian, they’ll either die or they’ll end up with terrible injuries. Maybe there are a few lucky ones who survive without that happening. So you add to that, undernourishment. Dr, Ruth Kennedy always likes to remind us that the food in Ethiopia is really healthy, so they get good nourishment, but not enough. And these women work so hard, they burn a lot of calories, so the girls are underdeveloped. But the boys are too, it’s not just the girls, the boys are tiny.

CR: But they don’t have to push a baby out.

MOS: Right, they don’t. Then you add to that early marriage. So there are a lot of complicating factors. But if got rid of the cultural factors and even the undernourishment, there’d still be obstructed labor. And without a caesarian they would still suffer from fistula.

We still had fistula in the US until 1895.

AB: But Ethiopia does have one of the highest rates of young marriage in the world. It’s a complex picture, but it certainly is a factor that, if you have a ten-year-old-girl, who is as undernourished and works as hard as those girls do, it’s very unlikely that she’s going to be able to pass a baby through her pelvis.

MOS: One of the girls in the film was 15, but she was married when she was eight. She didn’t get pregnant until she was 15, but it’s still a big problem.

CR: How did you locate the young women, the characters, for the film?

MOS: I went with a big crew to a region of Ethiopia, a very poor area, and went out beyond the town we were staying in (just with my interpreter and producer and our guide). We worked with the local clinics and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church searching for these women; we went on immunization trips. And we weren’t finding any one. I knew it would be hard, and finally on day five . . .

CR: There are so many women suffering with fistula, why did you think it would be hard to find them –– because of the shame factor?

MOS: Well, yes, they hide. I think the villagers may or may not know what kind of sickness they have, or if they know, they’re afraid to tell. It’s interesting, we were just communicating with women, and really had no luck. And it was our guides, the men, who ended up having a little more luck. We found one young woman and I asked if I could take her picture. She said, “Oh, yes, I’ve had my picture taken a lot at the fistula hospital. And, lo and behold, she’d already been cured! I was about to cry. I said, “Very nice to meet you, but . . .” It turned out that she was on her way to her friend Ayehu’s house. She was sick and she wanted Ayehu to visit the hospital. So the whole scene in the film is exactly how it happened, how we arrived at Ayehu’s.

And then another women we found, thanks to a boy in the marketplace, who admitted that there was a woman in his village who was leaking. But he was so afraid, it took our guides an hour to convince him that he was doing a good thing by telling us how t find her. And then Yenenesh just came to our doorstep at the hospital. She happened to be a maid at a house in the town, and word spread, and the man she worked for heard about us and said, “Come, there are some people who are going to help you.” He was so happy. And there she was, two nights before we were leaving. So that’s how we found them.

Amy, you should talk about how you identified whom you were going to interview in the hospital.

AB: As I’m thinking about it now, I had the opposite experience and the opposite challenge from Mary Olive, which was we arrived at the hospital and it was not about finding the women, but the problem of narrowing it down from an enormous selection of candidates. They had about a hundred beds. And every woman’s story is compelling and heartbreaking. We asked the hospital if we could interview all the women who had arrived the day before, because we wanted to get their experience from the very beginning of their stay, hadn’t even been examined by the doctors yet.

We interviewed about 12 women that first day, and I had a set list of questions: How long have you been leaking? How old were you when you got married? What was your husband’s reaction? We went through kind of cataloging the stories. It was a day of just crying after hearing these stories. And, too, seeing which women seemed the most comfortable just talking to us. But we certainly didn’t bring any cameras in that day. It was a chance to see how they felt about the idea of us following them around.

Out of that first day we found two of the women we followed, one of which, Almaz, ended up in the film. Her story stood out because she’d had a double fistula, which –– well, urine is one thing, but add feces to that for three years, it’s hard to fathom. The next day we actually saw Wubete from across the room and she was kind of peering around the corner looking at us and her face was so expressive. And as soon as she opened her mouth, there was something about the quality of her childlike hope. She’s been there already three times. And I think there was something else interesting about her story because she had already been operated on, but she hadn’t been cured yet. So that’s how it started at the hospital.

CR: What was your purpose in making this film?

MOS: Our goal was not to just make an advocacy piece. We felt that we would advocate the best by making a beautiful nonfiction narrative film. The easy sell for the hospital would be: Woman comes in, fistula gets cured, woman goes home. Transformation, she’s happy, the end. But you need setbacks and conflict in a good film. And so these stories were, I think, particularly compelling and stood out to Amy. We were a little nervous about having a character who was not completely cured, but the fact that she finds her way, finds a way to grow up and be strong anyway, is all the more moving. So she ends up having one of the best stories, if not the best story, even though she wasn’t cured.

I hope that people see that we were not just making a film about fistula, but about women who just wanted to be whole people again.

AB: That tenacity was important, that they were willing to do whatever it was going to take. Neither of us had any idea about what would transpire with these women, what would happen next. In some cases it was very straightforward and happy; and in other case it was very complicated and an indirect route to the end product.

MOS: We never thought we would have five characters, but each one seemed to bring something so different.

CR: How was it for these women after they were cured and they returned home? Were they welcomed back into their society?

MOS: That’s a complicated question. I’m not sure Amy or I know the answer or if the hospital even knows the answer. My guess is that for the women who were cured, and who hadn’t been sick for that long, they’re welcomed back. Zewdie was welcomed back immediately, although she was nervous about reintegrating. Ayehu, the first woman you meet in the film was sick for six years, and I went back and saw her three months after she’s been cured. She was still angry because of the way her family had treated her, so she wasn’t running out to the well to hang out with the neighbors yet. She’s older and doesn’t plan on getting married again. For the younger women who get cured, my understanding is that they reintegrate pretty quickly.

It’s not that hard to get married again. We found that virginity in an orthodox community is not a big issue. Some of the women had had three or four husbands. If you’re married and your husband leaves, you can get married again.

AB: There are so many reasons why girls are married off early. We want to do our next film on early marriage, which we’ve gotten some interest in.

CR: Early marriage in Ethiopia?

AB: Yeah, we’re going to focus on Ethiopia because it has such a high rate, for a variety of reasons –– from economics to making sure that your daughter is protected and not abducted into marriage as Almaz was. You know, you’re abducted, then you’re raped, then you’re a wife. Almaz’s husband treated her well, sold a cow so he could help her, bought soap for her. He never abandoned her, or put her out of the house. But when Almaz was cured and we went home with her to film the homecoming, it all started to come out what her sense of this marriage was. She just had so much spunk, I left thinking: I wonder if she’s going to stay with this guy. And, lo and behold, as soon as her body was healed, she was out of there. She left her husband and her village and moved back to Addis Ababa and found a job on a rose farm. So she acquired the strength to leave a marriage she never wanted to be in in the first place. But every story was different.

CR: How long did you film in Ethiopia?

AB: We were in the hospital for 2 ½ to 3 weeks following the women through their surgical procedures and recovery process. Then we went off for a week before we returned. So that first trip was about four weeks. And then a couple months later we went back to film Wubete for a couple of weeks.

MOS: Then I went back again with our composer and we recorder traditional music and a lot of the traditional sounds to include.

But what I didn’t do was tour. So, I’m taking some time next fall to travel in Ethiopia, and we’re premièring the film then!

(This interview was originally published in the IDA e-Newsletter 2/6/08.)

Park City Dispatch 8––On GreenCine Daily

2008-02-01T12:37:00.000-08:00

Docs Rock at Sundance

As in recent years, the documentaries once again stole the show at Sundance 08. Among the 41 films I crammed into nine days, 23 were nonfiction titles.

Topics included: social activism, environmentalism, economic concerns, anti-war issues, the corrosion of democracy, world politics, displacement, gender identity, inspiring senior citizens, and entertaining biographies of Roman Polanski, Hunter S Thompson and Patti Smith.

One festival highlight was certainly the premiere of U2 3D, a genuine concert experience utilizing the technology of 3-D and surround-sound. Leave it to Bono, the Edge, Adam and Larry (all in attendance at the screening, along with Al Gore) to merge rock-and-roll with social activism. After the screening, Bono's response to an audience question about whether the band might consider doing a "deeper" show, inadvertently spoke to the festival's raison d'etre: "Underneath there is a narrative running: social activism, human rights, non-violence. Taking human rights on the road is not a flippant thing to do," he reasoned. "I think you might know that in this country."

I marveled at many of the documentaries' timeliness and the prescience of the filmmakers, many of whom spent upwards of three, four, and five years in production. For example, I.O.U.S.A., Fields of Fuel, Secrecy, Flow: For Love of Water, Dinner with the President, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Slingshot Hip Hop and Bigger, Stronger, Faster each address topics of immediate national and international concern.

Continue reading at: http://daily.greencine.com/archives/2008_01.html
Originally published on GreenCine Daily, 1/31/08.

Sundance 2008: Day 7, Weds., 1/23/08

2008-01-23T22:23:00.000-08:00

Parties and Panels

Something I haven’t yet mentioned, the parties I’ve attended as well as the informative and worthwhile film panels.

Sundance parties are particularly legendary, even infamous. I’d heard many stories and before this year, felt a little left out. But press credentials go a long way –– and journalists are invited to a number of parties.

Earlier in the week, while working in the pressroom, I started a conversation with a guy who, it turns out, attended Stanford years ago and his daughter is currently a student there. I thought he was another film journalist, but he turned out to be the president and CEO of Sundance Channels. You never know whom you’re going to meet here (witness Bono’s and my intersection last Saturday night). Larry invited me to the Sundance Channel Party downtown on Main Street and I was thrilled. I’d already RSVP’d to the IDA (Independent Documentary Association) invitation to their Heineken sushi party, held right after SC’s.

Because I was coming from interviews with two directors, I arrived late at the Sundance Channel party, but it was still in full swing. I made my way through the throngs looking for anyone I might know or recognize. Alas, no one. After 15 minutes I headed up to Park St. to The Lift (literally a ski lift in the middle of town) for the IDA party. The editor of “Documentary” Magazine (in which I am proudly listed as a Contributing Editor in the masthead) greeted me. Yay, I know someone. Then I saw A.J. Schnack, a documentary filmmaker (“Kurt Cobain: About a Son”) I met and interviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago. Naturally, by the time I arrived, all the sushi was eaten. But, given today’s NYT headline –– “High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi” –– maybe that wasn’t so bad. Oh, well, I've never been much of a party person and feel much more comfortable one-on-one. So, after 20 minutes, I split from The Lift and headed back to my favorite haunt: a movie theatre.

Tomorrow: Sundance Panels

Cross posted on "The Santa Cruz Sentinel"

Sundance: Day 6, Tuesday, 1/22/08

2008-01-23T09:29:00.000-08:00

Sundance: Day 6, Tuesday, 1/22/08

Yesterday I happened to be working in the Festival pressroom when the news of Heath Ledger's death broke. Industry insiders felt shock and deep sadness at the loss of this talented and much-too-young-to-die 28-year-old. A tragic waste of life.

Yesterday I interviewed two doc directors: Irena Salina, “Flow: For Love of Water,” and Stephen Walker, “Young @ Heart.”

The most compelling and politically/socially/environmentally important documentaries I've seen thus far include the following:

(For fuller descriptions of the first 5 titles, see earlier post: “Sundance: Opening Day, Thursday, 1/17/08):

“Flow: For Love of Water” (U.S.), director, Irena Salina.

“Fields of Fuel” (U.S.), director, Josh Tickell.

“I.O.U.S.A.” (U.S.), director, Patrick Creadon.

“The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo” (U.S.), director Lisa F. Jackson.

“An American Soldier” (U.S.), directed and written by Edet Belzberg.

“Secrecy” (U.S.), co-directors, Peter Galison and Robb Moss. Looks at the staggering production of government classified secret documents that involves millions of people and billions of dollars.

“Up The Yangtze” (Canada), director Yung Chang. In this riveting and gorgeous doc, Chang spent 5 years chronicling the life transitions of families who live near the Three Gorges Dam and must find a way to adjust to the rising waters in a dramatically changing China.

“Singshot Hip Hop” (U.S.), director, Jackie Reem Salloum. Palestinian rappers present alternative voices of resistance within the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Very hot.

“Trouble the Water” (U.S.), co-directors, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. Lessin, an aspiring rap artist, and her streetwise husband who, filmed their experience of being trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters, and seize their chance for a new beginning.

“The Women Of Brukman” (Les Femmes De La Brukman) (Canada), co-directors Isaac Isitan and Carole Poliquin. After the Argentinean economic meltdown between 2001 and 2003, with 60 percent of the population living in poverty and unemployment, after factory owners walked away from their businesses, workers took over a Buenos Aires men's clothing factory and managed to keep it in operation, providing employment.

“Alone In Four Walls” (“Allein In Vier Wanden”) (Germany),
director, Alexandra Westmeier. A heartbreaking account of teenage boys struggling to grow up in a home for delinquents in rural Russia where their home lives present even greater hardships.

“Be Like Others” (Canada, UK, USA, Iran), director, Tanaz Eshaghian. Forget what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at Columbia last year. This doc explores the unexpected subculture of young Iranian men who choose to undergo sex change surgery.

“Dinner With The President” (Pakistan), co-directors, Sabiha Sumar and Sachithanandam Sathananthan. Examines the current cultural climate in Pakistan by interviewing people-on-the-street, religious leaders

“In Prison My Whole Life” (UK), director, Marc Evans. Interviews with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Mos Def, Angela Davis, Snoop Dogg and others uncover the story behind award-winning journalist Mumia Abu Jamal’s death row sentence, and comes to startling realizations about American history and America's justice system.

“Triage: Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma” (Canada), director Patrick Reed. James Orbinski, former head of Doctors Without Borders, returns to Africa where he is forced to examine the meaning of humanitarianism.

Sundance –– Day 4, 1/20/08

2008-01-21T01:17:00.000-08:00

Meeting Bono

“U2 3D”: the event of Sundance ’08. Swaggering up the roundabout in front of the Eccles Performing Arts Theatre at Park City’s high school at 9 P.M.–– beefed-up bodyguard his shadow –– Bono, sporting Hunter S. Thompson transparent orange-tinted wraparounds, shook 20 hands, one of them mine. It was a “Beautiful Day,” a memorable moment.

When he reached a baby in a pram, Bono squatted down, looked him or her in the eye: “Thanks for coming! Are you cold,” he said, acknowledging the 10-degree chill.

Ah, just the opening the mother had waited for, “We don’t have tickets and we really want to see the movie!”

“How many in your party?”

“Three.”

“We can get you in. He’ll take care of it,” he assured the woman and pointed to an official-looking fellow.

As I turned around and headed into the theatre, Al Gore walked by me. Yes, the should-have-been president. No security, no Tipper, just another man beside him.

Inside, the theatre went crazy when U2 walked in. Gore was already posing for photos. The concert was scheduled for 9:45. As 10 o’clock came and went, I wondered when the film would commence and to that end, why they didn’t simply ask people to sit down. Then, surrounded by his entourage, Mr. Sundance himself, Robert Redford, strolled in and the audience went wild. Naturally, we couldn’t begin without our host.

Geoffrey Gilmore, the Festival Director took to the stage and invited the filmmakers (Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington), as well as the band, up to say a few words and introduce U2 in 3D. Bono said, “There’s something fitting about being here in a high school; we are a high school band, after all,” he laughed.

Finally, the house lights dimmed and we donned our 3D glasses as “U2 3D”’s opening credits rolled. The film comprises seven 2006 Latin American Vertigo concerts shot on location in São Paulo, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, among other cities (70,000 people each). Bono called it “a love song to Latin America.” The light show and staging are first class with a red and black color scheme and an audience-embracing horseshoe-shaped platform on which Bono, Edge, and Larry pranced, played guitar, and for one song, beat a standing drum like a Taiko drummer.

The band performs 14 songs, including “Pride (In the Name of Love,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “All Because of You,” “Vertigo,” and “Yahweh.” During “City of Blinding Lights,” in solidarity with the concert audiences, many among the audience of 1200 illumined our cell phones.

The 3D effects were, in the original sense of the word, awesome. At times I reached out and “touched” band and audience members. And occasionally it felt as if I needed to duck to avoid the neck of Larry’s bass guitar. The cinematic experience of U2 is obviously different from a “live” performance. But Saturday’s event proved the best of both worlds: an unprecedented virtual nearness to the rocking Irish troubadours on stage thanks to 3D technology and the actual proximity to them two rows in front of me. I watched them watch themselves.

During the Q&A after the film, an audience member asked if the band might consider “doing a “deeper” show, like the Beatles in “Yellow Submarine.” Bono seemed a bit put off at first, but he responded with what seemed obvious to most of us: “Underneath there is a narrative running: social activism, human rights, non-violence. Taking human rights on the road is not a flippant thing to do,” he reasoned. “I think you might know that in this country.”

Isn’t it about time the Swedish Academy awarded Bono the Nobel Peace Prize?

Sundance '08 -- Day 3, Sat., 1/19/08

2008-01-18T18:02:00.000-08:00

A broad spectrum of music-based documentaries and narratives echo through Sundance this year, including “Patti Smith: Dream of Life” (see yesterday’s post), “CSNY: Dèjá Vu,” “Anvil!: The True Story of Anvil,” and “U2 3D” (which I’ll rock to tomorrow at midnight). In addition to these, today I cheered on –– for different reasons –– two stellar documentaries: “Young @ Heart,” directed by Stephen Walker (UK) and “Slingshot Hip Hop,” directed by Jackie Reem Salloum.

The day before on the venue-to-venue shuttle, I’d overheard a twenty-something-couple rave about “Young @ Heart,” which they’d seen at an industry screening in L.A. Having read the film’s catalogue description, I was mildly interested, but when I arrived too late for entry into “Stranded: I’ve come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountain” (France, Gonzolo Arijon), I headed for “Heart.” And what a thrilling, poignant, inspiring experience it was. I have no doubt this doc will win some Festival award, find an enthusiastic distributor, and go on to thrill audiences both mature and youthful.

The eponymous Young @ Heart, a chorus comprised entirely of senior citizens in Northampton, Mass., has entertained audiences stateside and abroad since 1982. Okay, so far, nothing exceptional. But, dig this, their entire repertoire consists of rock’n’roll, punk, and R&B tunes. Sting, David Bowie, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Coldplay, the Clash(!) and Sonic Youth! The members’ ages range from 75 to 92. “Use it or lose it,” jokes Mary, 85, when asked why she belongs to the chorus.

“Young @ Heart” holds many surprises (like turning the notion of MTV music videos on its ear) and satisfies the essential question: what do we require as we grow older (during any age, really)? Nurturing family and friends, a fulfilling sense of community, compelling interests, stimulating conversation, a reason to get up in the morning. As a middle-aged woman from the audience declared after Young @ Heart’s concert at The Academy of Music: “I’m never going to complain about being tired or old again!”

Here’s a timely question for you: Can Hip-Hop supersede terrorism? The Palestinian rappers –– DAM and PR (Palestinian Rapperz) –– in “Slingshot Hip Hop” leave no doubt as their “words descend on you like kamikazes” and they serve their communities in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank as activists for (nonviolent) social change and prove that music is as powerful as bombs.

Sundance '08 -- Day 2, Fri., 1/18/08

2008-01-18T06:54:00.000-08:00

Con't. DOCS:

“Bigger, Stronger, Faster” (U.S.), director, Christopher Bell; co-written with Alexander Buono and Tamsin Rawady. With Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, and Roger Clemens in the news and, worse, Chris Benoit’s “’roid rage” slaying of his wife and 7-year-old son, and subsequent self-hanging last year, Bell examines America’s win-at-all-cost malady by exposing his two brothers' membership in the steroid subculture. The film opens with images of 1980s super-heroes: Rambo, Conan, and Hulk Hogan, but then analyzes the extent of (even rappers and R & B stars admit to using steroids and human-growth-hormones) and deeper issues surrounding these drugs: ethics in sports and the ramifications on both psychological and physical health.

“The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo” (U.S.), director Lisa F. Jackson sees Congolese women’s bodies as a wartime battleground; in fact, rape is a key destabilizing method in a corrupt cycle. Jackson interviewed women who survived rape in war-ravaged remote villages of the Congo, thereby, giving us an intimate glimpse into the atrocities that dominate their lives.

“An American Soldier” (U.S.), directed and written by Edet Belzberg. Five years into the war in Iraq, with no mandatory draft to fill its depleting ranks, the U.S. Army is more dependent than ever on persuasive recruiters to lure young would-be soldiers to the front lines. Enter Sergeant First Class Clay Usie, from Louisiana, one of the most successful recruiters in America today. In vérité-style, Belzberg chronicles Usie’s activities during a nine-month period. To high school youths facing a future of unemployment, or low-paying jobs, Usie appears to offer a reasonable alternative –– until their deployment to Iraq.

Three exciting American-produced bio-docs premier this year:

“Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” (U.S.), director, Alex Gibney. Following on the heels of Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour’s oral history of Thompson, Gibney (director of the award-winning “Taxi to the Darkside” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”) creates an intimate and revealing portrait of writer Hunter S. Thompson. Focusing on the decade from 1965 to 1975 and using never-before-seen clips of Thompson's home movies, newly discovered audiotapes and passages from unpublished manuscripts, Gibney creates a three-dimensional portrait of a true American icon.

“Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” (U.S.), director, Marina Zenovich. In this exploration of the infamous ’70s case, in which acclaimed director Polanski (“Rosemary’s Baby,” “Chinatown,” “The Pianist”) allegedly had sexual intercourse with a minor, Zenovich uncovers a very different story than that of which the legal system –– fired by the media –– convinced the public. Rather than face certain jail time, Polanski fled to Europe, where he remains to this day. Will this documentary resolve the myth and mystery that have haunted this professionally respected, personally reviled, controversial character?

“Patti Smith: Dream of Life” (U.S.), director, Steven Sebring. Legendary musician/poet/painter/activist and sometime lover of Sam Shepard, Smith once wrote: “Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line. You have your own internal world, and it’s not neat.” Amen to that. Sebring tracked this punk pioneer and spiritual child of Rimbaud, Blake, and Burroughs for 11 years through intimate personal revelations at her home to mesmerizing public performances.

TBC . . .

Sundance '08 -- Opening Day, Thurs., 1/17/08

2008-01-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Sundance 'o8 in 20-degree Park City, Utah, where the first of 10 days of enticing, thought-provoking, exhilarating, sobering, revelatory, and epiphanic domestic and world narrative, documentary, experimental, and short films begins today.

During the two-hour direct flight this morning, I devoured the catalogue descriptions of the 207 films screening in a variety of Festival venues from the fine old Egyptian Theatre on Main Street that seats 266, to the 1270-seat Eccles Theatre two miles away. Films begin at 8 A.M. each morning, and the die-hard could find herself slouching toward her condo the next morning at 2 A.M., with just a few hours of sleep before repeating her mad immersion in cinema for nine consecutive days.

This year’s Festival theme is PLACE, as in, film takes place –– psychologically and physically. Robert Redford, the founder of the Sundance Institute, puts it this way: “[Film] begins in the way that an individual filmmaker imagines an idea within a certain space, be it home or a city or a rural landscape. So you begin with an interior place and move to the exterior. The interior and exterior blend into the stories and onto the screen, where they become the experience of the viewer and create a new life altogether: a new space.”

Within that new space or consciousness, we as viewers may discover something new, or even recognize something about ourselves, “some truth,” as Redford observes, “a place [we’ve] never been before.”

The following are a few of the documentary “places” (in terms of political and social consciousness) I found potentially the most captivating, motivating, and perhaps even transformative:

“Fields of Fuel” (U.S.), director, Josh Tickell. With the price of oil at $100 a barrel, Tickell uncovers a desperately needed alternative for a decentralized, sustainable energy infrastructure, like a new Brooklyn biodiesel plant serving three states, a miraculous Arizona algae-based fuel farm, and the Swedish public voting to be petroleum free by 2020. Tickell’s passionate film tracks the rising domination of the petrochemical industry in the second half of the 20th century and, concurrently, summons citizens’ action.

“Flow: For Love of Water” (U.S.), director, Irena Salina. While, contrary to conventional belief, we can live without oil, water remains our most crucial resource (remember Frank Herbert’s “Dune”?). Given the goal of privatization by billion-dollar water companies, impoverished nations could be headed for extinction. But people around the world are fighting back (the Cochabamba protests of 2000, also know as “The Cochabamba Water Wars,” were a series of triumphant protests that took place in Bolivia’s third largest city because of the privatization of the municipal water supply threatened by the World Bank). Salina interviews African plumbers who secretly reconnect shantytown water pipes to ensure a community’s survival; a California scientist who exposes toxic public water supplies; and a “water guru” who promotes community-based initiatives to provide water throughout India.

“I.O.U.S.A.” (U.S.), director, Patrick Creadon. In spite of (or because of?) Bush and Bernanke’s (and Schwartzenegger’s) persistent and unsustainable tax cuts, the U.S. economy is on the brink of a meltdown. The over-burdened social-security system, the ever-expanding industrial-military-complex, and growing debts to foreign interests foreshadow a future of national economic (not to mention) spiritual bankruptcy. But Creadon, moving beyond partisan entanglements, suggests sound solutions for a future fiscally sound nation.

TBC . . .

An Interview with Jessica Yu, Director of "Protagonist"

2007-11-28T20:13:00.000-08:00

We Can Be Heroes
'Protagonist' Tracks the Euripidean Drama in Contemporary Lives

Jessica Yu directing puppeteers

Jessica Yu won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, an intimate portrait of the writer who lived for four decades paralyzed by polio and confined to an iron lung. Her 2004 feature documentary In the Realms of the Unreal, about the enigmatic “outsider” artist Henry Darger, won numerous prizes on the film festival circuit. Her other nonfiction films include The Living Museum (1999), about an art community in a New York mental institution, and Men of Reenaction, about Civil War reenactors. Yu also directs popular television programs, including episodes of ER, The West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy.

Protagonist explores extremism and the limits of certainty as it weaves the stories of four men––a German terrorist, a bank robber, an “ex-gay” evangelist and a martial arts student––all consumed by personal odysseys. The four stories in Protagonist are told in parallel threads structured like a multi-layered Greek drama. This adventurous documentary is inspired by the works of the 5th century BC playwright Euripides, and uses quotes from his plays as thematic chapter headings, providing a provocative common link between our contemporary stories and lending them a timeless quality. The film asks, What is the path to extremism? In responding to the turmoil of life, where does one draw the line between the reasonable and the unreasonable?
Cathleen, IDA's Contributing Editor, met up with Yu at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which screened her first feature-length fiction film, Ping Pong Playa. Protagonist opens November 30 in New York City and December 7 in Los Angeles.

Cathleen Rountree: Did you read the Classics in college? Is that where you first encountered Euripides, in particular, and Greek tragedy in general?

Jessica Yu: Well, like a great many students, I read the great works of art much too quickly! And Euripides was one of them. I remember reading The Bacchae, but I really had zero recollection of it. So this project was a way to revisit Euripides’ work in the context of being able to re-read it, actually absorb it, and think about it. So, just that alone, even if the film hadn’t happened, was a great experience.

CR: How did it work to take this classic and set it in our contemporary world?

JY: The concept of the film came to me from the Carr Foundation––Greg Carr and Nobel Smith––and they were interested in making a film about Euripides. I think they were more interested in Euripides, the man. And I couldn’t quite figure out how that would work, because there is very little known about him. But, there were 19 existing plays. So in reading the plays, I was trying to stay open to what emerged out of them. But at the same time, I was aware of a couple of things: Could you make a film about who Euripides was? Could you make a film about ancient Greek Literature, in a way that is not going to be totally alienating to the viewer? Of course the film ended up being about the themes, the structure of storytelling. But I think that turned out to be the connection between the architecture of narrative structure and the power of the human narrative structure, from the time those plays were written, until now.
And it also struck me that Euripides was called the “first psychologist,” that he really wrote about the way people think and the way they act. So in reading these stories, they came across as very fresh in a lot of ways. The same flaws he was interested in are the ones I’m interested in as well. So finding stories to populate that particular arc was not as far of a stretch as one might think.

CR: Talk a little more about “the human narrative structure”?

JY: What I think was interesting about what Euripides was attracted to is that you have an idea of a “hero,” who has good moral reasons behind what he is doing. But because of his very devotion to that cause, he loses track of it; he loses track of who he is. It’s kind of an extremist story that intrigued me: When does a good quality become too much? Or the classic character versus fate: Are you who you were born, or are you the circumstances into which you are tossed? Where does the real person emerge?
The other thing is that those stories really work. They’re great, compelling stories about the anti-heroic character. Your hero goes off track; how does he or she recover after they’ve created damage by their own very strong qualities? So in making the film, I was trying to find stories that were strong enough to stand on their own.
But, first, they had to be really strong stories, because I think that’s how Euripides attracted such a large audience––that sense of, What happens next?

CR: Well, let’s address that component now. You interviewed 200 individuals?

JY: Actually, we didn’t interview that many. I worked with my producers, Elise Pearlstein and Susan West, and we had a couple in interns who were helping out. We scoured every place we could think of: reading a lot of books, reading memoirs, going on the Internet, doing crazy Google searches, talking to people at cocktail parties.

CR: What did you say you were looking for?

Hans Joachim-Klein

JY: It depended. Originally, I was looking for people who’d had a kind of “dark epiphany.” And it had to happen in a moment. So we were looking up weird phrases like, “All of a sudden I realized my whole life changed at that moment ….” But that’s actually how we found one of the subjects in the film, Hans Joachim-Klein, the German ex-terrorist: from a bad Googly-translated German website.

CR: How long did this process take?

JY: It was about eight months looking for everybody.

CR: How did you select the four men who made it into the film?

Mark Salzman

JY: Two people I knew could work in the film right away––Joe Loya and Mark Salzman. But we had to hold off on how it was going to work, until we had all four, because they couldn’t be exactly the same story. And, ideally, we wanted to find four characters whose circumstances seemed very different.
It was really hard to find them. In fiction, there is often the great “clarifying moment,” but in real life it usually doesn’t happen that way, that the moment of realization strikes so definitively.

CR: Or sometimes if that does happen, the person is on his deathbed and it’s too late.

JY: Right! And we also didn’t want people who just became the same person for another cause—someone who is a fanatic for one cause becomes a fanatic for the opposite side. And we found quite a few cases of that.
So, we didn’t want the exact story, but there had to be certain elements in the arc of each person’s experience that had to be the same for the film to work.
The other part we looked for is what we called “the fever.” There’s some moment that sets things into motion––this idea that “Oh, okay, this has happened to me and this is how I’m going to fix it. I’m gonna keep going down this path until it works.” And that “fever” is when someone becomes completely obsessed with whatever this journey or activity is. So they had to have that obsession, that “fever,” that would lead up to that moment.

CR: So we’ve got the “fever,” then the epiphany …

JY: Right, and the other thing is that there had to be an acceptance of responsibility. That didn’t mean that we were looking for people who were going to flagellate themselves for the rest of their lives. But it couldn’t be someone who has this moment and then makes a lot of excuses. And that was also very difficult to find. We realized how true reckoning in someone’s life is quite rare.
That was something I was very grateful about, that the four characters in this film are at a point in their lives where they are completely clear-eyed about what happened and what they did. This doesn’t mean that they are all fine and good with what they did and that it won’t always stay with them. But they are at a place in their lives where they can talk about it. Then, their eloquence in talking about it was also important. They’re all good storytellers!

CR: You have a very visual style. It’s not just a matter of point-and-shoot talking heads. For instance, in In the Realms of the Unreal you were able to make the imagination—the unconscious— visible.

JY: I really appreciate that because, with In the Realms, and Protagonist as well, it makes it difficult when you have so many limitations. For example, in the Darger film, there’s no living person; and there’s so little evidence of who he was, in terms of photographs. But we had this room that was filled with everything he had gathered over many years. It was like the room was who he was. And I was trying to figure out how to show that; and, of course, how to deal with the paintings, how to make them come to life.
With Protagonist, I wanted to have the themes of Euripides provide the chapter headings in the film. So, again, it was like, how do we tie it together with some kind of look that’s a more versatile form of storytelling device? And it was lucky too because again, Joe Loya, the bank robber, isn’t someone who’s life is filled with pictures and home movies, and he wasn’t a famous guy, so how do you depict those scenes that happened, or how they might have felt? That’s where the whole puppet thing came to fruition.

CR: Had you had any previous experience with puppets?

Puppet from "Protagonist"

JY: None at all. I have to say that it was very late in the production that the idea of the puppets took shape. I had been thinking animation, but as much as I love animation, it’s very expensive and it’s too time-consuming. And it’s very mutable; it might be difficult to create the same look and feel for each of the stories. I did some research about the look of the plays during Euripides’ time and, actually, the actors wore these large, exaggerated masks. I liked the idea of having the masks as a way to represent several characters in the stories and then the pivotal events from our subjects’ pasts. Almost like a little theater troop of puppets. That process with our puppet designer, Janie Geiser, was so collaborative and immediate and fun.

CR: I read that out of the many possibilities the production team had found, only six of them were females! You’ve noted that "Men, it appeared, were far more likely to experience the particular breed of obsessive pursuit—and crashing revelation––that we were looking for."

JY: Well, I didn’t set off to find only men subjects. Toward the end of the searching process, we said, “God, we’ve got to find a woman!” But what seemed to happen is that when things started going south, women might sense that things were crumbling and they would kind of stay with it and things would fall apart that way. It wasn’t them hitting the wall. It was just a lot of signs that things were falling apart.
As an example, we looked at a couple of memoirs of candidates, but when things started going not so well, we saw phrases like, “Well, I realize that it wasn’t working out,” or “I knew that things were falling apart ….” So they seemed to have a self-knowledge about it, which doesn’t mean that they can save themselves from terrible disaster. But the men had such dramatic cases. Like a guy wakes up one morning and he’s king of the world, then that afternoon something happens to change it all. It’s like the Talking Heads’ song: “How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful life.”

CR: Protagonist is a great primer on storytelling—what makes for a strong story, and how the essential architecture of a story is so timeless and rooted in something so ancient.

JY: The story in a documentary still has to have a structure. It doesn’t have to be the classic three-part structure, but it’s still about what happens to the character, whether it’s a person or a place. What is the event that sets everything in motion? What is the turning point and how is your protagonist changed by it? Is there something learned or lost, or what’s the result at the end? So I think it’s the sense of dramatic tension that there is always something in balance, something that is pivotal.
Protagonist is a very classic kind of anti-heroic journey in a way: These four men set out to change destiny in some way. There was a moment when they decided, “I need to become another person. This is the way I’m going to control my life”––it’s a lot about control––and then this super-human monumental effort to make that happen, and the consequences, the ramifications of that. That there was damage and how do you recover your sense of yourself after you’ve completely lost track of yourself?

NOTE: This interview was first published in "IDA-Documentary" magazine e-zine on 11/27/07. www.documentary.org

11th International Latino Film Festival

2007-10-31T21:24:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Bay Area
2-18 November 2007

This year’s Festival opens tonight: the evening of the Day of the Dead. Fittingly, the Festival celebrates several historic Latino artists, such as: painter Diego Rivera, singer/dancer/actress Lola Flores, singer Benny Moré, and photographer Gabriel Figueroa.

The opening night film is “Nonna’s Trip” about the grandmother of the Torado family who has forgotten everything. Everything except that her final wish is to visit Italy - the land of her beloved late husband - along with her whole family. This humorous journey is filled with surprises, mix-ups and a film within the film – and is an unforgettable story of a family united by love for their grandmother. Following the opening night film, a Day of the Dead celebration with wine, food, and dancing takes place at the W Hotel (at Third and Howard).

Contact info: Website: www.latinofilmfestival.org. 415.513.5308. Email: info@latinofilmfestival.org.

The following events take place in San Francisco and San Jose.

A Conversation with Diego Luna: Actor/Producer/Director

Saturday November 3rd at the Castro Theatre 4:00 pm ($12/$10)
Following the screening of his directorial debut “Chávez,” join celebrated Mexican actor Diego Luna (“Y tu mamá también”) in conversation with Delfin Vigil of the “San Francisco Chronicle” about his journey from actor to producer and director.

Tribute to the Nuevo Cine Mexicano: with Diego Luna

Saturday November 3rd at the Castro Theatre 6:30 pm ($12/$10)
This tribute to Diego Luna, one of Mexico’s most talented filmmakers, takes a look at his career and how he has shaped contemporary Latino filmmaking.

¡CinePride!

Sunday November 4th at the Castro Theatre 7:30 pm ($35/$30)
A celebration of the Latino LGBT community after the screenings of "Cosas que no se dicen " and “Glue.” Special guest: Argentinean actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart of the award-winning film “Glue.”

San José

Noche Chicana Tribute to Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino

Thursday November 8th at Chacho’s Mexican Restaurant 8:00pm ($40/$35)
Following the screening of the documentary, “The Legacy of Luis Valdez,” is a celebration with Luis Valdez and Festival guests. Chacho’s Mexican Restaurant is known for its great food and fun Zoot Suit-themed atmosphere.

Tribute to Women in Film
Tribute to Women & Film Sponsored by the Castellano Family Foundation and the Consulate of Mexico in San Jose Friday, November 9th at Anno Domini 7:00pm($25/$20)
The International Latino Film Festival salutes women in film November 9th with a reception to follow the screening of “El brassier de Emma ” at 7pm at Camera 12. Director Maryse Sistach from Mexico will attend this special evening at Anno Domini in San José.

Film Highlights
“Emma’s Bra” (dir. Marisa Sistach), Pop-culturally speaking, 1962 was a very good year. Only months before the publication of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot still enthralled movie-goers. And American astronauts, Russian cosmonauts, UFOs and Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” (all of which set the stage for this delightful family comedy) ignited our imaginations. After older sister Cecilia flies off to Paris for college, her sister, thirteen-year-old Emma, remains with their loving, but squabbling parents, and fosters a growing fetish for all things associated with mammary glands: developing breasts, nursing infants, sexually-curious boys, and that bizarre male invention: the brassiere. Emma’s mother Amparo survives a breast (what else?) cancer scare and defies her patriarchal husband Francisco by taking a job teaching French. But precociously liberated Emma has the final word, or, in her case, triumph. Even as Friedan’s epistle lurked around the corner, this girl surely launched the Mexican women’s movement. A coming-of-age gem for all ages.
(Rountree–Festival Program Note)

“Portrait of Diego” (dirs: Gabriel Figueroa Flores and Diego Lopez Rivera), “I paint what I see,” declared Diego Rivera, considered the greatest Mexican painter of the 20th century. Upon the 50th anniversary of Rivera’s art career in 1949, his friends and fellow artists, photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, set out to capture el Maestro’s process on film. Before completion, however, they shelved the project. Nearly sixty years later, Gabriel Figueroa Flores (Figueroa’s son) and Diego Lopez Rivera (Rivera’s grandson) discovered the lost footage and, retracing the trio’s steps, revisited their haunts. Archival footage and interviews with Rivera’s friends and relatives establish the historical context, while evocative clips from Mexico’s Golden Era of Cinema dramatize the cultural milieu. The original film’s remarkably personal imagery, in gorgeous muted pastel tones, reveals Rivera in Mexico’s natural environs among the earthy peasants and pre-Columbian art he loved and commemorated in his humanistic paintings. Thanks to the astonishing “Retrato de Diego,” we now see what he painted.
(Rountree–Festival Program Note)

“Chávez” (dir. Diego Luna), A triumph at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, rising star Diego Luna (“Before Night Falls,” “Y tu mamá también,” “Sólo Dios sabé”), launches the West Coast premiere of his directorial debut at ILFF, for what promises to be a rousing event worthy of its subject. Upon reading the eponymous title, viewers may wonder, “Which Chávez??” Famous in international boxing circles, and considered one of the sport's all-time great talents, Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez battled his way from a poverty-stricken family of ten, to enjoy the iconic stature of national hero. Along the way, Chávez earned a near-record 89 straight professional victories, and served unwittingly as politicos’ poster-boy. As Luna follows “Mr. Knockout” during the wrenching final matches of his career, his cinema vèritè-style and elemental soundtrack reflect the kinetic physicality, balletic quality, and brute force of boxing, and captures the emotional gamut inherent in this sporting life.
(Rountree–Festival Program Note)

“The City of Photographers” (dir. Sebastián Moreno), During Augusto Pinochet's reign in Chile, a small group of independent photographers dared to capture the atrocities going on around them. While the army had guns, the photographers had an equally dangerous weapon - their cameras. This is a documentary about a brutal dictatorship and the courageous artists who challenged it. Definitely an important story: from the perspectives of Chile’s photojournalists who survived the Pinochet regime. Returning to several of the same locations they photographed 30 or more years ago, they recall bloody riots and commemorate martyred fellow photographers. Wonderful archival footage! What poetic justice to know that so many of these courageous protestors out-lived their nemesis, the fascistic general.

"Asalto al sueño/ Assaulted Dream" (dir. Uli Stelzner), Although the production values of Asalto are not the best, this cinema verité-style documentary is a gripping depiction of a group of Central American peasants’ fateful journey to the mythical promised land: the U.S. I find it interesting that it took a courageous German director (at great personal risk to himself) –– rather than a North American or Mexican filmmaker –– to tell the story of hope/hopelessness, on one side, and globalization, violence, and corruption, on the other. At a time when the term “illegal aliens” is bantered about, this important film should be required viewing for all American presidential candidates as well as every citizen. I very much enjoyed all three films, but the consequential and timely subject matter of this film –– and our specified category –– makes it imperative viewing.

“August Evening” (dir. Chris Eska), A family of undocumented workers in Texas faces a series of tough choices threatening the bonds that hold them together. Their very survival is at stake. Through vivid characters, subtle romance and gentle humor, this drama shows the collision of cultures and generations and how redemption can come from the most unlikely places.

“638 Ways to Kill Castro" (dir. Dollan Cannell), This shockingly objective documentary tells how the CIA and Cuban exiles have made 638 attempts on the life of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. From exploding cigars to advice from James Bond-creator Ian Fleming, find out exactly what the CIA has been up to on behalf of the American people.

“The Violin” (dir. Francisco Vargas), Amid the guerrilla warfare of 1970s Guerrero, Mexico, a seemingly simple peasant, Don Plutarco, enthralls an army captain with his violin playing. But there’s more to Don Plutarco than meets the eye. From Cannes (Best Actor) and a winner of eleven festival awards “El violin” explores what drives ordinary people to fight oppression

“Football - The Birth of a Passion” (dir. Jesús Sánchez Romeva), Nothing ignites passion around the world like football, soccer, rugby or calcio! Through vivid historical reconstructions, this documentary traces our ball obsession from intricate Mayan and Chinese rituals to Roman army training, from a Japanese ceremony to the Florentine game of calcio, eventually arriving at the present-day magic of Zidane and Beckham.

International Latino Filmmaker’s Conference
November 3 - 4, Mission Cultural Center
Keynote Speaker: Moctesuma Esparza
Venue: Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. 2868 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. General Admission $65/ Students $50.
For Latinos and non-Latinos alike, the conference taps into the vibrant environment of the International Latino Film Festival with screenings, special events and international guests. This two-day event is a great opportunity for networking, dialogue and learning.
Day One - Saturday November 3rd
10:00 am - Keynote Speaker: Moctesuma Esparza
Oscar nominated producer, director, founder of NALIP (National Association of Latino Producers) and Maya Theaters.

10:45 am - Technology Track The future of filmmaking and distribution moderated by Mitch Posada of latinlounge.tv

Break 11:45 - 12:40 pm

12:45 pm- Latino Images and Culture
A conversation with Rick Tejada Flores and Tony Labat.

1:45 pm - International Filmmakers Panel
A conversation about the issues facing International Latino filmmakers. Moderated by Graham Leggat, Executive Director of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Sebastian Silva, Inti Cordera and Carlos Bolado in conversation.

At the Castro Theatre:
4:00 pm - A Conversation with Diego Luna
With Delfin Vigil of the San Francisco Chronicle The young actor, producer and director tells his story.
Day Two - Sunday November 4th
10:00 am - Local Filmmakers Panel
A conversation about the issues facing Bay Area Latino filmmakers. Santhosh Daniel of the Global Film Initiative in conversation with local filmmakers

11:30 am - 1:00 pm - Local Filmmakers Screening
A screening of excellent local Latino shorts.

6:00pm - Filmmakers' Mixer - a chance to meet the filmmakers! At Amnesia, 853 Valencia St., SF

(Cross-posted on the "Santa Cruz Sentinel": http://www.santacruzlive.com/)

TIFF Day 3 – 9/8/07

2007-09-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

Celebrity Sightings:

Jody Foster, here with the Neil Jordan film “The Brave One,” in which she portrays a one-woman vigilante force.

Michael Moore, presenting the World Premiere of “Captain Mike Across America,” his strategically-released attempt to mobilize voters in anticipation of the 2008 presidential election. (As I write this from the press room, I’m actually watching Moore, via video, in his press conference.) The controversial filmmaker says he “visited 62 cities in 45 days, holding large rallies on college campuses.” He dubbed it “The Slacker Uprising Tour”!

Kenneth Branagh, here for his highly praised remake of “Sleuth,” starring Jude Law and Michael Caine. Probably won’t catch this one, as the release date is next month. I remember seeing the Anthony Shaffer play at A.C.T. in S.F. decades ago. Harold Pinter adapted the new version, which provides an added bonus.

Well, off to catch Sean Penn’s greatly anticipated “Into the Wild.” The famed actor penned and directed the film based on the book by Jon Krakauer, about a wealthy young college graduate, Christopher McCandless, who gives his inheritance away to OXFAM and, in the tradition of Thoreau and London, takes off into the wilderness of Alaska. We already know of his tragic demise, but, as they say, what a wild trip it was.

Ciao for now!

Cross-posted at "The Santa Cruz Sentinel": http://www.santacruzlive.com/blogs/epicenter/2007/09/07/tiff-fri–day-2-the-buzz/

TIFF Day 2 –– 9/7/07

2007-09-07T20:11:00.000-07:00

Wow, this place is jumping! The Press Room is packed. So far this morning, I’ve met a Brazilian filmmaker; a Turkish entrepreneur from Stanford, whose DVD-on-demand business Auteur.com is based in Palo Alto (“Need any writers,” I ask, expectantly. “I happen to have written my doctoral dissertation on Auteur Cinema.” [We’re meeting for coffee later in the week; keep your fingers crossed!]; a French film journalist from Paris Match; a representative of jamba.com, and a young Swiss Festival volunteer, who is a dead-ringer for Eric Bana. Not bad for the first hour.

Saw three films yesterday “Ulzhan,” “Secret Sunshine” (South Korea, Dir. Lee Chang-dong), and the excellent neo-noir “Jar City” (Iceland, Dir. Baltasar Kormákur), plus an evening screening of “Persepolis,” that I mentioned in my last post.

“Ulzhan” (see yesterday’s preview)

The fact that Jean-Claude Carrière penned the script for Volker Schlöndorff’s film excited me even more. This emotionally wrenching story revolves around Simon Charles (Philippe Torreton), a man who, the film slowly reveals, lost his beloved wife and two sons in a car accident in France, and desires nothing more than to walk into oblivion. The film opens in exotic Kazakhstan where Simon’s Peugot runs out of gas and he takes off on foot with a satchel, which holds the bare minimum of his belongings. This middle-aged man is definitely on a mission to meet his Maker, but life has other plans and throws a series of diversions in his path. These interruptions range from the ridiculous (a “cowboy” poolhall, Kazak-style and a tour (including a runway fashion show) of Astana (“Brasilia in the desert”), a city with a two billion dollar facelift) to the sublime (a meeting with a con artist/trickster-shaman (David Bennent, the boy from Schlöndorff’s 1979 film, “The Tin Drum”), who “sells” words and a young female teacher named Ulzhan (the gorgeous and transcendent Ayanat Ksenbai).

A LITTLE MIRACLE: I know this sounds too good to be true, but I swear it is … just this minute, as I wrote “the gorgeous and transcendent …” I looked up and six feet away from me stood Ayanat Ksenbai! No time right now to write that up (check back in a week or so for our interview), but just to say that Ayanat is grateful to “Borat” for enlightening the masses about Kazakhstan’s existence! However, she believes that “Ulzhan” presents a “more accurate image of the true Kazakhstan.” Well, you heard it hear, Live at Toronto.

Ciao for now!

Cross-posted at "The Santa Cruz Sentinel": http://www.santacruzlive.com/blogs/epicenter/2007/09/07/tiff-fri–day-2-the-buzz/

TIFF Day 1 –– 9/6/07

2007-09-06T18:37:00.000-07:00

2007 marks my second year at Toronto. And I hope to cement this as an annual trek to one of the major international film festivals (right up there with Cannes in May and Berlin in February). Last year I saw 43 films in seven days. (Impossible, you shriek? Not if you cram 16 films into the first two days, as I did. After arriving on a Thursday, on Friday, I hit the press office at by 8 A.M, and the Varsity screening complex within the hour. At two o’clock the next morning, I staggered the three miles back to my friend’s tiny flat, the attic of a 200-year-old charming row house. Her walk-in closet served as my office/bedroom and I slept on an inflatable twin mattress, which had a slow leak. By morning, no air separated my aching body from the floor. Sometimes “free” comes at a price.

My plan, after checking in at the press office first thing on Thursday morning: Sneak off to Niagara Falls for a couple hours. My only experience of this natural wonder is the 1955 Marilyn Monroe vehicle in which, as the betraying wife of Joseph Cotton, she pays the ultimate price when he tosses her off the local bell tower (not unlike Kim Novak in “Vertigo”). Well, we’ll see…

Celebrities on hand this year: Sean Penn (director of "Into the Wild"), Brad Pitt ("The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") (both in attendance last year), George Clooney, Jodie Foster ("The Brave One"),

Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal (yes, they’re a couple), Terrence Howard, Viggo Mortensen, the Coen Brothers, Woody Allen, Collin Farrell, Joaquin Phoenix, and three actors and a director I’m most interested in meeting: Cate Blanchette, Clive Owen, Catherine Keener, and Gillian Armstrong.

As a member of the Press Corps, I’ve been invited to a few special opening night screenings, including Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” about a young woman's experiences growing up in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the black-and-white animated feature was inspired by her bestselling series of graphic novels, which I taught in my Arts in a Multicultural Society course at UCSC. Since I’m hoping to interview Ms. Satrapi, who now lives in Paris, this is the one I’ll probably attend.

Okay, sufficiently apprised of this year’s offerings, I’m off to my first screening of the Festival: “Ulzhan,” by German director Volker Schlöndorff (“The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum,” 1975, “The Tin Drum,” 1979, “Swann in Love,” 1984, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” 1990), about a middle-aged Western man in Kazakhstan, who abandons his car, which has run out of gas, and starts to walk across the vast steppes of Central Asia. In this intriguing-sounding exploration of one man’s journey within a journey, he occasionally encounters people and the trappings of civilization, but he never lingers long or veers from the course that leads to his unknown destination.

Cross posted at "The Santa Cruz Sentinel": http://www.santacruzlive.com/blogs/epicenter/2007/09/06/memo-from-toronto/

Film Actresses Find Second Lives on TV

2007-08-29T21:32:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to Katharine Ross?

“Katharine who?” you might ask.

Remember “Elaine,” “Mrs. Robinson”’s daughter, in “The Graduate”? The gorgeous young woman “Benjamin” traveled back and forth between L.A. and U.C. Berkeley (erroneously driving across the Golden Gate Bridge to reach the East Bay from San Francisco!) to visit.
Within months, Ross became America’s sweetheart, which led to starring roles in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and “The Stepford Wives” (the original version, before Nicole Kidman and Christopher Walken camped-up the remake in 2004). Soon after the release of “The Graduate,” both actor Dustin Hoffman and director Mike Nichols became (and have remained) household names. But, unless pressed, who can recall the spunky, diminutive, long-auburn-tressed actress, who turned 68 in January (and remains a true Hollywood anomaly: an actress whose body is a plastic surgery-free zone).

Hollywood history is filled with examples of many a talented actress, who often shared a similar fate. (Although, no doubt until her dying day, Meryl Streep will continue dazzling movie audiences with her verbal gymnastics of obscure languages and her ability to learn yet another musical instrument.) But, I believe, the summer of 2007 may be remembered as the year cable television discovered movie actresses of a certain age and cast them in their own weekly-serialized dramas.

I hope you haven’t missed an episode of the riveting “Damages” on FX (Tuesdays at 10 PM), starring 58-year-old Glenn Close, the actress audiences love to hate (“Fatal Attraction,” “Dangerous Liaisons,” “101 Dalmatians”). Nominated five times for Oscar’s Best Actress Award, Close –– with her scary smile and demonic stare –– once again makes your skin crawl as Patty Hewes, the cold-blooded New York litigation attorney. But, unlike “Fatal Attraction”’s Alex Forrest, who boils bunnies for fun, Patty’s own Machiavellian tendencies are tempered by trouble at home. Namely, a son who purchases hand-grenades on line and delivers them, courtesy of Uncle Sam’s postal service, directly to Mom’s office. Yes, that could give even the most hard-bitten, unsentimental parent pause for thought.

Holly Hunter, the versatile 49-year-old Oscar winner for “The Piano,” assumes the titular role (and a producing credit) in TNT’s “Saving Grace” (Mondays at 10 PM). Grace Hanadarko (“darko” … get it? she’s a badass.), a police detective working in Oklahoma City, drives a beat-up old Porsche –– as she swigs from a whiskey bottle, sleeps with a married man, and disputes the existence of God with a (what else is new these days?) crusty angel, who drinks beer day and night, “chaws tobacca,” and could double as a country-Western singer. Hunter is ever watchable, even though, as Grace, her performance is a few notches below what we’ve come to expect from the quirky skills she displays in “The Incredible,” “Thirteen,” “The Firm,” and “Raising Arizona.”

If you’re a fan of Indies, you’re probably familiar with Lili Taylor (“I Shot Andy Warhol,” “Dogfight,” “Household Saints,” “Casa de los babys,” “Factotum,” as well as HBO’s “Six Feet Under”). In Lifetime’s “State of Mind” (Sundays at 9 PM) Taylor (at 41, the baby among the trio) plays psychiatrist Dr. Ann Bellowes. Although the series was created by Amy Bloom, a writer and psychotherapist –– without being too self-referential here –– Bellowes bears not the slightest resemblance to any psychiatrist I’ve ever met. She’s too “normal,” for starters. Taylor has a sweet way about her, but the series tries to do too much and with too many characters. By the third episode, I’d already lost interest.

Cable’s efforts to identify the segment of an audience that mirrors their leading ladies “of a certain age” –– just as “Sex in the City” appealed to women in their 30s –– is working.

Perhaps next summer they’ll even surprise us with a new drama, starring the still effervescent and natural Katharine Ross. Now that’s a series I’d look forward to.

NOTE: This article originally appeared in Cathleen's Cinema and Culture Column in the “The Santa Cruz Sentinel” on 24 August 2007.

The Hidden Half: Images of Women in Middle Eastern Cinema

2007-08-22T23:04:00.000-07:00

What are women’s lives like in other parts of the world? This question can be answered in three primary ways: through travel and personal experience, through the news media, and through literature and cinema. At Toronto (2006), Sundance, and the San Francisco International Film Festival this year, a spate of excellent Middle Eastern documentary and narrative films shed light on the subject; and all but one of them was directed by a woman. Bay Area audiences have additional opportunities to catch Middle Eastern films about women at the upcoming Arab Film Festival (October 18–November 4, aff.org), the Global Lens film series (November t.b.a., globalfilm.org), and the United Nations Association Film Festival (October 24–28, unaff.org).

Rise Up, Spiral Down ...

In "Offside," Jafar Panahi, the director of well-known Iranian films such as "The Mirror," "The Circle," and "The White Balloon" (all of which tell stories about women and girls), follows a group of young women as they wrestle, deceive, and otherwise attempt to finagle their way into a soccer finals match in Tehran. Iranian law bars women from attending sporting events. During my interview with Mr. Panahi in Toronto, he mentioned that the inspiration for the film arose out of his own 15-year-old daughter’s attempt to sneak into a match wearing a male friend’s robe (she was caught and tossed out). When I asked if he thought the law might change, he replied, “In Islam, women are forbidden to look at men’s bare legs. There is nothing we can do about the religious laws because they are etched in stone, so we can forget about changing the laws.”

"Women’s Prison," directed by Manijeh Hekmat unfolds in a setting more sinister than a sporting arena. Banned in Iran, the film traces the story of women in Iranian society since the Islamic Revolution, through the ordeal of women behind bars. This fascinating drama offered by Global Lens, hinges on the struggle between an independent reform-driven prisoner and a determined warden, compelled by her Islamic beliefs.

"Mainline," by Iranian director Rakhsan Bani-Etemad (co-directed by Mohsen Abdolvahab), dramatizes a young middle-class woman’s downward spiral into heroin addiction. According to the directors, young people under the age of 30 comprise 70 percent of Iran’s population, and drug addiction among this demographic is rising to alarming heights. The filmmakers effectively use a cinema vérité approach to capture the grit and desolation of drug life and the desperate challenges of rehabilitation.

"These Girls," directed by Tahani Rached, plunges deep into Egyptian street life. The documentary follows a group of adolescents who live, suffer, rejoice, and sometimes die, on the streets of Cairo as they sniff glue, prostitute themselves, and band together to create some semblance of security and family. Rached’s empathic connection to “these girls” creates a compassionate film that leaves a lasting impression on the viewer.

Dark though these films are, they signal a new era in the complexity of representations of women in Middle Eastern cinema, and at the forefront of the group is a new work by filmmaker Niki Karimi.

Mapping the New Interior ...

"A Few Days Later…," directed by and starring the well-known Iranian actress and director Karimi ("One Night," "Two Women," "The Hidden Half"), is a minimalist portrait of an educated, professional woman dealing with pressures in all aspects of her life. Shahrzad, a graphic designer, artist, and university professor living in Tehran, is besieged by a demanding boss, a disapproving mother and friends, an obnoxious neighbor, and an indecisive lover.

When I interviewed Karimi at Toronto, I noted that her film—with its melancholic atmosphere, gorgeous landscapes, and a main character who drives (sometimes aimlessly) as she pursues an existential questioning of life––approximates a feminist version of Abbas Kiarostami’s "Taste of Cherry" (1997). “Really!” she laughed, pleased at the comparison. Karimi has, in fact, worked as Kiarostami’s assistant, and he produced her first directing effort "To Have Or Not to Have" (2001). I asked what her impetus was for making her latest film and she suggested, “The film is about things that are happening in society to women my age. I felt that there were few films about the experiences of women. I call this ‘personal cinema,’ not cinema from the commercial film industry. I wanted to show a woman trying to earn money, be on her own, and how many problems can surround her. I wanted to show the distance that she has from society. Because of that, she’s living out of the city. And each day she travels on the road and looks at the city and asks herself, ‘What is this place I’m going to?’”

I mention that Shahrzad appears to lead a very privileged life in comparison to other representations of Iranian women that I have seen on film. While the character may be privileged, Karimi points out, “She is not ‘upper class.’ I mean, she is middle-class: she is working, she is an artist, she is also a professor at a university. She is not very rich, but she is taking care of herself. She is typical of Iranian women. We have so many women lawyers, artists, professors, especially in the last 20 years, we have so many women who have graduated from university. They work, have houses, marry, and divorce, like women in the West.”

The Political is Personal ...

Many of the films I saw this year are suffused in political upheaval, whether it is an undercurrent or the main issue. Malalai Joya, subject of Danish filmmaker Eva Mulvad’s documentary "Enemies of Happiness," is dedicated to improving the lives of her countrywomen. The film follows Joya, a 28-year-old delegate in the Afghanistan parliament, as she campaigns for election, receives threats on her life (there have been four), and subsequently leads a political life where she must remain in hiding or be protected by armed guards in public. "Enemies of Happiness" provides a unique insight into today’s Afghanistan, a society destroyed by war and still ruled by tradition. Joya is a controversial leader for a people who have been promised peace and prosperity, but who continue to be ravaged by war. She successfully negotiates with clan leaders and opium kings, and on behalf of despairing adolescent girls, promised in marriage to men old enough to be their grandfathers. This radical freedom fighter for women displays courage and fosters the belief that one person does make a difference.

The Arab Film Festival recently screened two documentaries about Iraqi women and life in Baghdad during the U.S. occupation. In "The Tenth Planet: A Single Life in Baghdad," by Melis Birder, a young Baghdadi woman describes herself thus: “There are nine planets in the universe and I am the tenth one.” Her name means “planet” in Arabic and she is indeed a world unto herself, unafraid to speak her mind about sex, love and politics. "Baghdad Days" is by and about Heba Bassem, a young student from Kirkuk, who returns to Baghdad after the war to finish her film studies at the Art Academy. For her final project, Heba captures her struggles to complete her studies in the semi-destroyed city of Baghdad, where nothing remains the same.

One film, from Global Lens, offers a stunning look at two women’s experiences in Algeria. "Enough!," by Djamila Sahraoui, takes place in the 1990s, and follows a nurse and a doctor; the husband of the latter has been abducted by rebel forces unhappy with his reportage. The women, anachronisms in Islamist Algeria, reflect on earlier times as they confront contemporary religious limitations imposed on females.

"Kiss Me Not on the Eyes," by Lebanese writer-director Jocelyne Saab reveals the conflicts for women in Egyptian culture by juxtaposing female sensuality with female circumcision; love of poetry with religious repression; emancipated dance with physical restraint. Amid the lavish color, intoxicating music, and historical architecture of contemporary Cairo, Dunia, a free-spirited, belly dancer, studies Arabic love poetry at the university as she maneuvers her way through a repressive society. But once she marries her ardent long-term boyfriend Mandouh, he constricts Dunia’s independent nature. Instead she finds philosophical nourishment in her relationship with her professor. "Kiss Me Not" explores cross-cultural concerns about ownership of women’s bodies and, by extension, the inherent pleasure within them.

In August 2003, Palestinian-Australian documentary filmmaker Sherine Salama, awakened convinced that Yasser Arafat was going to die, and soon. She recognized the importance of following her prescient dream and "The Last Days of Yasser Arafat" resulted. During our interview in San Francisco, Salama told me she is not, by nature, a very political person, but she felt “a kind of duty to make a film about Arafat before he died.” In "Last Days" Salama accomplishes the daunting task of humanizing the typically demonized president. Much of the documentary’s action revolves around her attempt to break through the inner sanctum of aids, bodyguards, and press secretaries surrounding Arafat's compound at Ramallah to get an interview with him. It takes more than a year, but she finally ingratiates herself and her interview is granted. When the documentarian meets the despot their conversation is amiable and Arafat is engaged. Within a month, after Arafat’s death, Salama realizes that hers is the ultimate interview. By following her instincts she provided the world with a final glimpse of one of the most controversial leaders of the 20th century. I urge you to check out this film and the others featured in this article for an unforgettable look at women’s lives in the Middle East.

NOTE: This article was first published in the July/August 2007 issue of "Release Print."

Cathleen teaches a six-week course, Faces of Women in Middle Eastern Cinema, begining this October (2007) at UC Santa Cruz, Extension in Cupertino.

An Interview with Steven Okazaki, Director

2007-08-05T19:04:00.000-07:00

WHITE LIGHT/BLACK RAIN premieres on HBO on Monday, August 6, 2007

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival I viewed, back-to-back, films about the making of "Dr. Atomic," the John Adams-Peter Sellars collaborative opera (which I was lucky enough to see during its San Francisco debut in 2005), and "White Light/Black Rain," Steven Okazaki’s heartbreaking and sobering series of interviews with survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two films (rich, but difficult viewing) served as bookends on a horrific subject: the creator/destroyer Robert J. Oppenheimer’s engineering of the first atomic bomb, its testing at Alamagordo, and the ultimate detonation in 1945, on August 6 and 9, of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” on unsuspecting Japanese citizens of, respectively, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After a succinct opening, a ninety-second historical overview of events leading up to the dropping of the bombs, "White Light/Black Rain" makes a statement by asking a question: “What historical event occurred on August 6, 1945?” the filmmakers randomly ask young people walking on the streets of Hiroshima. “I don’t know,” each teenager responds. “Did something important happen?” asks one. “An earthquake?” asks another. Okazaki says that they had planned to ask thirty or more people this question, but stopped after the first ten, when the responses were the same. If this is what the younger generation knows about the most significant event in Japan’s history––if, indeed, not the world’s––it’s chilling to consider that seventy-five percent of Japan’s population was born after 1945.

Steven Okazaki, the recipient of three Academy Award nominations ("Days of Waiting," a documentary short, about Estelle Peck Ishigo, one of the few Caucasians interned with Japanese Americans during WW II, won both an Oscar and Peabody Award in 1991), was born and raised in Venice, California. As an American of Japanese lineage, he was in a unique position, perhaps, even, the perfect person, to make a film on this topic. Did he feel a primary sense of loyalty to either culture? I asked, when we met, first at Sundance, and later, in Berkeley, California (where he lives with his wife, writer Peggy Orenstein, and their daughter, Daisy Tomoko), at his offices in the Saul Zaentz Media Center.

“I’ve always felt a certain distance from both cultures,” Okazaki replied. “I’m an American, but my grandparents, parents and I were treated as lesser because of the way we look. My grandparents lost everything [during the war]. My parents were squashed and oppressed. And I have had to fight twice as hard for my opportunities. But I’m not Japanese. If I don’t open my mouth when I’m in Japan, then I fit in. But as soon as I do, then I’m a foreigner, an outsider. I understand the culture, but I’m not part of it and don’t want to be. I guess I always feel like an outsider, even among peers, in my community and at family gatherings. So, yes, I think I am a good choice to make this film, because, although I know both cultures extremely well, I am ‘the other’ to both.”

For 25 years, since the first time he visited Japan, Okazaki had wanted to make “a great film about Hiroshima and Nagasaki--an ambitious, comprehensive, powerful film.” But at the time, he felt he lacked “the skill to pull it off.” Later, he recalls, he “faced a wall of censorship from both Japan and the United States,” then, he couldn't find the funding. He put “The Big Film” on hold and made the documentary short "The Mushroom Club" in 2005, which was nominated for an Academy Award. The film is “a little tribute, a bow and a thank you, to the people of Hiroshima,” explains Okazaki, “to pay off the debt I felt to them for sharing their stories with me.”

During post-production, Sara Bernstein at HBO Documentary Films ("White Light/Black Rain" airs on HBO beginning August 6 at 7:30 P.M.) called and asked him if he was interested in doing “a big, ambitious film” about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okazaki sees "The Mushroom Club" as a “kind of introduction” to "White Light/Black Rain." The first film “takes the viewer by the hand,” he says, “and slowly you see the city, meet the survivors and hear bits and pieces of the story. It is very consciously small and personal. I wanted to say, ‘Come with me, don't be afraid, just watch and listen.’ "White Light" is his “big film, it moves forward, very determined, doesn’t hold anything back, and tells the whole story. It says, ‘Pay attention, these people have something important, disturbing and amazing to say.’”

The film is vividly impressionistic and deeply moving. In addition to a series of captivating interviews with survivors (known as hibakusha––people exposed to the bomb and subsequent radiation) and three American soldiers, who carried out the bombing mission, White Light’s rich texture, both visually and aurally, combines painfully disturbing archival footage, survivors’ drawings of their memories of the horrific event, animation, and an intriguing soundtrack that includes several tracks by the Scottish band Mogwai. To come up with the look of the film, Okazaki says he took his “cues from the subjects. They are warm, intelligent, shy people with great dignity. The visuals and the music serve their stories, and never overwhelm them, but also hold our attention when we need a break from the intense drama of the stories.

“With most documentaries, you take advantage of every drop of drama you find,” he analyzes, but the Hiroshima and Nagasaki stories are “so emotionally overwhelming––a child walking out of a bomb shelter to discover that everyone in her school is dead; a mother watching helplessly as her children burn to death; young children committing suicide––you have to be careful about devastating the audience and losing them.”

About the soundtrack, Okazaki explains, “one of the fun things for me on any film is thinking about the music. The moment the project starts, I listen to everything I can. I usually have a fat budget item called ‘Music Research’ and I buy hundreds of CDs, listen to them, and think about the film.” He says he “can’t start editing until I have a strong sense of where I want to go with the music.” On "White Light" he collected about thirty Mogwai songs and “whenever I got to a scene I’d pop them all on until I found the one that fit.” When he finds something that works, he says, “it almost never changes after that.” He made the decision to forego period music, because it made the film feel “campy and dated. Even though the stories are 60 years old, you want it to feel like it’s happening now.”

A genuine sense of intimacy with the film’s participants as they recount their stories is one of the remarkable aspects of "White Light." Was it difficult persuading the survivors to open up about such a painful part of their lives? On the contrary, Okazaki clarifies, “they were mostly incredibly eager to share their stories and tell the world what happened. Many said that their own spouses, children and friends were reluctant to ask them about their experience, so they appreciated the chance to really talk.”

By nature, a project such as "White Light" raises emotional, moral, political and philosophical issues and questions for a filmmaker. How did Okazaki handle them? “I try to not come to a project with a set moral or political stand,” he explains. “I could be wrong and miss something because I was looking for something else. I try to stay open minded, do the research, do the filming and edit the film. That’s my job: to make the film, tell the story, not to decide the rights and wrongs, who's good and bad. I hate films where you know the filmmaker’s political or moral point of view in the first two minutes. Why bother?”
Okazaki then references "Black Tar Heroin," his first documentary for HBO, for which he followed five heroin addicts for three years. “I realized that most of what I thought I knew was wrong, and the best thing to do was to just follow the subjects. I try to be a filmmaker first. Sometimes you can’t. When you’re filming a drug addict and they overdose, you put the camera down and try to save their lives. It’s not a choice. Later on, you might think, ‘Wow, that would have been a powerful scene,’ but you have to live with yourself.”

He admits that "White Light/Black Rain" was difficult, emotionally. “I would be sitting there, listening to someone talk about reaching out to touch their mother and watching the body crumble into ashes. Later, I would worry that I wasn’t reacting emotionally to what I was hearing, but would instead be thinking, ‘Wow, this will be a powerful scene.’ But when I started editing the interviews and going through the archival footage, I would break down and start weeping, unexpectedly, every couple of weeks, not necessarily reacting to a particular scene, but the whole experience.”

"White Light" clearly goes to great lengths to be “fair”; there is little directive from the film to “take sides,” to “blame” either Japan or the U.S. (and yet, it holds both responsible for the consequences of their acts). Still, scathing revelations are made about both countries. What, I wondered, is Okazaki’s opinion about the responsibility of documentarians toward the “truth” and maintaining objectivity in their work?

“Again, I hate documentaries that simply support the prejudices of the filmmaker in the guise of exploring a compelling subject,” he stresses. “The so-called ‘docu-gandas,’ made popular and profitable by Michael Moore, but in existence since the beginning of filmmaking, would be fine as entertainment, except the audience is generally too trusting and can’t necessarily discern how the material is being manipulated. When I watch a documentary, I am very conscious of what is artistic license and what is cheating, but only the filmmaker knows for sure. I’m disturbed by the trend, but I can only be responsible for myself.”

"White Light/Black Rain" ends with the staggering statement that there are now enough nuclear weapons in the world to equal 400,000 Hiroshimas. As one of the military men responsible for dropping the atom bombs puts it in the film: “The genie is out of the bottle and can’t be stuffed back in the bottle. From now on, the world will live with the possibility of nuclear exchanges and nuclear war.”

But in person, Steven Okazaki ends on a more humanist note: “I just want people to stop arguing about the rights and wrongs of the atomic bombings, whose fault it is, who deserved it or didn’t, whether it was worse, or not as bad, as other holocausts, and just listen to the stories of the people who were there. People like you and me, our parents, our children, our friends.”

(A version of this interview first appeared in the July-August 2007 print version of "Documentary" Magazine.)

INTERVIEW "Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman"

2007-07-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

An Interview with director, Jennifer Fox

Now playing at Film Forum in NYC

In our post-9/11 world, the phrase “fear of flying” has a very different meaning from the one championed by Erica Jong in her 1973 bra-burning manifesto of liberation. Jong’s iconic "Fear of Flying" examined the female psyche (primarily hers) through the man-woman conundrum, sex, marriage, divorce, motherhood and that elusive Shangri-la, Freedom. And Jong modernized the quotidian sexual fantasy into a rousing “zipless fuck.”

Fast-forward 34 years. For "Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman," director Jennifer Fox spent five years visiting 17 countries, making countless women friends, and shooting 1,700 hours of film in her search into the identity of contemporary women. Using her own life and loves as the film’s central conceit, Fox sought not to create a film about herself, but to weave a connection with other women and their stories. The wingspan of this audacious and exhilarating six-part, six-hour series stretches from Phnom Penh to Islamabad, from Lapland to Capetown, and effectively employs flying metaphors throughout. Chapter titles include “Test Piloting,” “Experiencing Turbulence,” “Crash and Burn,” “Walking Away from the Wreck” and “Breaking the Sound Barrier.” Appropriately, "Flying" opens at the Film Forum in New York City on Independence Day and screens through July 17.

The editing of the massive amounts of footage Fox acquired was entrusted to the award-winning Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen. The fact that the “confessional” aspect of the film does not deteriorate into a narcissistic, solipsistic mess no doubt owes a great deal to Andersen’s skills. In an interview he observes, “The whole concept of the film is a central character who evolves when she is reflected in other women. It makes her smarter, it pushes her and makes her move on in life.”

Fox, the award-winning director/producer of "Beirut: The Last Home Movie" (1987) and the groundbreaking 10-hour PBS television series "An American Love Story" (1999), developed a simple shooting technique she calls “passing the camera.” Her goal was to mirror the way women speak normally when they are alone together. “I had noticed that women have these endless free-flowing circular conversations about any life topic for hours,” she explains. However, she feared that introducing the camera would destroy the genuine intimacy among women. “I decided to try to use the camera in a way that mimicked the way women’s conversations usually occur. So, rather than let the camera be in a third-person position, either on a tripod or with a cameraperson, I decided to pass the camera between myself and other women in a similar way to how women ‘pass the ball’ back and forth in conversations,” she describes. She discovered that women “loved this technique” and that it maintained the intimacy and presence that normally accompany female conversations.

Intimacy and presence permeate Fox’s work and life: We met three times at this year’s Sundance screening of "Flying," and we have since spoken several times by phone as well as exchanged numerous e-mails. It’s easy to see why women in the film, whom she’s just met (no matter how different their cultural and ethnic heritage may be from hers), feel so relaxed in her company. Her warmth, caring and genuine concern energetically affect everyone within her radius.

In "Flying," the “passing the camera” technique becomes the great equalizer, as no one person in the conversation has more power than the other. Both film each other, both can ask questions of the other, both people are equally on the line. “On top of that,” Fox adds, “the whole question, ‘Can a layperson shoot with a camera?’ is so obviously answered in the film. My camera instruction to each woman took about 30 seconds, and within 30 seconds they were filming me, often quite beautifully. This was true whether it be women in New York, Britain, India or Pakistan—virtually anywhere.”

The filmmaker traveled alone through what are often considered some of the most dangerous regions on the planet, but because of the nature of her project, she always made advance arrangements with the women she planned to meet. “And being under the care and guidance of a local woman meant that I was much safer than I would have been had I been on my own,” she concedes.

For example, arriving in India, she met with Paromita, a 32-year-old political activist lawyer, and was “amazed” at how few people bothered her on the street because Paromita served as a guardian of sorts. Fox had traveled in India many times as a single woman and had been “constantly harassed and even got into some pretty awful situations.” Thanks to Paromita, Fox was able to integrate into Indian culture “in a really wonderful and seamless manner. This vision of another culture was great for the film, but it was also great for me personally because I had the best experience of India that I ever had.”

As a filmmaker working on her own, there were built-in restrictions and limitations in terms of equipment. Fox decided to use only natural light and rarely a tripod. She traveled with her Sony PDX10 PAL DVCam—the smallest broadcast-level widescreen camera available. She purchased a Seinheiser ME80 short shotgun mic, which she mounted on top of the camera and then “gerry-rigged a second mic, an electrosonic lavelier, on the back of the microphone to get the voice of the person holding the camera.” She carried five or six long-lasting batteries to assure full days of shooting. Fox also had two electrosonic radio mics for situations where it was better to radio mic someone, or herself, depending on the situation. “I think this kit is pretty much the bare minimum of a solo filmmaking kit,” she says. And she never left home with fewer than 60 expensive Sony PDVM 40-minute DVCam Professional tapes.

Although she shot on PAL, the requirements for Sundance warranted something different. Fox explains, “We shot the entire film in PAL DVCam for two reasons: The film is a Danish co-production, so we knew we would be doing most of the post-production in Europe, where PAL is the main format. But the main reason I wanted to shoot in PAL is that it’s such a higher quality video format compared to NTSC.” But because PAL has a different frame rate than NTSC, shooting in that format caused technical problems when converting the final film back to NTSC.

While looking for a producing partner that would inspire the language of the film she was planning, Fox felt the documentary film work coming out of Denmark was closest to her “aspirations for this new language I wanted to work in for 'Flying.'” So she partnered with a Danish producer, Easy Film, and together funded the film through a grant from the Danish Film Institute (similar to the National Endowment for the Arts in the U.S.). As a Danish co-production, the key personnel were required to be Danish, including the editor. “This meant that the film was an artistic collaboration between an American and Danish sensibility,” says Fox. She believes the project benefited tremendously from that fusion.

The film was also funded through pre-sales to seven international broadcasters. “It began as a feature film and most of these broadcasters were able to switch to purchase it as a series,” she explains. “However, our American broadcaster HBO doesn’t broadcast limited series and initially had to pass on it.” Once completed, the film was purchased for American broadcast by the Sundance Channel, which will air the six-episode series in 2008. An additional source of support came from Creative Capital, a New York-based foundation, which, Fox points out, “really follows the artist through all stages of production and distribution. I felt very privileged to have such backing.”

In terms of advice to filmmakers, Fox stresses the importance of understanding the right type of funding for one’s film. A film might be suitable for an American foundation, public television, commercial television or international pre-sales. “It is rare that a film is fundable from every avenue,” she states. “The key for independent filmmakers is not to be afraid of business and to educate themselves in as wide and diverse types of funding and distribution possibilities as they can.”

For self-preservation, she believes, an independent filmmaker cannot stay in the dark about the complexities of the film business. “I think that we should educate ourselves on the world market—not just television markets but also DVD and Internet markets.” Fox enjoys the business side of filmmaking and finds it interesting and exciting, but also a necessity to survive. “The world market keeps changing,” she warns. “As filmmakers, we need to evolve with the marketplace; otherwise we won’t survive. For me, survival is in itself success.”

This interview, titled "Praise Free Women and Pass the Camera," was originally published in the July/August 2007 issue of IDA "Documentary" Magazine.

INTERVIEW: Sophie Fiennes and THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA

2007-05-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

"THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA, directed by Sophie Fiennes (sister to Ralph and Joseph), was a popular draw at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. A blueprint for approaching cinema through a psychoanalytic lens, the three-part series consists of substantial film clips and tongue-in-cheek, meticulously recreated settings of famous films (Melanie under siege on Bodega Bay in THE BIRDS; a cadaverous Mrs. Bates in the basement of PSYCHO; a lunatic Frank on the couch in the unquestionably "perverted" BLUE VELVET). However, in place of Melanie, Mrs. Bates, and Frank, sits Fiennes's 'guide,' the world-renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The good doctor clearly relishes his role by tossing off such stimulating Freudianisms as: 'Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire. It tells you how to desire.' As Thom Powers notes in his Toronto catalogue review, 'This doc will make you proud to call yourself a pervert.'

"The aim of The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, she says, is to 'document Zizek's thinking on cinema and perhaps the process of thinking itself as a performance, something caught, alive in its moment.' If not a performance, this interview serves as 'something caught' and hopefully remains 'alive in its moment.'"

Continue reading Cathleen's interview with Sophie on Greencine: http://www.greencine.com/central/sophiefiennes

THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
May 3-6, 2007
Roxie Cinema, San Francisco
Fri., May 11 – Tues., May 15

THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA DVD is available for purchase at: www.pervertsguidetocinema.com for £21.99, inclding free shipping worldwide.

SFIFF: HANA and Hirokazu Kore-eda

2007-05-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

HANA: Don't miss this exquisite Japanese film.

"A movie about a samurai from the director of AFTER LIFE and NOBODY KNOWS. Filled with Kore-eda's characteristic moments of quiet beauty, this tale of a hapless samurai seeking vengeance but finding acceptance is a celebration of pacifism and a tribute to Japanese cinema history." (SFIFF film note)

My interview with director Hirokazu Kore-eda is available at the exceptional site (film news, reviews, interviews, rentals, sales): http://www.greencine.com/central/hirokazukoreeda

"Hirokazu Kore-eda: Synching Up with the After Life"

"Upon first meeting one of the great humanist filmmakers, Hirokazu Kore-eda, last September at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was struck by his modesty and peacefulness, characteristics embodied also by Soza (Junichi Okada), the reluctant swordsman/hero in Kore-eda’s most recent film Hana, screening this week at SFIFF. An aficionada of his four previous films: Maborosi (1996), After Life (1999), Distance (2002), and Nobody Knows (2004), I was ecstatic at the opportunity to meet and speak with this foremost world cinema director, who, as far as I’m concerned, should be considered one of Japan’s Living Treasures." (Continue reading at: http://www.greencine.com/central/hirokazukoreeda)

HANA
Dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda
Japan, 2006, 127 mins.

Wed. May 2 6:45 Kabuki
Sat. May 5 5:45 PFA

SFIFF 2 LATIN AMERICAN FILMS

2007-04-24T21:51:00.000-07:00

As I'm finishing up a couple of interviews with directors today, I thought I'd post two Film Notes I wrote for this year's Festival catalogue.

THE 12 LABORS (OS 12 TRABALHOS)

CITY OF GOD and BUS 174 (SFIFF 2003) gripped viewers with their chronicling of the poverty, violence, injustice, drug addiction, child abuse, and police brutality that two million homeless children endure daily in the urban jungle of São Paulo. The less edgy, but eloquent, 12 LABORS could be seen as a “prequel” to BUS 174. “Neighborhoods denote classes, streets denote who you are. Man, depending on where you were born your story is written even before it starts.” Thus begins the account of eighteen-year-old Heracles (Sidney Santiago), just out of a FEBEM reform school, who, on his first day as a motorcycle courier (and like his Greek demi-god namesake), must overcome 12 hurdles of increasing difficulty. Fortunately, he receives the help of sympathetic characters who, much like mythic deities, appear when he most needs assistance. His struggles render Heracles a faithful embodiment of what the Greeks called pathos, the experience of virtuous struggle and suffering which leads to, if not fame and (in Hercules' case) immortality, self-respect, confidence, and a sense of possibility.

In a metropolis whose congested arteries run thick with 300,000 motorcycle delivery boys, Heracles’ own existence reflects the city’s chaos and its youth in crisis. The film’s lyrical omniscient voice-over narrative counterpoints the hip inner-city soundtrack and energy-infused urban cinematography. And young thespian Sidney Santiago, who deservedly won the Best Actor Award at last year’s Rio International Film Festival, perfectly personifies the somber Heracles whose imagination, poetic sensitivity, and artistic talent may be his sole salvation.

DIRECTOR BIO:
Ricardo Elias, born in São Paulo in 1968, studied cinema at the University of São Paulo. His work includes TV specials, documentaries, and dramatic films. DE PASSAGEM (2003), Elias’ first film, won several awards at the Gramado (Brazil) Film Festival, including: best film, directing, supporting actor, and the critics’ prize. THE 12 LABORS was awarded the Best Film of the Horizon section at the 2006 San Sebastián Film Festival, in Spain. About THE 12 LABORS Elias says, “The myth of Hercules is a reference point used to discuss issues relevant to the difficulty of finding a job in [today’s] globalized world.”

THE 12 LABORS (OS 12 TRABALHOS)
Dir. Ricardo Elias
Brazil, 2006, 90 min.

Sun April 29 9:30 Kabuki
Mon April 30 7:00 Kabuki
Sat May 5 4:30 Kabuki
Mon May 7 9:15 Aquarius

AGUA

Can one man’s collapse trigger another man’s salvation? One possible response unfolds in screenwriter-director Verónica Chen’s impressionistic venture into the vagaries of identity, fate, and free will. This sophomore effort––after VAGON FUMADOR/SMOKERS ONLY (SFIFF, 2002)––demonstrates a visual and narrative sophistication generally found in more experienced auteurs. The silent opening scenes of AGUA take place in an unearthly, desolate Argentine desert landscape, where a man tangles with a thorny cactus to retrieve its succulent flesh. But this man’s isolation and physical dehydration signify a spiritual thirst. During his prolonged drive back to civilization, the hypnotic pattern of the highway’s broken dividing line, intercut with the solid black line at the bottom of a pool that keeps a swimmer on course, serve as the convergence points for the two main characters: Goyo (Rafael Ferro), a 34-year-old once-discredited contestant of the grueling 35-mile Santa Fe-Coronda River marathon, and Chino (Nicolás Mateo), 20, a long-distance indoor swimmer, with a pregnant girlfriend, Luisa (Jimena Anganuzzi). The protagonists connect to life through swimming. After Chino fails to make the national swim team, a character says of him: “Out of water, he gasps.” And because of his aggressive competitiveness, Goyo is known as “the river shark.”

Water, especially the ominous, serpentine jungle river, interweaves the destinies of these men in profound and surprising ways. “How do you cross the bridge to the real world?” Chino contemplates. AGUA is a meditation on living in the present, rather than in one’s past glories or grievances, or in future promise.

DIRECTOR BIO:
Argentine director, writer, editor, producer Verónica Chen was born in Buenos Aires in 1969. She studied Classical Literature and Cinema. Her first film VAGON FUMADOR/SMOKERS ONLY screened at SFIFF in 2002. AGUA won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Youth Jury Award at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2006, in addition to the Special Jury Prize for New Voices/New Visions at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in 2007. About the river featured in AGUA, Chen says: “The river for me is the jungle, far from the idea of the 'idyllic' Nature like Rousseau depicts. It’s like hell, the dark side.”

AGUA
Dir.: Verónica Chen
Argentina, 2006, 89 min.

Sat May 5 12:30 Kabuki
Sun May 6 4:30 Kabuki
Wed May 9 8:50 PFA