Still in Motion

Dokufest 2011: Lo-Fi Films Take Prizes, Documentary in the Raw

As important as it is for an international festival to have a well-curated film program, its juries require careful curation, as well.  That is, if the festival in question means to distinguish itself as a distinctive voice in the landscape.  This year, as in all others, Dokufest curated the kinds of juries, that when gathered together to make decisions about "the best" of what they saw in their competitions, become a collective force for adventurous taste, brave choices, and thoughtful pondering (and arguing, hopefully) about why they want to give a prize to a particular film.  I was impressed by the jury selections this year and was happy to have a hand in curating them.  You can read about the other fantastic prize-winners here, but in this post, I want to try and put some coherent thoughts together about two of them, both pieces that illustrate the pure power of observation with very little interference, or the "noise" of a more sophisticated apparatus.  The best drama is the quiet, human kind, revealed in the contemplative spaces of our lives, when we think we can see things as they really are.  And still, we question.

Like most of us who love movies, I go faint with pleasure at a glorious display of breathtaking cinematography; I revel in well-composed, brilliantly-lit pretty pictures, especially when they're being projected on a big screen for a few souls gathered together in the dark to transport themselves outside their own mundane existences.  And I think most of the jury members feel the same.  But the Human Rights Dox jury--comprised of American producer Sandra Ruch, German journalist and human rights scholar, Sebastian Saam, and American / Albanian screenwriter, filmmaker and professor, Thomas Logoreci--chose a film that was mostly shot on cheap video cameras lodged immovably on the walls of an interrogation room to record what goes on inside.  We are hard-pressed to ever get a close, or very clear, look at the protagonists' faces, but we connect with them so viscerally, it is like we are in that room, sweating, scared, bewildered, caught.  The International Dox jury, in turn, chose a film for their feature selection entirely shot on a mobile phone, accompanied by a soundtrack of ambient noise picked up from a staticky scanner.  These five cineastes, all to a person--all award-winning filmmakers and writers, and a film curator from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for good measure--were caught up in a reflection that revealed all the messiness, confusion and loneliness of real life.  And they recognized themselves.  This could be you; this could be your son; this could be your mother.  It's all so deliciously and harrowingly real.  (Photo of Prizren above, courtesy, Eroll Bilibani.) 

Luc Coté and Patricio Henríquez have both been making films for a long time.  But I don't think they have ever made (or probably ever will make) a film as important as You Don't Like the Truth--4 Days Inside Guantánamo.  The film's principal documentation is a filmed meeting of a Canadian interrogation team with a child who is a Canadian citizen.  The boy was arrested after an attack in which he was severely wounded, then detained, tortured and, consequently moved to a prison to be locked up without proper due process of the law.  He is accused of killing an American soldier.  Based on seven hours of recorded video (some sections of which have been censored by the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service--CSIS), the footage was declassified by the Supreme Court of Canada, and I'm sure after watching this film, they wish they'd kept it under wraps.  The interrogration lasts for four days in February of 2003, each day a new chapter with a heading that spells doom:  Day 1--Hope, Day 2--Fallout, Day 3--Blackmail, Day 4--Failure. 

Omar Khadr is a tortured child, and as we learn about the particulars of what happened to him in Afghanistan and the family history that got him there from Canada, we see this boy, still in need of medical attention, tortured even further by the very people he is hoping will save him and get him released and sent home to re-join his family.  He is tortured with false friendship, Subway sandwiches and McDonald's hamburgers; he is tortured by verbal taunting and bullying; and, most sinister of all, he is tortured by such a barrage of inarticulate, foolish banter from his unseen interrogator, that the expression "banality of evil" takes on new meaning.  Along with this recorded video, the directors went in search of everyone that has been involved with the teenaged prisoner since his arrest, including his fellow cellmates at both Bagram, where he was first detained, and the prison in Guantánamo, a name that will forever be associated with the worst of human rights abuses.  They all are filmed watching the footage of Khadr's interrogation and asked to speak candidly for the camera about their thoughts--and they do.  This is an exceedingly difficult and uncomfortable film to sit through.  But you must see it--if only to remind yourself that you are complicit in some way for this young man's plight--and many others like him.  Sorry to say, we are all complicit.  This is one of those films that makes that statement impossible to deny.

 

When I went to Prizren to work with Veton back in May, we madly traded films we loved and wanted the other to watch right now, like a couple of kids with a flush set of the coolest baseball cards around.  He handed me a copy of Boris Gerrets' hour-long film, People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am, and told me I had to watch it and tell him what I thought.  He didn't say anymore than that so I could make up my own mind, which is one of the many thousands of things I love about Veton.  After watching it and telling him it moved me so deeply I wouldn't be able to watch anything else that day, he told me he was thinking of putting this small film into the international competition.  I told him I thought that was a fine idea.

Gerrets is an award-winning filmmaker, editor and visual artist working between London and Amsterdam.  This is not some jerk who picked up a cell phone and decided to make a movie 'cause hey! he can.  To open his story, Gerrets uses the convention of a probing question that will set him off on an interesting journey:  What would it be like to enter the life of a complete stranger?  In most movies, fiction, non-fiction or otherwise, this kind of "tagline" often results in inane and stupid behavior displayed on the screen by gorgeous girl and boy actors.  We watch as they flirt, party like animals, get drunk, vomit on each other, kiss each other, fuck each other, botch up every single thing in their lives, and then get the girl / boy at the end, anyway.  Actually, come to think of it, Gerrets' film does have a lot of those elements.  But the characters he encounters are people he comes to care about deeply and that initial question blossoms into more profound questions about the role of the observer, the storyteller.  What are his moral obligations?  How complicit is he in what's happening in front of his camera?  What does he do now that he's emotionally involved with these people he met randomly as part of an art exploration?  What are his responsibilities, if any, in divulging his confusion, his angst, his fear, that he's created something unstoppable?  And it is unstoppable, life is, while it's being lived.  Then it does stop.  Full stop.  And then there are only photos and recordings and dribs and drabs of the person that shed that life left behind.  It's hard to imagine that in an hour's time, Gerrets was able to craft worlds upon worlds with so little, but he did.  His lo-fi film is a shiny gem.

Dokufest 2011: Mirko Ilic Does Prizren

One of the personal highlights of Dokufest this year was meeting up again with old friends, and making new ones.  We had quite a few illustrious lights of nonfiction filmmaking there, James Longely, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Gary Tarn, Marshall Curry, Alex Nanau, Pietro Marcello, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher, etc., etc.  And then there was Mirko Ilic, wildman and creative force.  The guy is fly.  And while not a filmmaker, Ilic knows all about the intense power of the image.  Here is a "reprint" of the article I wrote for the DokuDaily during the fest after Ilic's talk there.  (Fisnik, you're a prince among men.):

Yesterday afternoon [24 July] in Prizren’s Hammam Museum, the great designer, illustrator and thinker, Mirko Ilic, delivered a talk to a packed house of young designers and artists in a lecture entitled, “Design of Dissent.”  The Bosnian-born 57-year-old runs a very successful three-person commercial design studio in New York City.  He was introduced by Prishtina-based designer, Bardhi Haliti, and later in the post-lecture Q&A, Ilic expressed intense admiration for the young artist, in fact, calling him “heroic,” since Haliti had chosen to give up a successful career in New York to come back and work in Kosova.

In his hour-long talk, the charismatic Ilic spoke eloquently and powerfully (and quite humorously) about his own personal journey to discover the power of good design and how it can be used to socially and politically charge a populous to think about the world around them.  And, in turn, protest and agitate for change.  In speaking specifically of the challenges young Kosovars might face in building a career in the industry, Ilic presented a cautionary tale.  Acknowledging that building a local vibrant economy in this young, burgeoning country is of utmost importance, he did mention that this is a designer’s great dilemma.  For if someone works for a commercial entity, he or she will constantly have to push products and ideas, which have little to do with the culture in which he or she is living.  It is a necessity to make a good living and build a sustainable career.  However, it can also sound a death knell for an up-and-coming artist’s ability to constantly create and present a singular vision and body of work that has substance, heft and meaning.  The age-old quandary of any creative in the face of a lucrative career is that that career will most certainly present an encounter with the ethics of design and advertising, which can be sticky.  (Portrait of Ilic by Lindsay Isola.)

Ilic “deeply believes in laziness,” and feels that the “lazy” creative—one who, say, might think about things six hours of his or her work day and actually produce something for about two—will, in essence, produce much more profound and meaningful work than the designer who “works hard” in front of his or her computer for a solid eight hours or more, for “thinking is the most creative aspect of this business.”  It is important to question why one is doing what one is doing for, historically, according to Ilic, “thinking has saved art.”  And the ability to produce socially and/or politically motivated work requires time to think.

In speaking specifically of designers and artists working in oppressive regimes, Ilic compared the landscape of working in a controlled and censored regime, or system, versus working in a totally free environment like the one in which he works in the US where he can create anything he wants and put it out for public consumption with little or no risk to his personal safety.  In systems of oppression, designers have had to learn to survive by mastering the subtle art of delivering the double message, becoming fluent in “double speak,” the encoded language that is hidden beneath the surface of a, seemingly, mundane symbol or image.  “Any idiot can do work that will land him in jail.”  It is the intelligent artist who will constantly dredge the depths of his or her creative vision to deliver a wallop subtly, and artfully, to his or her audience, in essence, saying to the client, “If you don’t trust me, I can always mess you up.  Trust me, and everything will be transparent.”  This takes risk and bravery from not only the artist, but also from the publisher of the work itself.

This led Ilic to talk about the importance of building a personal aesthetic, a personal vocabulary of protest through art, and protecting that at all costs.  He, himself, shills for big, corporate clients with big, fat budgets, creating commercials and other design work to sell television shows and other products.  However, he also constantly creates, self-publishes and self-distributes work that is not beholden to any paying client.  He says, “It is important to do work that protects the rights of others in order to protect your own rights.”  If artists can’t or won’t speak for the powerless, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the work is, indeed, meaningless.  “In order to be a good subversive, you need brains and the bravery to use them cleverly and clearly.”  Speaking specifically of gay rights, women’s rights, black rights, human rights, Ilic emphasized that “you must know your symbols to insult someone on purpose.”  In other words, effective insult never comes “by accident.” 

To wrap up his talk, Ilic shared an extended slide show of images that he has published in his seminal book co-created with Milton Glaser, The Design of Dissent, sharing the subversive work of artists from all over the world, work that could, and has, resulted in some serious trouble for its makers—imprisonment, expulsion from their homelands, and even, in some cases, death.  The book consists of designs that risk, particularly in their use of symbols and imagery of protest about what is happening in the artists’ own culture or country, protest “from within.”  An extension of this idea was addressed in the Q&A with the audience (many of whose comments Ilic summarily dismissed as naïve or misguided, urging people to go out and live a little and “then come back and tell me something worth knowing”). 

“Change must happen here,” Ilic stated emphatically to the audience.  For it’s all well and good, he says, for the very few who will get a chance to study abroad, or get opportunities to work outside their own country to build successful careers.  But for those who will stay and build an articulate creative landscape in their own country, the imperative is to have the bravery and intelligence to make a difference in your own backyard.

 

 

 

 

Dokufest 2011: A LETTER TO DAD

It's been exactly three days since returning to Berlin from Kosova and Albania, and as part of my massive decompression, between batting away writing deadlines, I am watching as many films as I can.  Something you would have thought I had done plenty of the last month considering I spent most of that time at a film festival.  But, I had other duties this year (which are listed handily on my Facebook page if you're at all interested).

While I did watch some films, of course, I wanted to start this first blog snog to beloved Dokufest with some thoughts on the small, but powerful, film that won this year's Balkan Dox competition, a strand with a staggering fourteen films.  The intrepid Balkan Dox jury--Alexander Nanau (whose film made in Romania, The World According to Ion B., won last year's Dokufest Balkan prize); American filmmaker, Donal Mosher (October Country), and Sara Garcia, founder and co-director of Play-Doc in northern Spain--gave Serbian, Srdjan Keca, the prize.  (As well, the jury awarded Cinema Komunisto's director, Mila Turajlic, for Best Newcomer.)  The evening the jury finished deliberations, Nanau told me that Keca's film is one that "really stays with you," and after watching it, I would have to say I agree.  The film is a highly personal and resonant film about trying to unslip the knots of a past that you lived through as a child.  Childhood, as we all know, is a time where you miss so much of what's happening around you, while simultaneously, sense memories are embedding themselves deeply enough to last a lifetime.

While this is not the 29-year-old's first film, for such a young filmmaker, he has a keen and sophisticated cinematic eye, a voice, both visual and aural, for solid storytelling.  I am a fan of the long, beautifully composed static frame in documentary; it provides a breathing space, a nonverbal contexualization in which a good director / cinematographer will indulge his audience, providing a resting spot for the eye and mind as the story unfolds.  These still lifes tell us much in their silence and poise, as much as the home movies show us that this family was one like any other--a parade of photos and moving images on fragile Super 8, filled with young love, marriage, children, birthday parties and living room shenanigans.

Marinko Keca, the filmmaker's father, has passed away from advanced stages of cancer without his family around him.  The burning question of his son, Srdjan, is why his father chose to die alone.  And while he never finds a fully satisfactory answer to that question, he does manage to piece together a powerful 45-minute film, a collaboration between generations, the younger member still here on earth and coping the best he can, the other the incorporeal manifestation of a whole generation of men and women who lost part of their souls to a war that none of them ever fully understood.

Keca's Serbian father and Croatian mother married in 1979, one year before Yugoslav leader Tito dies.  The union is considered ill-crossed--not at the time they first meet, but by 90s wartime, Keca finds himself the product of a "mixed" marriage, a relationship that founders mostly due to Marinko's intense post-traumatic stress disorder upon returning from the war.  In one scene in particular, Keca's camera work really shines: as he holds the camera steady, we see intermittent close-up images of old family photos with his mother's face a ghostly blur behind them; then, as he pulls focus, we see the pictures whisked away to reveal his mother's face clearly, grounded in the here and now.  In a very simple, understated way, Keca, in the language of cinema, traverses past and present, weaving some kind of bridge between the two with his lens.  It's a beautiful moment, filled with quiet eloquence about the internal limbo in which the young man is stuck trying to process his father's death.

There were many expert and subtle storytelling touches, particularly notable in the way in which he crafts the interviews with the three most important men in Marinko's life: his best friend, his business partner, and his brother, the filmmaker's uncle.  All of them tell Srdjan outright that they can't, and won't, talk about certain things regarding the war.  And then, to a man, they each proceed to deliver deeply emotional soliloquies about their own experiences, and those of Keca's father, a man they profoundly loved and respected.  He even gets them, in essence, to direct their own scenes:  "OK.  Now you hold the camera.  I'll start the engine, and we'll go slowly," says his father's friend as they're shooting on his boat.  And Marinko's business partner (after finger-wagging at his old mother for walking into the frame while he's being filmed) knows that with his big belly and "big Serbian soul," he will barely fit into the frame.  Knowingly, the director has already set up a pretty wide shot in anticipation, and the ebullient man fits just fine.

This is rich storytelling, and the jury prize is a well-deserved nod to a deep thinker, one that has left behind a career in theoretical physics (of all things), to pick up a camera.  Gracefully edited by Katharine Lee, Srdjan and Marinko Keca, father and son, crafted this film together in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Romania over the course of twenty-two years, almost three-quarters of the filmmaker's lifetime.  As Srdjan notes at one point, both men hide behind the camera lens, their mutual concealment perhaps bonding them in complicity, fellow travelers through the ravages of their region's past. 

At the film's end, Srdjan comments to his father's ghost:  "You know, we always blame this war.  But the war is made by people.  Don't you think so?"