(If you haven’t already, read Part One of Pamela Cohn’s wrap-up right here.)

This year, the T/F team watched about 700 films sent to them for consideration for their carefully curated festival of just 40 selections. The programming ethos is a complex one, as it is for most festivals that pride themselves on offering challenging work that will rarely be seen outside the circuit—hard choices that have very little to do with anything except celebrating great work and serving it up to small town audiences hungry for such fare.

What the program intends to offer (turning down many, many excellent films in the process) is a “stunning array of approaches.” The “There are no small stories” tagline is indicative of the celebration of a singular vision in telling true stories and bringing it to a small community like Columbia. Makes sense since the way they tend to see the world is distinctly human-scale, a place where individual, lonely satellites looking for sensible terrain can commune together in dark cinemas for a long weekend of great film. And then talk about what they saw over giant plates of fried things and local artisanal beer. Heaven.

The Invention of Dr. NakaMats (directed by Kaspar Astrup Schröder) — Leave it to a Danish filmmaker to find a man like this and make a film about him. The 80-year-old doctor has over 3,300 inventions under his stylish belt, including the floppy disk and Love Jet potion, a “sex enhancer” for women. Dr. NakaMats is a joyously hilarious character and it’s a pleasure to spend time with him as he explains his life’s work. Schröder shoots a blithe day-in-the-life portrait of this wacky, brilliant man. This played, appropriately, with Brad Beesley’s new 14-minute short, Mr. Hypnotism, the story of Ron Dante (uh-oh, website overload!).

It Felt Like a Kiss (directed by Adam Curtis) — The latest work from the director of The Power of Nightmares is a wonder. A lot of us had to skip the next movie we planned to watch and go lie down for a bit in a quiet place to recover. In It Felt Like a Kiss—described by festival co-founder Paul Sturtz as a “psycho-archaeological dig”—Curtis, like some diabolical alchemist, presents America at its nightmarish worst, sewing together stunning visual montages of archival footage accompanied by a pulse-pounding soundtrack. It is an explosive, pugilistic piece of filmmaking, kind of like psychedelic, electric-shock therapy for the senses. Watching this reminded me of my experience watching Ken Russell’s Tommy for the first time, especially Tina Turner’s “Gypsy Acid Queen” number. Shattering, haunting, electrifying, definitely not for the weak of heart.

Kati With an I (directed by Robert Greene) — Kati is Greene’s much younger half-sister and he has been shooting footage of her since she was a little girl. In this über-intimate portrait, a very “small story” indeed, Greene captures Kati, a teenager about to graduate high school and already engaged to her childhood sweetheart whom she plans to marry “in five years,” over the course of three emotional days. Her future, in many ways, is set in this vivacious girl’s mind—she has it all planned out in the way we, as little girls, used to do when we could describe in minute detail our dream wedding day. The problem is, little boys dream of other things, even while professing undying love and devotion, wailing romantic songs along with the radio behind the wheels of pickups in the dopey earnest way teenagers do. We see many of Kati’s dreams disintegrate as she encounters the irrevocable onslaught of young adulthood, its expectations and endless responsibilities, which come way, way too soon. Kati With an I has the same poetic pangs of angst and bewilderment as Matthew Porterfield’s beautiful Putty Hill, providing resonant collective memories of what it’s like to be an unsophisticated child “on the verge.” Greene’s and Sean Price Williams’s cinematography is a revelation, lush and sensuous. And Greene’s editing is both sophisticated and visceral, enhancing the deeply emotional journey of their young subject with all of the pain-filled splendor she can muster for the camera. Remarkable that they made a feature film this nuanced and fulgent with just 14 hours of footage.

Those Who Remain (Los Que Se Quedan) (directed by Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman) — There have been many films made about the Mexican emigrant experience from this side of the fence, but Rulfo and Hagerman’s beautiful, highly romantic film is set in Mexico with the people left behind. Absent loved ones—husbands, wives, sons, daughters, any of those that are able—have crossed over to the States to earn enough money to support entire families back home. With graceful strokes, the filmmakers create a vision of this homeland that many are forced to leave, and where many are forced to live, sometimes, whole lifetimes estranged from their closest relatives. Like the most emotionally resonant films do, Those Who Remain celebrates its subjects with a full arsenal of cinematic metaphor, and mines vérité riches with patient and loving observation. The film won the big doc prize at the ’09 Los Angeles Film Festival.

Waste Land (directed by Lucy Walker) — Walker is an intrepid filmmaker. She tells bold, adventurous stories from very small, circumscribed worlds (The Devil’s Playground, Blindsight), her subjects the disenfranchised, the outcasts, the “invisible.” She also makes films for the big screen. In her latest, we accompany her to the massive garbage dumps of Brazil with Brazilian-born artist Vic Muniz, as he travels from his workspace in Brooklyn to the world’s largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio. His latest project involves a collaboration with a few of the catedores, or garbage pickers, who live and work in the Jardim Gramacho, using the collected trash as material for his portraits, a source material he’s used for inspiration for his art pieces for years. Walker’s camera captures the surprising spirit and strength and joy of these people in wondrous and deeply moving ways in a place most of us would be hard pressed to bear for half a day. Man, the Brazilians are tough! This film, not surprisingly, won the Audience Award at both the Sundance festival and the Berlinale.

There are several more films I saw that will be débuting or playing at other festivals in the near future, so we’ll circle back and weigh in on them at a later date. Some have already been reviewed on this site.

But if you find yourself with a chance to see any of these, do: Circo by Aaron Schock, Familia by Mikael Wiström and Alberto Herkovits, Greetings from the Woods by Mikel Cee Karlsson, Last Train Home by Lixin Fan, The Mirror (Lo Specchio) by David Christensen, The Red Chapel by Mads Brügger (playing next in New York as part of New Directors/New Films), Restrepo by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.

— Pamela Cohn

In a free local Missouri paper called VOX Magazine, reporter Aaron Channon writes, “The winter air in Columbia is not charged with the taste of salt water off the Mediterranean, and George Clooney will not be spotted sauntering along the sandy shores of Stephens Lake. Despite this—for a few days, at least—Columbia becomes a cultural island awash in a vast sea of Missourah. Such is the effect of the True/False Film Festival.”

Those of us who have been coming to the festival for several years know that this event provides a retreat and a respite from the grind of the circuit, and the daily Sisyphean task of funding, making, finishing and distributing independent films. While we talk incessantly and obsessively about great nonfiction cinema and run from theater to theater to see both already discovered, and undiscovered, gems from around the world, it is the intimacy, coziness and distinct lack of “marketplace” that sets this fest apart from most others. It’s just a pleasure, that’s all.

This year, we did have some superstars—of the documentary world, at least—sauntering down the streets of downtown Columbia: Adam Curtis (It Felt Like a Kiss), Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger (Restrepo), Lixin Fan and Mila Aung Thwin (Last Train Home), Rob Lemkin (Enemies of the People, recipient of the True Life Fund), Laura Poitras (The Oath, fresh from Sundance and Berlin and recipient of the True Vision Award; My Country, My Country was also shown), Leon Gast (Smash His Camera), Lucy Walker (Waste Land), Marshall Curry (Racing Dreams), Sam Green (Utopia in Four Movements).

As well, there were new talents who are making an incredible impact on the scene with their stellar work, and international filmmakers who were visiting the US for the very first time. (And yes, they did say, “Where the hell are we?”) What struck me most profoundly, however, were the travel war stories of just getting to the damned place. I’m not even sure David Wilson and Paul Sturtz realize what an imperative destination this has become for top programmers and funders and producers out of New York, DC, LA, and elsewhere. Some folks had trips that were so delayed by bad winter storms, they didn’t even get there until almost the end of the festival, waited hours at airports and traveled great distances over the prairie to experience at least some of it. And SWAMI, Julia Reichert showed up with pneumonia!

As usual, I saw various and sundry things and my schedule, also as usual, got upended by last-minute choices of films to see (peer pressure), wonderful conversations I didn’t want to end, meeting a filmmaker whose work I admire and gabbing way past the start time of the next show; or just enjoying a meal with friends at one of the generous, local eateries that feed us all so well during our stay. I also got to be a ringleader for the first time this year, intro-ing films and doing post-screening Q&As with Columbia’s great audiences. In this post and, probably one more, I’ll do a rundown of some of the films that impressed me greatly, so here we go.

All the films in the excellent program, to a director, have exceedingly strong, very personal points-of-view. They investigate history, current events, politics, society, religion, the arts, etc., in ways in which something with a wide scope—a story that tells much about us—is writ small, creating an almost uncomfortable intimacy between audience and subject(s). Which brings to mind both Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath’s Enemies of the People, and Laura Poitras’ The Oath. The best thing I’ve read about the first film, fresh from its Sundance premiere, is this from Neil Miller’s Film School Rejects blog: “No one is doing real journalism anymore. This is something that as a movie blogger, I’m told all the time. Many folks in my industry have no ability or interest in doing real journalism (though there are exceptions; don’t get me wrong). So in the small world of blogging about film, that might be mostly true. But if we draw our lens back a bit and take a look at the world, pushing aside the gossip-hounds and the slew of celeb-fucking shows on television, there is a place where real journalism is thriving. It exists in the world of documentary filmmaking. That is where we find more than just real journalists doing life-threatening investigation; we also find truth.” Yes, that’s where we find it.

The Oath (directed by Laura Poitras) — In the case of Poitras, her search for truth with regards to her main subject, Abu Jandal, former bodyguard to Osama bin Laden, and now a cab driver in his native Yemen, is elusive. The cat-and-mouse between filmmaker and subject creates a suspense and tension that is palpable, that goes beyond the idea of engaging head on with a leading jihadist at the forefront of the fundamentalist movement. But Jandal is also going through some profound crises of conscience, both privately and publicly, and he is just an absolutely fascinating man—smart, charismatic, forthright, and tortured. Poitras shoots thrillingly intimate vérité (supported by DP Kirsten Johnson’s gorgeous cinematography of Yemen) and asks respectful, but persistent, questions—about 9/11, about Jandal’s brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, who served time in Guantánamo, about innocent lives lost due to acts of terrorism in the name of Allah. Jandal giveth, and then he taketh, but Poitras and her co-producer and editor, Jonathan Oppenheim, found ways in which to utilize the strengths of her incredible access to this man, creating an “inverse thriller,” as Jason Silverman calls it. It is a tremendously challenging film and Poitras has raised the bar of nonfiction storytelling in a hugely significant way with this second installment of her post-911 film trilogy.

And Everything Is Going Fine (directed by Steven Soderbergh) — Soderbergh has pieced together a loving post-mortem video portrait of performer/writer/actor/philosopher Spalding Gray through live performance footage, several talks with him over the course of his career (with a wacky array of interviewers and venues), and family home movies. It is an exceedingly intimate look at a man who shared just about everything there is to share about the human experience through his intensely personal monologues performed live on a stage with very little in the way of accoutrements—a table, a chair, a microphone, and his notebook. Throughout the film, Soderbergh vigilantly showcases Gray’s rarest trait—to masterfully perform live, while simultaneously experiencing crippling inner turmoil and severe emotional distress, deriving “order from chaos,” and sharing with us all the bottomless absurdity and searing pain of life. I miss his voice so much.

Antoine (directed by Laura Bari) — I adore this film. I saw this at a previous festival last year; you can read my review on this site here.

As Lilith (directed by Eytan Harris) — If I had to pick an undiscovered gem at this year’s festival that impacted me the most, I would have to say that Harris’ film is it. When David Wilson introduced it, he jokingly talked about his partner-in-crime Paul Sturtz’s ability to sniff out a “phony” doc. While watching this film, they were convinced that they were in the hands of a trickster, Wilson describing it as “getting weirder and weirder and weirder.” And then in the course of watching it, “realer and realer and realer.” Okay, not exactly grammatically correct, but you get the picture. This is pure vérité at its best and Eytan’s camera work reminds me of Al Maysles’, the lens connecting filmmaker and subject in such an intimate and trusting way, a viewer experiences a downright sense of privilege to be taken along for the ride. ZAKA is Israel’s emergency “cleanup” service, removing the remains of loved ones and offering comfort and solace to the bereaved. Their main mission (and they will not be deterred) is to supply an Orthodox burial service. In the small, wealthy beach town of Zikhron Yaacov in the north of the country, a teenaged girl has committed suicide, hanging herself from a tree in the front yard of her house directly in front of her mother’s bedroom window. Said mother, who has renamed herself Lilith, has plans to cremate the body. And so begins a battle royal between her and the Orthodox community of ZAKA, along with the secular community in which she resides. Harris becomes an important witness to a woman plagued by her own demons and those of her children, as well as the outright abuse and harassment she experiences from the society around her. It is a mysterious, fascinating and deeply disturbing story (with many instances of macabre humor) told by a director at the top of his craft. One old woman coming out of the theater said to her grown children, “Okay, in ten words, what in the world did we just see?”

GasLand (directed by Josh Fox) — I (and, I think, a lot of us) want to see “social issue documentaries” made more like this one. Fox, a first-time documentary filmmaker coming out of an experimental theatrical background, hits the road from his home in the Catskills/Poconos region of upstate New York and Pennsylvania and goes on a personal quest across the US to expose the damage of the practice of fracking. This method uses a highly toxic chemical combination to assist in the drilling process for “natural” gas, poisoning soil and groundwater supplies. His journalism is impeccable, his presence entertaining and engaging, the cinematography sublime. One filmmaker I spoke with calls it “an art film in the guise of an issue film.” Staggeringly impressive. Mr. Fox, please keep making films; we need more voices and visions like yours. (GasLand won the Special Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance.)

How to Fold a Flag (directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein) — I meant to write on this superb film when I saw it at Stranger Than Fiction in New York last fall, fresh off its début at Toronto. The True/False kids are diehard fans of Tucker and Epperlein, and so am I. Tucker and Epperlein, a husband and wife team, have devoted their independent film work to documenting the US invasion of Iraq since its inception six years ago, starting with the excellent Gunner Palace, and have created one of the few deeply emotional and personal cinematic archives of this war due to the close relationships and collaborations they’ve developed with their subjects over the years, in particular, a group of soldiers and their families, all of whom they revisit in this film as they re-adjust to civilian life. They are superb filmmakers—Tucker’s shooting, particularly in this latest piece, is astoundingly strong, resonant, filled with light, beautiful. The title is evocative of a schoolkid’s primer, the type of simple, instruction-based how-to that Americans, especially, still need in order to come to terms with the fact that we are still waging an unfavorable war that’s gone on and on (it was supposed to be over by Christmas of 2003), and a war that’s also now being pretty much ignored by everyone except for those in this country that are still serving and those that are waiting anxiously for those serving to return home. And, of course, there’s the impact on the Iraqis, a lot of whom are still living in devastating and dangerous circumstances every single day. There is still a body count on both sides piling up, even though our attention is now being shuttled over to Afghanistan. What the subjects in How to Fold a Flag offer in abundance, in quite complex ways, are the virtues said to represent each fold as the American Flag is “closed” twelve times at a memorial service for an enlisted man or woman. This giant piece of cloth, pared down to a small triangle one can hold in one’s hands, is then presented to the mother, father, wife, son, daughter, of the dead soldier. These virtues are: liberty, unity, justice, perseverance, hardiness, valor, purity, innocence, sacrifice, honor, independence, truth. If any film deserved a national theatrical run right now, especially due to our Iraq “fatigue,” it would be this one. I hope, at the very least, more festivals will program it.

More in my next installment (which you can now read right here)…

— Pamela Cohn

Berlinale Talent Campus #8

The modest facilities that house the Berlinale Talent Campus, now in its eighth year, are set apart from the main festival’s epicenter, the grand Potsdamer Platz and environs. It is its own universe, a vibrant place where talent from all over the world comes to hone skills for taking cinematic wares out into the marketplace.

I decided to forego one day at the cinemas and spend some time there. I managed to get myself a spot as an observer for the DocStation presentations, which turned out to be a hot ticket, and attended a seminar/discussion on film criticism before jumping back into the main festival fray. During a short break between these two events, I nosed around one of the common areas, eavesdropped on conversations, and spoke to several people with projects at the campus that year—composers, filmmakers, writers, producers, etc. There were also a good number of others of their ilk not participating in the Campus directly, but who were there to network (the number one reason to be in Berlin at festival time).

The Campus takes place parallel to the Berlinale and works as an intensive weeklong academy. Creative professionals from every field of the film industry are available as speakers, teachers and mentors for discussion. A number of guests from the festival’s program are also invited to discuss their work in intimate seminars.

About 350 girls and boys are invited to Berlin each year to reflect on their cinematic ideas in workshops, lectures and panel discussions, and to work on their projects in specialized hands-on studios. (However, the DocStation is very select and only takes twelve projects.) Satellite campuses with similar constructs are opening up all over the world, particularly in places that do not have any kind of film industry infrastructure. We should start one in New York!

Initiated by Berlinale Director Dieter Kosslick, the Campus is organized by a project team from Berlin and funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in co-operation with MEDIA, a training program of the European Union, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Skillset, the UK Film Council, as well as 40 other partners, embassies and cultural institutes.

Also, another new initiative: since 2004, the Talent Campus has launched a new Internet portal for emerging international film critics: www.talentpress.org. This new portal is open to film critics who are current or former participants of the Berlinale Talent Campus’ Talent Press program. It offers them year-round opportunities to publish their film and festival reviews from anywhere in the world. The program invites eight budding film journalists to the Berlinale every year and offers them an intensive look into the inner workings of an international film festival. During the Campus week, they’re guided by experienced film critics, such as Dana Linssen, Stephanie Zacharek, Chris Fujiwara and Derek Malcolm. Their articles and reviews are published during the Berlinale in its publications, but also on the Goethe-Institut website and the FIPRESCI site. In addition, for the second year, selected articles from these critics are published in the Berlinale edition of the trade magazine The Hollywood Reporter. This program, too, is being replicated in several other countries.

The DocStation projects were presented, as budding film projects often are, as a theater piece; to my mind, a somewhat unfair contrivance for the filmmakers. It takes time away from their voices and focuses more on the event itself and the people staging it. This was no different. The moderator, Sirkka Möller, talked too much, taking up way too much air- time. When she realized the event was going to run over time, she then rushed the filmmakers through their responses to questions posed by Hans Robert Eisenhauer, a well-respected, well-spoken German producer and commissioning editor. At one point, she had an extended ear-whispering conversation with him while a filmmaker was speaking to them!

Eisenhauer’s questions weren’t meant to challenge the vision of the filmmaker, so much as to request more information about his or her motivations for making the piece. To equalize the playing field, since all the projects were in various stages of development, no trailers were shown, only still photographs that were supplied by the filmmakers. One participating artist complained, however, that Möller, ultimately, got to choose which photos were used, only half a dozen from a choice of about 30 from each project.

The other contrivance, which I thought was kind of horrid, is that they chose two actors to read the one-page treatments out loud as the slide show played. The young man and young woman who read did a valiant job, but there was a lot of stumbling and bumbling around because they had received these materials just the night before. The filmmakers should be allowed to read and/or present their own projects themselves, given the same amount of time it took for them to be read by complete strangers, as if in some community playhouse performance. The projects were also, oddly, presented in “themed” pairs, two filmmakers at a time sharing the stage—again something the moderator had imposed—so that’s the way I’ll present them here.

My other complaint was that the first cards which showed the name of the filmmaker and the title of the project went by in a two-second flash, making it very hard for someone taking notes to get it all down properly. No dossier was handed out to spectators, which would have been helpful. Again, this weird sort of control issue that was going on gave short shrift to the filmmakers—the ones who were providing the content for this whole shebang. Okay, gripe session over. But hand it over to the filmmakers more, please, and let them shine. It’s their moment. The pitch session three-ring circus needs to go the way of the moderated panel “discussion.”

As much as they tried for the aforementioned level playing field, some presentations were stronger, since some people naturally present in a situation like this better than others do, but all in all, a very intriguing group of projects with varying styles and issues; most every filmmaker was extremely articulate in the ways in which they expressed the different imperatives (creative, ideological, personal) for making their films. Some, like Fadi Aindash’s Faithless from Jordan, and Dirk Harthey’s Disconnected from Germany, were about the filmmaker penetrating into small communities, or into individual lives, that are completely isolated from the larger society—workers living on ships in the middle of the ocean, a leper colony, an old-age home. In Aindash’s case, his plan is to penetrate a madrassa (Islamic religious school) that educates Muslim fundamentalists. Aindash’s most interesting question as a reformed Muslim: Is there something valid in extremism? As outsiders themselves penetrating these self-contained societies, the filmmakers mean to express the idea of hidden worlds free from the bonds of normal social constructs.

In the case of a couple of other projects, it was about the filmmaker him- or herself living in a country and culture not their own, experiencing their own sense of isolation, i.e., a young Brazilian woman living in the Netherlands trying to make sense of the Dutch term “Gezellig,” something even the Dutch can’t really define; or a white Australian lad living in his adopted city of Tokyo. Trying to make sense of their chosen homelands was their creative impulse.

Politics and the way in which they intersect with media was another theme presented in a couple of projects, one of which was particularly intriguing: Peruvian journalist Amanda Gonzales Cordova’s story about Professor Edmundo Cruz, who investigated and exposed the La Cantuta (Devil’s Mouth) killings and the crimes against the citizens of Peru perpetrated by the Fujimori government. Bulgarian filmmaker Tonislav Hristov, who lives in Finland (and had two projects in the DocStation, one as a director, one as a producer, see Woman on Hold below), will tell the story of a prison for boys in Bulgaria where he teaches a film course. He will be asking these imprisoned young men to cinematically realize the things they dream about through their short films as he makes his feature about their lives there. Violeta Ayala (Stolen) was there with a project called Cocaine Prison, a story of how the cocaine industry is the only means possible for Bolivians to survive economically, and how even members of her own family rely on being part of the production chain that keeps that country going. Yet another intriguing project was presented by filmmaker Kaizer, an African living in Canada, called The Smiling Pirate, about Somali piracy through the life of Somalian teenager, Abde Wale Abdul Kadhir Muse, who is in prison facing a life sentence in the States after being captured holding an American ship hostage on the coast of Somalia. Some pirates say they become pirates because western ships are dumping toxic waste in their waters, over-fishing and using the Somali coast to transport illegal weapons to war zones in Africa.

German Marcel Michael Weyn and New Zealander Dan Salmon have projects that are portraits of very unusual artists: Weyn’s is about a photographer that also leads the Hell’s Angels organization out of Stuttgart (Forever Angel), while Salmon’s is about mute painter Susan Wright (Pictures of Susan).

Finally, there were two strong projects helmed by young women, both filmmakers coming from other disciplines: Zambian writer Jessie Chisi, co-directing a project with young up-and-coming Finnish filmmaker, Salla Sorri, called Woman on Hold, about her cousin, Esther Phiri, a champion female boxer going for the Olympics in 2012. Swedish photographer Tora Mårtens tells a reverse-immigrant story of two Colombian brothers raised in Sweden going back to their native country as adults. After telling a friend that I thought Mårtens’ was the weakest presentation (and next to Chisi who was electrifying, confident and funny, sounded even more so), he told me, “But yes, you haven’t seen her footage or her other films, though. She’s a remarkable talent with an incredible eye.” Thus, just one more drawback of the floorshow.

Lastly, I’ll mention the seminar I attended after lunch called Fear Eats the Soul (a nod to Fassbinder), where film critics Nick James (chief editor of Sight & Sound), David Thomson (curator of the Berlinale Retrospective program), Stephanie Zacharek (Salon.com) and Dana Linssen (Denmark’s de Filmkrant) debated the state of modern film criticism.

James has written a very incisive article called “Who Needs Film Critics?,” or as the print version was called, “On Provocation,” where he purports that today’s film critics, for the most part, are simply pawns, or extensions, of the marketing machine around a film, and, for the most part, don’t bother to take any kind of substantive critical stance. He also stated that, in his opinion, when film festivals themselves are investing money in films, “pleasing” cinema becomes the norm, foregoing more complex work “that invigorates in a more aggressive way” (he references the work of Gaspar Noé, Quentin Tarantino, Lars von Trier). Statements I don’t happen to agree with much, especially because Noé, et al, do definitely get the critical attention they deserve. FILMMAKER Magazine editor Scott Macaulay has one of the strongest interviews I’ve ever read with von Trier—a fascinating and honest conversation.

But, to me, what seemed to be James’ main beef was the “professional print film critic” being “challenged by bloggers.” While publications like Sight & Sound are certainly a vital archive of modern cinema, and one hopes will continue to be so into the future, what didn’t really seem to be recognized in this rarefied atmosphere (and what the young audience of journalists and filmmakers take for granted) is that in any community, when people make adaptations of the tools necessary to further an art form or discipline, they better contextualize and localize the validity of that art form or discipline. There are many, many fine film critics with blogs that are housing work that, to my mind, is definitely part and parcel of this same archive that James purports to create with his publication. The older operating system needs to be incorporated into the newer operating system, to be sure, but to not recognize that we make, distribute and consume media in an entirely different way now and to try and step into the void a bit and join the rest of us is foolhardy and will, certainly, make them more irrelevant than they already feel they might be.

To a person, all the panelists agreed that it comes down to good writing. Period. And this, of course, is where I wholeheartedly agree. The proviso about being able to write well on cinema, though, can only happen when critics, or anyone writing on the arts in any interesting way, lead expansive lives. If all one is doing is just going to see movie upon movie upon movie, never experiencing any other way in which you can contextualize what you watch in the cinema (reading literature, looking at art, traveling, cooking, flying your own biplane, whatever), then it’s really an empty exercise. Zacharek: “In order to write about movies well, one needs to draw on a lot of sources.” She also said, “There are intelligent ways to write about crap,” and that that is also a really important skill for a good critic to hone. James complains that there is also a woeful lack of intensely personal, risk-taking criticism, the kind where a writer has honed a distinct voice, a distinct point-of-view. He profoundly objects to the “fan boy” way of writing about film, as if one is part of the media machine, meant to bolster already bloated PR campaigns for mediocre work. Yes.

Thomson, always erudite and humorous, but somewhat a bit removed from the proceedings, as if his mere presence was enough, talked about the convergence of “big” and “small” cinema, meaning startlingly fresh and intelligent fare made for television (The Wire, the Red Riding trilogy) which could easily play in cinemas or have the visual and narrative heft to do so (read Lena Dunham’s excellent, and intensely personal, post on the Red Riding screenings at the IFC Center here) and something like In the Loop, which to him looked like a television show blown up, for no apparent reason, for the cinema screen. (Be sure to also read Thomson’s piece on Red Riding here.)

See, “real” film critics and “bloggers” can live peacefully side by side, enhancing the craft of writing about cinema in new and resonant ways.

All in all a pretty entertaining “debate,” although it’s a stretch to call it that. Once the audience was asked to dialogue with the panelists, however, there was a distinct disconnect with no one really willing to concede (with the exception of Zacharek) that online film journals, sites and blogs (like this one) mean to fill in the gaps with substantive and meaningful discourse about what’s being made today. We do want to celebrate great film, to be sure, and we do want to hone our distinctive voices. We’re working on that vociferously. Give us a chance.

— Pamela Cohn

ALSO:

***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART ONE***
***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART TWO***
***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART THREE***

Panorama Dokumente at the 60th Berlinale Film Festival

Budrus (directed by Julia Bacha) — This film won second place for the Panorama Audience Award. (First place went to Lucy Walker, João Jardim and Karen Harley’s Waste Land, and third place went to Daniel Schmid, Le chat qui pense by Pascal Hofmann and Benny Jaberg.)

Budrus is a tiny Palestinian village, 31 kilometers northwest of Ramallah with a population of about 1500 inhabitants, many of them children and young adults. In 2003, the Israeli government went through on its project to erect a physical barrier, a giant wall that (seemingly, arbitrarily) cut swaths straight through the town, cutting off the people from their fields of olive trees, their only source of income and the physical manifestation of their familial and spiritual heritage. Some of these trees were promptly uprooted by bulldozers to make way for this wall—in essence, destroying the village’s only means of survival. Bacha, who partnered with Ronit Avni, a Palestinian journalist/activist, through Avni’s organization, Just Vision, followed the events in Budrus for five years, capturing a nonviolent uprising on the part of the citizens who fought heroically and relentlessly to save their home. And won.

This film is extraordinary on so many levels and provides a truly visceral experience of what it must have been like on the ground there, these villagers bravely facing young, highly trained (but confused and petrified) Israeli soldiers just trying to follow orders. Focusing on Palestinian activist Ayed Morrar, a modest, quiet man (who initially refused to be the focus of the film), she documents the story of this small uprising that made dramatic and far-reaching changes in this insane gerrymandering project on the part of the Israeli government, a small country that has so compromised itself on the human rights front, it’s heartbreaking. Another major protagonist is Morrar’s 15-year-old daughter, Iltezam, an extraordinarily articulate and passionate young Muslim woman who really becomes the soul of the film. The on-the-ground footage was shot by a team of six people, including Bacha; she, in turn, has expertly edited the piece into a 78-minute testament to how a few “powerless” individuals can change the course of history. In the process of Morrar’s work, he also manages to bring together organizations and groups of people that view one another as the enemy. Not only do members of Hamas and Fatah join in, but hundreds of Israeli citizens also take part in these protests, along with a collection of ordinary citizens from all over the globe who come to Palestine simply to bear witness to what’s going on there. It was an honor to have Ayed Morrar there for the Q&A with the film team. An exhilarating screening, an important film.

Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar (directed by James Rasin) — A long time in the making, this story of transsexual performer Candy Darling could have been better told in more proficient hands. There’s something really essential missing and I’m pretty sure it has to do with the focus on Jeremiah Newton, purportedly Darling’s “long-standing partner,” whatever that means. He has spent his whole life, seemingly, devoted to her memory, and not doing much else, in that vampiric sort of way obsessed people do who never develop lives of their own. To use him as the filter or conduit to Darling and her very short, tragic life made the whole affair much sadder and tawdrier than it needed to be. The archival footage is absolutely magnificent and brings us closer to the Darling that very few people knew, but the talking head interviews are cold, rather abysmal and mean-spirited, and the contrivances of the story of her burial plot, alongside the story of Newton’s mother’s death just depressed the hell out of me; I found it completely inappropriate to the story at hand. This “Warhol superstar” inspired so many artists among the New York underground in the sixties and seventies, I would have hoped she would have received a better cinematic post-mortem. She was an icon of a decade that changed things profoundly in our society in so many ways, a young man straight out of Long Island who dreamed of being a glamorous and beautiful starlet like his heroine and inspiration, actress Kim Novak. I’m not sure where this project got hijacked along the way, but in talking to a producer who has worked on this from the beginning (and is currently uncredited on the film), putting together Darling’s story was a massive group effort of researchers, archivists and digging deep into people’s attics and scrapbooks. Darling died of leukemia in 1974 at the age of 29. I hope there is someone out there that can do her life story justice. Despite the aforementioned extraordinary archival photos and video, and expert editing, as usual, by Zachary Stuart-Pontier (Catfish, NY Export: Opus Jazz), this film doesn’t do that at all.

Making the Boys (directed by Crayton Robey) — Robey, in his highly accomplished second feature film (following the multiple award-winning When Ocean Meets Sky), documents the story of Mart Crowley, the man responsible for creating a massively popular stage play called The Boys in the Band, featuring openly gay characters in New York in 1968. Crowley (a very unwilling participant in this project for quite a while) is magnificent in all his crotchety glory and the piece has loads of character—in its cinematography (Eric Metzgar and Charles Poekel), its fantastic score (Fran Minarik and Peter Angell) and its sharp editing (Seth Hurlbert). All of these elements help to place us in late ‘60s and ‘70s New York and in sunny California amongst the movie stars. The archival riches, as well, cannot be overestimated (crack New York-based archival researcher, Rosemary Rotondi, really outdoes herself).

For such a play to become a huge hit back then was nothing short of sensational and when The Boys in the Band hit Broadway in April of ’68, it had a run of 1,001 performances; its playwright, who hadn’t experienced much success up until then but whose name was up on the theater marquee above the title of the play, became very much in demand. Not to mention the query of, “Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?” becoming part of the modern vernacular. When William Friedkin’s screen adaptation hit cinemas a year later, the story truly became part of mainstream culture. Robey snags a wonderful interview with Friedkin. Without giving too much away, the last quarter hour of the film, when Friedkin appears, packs a very intense emotional punch; it’s unexpected, refreshing and brings all the painful history of the gay movement to the forefront of this deftly directed film.

Postcard to Daddy (directed by Michael Stock) — Winner of this year’s Teddy Award for Best Documentary, Stock tells an autobiographical story of sexual abuse between the ages of eight and sixteen by his father. Twenty-five years later, before his camera, he confronts his mother and siblings, a left-wing, liberal group who wouldn’t imagine that theirs would be a family with a secret like this. As the youngest of three, Michael was the only one to experience this abuse and he wants to know why. In conversations with his family at their mother’s home in Germany’s peaceful Black Forest, he learns that his sister, Anja, a mother of two sons, has cut off her father from her and her family’s life. His brother, Christian, is the only one to keep in touch with their father, although he is also condemnatory of his behavior and actions. This film reminded me very much of Chico Colvard’s Family Affair (you can read my review of his film here) in its beautifully crafted, but very basic way of telling an exceedingly painful story. There is a fierce determination to finally heal. Stock, a handsome man with piercing blue eyes, forthrightly discusses his life-long feelings of shame and guilt, his promiscuous sex life, and living with HIV. When he had a heart attack in the fall of 2007 at the age of 39, he decided to face this childhood trauma once again and document the whole thing. On a trip to Thailand with his mother, he decides to make a video postcard to his father.

Waste Land (directed by Lucy Walker, João Jardim and Karen Harley) — Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to catch this at Berlinale, but will be seeing it at True/False this weekend (Editor’s Note: I saw it at Sundance and wrote about it here). As mentioned above, this film took top prize for the Audience Award in Berlin.

The Oath (directed by Laura Poitras) — A few films were brought to Berlin directly from Sundance; some to go directly into the marketplace to screen for foreign buyers and distributors, some to exhibit in front of festival audiences. Poitras received four screenings at the festival, every single one of them a complete sell-out. Poitras also delivers one hell of a Q&A and I’m excited to report that I will be getting to conduct one of those at the True/False Film Fest this coming weekend. I need to see this amazing film again to properly write about it, so again, will do so post T/F. I’m hoping to grab a sit-down with her, as well. You can read my interview with her from April of ’08 about the first film in her post-9/11 America trilogy, My Country, My Country, here. Poitras will also be receiving the True Vision Award in Columbia.

In my last Berlinale wrap-up post: Berlinale Talent Campus DocStation presentations, and grumpy film critics. FYI, the juried prizes of the Berlin Talent Campus are the “Berlin Today Award” given to Bryn Chainey from Australia for the project Jonah and the Vicarious Nature of Homesickness, and the Score Competition went to Camilo Sanabria from Colombia.

— Pamela Cohn

ALSO:

***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART ONE***
***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART TWO***
***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART FOUR***

Both in style and in content, the Panorama’s film selection is extremely diverse with auteur cinema at its core. All films in the Panorama section are, outside of their countries of origin, either world or European premieres and members of the audience and the press have an opportunity to discuss the films with the directors, producers and actors. Panorama Dokumente, as well, offers a special focus on the world’s most interesting nonfiction films.

A number of prizes from the Independent Juries are awarded as part of Panorama, which include the “Teddy Award,” the world’s most important queer film award, which started out in Panorama and can be awarded to films from any section of the Berlinale. This year, Lisa Cholodenko won the Teddy for Best Feature for her latest piece, The Kids Are All Right, and another American filmmaker, Jake Yuzna, won the jury prize for his innovative and deeply moving first feature, Open, inspired by the life and work of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. (French visual artist Marie Losier is currently completing an intimate and artful documentary portrait on Genesis, as well.)

Also, several independent juries award their prizes to Panorama films, including the FIPRESCI, Amnesty International, the Ecumenical Jury and Label Europa Cinema awards. Here are all the award winners from this year.

Panorama has its roots in the “Info-Schau,” which during the 1970s was a complimentary section of the Competition program. Since 1982, Wieland Speck has been part of this team, and in ’86, he named it Panorama. The section’s commitment to gay, lesbian and transgender film was already clearly visible in the ‘80s, and today, this commitment is internationally regarded as one of the Panorama`s outstanding qualities. The Teddy Award will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year.

Here are some of the Panorama films I managed to catch at this year’s fest, both in and out of competition:

Panorama Special

L’Arbre et la Foret (Family Tree) (directed and written by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau) — Frédérik, played by Guy Marchand in a beautiful performance, runs a tree nursery. He is one of those quiet, dedicated men with a deep secret only his wife and eldest son know about. His son’s death loosens something in him but he chooses not to attend the funeral. He is angrily rebuked for this by the alcoholic Guillaume (Francois Negret), which leads to a heated exchange between the other family members in which the secret is revealed: when Frédérik was twenty years old and France was occupied by Germany, he was deported to a concentration camp for being homosexual. This magnificently shot piece contains many quiet, subdued confessions between characters that build to a deeply emotional portrait of a family revisiting its newly discovered history. Beautiful cinematographic work by DP Matthieu Poirot-Delpech.

Kawasakiho Ruze (Kawasaki’s Rose) (directed by Jan Hrebejk) — Pavel Josek (Martin Huba), once a political dissident, is now a respected doctor and beloved family man. At the beginning of the story, his grown daughter Lucie (Lenka Vlasáková) is very ill. When she recovers, she discovers her husband, Ludék (Milan Mikulcik), has been unfaithful. Ludék is also extremely jealous of all the attention paid to his revered father-in-law, who is being featured in a documentary celebrating his life and work. Ludék is working on the film as a sound engineer and discovers a blot in Pavel’s story. In the ‘70s, he worked for the Czech secret service as an informer, betraying a friend who was forced to flee the country, a man who, it is discovered, is the biological father of Lucie. Like L’arbre et la Foret, this is a highly proficient and subtle work with strong performances (also gorgeously shot in 35mm CinemaScope) on one family’s (re)discovery of their past, both personal and collective memory resonating to create a quietly painful portrayal of guilt and forgiveness. The screenplay, written by Hrebejk’s long-time collaborator Petr Jarchovsky, received the Sazka Award in 2009.

Phobidilia (directed by Yoav Paz and Doron Paz) — The brothers Paz have created a singular vision in their first feature. Born into a family of stage and film directors in Natanya, Israel, they began working in the music video and commercial world. The film’s protagonist, the young Regev Wainblum (Ofer Shechter), has experienced a profound personal crisis that was very public. He withdraws from the world and holes up in his apartment, having his food delivered to his door, watching hours and hours of television and finding companionship on the Internet. After four years of this, estate agent Grumps (Shlomo Bar Shavit) pays him a visit and tells him he’s been ordered by the landlord to kick Wainblum out so he can sell the apartment. Grumps is a holocaust survivor (a survivor because he knows something about hiding out), a tough old man who won’t take no for an answer. Daniela (Efrat Baumwald) also pays a visit doing door-to-door market research and the two are soon embroiled in a passionate, but totally misunderstood, love affair. Both Grumps and Daniela try to coax Wainblum out of his lair, but he resists them both, his relationships with them devolving into a fight to the finish in his commitment to never, ever leave and go outside again. The Paz brothers get extremely strong and well-defined performances from their small cast, each of whom give riveting performances.

Panorama

Son of Babylon (directed by Mohamed Al-Daradji) — This film takes place in 2003, three weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s régime. In the north of the country, Kurdish 12-year-old, Ahmed, sets off on a journey with his grandmother in search of his father, a man he has never met since he was arrested at the end of the Gulf War by Hussein’s Republican Guard. They meet fellow travelers along the way, people also searching for loved ones gone missing for years. Yassir Taleeb and Shezad Hussen, who play Ahmed and Um-Ibrahim, respectively, give naturalistic and resonant performances. They are not professional actors; Hussen, in fact, is the only female witness to testify during the trials against Saddam Hussein and his reign of terror. At times, I felt like I was watching a documentary film (and that’s high praise from me). Al-Daradji, the co-writer and co-DP, creates an intense intimacy in his second feature. Born in Baghdad in 1978, he studied art there and then moved to the Netherlands to study film, completing his cinema studies in the UK. Also coming from the commercial world, he gives the film technical and cinematic heft without losing the emotional soul of this large story writ small. Beautiful—I was deeply moved by this film. This won both the Peace Prize and the Amnesty International Film Prize, both juried awards.

The Owls (directed by Cheryl Dunye) — Dunye is an American director/writer/actor to watch. Her film, co-written with Sarah Schulman and shot by Alison Kelly, tells the story of “The Screech,” a band that was once hot a decade ago. Iris (Guinevere Turner) and Lily (Lisa Gornick) were the lead singers, MJ (V.S. Brodie) the producer, and Carol (Dunye) their resident groupie. These days, Iris drinks a lot and fantasizes about a big comeback. She and MJ were once a couple who split up years ago, but they’re still tied to one another. Carol and Lily’s relationship bores them to tears but they keep talking about having a kid together. The script is really brilliant and very funny and the film clocks in at an economical 67 minutes. Things get shaken up a bit by a young troublemaker (what else is new?) named Cricket (Deak Ergenikos). Jealousy, old rivalries and hurt feelings result in mayhem at a coked-up party that goes terribly awry and Cricket ends up dead. Her death bonds these feuding, discontented women and they patch up their differences and, together, get rid of the corpse. A year later, Skye (Skyler Cooper) shows up on Lily and Carol’s doorstep ready to seduce and destroy. This film created something now called The Parliament Collective, a group of multiethnic lesbian and gay artists who worked on this project, developing the story together. Dunye, a Philadelphia native, won a Teddy Award for The Watermelon Woman in 1996.

Plein Sud (Going South) (directed by Sébastien Lifshitz) — Lifshitz also received a Teddy for a previous film called Wild Side in 2004. His fist film since then is a moody “Western,” quiet, intense and luminous, a classic summertime road movie. Sam (Yannick Renier) picks up two hitchhikers in his old Ford as he’s heading to the south of France so he won’t be too bored on his journey. Léa (Léa Seydoux) and Mathieu (Théo Frilet) are brother and sister. The whole film takes place on the journey as these relationships emerge in a confined space—yet, time and space are fluid. Everything is overshadowed by a secret Sam (who says virtually nothing throughout the film) holds close to the vest, but we discover his mission is one of revenge. As well, Léa and Mathius have secrets of their own. I was fairly bored with this piece—although it’s quite visually stunning—until about halfway through. As I was sitting there contemplating whether to leave or not (I had walked out of two other films that day), I challenged myself to stay put. The film left me with a somewhat dissatisfied feeling, but it did resonate over the course of the next several days, mostly due to a challenging structure and the way the director played with time and memory. I think I actually want to see it again.

Open (directed by Jake Yuzna) — This film won the jury prize at the Teddy Awards, a complete and delightful surprise to this young first-time filmmaker from Minneapolis (although he’s made his living as a DP for many years in the porn industry). Based on the life and work of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Open combines all kinds of cross-gender permutations. One of the protagonists is named Cynthia, a hermaphrodite. She meets Gen and Jay, a couple that has recently undergone plastic surgery enhancements to create a pandrogyne, a label Genesis, herself, coined to define a person created by both a man and a woman who go through facial and body surgeries to resemble one another until they look like the same person, two people able to merge their separate identities to become a single entity. Cynthia leaves her husband upon discovering Gen and Jay, and together they go on a road trip that illustrates the story of “what’s left of the American dream.” There’s also a love story about Syd, a transgender woman who meets Nick. They fall in love and Syd becomes pregnant, a biological impossibility. But, that’s where this film excels in its artifice and artistry to expand beyond the confines of our (limited) biology. The actors are authentic hermaphrodites and transgender people who all join forces to present alternative possibilities.

The one other film I want to talk about, which appeared at the Berlinale as part of the International Forum for New Cinema, is Matthew Porterfield’s Putty Hill, one of the strongest selections I saw at the festival. Porterfield wrote a post about the making of Putty Hill on this very site. I will be writing a full review closer to the film’s US début at this year’s SXSW fest next month. But needless to say, seeing this very, very small film make its grand international début at Berlin was a thrill and an inspiration. Not to mention the fact that it received many invitations from several prestigious international film festivals and a distribution deal from Arsenal Film in Germany. Not bad for a $20,000 film shot in two weeks.

In my next post, some selections from the Panorama Dokumente.

— Pamela Cohn

ALSO:

***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART ONE***
***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART THREE***
***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART FOUR***

But the Berlinale is a far more intimate festival than it first appears, and once you get your bearings (no pun intended) and dive in, it’s fairly easy to navigate. Being a New Yorker, I found the diversity, the worlds upon worlds you encounter around every corner as the festival wends its way into every nook and cranny of the lovely city of Berlin, invigorating. Since I was also a first-time visitor to the city itself, the festival enabled me to get around and to “focus my gaze” a bit, as Festival Director, Dieter Kosslick, suggests one do in his introduction to the 464-page behemoth of a catalog. The city, somehow, contextualized my festival experience, making it more human-scale than I first thought it would be.

As for that unwieldy program, Kosslick has garnered much negative press, for this year’s offerings in particular, specifically the Wettbewerb, or Competition selections, of which I saw only three. By the time I figured out how the system worked, most screenings for these films were sold out. To be honest, schlepping to a theater and standing around for an hour in the hopes that I might get a seat if I was lucky (at the suggestion of the press office) is just not my thing; I’m just not going to do it—not as an accredited journalist covering the festival, at any rate. My naiveté and inexperience saved the day, as it usually does, since I didn’t get too caught up in “must-sees,” but relied on my instincts and interests (and what my schedule would allow) and went to see the “smaller” fare. With a couple of exceptions, I found the docs to be much stronger, as a rule, than the narrative selections, but saw a very strong strand of narrative short films and a couple of real feature-length gems.

I arrived the day after the festival started on the 11^th and departed the day before the festival wrapped up, so I had the time to spread my wings a bit and investigate what was going on in each zone, each strand, dabbling here and there since my advancing age seems to be accompanied by a strenuous case of adult-onset ADD. Every screening and event I attended had robust crowds, most of the screenings sold-out entirely. Long, long queues of very patient people waiting to buy tickets every day was just part of the scenery. And like most festivals, the parties were really where the action was, a grand chance to meet fellow cinephiles, as well as a dazzling array of talented and dedicated programmers and curators from all over the world.

Even the market had a very intense social aspect to it. Every day I would enter and go visiting, stepping up to various desks to see what they were selling and interested in buying. It was a great education for a neophyte Berlinale spectator and participant, and budding international producer.

Getting back to the films: I think any ambitious arts event like the Berlinale prides itself on exhibiting works that push discussion, welcoming dissent and outrage, allowing a spectator to discover her “discomfort” zone in terms of what she can bear to watch, or choose to give an inordinate amount of patience to. Sometimes sitting through that discomfort paid off; other times it, distinctly, did not. And I did walk out of a couple of films, a regular sight at every screening I attended, which is a strong statement when one’s waited on line for two hours to buy a ticket. There were many bizarre, unsettling, and challenging pieces of work. Lots of the German films were just plain weird; sometimes, I felt like someone had slipped something into my drink when I wasn’t looking since I would helplessly fall into a deep slumber from sheer disorientation.

At any rate, in the next couple of posts, I will talk about some highlights and experiences—films, Talent Campus projects, seminars and gatherings. All in all, it was an exhilarating time, one I hope to experience again in the years to come. What follows is a rundown of the twenty-three films I saw during the course of the week. While that’s probably a very, very low amount compared to, say, a (cranky) Hollywood Reporter critic who sits through six or seven films a day until his brain drips out of his ears, I wanted to experience the festival in its entirety. And, honestly, I wanted to party in Berlin as much as I could. Party, film? Party, film? Party, film? Party, party, party.

I will note when more extensive reviews of some of the films, mentioned by section, will be forthcoming and/or requested by my gracious and generous editor (or they’ll be posted on Still in Motion). Timing will be delayed, in some cases, in order to coalesce with a domestic festival début, or just to wrap my mind around what I want to say about more complex, emotionally resonant work. I’m slow that way.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (directed by Banksy) — This first feature is “about a man who tried to make a film about me,” says its director, the renowned Bristol, UK graffiti artist, a person who has fiercely guarded his identity to avoid arrest and jail time for his painterly transgressions. He now exhibits at places like the MoMA and London’s Tate Modern. French shop owner Thierry Guetta stalks Banksy with his camera, as well as other “vandals” of the streets. And then Banksy turns the camera right back on Guetta. What ensues is a disastrous mess of a film, frustrating and maddening to watch due to the bumbling, stumbling way both filmmaker and subject (and who’s to say, really, which is which) encounter one another through their lenses. It’s kind of an ingenious little crime caper, ultimately, on the quantification of both the artist and the “art” he makes, and the bizarre symbiotic (in this case, succubistic) relationship that develops between documenter and documentee. I had a good time.

Mammuth (directed by Benoit Delépine and Gustave Kervern) — French icon, Gérard Depardieu, plays the porky main character, a 60-year-old slaughterhouse worker that is about to retire when he discovers that half a dozen of his employers never registered his earnings. In order to receive his full pension, the onus is on him to provide the proof of his employment over the past six decades of his life. This starts one of those dreadful “journeys of self-discovery” as he and his wife mount his Mammoth motorbike (he is also called Mammuth) to traverse the places of his past. As Depardieu’s malleable face and soulful eyes are always wonders to behold, I stayed with it, but it does devolve into sheer dopiness most of the time and I lost patience after a while. Not too harmful, but it lacked the substance I was hoping might be there.

Der Räuber (directed by Benjamin Heisenberg, who is also the co-founding editor of the film magazine Revolver) — Shot in CinemaScope with a very sparse script by Wolfgang Widerhofer, this story is about a man who is a successful marathon runner and also robs banks. His obsession with physical prowess and muscle power forces him to partake in these criminal acts (and escapes) several times a day—all of it in service to an apparently severe dopamine addiction and the joy of the stamina in running as fast as he can for as long as he can—to nowhere. This second feature of Heisenberg’s is based on a novel by Martin Prinz, which, in turn, is based on a real-life story of an Austrian man. The first thirty to forty-five minutes are thrilling in their intensity, providing a sheer adrenaline rush as we run beside this human blur for what seems like hours. It’s stylish, to be sure, but lacks the substance to sustain its 96-minute “running” time, becoming tedious and repetitive and never really allowing us to discern much of what might motivate him to do what he does. Maybe we’re not supposed to care? Unclear. Like most of the films I saw, this one, too, was heavy on style and form, very light on substance and story, thus making it, ultimately, a bore, aka, much ado about nada.

I only managed to see a single shorts program (one of six), but it was a really strong one. I am not a fan of shorts programs, in general, truth be told. I find them enervating and I lose focus after a while, so that by the fourth or fifth selection, I don’t want to shift gears anymore into yet another universe. I would much rather see one short programmed in front of a feature and I was told that this used to be the way they were exhibited, for the most part. I know it’s much easier to schedule blocks of short films together in 90-minute or two-hour time slots, but I think the former way of showcasing these works would give them much greater heft and power, qualities each of these selections (with one exception) had in abundance in different ways. As it was, this was yet another non-contextualized collection. If there was something thematic going on, it was lost on me.

In order of appearance:

Glukhota (Deafness) (directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskly [no typos here], 11 minutes) — This Russian selection packed a wallop. Beautifully shot, this is a short episode in the lives of some students at a deaf-mute boarding school, reconstructed in real time. There is profound character development in camera and behind the lens, and Slaboshpytskly conveys a brooding and intense mood throughout. The film is totally silent except for very muted ambient noise and human sounds muffled behind glass. Creepy and deeply disturbing, this short story writer has found his art form, as well, in cinema. This is his second film at Berlinale, following Diagnoz in 2009.

Händelse Vid Bank (Incident by a Bank) (directed by Ruben Östlund, 12 minutes) — This Swedish selection won the Golden Bear for Best Short at this year’s festival. It’s a forensic (and very funny) reconstruction of a bank robbery gone terribly wrong, witnessed and recorded by bystanders in 2006 in Gothenburg, Sweden. There were 96 people carefully choreographed for the camera in this sharply written and realized film, which also contains delightful displays of slapstick humor in abundance. Very much a crowd pleaser.

Photos of God (directed by Paul Wright, 28 minutes) — This selection from the UK was my least favorite of the bunch, an indulgently long short. Shot in an impressionistic and painterly style, I found the story utterly derivative and predictable, the acting, for the most part, overwrought. It’s about a young man (a highly watchable actor named Farren Morgan) who must look after his mother. Along with her, he is suffering from an unrelenting isolation without any resources to break out of the oppressive life force that surrounds him in the guise of this woman who is completely dependent on him. They are both victims of haunting memories of a family tragedy—a car accident caused by a drunk father, disabling the mother and killing the baby sister. Unrelentingly grim, and starting with its title, inexcusably pretentious.

Ich Muss Mich Künstlerisch Gesehen Regenerieren (I Need To Rejuvenate Myself Artistically) (directed by Christine Grosse and Ute Schall, 19 minutes) — This German film is a hoot and had the audience in stitches. Charlotte, a director, makes a feature film in which she succeeds in successfully illustrating the resonance of one person’s private thoughts into political action. She then promptly falls into a depression. In order to “rejuvenate herself artistically,” she decides to make a documentary, a social issue documentary about poverty and social hardship, a completely contrived piece. She directs her “subject” with an iron fist as her bumbling film crew tries to capture the “reality” that’s transpiring in front of the camera. The performance by Grosse in front of this “documentary” lens is absolutely hilarious, as is that of every member of the absurd crew, all of whom, literally, fall over one another to capture every eye twitch, every drop of condensation on a coffee spoon.

12 Jahre (12 Years) (directed by Daniel Nocke, 4 minutes) — A fantastical-looking tale, this super short animated piece tells the story of a tortured soul, a “big dog” that after twelve years has grown embittered by the hostility of everyone around her towards her relationship. And she’s had it. Delightful.

In Part Zwei, I will share some (not all) of the selections I saw from Berlinale Special, Panorama Special, Panorama and Panorama Documentaries, plus a couple of other American films that shone like one of the bright stars in the dazzling trailer that celebrated sixty years of Berlinale. Don’t ask me why, but I welled up every time that thing played.

And, in Part Drei, Berlinale Talent Campus DocStation presentations, and “Fear Eats the Soul,” (the title of a Fassbinder film, how precious) a panel discussion / supposed debate about the state of modern film criticism with Berlinale Retrospective curator David Thomson, Sight & Sound editor Nick James, and Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek, moderated by Dana Linssen, editor of Denmark’s de Filmkrant. Interesting, but a huge disconnect between these people and their young audience. More on this in a bit.

And, last but not least, my last evening in Berlin spent at the elegant and campy Teddy Awards!, seated third row center with my fellow hooker, Mr. Crayton Robey, director of Making the Boys (Panorama Documentary section). A gay time was had by all.

— Pamela Cohn

ALSO:

***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART TWO***
***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART THREE***
***BERLINALE ‘10 WRAP-UP PART FOUR***

The relationship between 29-year-old Opper and 20-year-old Klein-Cloud could be said to be a love story, for in working together on this film (shot over the course of three years), each realized new personal and professional heights with the support of a strong partner and a shared vision. They met in a Jewish day school in Brooklyn a decade ago; Opper the new, shy teacher right out of university, and Avery, the rambunctious and joyful student, a beautiful dark-skinned black girl. This is also when Opper got an eyeful of Avery’s unusual family. With several professional credits under her belt as a filmmaker, she went back to them many years later and asked if they’d be the subjects of her first feature-length documentary.

Off and Running tells the story of the Klein-Cloud family, a white lesbian couple who are raising three children in a loving Jewish household. Before meeting, each woman had adopted a child—Tova adopting Rafi, a mixed-race boy, Travis adopting Avery, an African-American girl; after many years together, they also adopted Zay-Zay, a Korean boy. As Avery nears the end of her high school career and is getting ready for college, she starts to have an urgent need to contact her birth mother, curious about the roots she’s never explored. This catalyzes an intense identity crisis in the young woman and we share her rocky journey as she searches for her true north, as she attempts to gather together all the disparate elements of her identity—African American, Jew, transracial adoptee, athlete, sister, daughter. Click here to see the trailer.

On January 29th, Off and Running will have its theatrical premiere at the IFC Center. In addition to the above-mentioned prize, the film won jury nods for Outstanding Doc at Outfest and Philadelphia’s Q Fest. The film premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival (where it was a top-ten audience fave) and will have its national broadcast début on PBS’ P.O.V. 2010 series, airing this November. Many of independent film’s most prestigious and important organizations have been behind it from the start—Tribeca All Access, ITVS, P.O.V., the IFP, DocuClub and New York Women in Film and Television, among others. Opper was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film this year.

During this talk on a cold New Year’s Eve late afternoon over bowls of soup and crackers, we two old ladies sat and gabbed about storytelling. Nicole acknowledged that, “The ghost in the room is Avery and it’s a bit painful to even sit for an interview and talk about this film without her weighing in. She is the filmmaker, too.”

Hammer To Nail: How long have you been a filmmaker?

NO: Since 1997. I was making “backyard” videos with friends.

H2N: Did anything momentous happen to you when you picked up a camera?

NO: No, not really. At that point, it was just an extension of theater for me. I grew up doing community theater as a performer and then, as soon as possible, as a director. I directed things like comedy sketches, monologues, this and that. Originally, I was just really passionate about theater and performance; the camera was just an easy way to keep that going and to control a bit more through editing.

H2N: What excited you the most about directing?

NO: The collaboration—I love collaboration, the collaborative spirit, working with someone and trying to meld two visions, or three or four. I always questioned my abilities and authenticity in terms of being the right person to tell a story and I did during the making of this film—for a very long time I felt that way. I was actually quite open about it with Avery and it was a constant conversation between us. I would ask, “Avery, how do you feel about the fact that I’m directing this movie about you?” [laughs] And her answer would always change, which was fun. By the end though, she was saying that I was really the right person to tell it because she thought, in a weird way, I could understand what it’s like to be her. I thought that was interesting because I felt that I could never know what it’s like to be her. How could I be the right person? For her, it was the gay thing, as if by being gay I would know what her life was like growing up in a gay world with her moms.

H2N: It really doesn’t seem to me that she grew up in a “gay world,” necessarily. Is that how she saw it?

NO: Well, I think if you’re a child of gay people, there is a community there, automatically.

H2N: Due to the private nature of Tova and Travis, we don’t really see a lot of that, though.

NO: No, not in the film.

H2N: The Jewish aspects are, obviously, very much in place, since she was put into a Jewish day school as a kid. What was it about the gay experience, being raised by two moms, that was so profound, do you think?

NO: What fascinates me about the fact that she says this now, is that she was combative about it for so long. While the camera was rolling during interviews, I was always trying to pull that out of her, this idea that her moms could relate to her as an outsider in this way. She was the one to really educate me. She’d say, “Open your eyes, Nicole. No! Just because my moms are gay doesn’t mean they understand my experience, as an outsider, as a black woman growing up in a Jewish community.” By the time I really came around to understanding that, she turned it back on me by telling me that she thought I was the right person to tell her story because of my own gay experience. It’s a bit contradictory. That’s part of the fun of telling a coming-of-age story. Your subject is forever changing while you’re making the film. I got to track that. While we were preserving certain moments, everything was evolving. It’s really acute when you’re a teenager, even though we evolve throughout our lives.

H2N: In your next project, your main subjects are also teens, also outsiders, so you’re obviously strongly drawn to these stories of a young person’s evolution. What is it in particular that attracts you to those stories?

NO: I love watching people discover themselves and figure themselves out. It’s a gift when you get to see it firsthand. It’s not something that’s obvious; we don’t notice ourselves, necessarily, when we’re having revelations. They just happen organically. When you’re filming it, you get to revisit it in the edit room and actually track a person’s evolution. I just want to keep doing that over and over again.

H2N: What moments in the film are hard for Avery?

NO: They’re not the moments that I would assume would be hard for her. But that could also change over time and those moments that don’t seem to faze her now, might one day. But she was very mature in her thinking about a lot of the obstacles she encountered. She had a broad perspective about a lot of what she was experiencing. I was really impressed by that, always.

H2N: You never actually lived with the Klein-Clouds, correct?

NO: No, although it did come up at one point since they had a spare room but that was too much. What actually happened was that I was moving to Brooklyn with my girlfriend at the time and we were looking at a bunch of places to live and Tova got really involved and started looking on Craigslist for places around the neighborhood. I told her I wasn’t sure I should be right next door. [laughs] Living in the same house with them would have been weird. Although, I’m doing that for the next one; however, it’s not just one family.

H2N: Because you were friends with them, were boundaries an issue? Did that crop up from time to time? This is a constant issue to ponder in documentary, especially ones that happen over the course of several years.

NO: I don’t know; it’s hard to say. But yes is the answer, actually. Ethics are tricky. There is no defined document as there is in, say, journalism. We had a contract between us of sorts that went beyond a release form. When I approached them, I had a three-page document written up about what I was interested in, the specific issues that I wanted to explore in the film. I wanted to be sure they were clear about my intentions. Because one thing I doubted from the beginning was the fact that they were really hearing me when I said that this was going to be a feature documentary film and I wanted it to be on public television. So that was something we revisited over and over again. I appreciated how open they were being and how much access they were permitting. And yet, if they didn’t think it was going anywhere, then that made everything pretty much a moot point, right? It was important that they understood that I wanted this to go far.

H2N: But how does that change things in terms of their participation? Or does it?

NO: I know that there were certain things they wanted to remain private and never really shared. But, for the most part, because they saw how close I was to their daughter and because they believed that I was a good influence on her life, they were open to sharing whatever they could share. To some degree, it was a matter of desperation. There would be moments when they didn’t know where Avery was and I did. So we all had to be open and honest and trusting of one another.

H2N: And how did that affect the trust between you and Avery?

NO: I would tell her that I was going to call them to tell them where she was. It was just a matter of her not wanting to pick up the phone and deal. It wasn’t as though she wanted them to be sitting up at night sick with worry about her. She just didn’t want to be the one making the move. So that never really became a conflict for any of us, I don’t think. But, there were things that were conflicting. There were moments when Tova would call and tell me all about something Avery had done and I would eventually have to say that it was too much for me. I’m choosing to tell this story from Avery’s point-of-view. What she says contradicts what you’re telling me. I had to ask her to not call me with all the details. She was really wonderful about it.

. . . Actually, I think I got that wrong. She initiated all that and told me that she felt it was stressing me out when she would call and tell me things, so she decided to lay off. And I said thank you. There were moments when both of us knew that Avery was straight-up lying, but I had to stay committed to her, to the integrity of that idea that it was her story and we’re telling it from her point-of-view.

H2N: Did you ever worry that this whole process of documenting her story was, somehow, detrimental to her in any way?

NO: I worried about that a lot. I never felt that it was, but I was constantly policing myself about it, just to be sure. Going back to this question of ethics: so many of us end up relying on our gut instinct and hoping that we’re right, hoping that we have this moral center that’s guiding us. So, if I felt uncomfortable or uneasy or guilty about something, then I would stop and check myself. The question implicit there is, are we right when we’re following our gut? Does our gut really know what’s best? That’s where I was always stuck: I think I’m doing the right thing, but if there is no standard out there, how can we ever know? This is something that can still be discovered since I’ll be in touch with Avery for a long time. If she decides in ten or twenty years that I screwed her up, then we’ll talk about it then. [laughs] But that doesn’t seem to be the case right now.

H2N: The camera, oftentimes, is used a lot as a “confessional” tool with kids, without making it all that inclusive for an audience except in a very passive, voyeuristic way. Does that irk you, is that bothersome?

NO: The only thing that really bothers me, and should be thought about a lot more than it is, are subjects not being in on the agenda, subjects not being fully aware of what a filmmaker is after, what message they’re trying to send. When there isn’t transparency, and the filmmaker isn’t talking about his or her goals in the story he or she sees taking shape, and including the subject in the feedback sessions and editorial decisions, then I think real damage can be done, or there’s the potential for it. I worry about that a lot. Reality television has set many lows in exploitation.

H2N: It’s exposing someone in a way that has nothing to do with telling his or her story, that’s for sure. It’s all about the gotcha moment, more or less.

NO: That’s really what it comes down to: if, as a filmmaker, you can’t have just basic respect for the people being represented in your film, that’s a real problem.

H2N: Yet some filmmakers would argue that that also serves a purpose, that it’s part and parcel of documentary filmmaking, this idea of exposure, of uncovering something.

NO: Well, maybe I need to have a harder edge, but that kind of stuff offends me on a really personal level. That always needs to be recognized, this notion that the people in your film are not pawns and the film that you make is going to live with them and represent them for the rest of their lives. I know it’s been going on forever and ever and will continue, but if you can’t look the person in the eye that sat there and trusted you with their story, then how do you live with yourself?

H2N: Have you and Avery talked about revisiting her years from now, coming back into her life as a “where are they now” kind of thing? Why are you making gagging noises? [laughter]

NO: You know, we can’t all be Michael Apted. It’s too much, you know?! [laughs] We filmed a specific time in a specific place. I will always be fascinated by Avery, but I’d like the continuation of our relationship to be off-camera.

H2N: But capturing a larger trajectory of a life—is that interesting to you at all?

NO: Absolutely. I guess I would say if we can step outside the confines of a feature documentary, time length and all of these things, then there are a lot more possibilities. I just saw this update on Outside, Looking In: Transracial Adoption in America, in which the filmmaker himself is a subject, a transracial adoptee. He did this piece that was commissioned as a new media piece where he goes back and interviews his nephew again who’s now much older, very well spoken. He re-interviews himself, too, about where they stand now, several years later. It’s about a 15-minute piece that streams online. I can see something like that happening. But it would need to take a different form.

H2N: There are infinite possibilities for that now and that will continue to burgeon, I think. The way we share media is so different than it was even two or three years ago. The cycle, too, of creating and making a feature-length doc is burdensome—fundraising, grant-writing, rough cut after rough cut in review with any number of people. It’s a long endeavor in terms of time and stamina. Is there some other way in which you think about making films?

NO: I’m as excited as the next person about all the possibilities of social media, new media. But, I do really romanticize the traditional feature-length film, in particular, the communal experience of sitting in a theater. I think there’s something really special in that. I start to feel a little empty or alienated whenever people start talking about watching everything on their laptops. Maybe I’ll change with the times, but I love the theatrical experience and I hope it never goes away. The way I like to think of it is as complementary work to a long-form piece, extensions of it, if you will, rather than a replacement.

H2N: What draws you to another human being, in general, to make you spend that much time documenting his or her story and investing time beyond the project itself, beyond the exploration of all the external issues brought out in that process? In other words, where is the delineation between what that process feeds you as an artist and what it feeds you, personally? Coming off this experience, a particularly successful personal and professional partnership, what kinds of expectations do you have going forward?

NO: It certainly set a standard for me. I don’t feel like I could now make a film where the people in the film didn’t play a really important creative role—maybe not everybody in the film, but in this case, Avery, the main subject. I don’t know if I’ve been able to identify it; it’s really elusive. It’s kind of like magic, what these qualities are that add up to a person that you want to completely obsess yourself over [laughs]. Probably, first and foremost, is her willingness to be so completely honest and raw and vulnerable. It’s such a gift and an honor when someone opens herself up to you that way and if what’s revealed is really interesting and relevant and worthy of a story, then I’m going to want to follow it through and give up everything to do it.

H2N: She’s so intent on transcending her circumstance. It’s an exceedingly difficult thing to do. We still live in a society that’s quite intent on boxing people in more than anything else. In Avery’s particular circumstance, though, there’s really no way to box that girl in or define her in terms of her life, her family, etc. It’s something she seemed to have innately realized from when she was little. And on the other hand, at least the way this story is told, there seems to be an astounding amount of naïveté on the part of Tova and Travis about just that, that this circumscribed world of Jewish day school and birthright issues and the color of her skin wouldn’t, somehow, kind of blow up into a real crisis of identity.

NO: I would always ask certain leading questions about that, but you know I’ve kind of moved on this issue a bit, too. Number one, I really respect them as parents and I really do believe they tried their best. And maybe their best wasn’t good enough but we could say that about all sorts of things. It’s a tough one. Sometimes I get angry on this issue because I’m protective of them, too. We get to pass all sorts of judgments on adoptive parents, particularly queer adoptive parents are under real scrutiny about how they’re raising “our” children—society’s collective children. You would never get away with that with a biological parent. Those parents get to say, “Don’t tell me how to raise my child. I know what’s best for my child.” So there is this part of me that feels like saying, “Screw you, don’t tell them [Tova and Travis] how to raise their child!” They’re her parents; they’re the ones who have known her since birth the way nobody else has. They’re paying attention to all her needs, her personality, her special quirks that only they really know. At the same time, I totally recognize everything that the film is highlighting about racial difference and privilege. I’m a little bit reticent to comment further than what the film already says on that issue out of respect for them.

H2N: I certainly wouldn’t be one to demonize them for their shortcomings, if indeed that’s what they are. But I think their closeness to this child has created a bit of myopia and I don’t know too many instances where that isn’t true in any parent/child relationship. But from what you’ve told me about different experiences in Q&As, this is a real hard-core issue for a lot of people who are not shy at all about passing judgment on these two women raising three adoptive children of varying races and ethnicities.

NO: In a most gentle and respectful way, I ask people to just look at themselves and their own way of doing things rather than putting energy into deciding what’s wrong with the way Tova and Travis are raising their kids. All of us can always improve.

H2N: How have teens responded to the film?

NO: It’s a mix. I haven’t talked to a lot of boys about this film, but so far, for the most part, I sense that young women Avery’s age really glom onto it. They really relate. Young men are a little bit more, um, let’s say lukewarm, towards it [laughs]. Obviously, I hate gender generalizations; I know there are and will be some young men that can relate to her story in several ways. I’ve showed a lot of other young media makers the film—16-, 17-, 18-year-old kids that are picking up video cameras and making their own stories and they all appreciate it because they recognize Avery’s role in it. They see that she chose to leave things in the film that were probably hard for her. They see themselves in her and in the various situations in which she finds herself. There may be nothing in common on the surface in terms of their own personal experience, but they get Avery.

H2N: Did you have that particular audience distinctly in mind while making this?

NO: Yeah. I mean I certainly always hoped that it would resonate for teenagers, never really knowing if it would. I think the reality for most documentaries today is that if it’s going to be seen by that age group, it’ll be in schools and other educational settings, so that’s my goal, really, to get it there, beyond public television where the audience is much older. When I went to ITVS for orientation, they told us that the largest PBS audiences are those under six and those over sixty!

H2N: Well, that cuts a wide swath. [laughter]

NO: Stats change a little bit for POV and some other strands.

H2N: I think the other issue, of course, is content since there’s so little media that’s really substantive for that age group. It’s remarkable that more people are not tapping into this amazing resource of young people really hungry to see themselves portrayed in genuine ways. The best stuff I’ve seen is, in fact, made by themselves for themselves, you know? It seems you get that innately in the work you mean to do; it’s a very specific goal for you and that you consider this a vital and valuable way to storytell, in a sea of content that is not really all that vital or valuable. In this portrait of a young woman, you’ve captured such a mélange of elements that make up a life—both the great and not-so-great. They interchange constantly so that it becomes a very human story, i.e., messy and complicated. You’re right in your estimation of Avery’s bravery to share all that.

When you’re teaching filmmaking to young people, what kinds of ways do you impress upon them that that kind of depth is really important?

NO: I’m not sure I do. I try to draw it out in subtle ways, of course. There’s definitely no formula. Generally, I just call their bluff. If I see a lot of posing going on, I’ll say, “Tell me what’s really going on?” I think that has to happen in the moment or it’ll never happen at all.

H2N: The camera can also record something that we then re-watch and don’t recognize. Do you think young people get that something unexpected can be translated from “real life” to one that’s portrayed on video?

NO: Young people are incredibly savvy and they recognize that anything going into the camera will be manipulated in the edit. That’s why I advocate for them learning how to control their own stories. I think the concern is when they open up to an adult who doesn’t necessarily have their best interests in mind. They go off and make the film they want to make. The kids aren’t really a part of all that. That’s where I get really protective. There’s a mix of good and bad when someone is in charge in the edit room and trying to tell their own story. There are so many reasons, as we know, why autobiographical filmmakers choose to hire an editor in order to be able to look at their own work in a somewhat objective way. In the case of teenagers, it’s such an opportunity to reflect and learn about where they are in life and, as Avery puts it, what she may want “to change about herself.” I think it’s always preferable that they give it a shot, being in charge of how they manipulate their own story.

H2N: Do you think that might inform them on how to turn a camera on other people and do them justice? To me, that’s an essential exercise to go through for any media maker—first see how it feels to be the subject. Have you turned the camera on yourself?

NO: Never. A bit ironic, I know. However, just a couple of days ago, I did just that with a Flipcam. I made a little video diary, which I did not edit. I did it in the subway. And then I went home and I watched it. It was interesting. [laughs] I’m looking at myself as a character, a whole other entity. I’ve been on the other side of someone’s camera on occasion but certainly didn’t have any creative control. [Interestingly, since this interview took place, Nicole tells me that she’s been filming herself practically every single day.]

So far, in my experience in working with teenagers who are making their own work, they tend to be really, really honest and tend to try not to “dress up” their own image, at least not as much as adults do. There’s less of an agenda, maybe less at stake. I do notice that adults that are making autobiographical work will often create unrecognizable characters because of the message they’re trying to send, whatever agenda they’re serving takes precedence over authenticity. Teenagers, for the most part, are just trying to figure themselves out through the use of this medium. You can feel the difference.

H2N: What are some of the more profound aspects of that, particularly when they’re in the edit? What do you notice about the choices they make that might be different from the way you might edit that same piece?

NO: Obviously, teenagers are the most self-conscious people in the world. There’s always the “bad angle” issue or a place where they think they sound stupid. It’s really tough to generalize with these things. I guess I could say that this honesty and purity has become this diamond-in-the-rough way of working for kids that have become bombarded with so many un-truths in the media. You always recognize when they’ve delivered something that’s truthful. They attach themselves to that right away. They can recognize that when something moves them, it’s going to probably move other people, as well.

H2N: Circling back to this whole theatrical experience, we can say that there’s a lot of passivity in taking in media, a one-way exchange, if you will. But in a cinema, there can be a profound exchange with the audience, a profound connection can be made. It’s cheesy when you talk about it, for some reason, but that’s really what we’re all looking for, this transcendence that enables us to connect, especially to a story that might be really far away from our own reality.

NO: You’re helping me tap into something that I think happened with Avery a lot during interviews. There were so many adults trying to tell her what she should do and what they thought would be best for her. It got so overwhelming and jumbled in her mind, that interviews became this moment of, almost, a cry for help. “Here’s how I feel. Here’s what I think. At least you’re listening and your camera’s recording. Let’s just put it out there.”

H2N: The portrayal of the relationship with her and Rafi, this brother and sister act was, for me, one of the strongest aspects. Because you have this boy/man who can intellectualize, in a pretty facile way, what Avery is expressing in pure emotion. She’s experiencing a lot of trauma in the years you spent documenting her story. He’s so hyper-articulate, has a real gift for language. This, ironically, is how he probably dissembles a bit and keeps the chaos of being a teenager at bay. He’s the perfect foil for her, a sounding board that is distinctive from everything else around her—and also, he was raised the same way she was, he was adopted, too, he’s a mixed-race kid raised by two white women, etc. But he’s also male, he’s light-skinned, he has astoundingly ambitious academic abilities and goals for himself and he feels confident in those abilities. He also brings a real light-heartedness to things and can bring Avery back down a bit from the precipice when she’s about to really crack.

NO: It was both intentional and a happy accident that these two voices together create this unique perspective on things. He has such a way of controlling the conversation sometimes, both with his intellect, and then with his silliness. I certainly felt like it was important that people see how differently Avery and Rafi developed, the different ways they processed the same things and move through the world based on those processes of discovery about who they are and their place in the world. They were raised by the same two people. It’s important, for nothing else, to avoid these generalizations about what must happen when you put people in situations together. It was definitely a bit of a happy accident that he became such a foil for her in that way.

H2N: Does the finished film disappoint you in any way? I mean, specifically, in terms of its reception by an audience.

NO: More than anything else, I can’t help but feel disappointed when people just boil it down to a simple black-and-white issue of Avery’s way of making the right, or wrong, choices. I see it as this very complicated interplay of race and sexuality, difference and identity, adoption issues, the erasing of her birth history. I find it so frustrating when people ignore the weight and importance of that. It is a vital issue for so many adoptees, this negation of history. They have no contact with the birth family or very little information, which is still the case of so many. These are the only citizens that cannot access their own birth certificates. I get that there would be this knee-jerk response from a lot of adoptive parents, that they [Tova and Travis] are not quite doing it right. It’s so much bigger than that, though. When that happens, I feel like I’ve failed. But I also feel like it’s a bit out of my control. I do not feel like I failed in my portrayal of Avery because she’s very happy with the film. She stands up for it, shows up to every Q&A she’s invited to and has been enjoying the process of seeing it go out into the world. The moms have a harder time with it. They’re very private people. But they’ve also expressed their approval of the film.

H2N: You’re embarking on your next project where your subjects are from a different culture [Mexico], but are also teenagers finding their way in a particular situation. Knowing that this collaboration will be informed by the one you had with Avery, what are your particular concerns? Or is it just too early to say?

NO: It might be too early to say. I haven’t had a lot of fantasies about how it will go because it’s all sort of a vague blur right now. But it helps to know that I’m not walking into alien territory. I’ve been to this place before and I’ve been moved and changed and transformed by this place before. I know, more or less, what I’m walking into. Of course, there will be cultural differences, but at the same time, I was raised and grew up with this culture because I grew up ten minutes away from Mexico [in San Diego, California]. It’s not going to be like landing in a place in Africa for the first time. I feel connected to this culture even though it’s not mine. I want to allow myself to be surprised and not suppose or bet on anything that might, or might not, happen. When I step off the plane, we’ll see what happens. This method can be problematic when it comes to proposal writing, of course.

H2N: Yeah, but that kind of stuff you can make up knowing it’s going to change profoundly anyway—we’re talking about documentary here, after all. [laughter]

NO: I think you just absolutely have to believe that your project is not about you. It’s about the story and if everything you’re doing is serving the story and you feel strongly that that story can do some kind of good in the world, then the confidence will follow. That’s how it was with Off and Running. It was never about, “Oh, believe in me as a filmmaker [to potential funders, grant-giving entities, etc.].” It was more like believe in the worth and power of this story and how much Avery has to share with us. And I hope you’ll think I’ll be good enough to do the job. That’s really what it was about. It’s the same for the next one. I firmly believe that people need to know that this foster home for abandoned kids exists, this amazing, self-sustaining weird little social experiment of a home that has survived and thrived for three decades already and will continue to do so. But it’s kind of a loner out there and I wonder why it’s never been replicated and why more of them don’t exist. The foster care system there is in shambles. We can learn from it. I’m going to have to depend on the compelling personalities of these boys to get that story across. I’m expecting support for this project because of them, not because they might find me particularly compelling, but because I can do the job.

H2N: Whose work do you admire?

NO: Sam Pollard, definitely, first and foremost. Four Little Girls, the film he edited and produced, is probably the most impactful film I’ve seen; seeing that film made me want to do this. Macky [Alston], for sure—his films are great but, more than that, he’s a person I really admire, which I can say for all my mentors. Judith Helfand’s work has been a big inspiration for me, in particular, especially Healthy Baby Girl, which is very personal and raw, difficult to watch even. That’s the kind of stuff I love.

H2N: Would you ever turn the camera on yourself, do you think, be the protagonist of your own film?

NO: I’m not opposed to it. If it seems like the right thing to do, if the story calls for it. So far, it hasn’t. The performer part of me has really receded into the background.

This next project is just something I’m really anxious to begin even though Off and Running has a pretty intense course still to run—the theatrical release, more festivals, the broadcast in November. But I hope to devote a year of shooting for this next one after my three-month research trip. When I come back, I hope to have a much clearer answer for that. I’ve told them that for one year I need to live there and shoot every day. I want that structure, that defined time frame for both myself and for them. But I do want very much to develop a similar collaboration and that really will dictate the time frame more than anything. They’re opening themselves up and making the choice to participate and that’s what I have to honor above everything. It levels the playing field a little bit, makes things more fair.

H2N: We’d see different pieces of filmmaking, I think, if more filmmakers collaborated the way you mean to with your subjects. It is unique.

NO: Well, you end up being really surprised. I don’t know—maybe I had a miraculously unique experience with Avery and the rest of the family. I told Tova and Travis to please tell me about any changes they wanted to make. The most obvious stuff where they’re struggling and vulnerable and they’re lost a bit—they never asked to change any of that stuff or to not keep it in the final cut. It was usually just factual things that they wanted to set straight or the more subtle understandings about their relationship to Avery. It was never about censoring us. I just think people would be really surprised at how willing subjects are to be brave and let themselves be seen as flawed human beings for the sake of the film or the project. That’s what they did. They didn’t say, “Make me look better.” They said, “Get it right. Be accurate.” We also have to take into account that they were heroes of mine when I met them. They were the first gay parents I’d ever met and they were people with whom I wanted to maintain a relationship. I would hope that, regardless of how much I wanted that, though, I would still be respectful of their wishes. But in this case, in particular, they were real role models for me, guides in a way. They’re twice my age. There’s just innate respect.

H2N: Your generosity of spirit in truly understanding what that kind of collaboration involves, is somewhat rare, even in an art form that prides itself on that. But really what most filmmakers want is access and cooperation, a good performance, certainly. But this kind of collaboration where your subject’s in the edit room? Not so sure that occurs that often. The bottom line is that, Tova and Travis aside, Avery’s story, in the wrong hands, could have been disastrous. She traverses some very dicey territory and the way in which all that is documented could have potentially been very damaging—to all concerned.

NO: Definitely. But we documentary filmmakers open ourselves up to that vulnerability, too. More than any other art form, this one forces you to ask hard questions every step of the way. We feel compelled (or are asked) to show a work-in-progress—something not even finished—to expose our work to a lot of people we don’t even know. There are a lot of artists that reject that kind of thing. But it’s part of how we work. I had endless rough cut screenings with people I didn’t know, who didn’t know me. I felt like I gained a lot from that. Sometimes I thought it was a waste of my time. But usually it was really useful. I’m not going to generalize, but that seems a lot less common in other art forms. The narrative filmmakers I know would absolutely refuse to show anything they didn’t want to show and leave it open to criticism. It’s between them and their editor and people see it when it’s done.

H2N: There are plenty of documentarians that are like that, as well.

NO: I can make the generalization that it happens less with documentary because documentarians feel this responsibility, this obligation to representing this whole “social experience” to people. I don’t agree with that, necessarily. It depends on the film. Who’s that guy that made the Vogue movie? RJ Cutler, right?

H2N: The September Issue.

NO: Yes. I can sense he’s kind of a large ego, as well, but he’s always telling people that it’s wrong to expect that documentary filmmakers are solely out to get some kind of large sociological survey of something or other. I appreciate that because he says out loud what a lot of us are thinking but afraid to say. Sometimes it just takes someone very forthright and opinionated to say it out loud. You’re grateful somebody said it. Because it’s obnoxious. We’re all telling stories. I don’t always want to be justifying my work based on its social value and he was saying that in the guise of his own film—it’s not an exposé or major commentary on the fashion industry, it’s a portrait of a woman. He said that it’s a misconception (and I’m paraphrasing here) that audiences have, that we are only about telling these “collective experiences.” It’s just storytelling, like anything else.

— Pamela Cohn

On the surface, those of us who have never had to suffer severe abuse at the hands of a parent, be it verbal, physical or sexual, do not necessarily look (or act) any differently from those children who have. As childhood and teenage photos of what appear to be three happy, well adjusted, doted upon, beautiful girls floats across the screen in Chico Colvard’s feature documentary debut, Family Affair (world premiering in the Sundance US Documentary Competition), the insidious nature of how deep and well-hidden a family’s dark secrets can go becomes almost too much to bear.

For Colvard, the beginning of exposing his own family’s dark secrets started, unwittingly, innocently, as a little boy. In the kitchen of their home in Radcliff, Kentucky in 1978, he accidentally shot one of his sisters, tempted to pick up one of his father’s guns and, unfortunately, finding some bullets after watching his hero on television, The Rifleman. This explosion of violence shattered the family: father arrested and sent to prison after Pauline (Paula), believing she was going to die, tells their mother what is going on; all four children separated and scattered to different relatives’ homes; mother having to face the fact that the man physically and verbally abusing her was also having “affairs” with all three of their daughters. When the father (a black man raised in the segregated South, also an abused child, and on his own since 13 years of age) leaves prison after serving less than a year, the daughters run back to him, loyally, willingly, continuing to see him and have relations with him. The mother (a white German Jewish woman) then flees, abandoning the family entirely, profoundly betrayed by her own daughters. They never see her again. A story of Shakespearean proportions.

Fifteen years later, Colvard, who has not spoken to, or seen his father in that time, goes to Thanksgiving at one of his sister’s houses, only to confront, not the demon in the flesh he expected to find, but a pretty normal family holiday scene, one just like any other in millions of households across the country—laughter, teasing, hugs and kisses, family photos, a celebratory communal meal. Staggered by the “normalcy” of his sisters’ relationships with their father, he sets out to try and figure out, and reveal, the many complexities that reside within an abusive parent-child relationship.

Family Affair is a straightforward, but intense, investigation as to why, to this day, “There are certain things we don’t talk about,” despite childhoods that were irrevocably damaging, where “no help came for so long,” no rescue in sight. These girls—Angelika (Angie), Chiquita (Chici) and Pauline (Paula)—fully adapted themselves to the situation—so much so that they continued relations with their father even after they were grown and could, ostensibly, defend themselves. Angie, pregnant for the first time at 14 by her father, says she prayed for someone to “give her a way out” from the ages of five to thirteen. But she acknowledges unequivocally that after that point, she became “the girlfriend, the wife, the seductress.” And Chici tells an unsettled Colvard, “I enjoyed sex with my father.”

What this filmmaker does so simply and generously, and what makes the piece so emotionally resonant and rich, is he hands the reins of the story over to his sisters and they tell him, in astoundingly open ways, what it was like for them when they were girls. Throughout, they offer unapologetic, non-histrionic, sometimes humorous testimony, straightforward talk from the mouths and hearts of three exceedingly strong women, all of whom still suffer the ramifications of the intense abuse they experienced at the hands of their father. Touchingly, they also share and articulate the ways in which they worry about heredity when they talk about their fears and insecurities about raising their own children. It is riveting and painful and Colvard meets his own feelings of inadequacy with an unrelenting and deliberate journey into the most complex parts of who we are as parents, children, and siblings.

There are never pat answers or neat resolutions on offer, although he does go see his mother after eighteen years and walks away better understanding her side of things, as do we. She is a woman who, with the help of a new husband and her steadfast faith, has moved on, forgiven. But not forgotten. There is no tearful family reunion; there is no contrived circle of love and healing at the end of the film; there is no simplistic redressing of the morass of plain wrongness that has transpired between this parent and his female children. There is just moving on, living, dealing. Some might say there are massive amounts of denial on display. This viewer thought there was very little of that, actually.

Except for a haunting and beautiful score by composer Miriam Cutler, and a few artfully done recreations of certain memories the girls describe, the film is pared-down, gritty, never devolving into anything slick or overly produced. And except for one brief visit with Colvard to a doctor who specializes in treating victims of long-term incest (and I have a feeling this was something that was imposed in the interests of marking this as an “issue” film), the documenting of this story, the collaboration inherent in the telling of it, with everything in plain sight, is its strongest aspect, its healing force, a sort of gift that Colvard bestows on the three sisters who, in turn, share with him the utter hell that has been their lives, telling their story with dignity, grace, humor, refusing, at least on the outside, to live as life-long victims of a childhood probably very few of us would have survived intact.

What kind of public reception this film will have, how it might affect the way families and therapists talk about these things in the future, is really up for grabs. I took it in as an incredibly moving testimony to the power of human resilience and an example of the child-like faith that can enable us to move beyond the worst of what can happen to us when we’re vulnerable and small and at the mercy of the custodians that cross our paths. Or live under the same roof with us.

— Pamela Cohn

In Mads Brügger’s The Red Chapel, we get a rare glimpse of the dystopic urban nightmare that is Pyongyang, North Korea. The film has gone out into the world as a Danish film, but it is very much a North Korean one as well, a chilling and fascinating glimpse of that clandestine place. And, what at first seems like a Python-esque charade played just for laughs, manages to provide plenty of fiercely sobering moments due mostly to a brilliant script masterminded by its director, a star journalist and personality in his native Denmark.

The Red Chapel’s shorthand log line, if it needed one, would probably be something along the lines of “The Yes Men do North Korea.” (Take a look at part of it here.) For its US premiere, it will screen as part of Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition. The aptly named director Mads Brügger’s wild adventure takes us into the maw of Kim Jong-Il’s secret empire. How these Danes got permission is anyone’s guess, but we’ll chalk it up to kismet since this filmmaker does not squander a moment of his time there to explore and extrapolate upon the nature of this country that has cut its population off from the rest of the world while eating hundreds of thousands of its own through mind control, starvation, torture and life-long imprisonment. In other countries, one can be labeled a dissident and still go home and have dinner with the kids. Not in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. One can be “disappeared” permanently. Enough of what goes on there has been leaked out over the decades to know that to not only get in there, but to get in there with cameras, is an impressive feat, indeed.

The chilling brilliance of The Red Chapel shows itself in its leadership on both sides of the fence. On the official site of Denmark, there is an essay on the personality of the Danes by journalist Victor Andersen that says, “Common to all Danes is their tendency to take the ups and downs of life with a touch of irony, often self-irony. . . . They tend to say the opposite of what they think, in keeping with the nature of [that] irony.” In other words, they could turn out to make great spies and get away with a hell of a lot in a place that doesn’t know what irony is.

However, it also says that, “There have also been traces of local insularity, snobbery and conformity. It was best not to be different or odd.” So a Dane might feel a certain empathy with the North Koreans, perhaps, who are conformists par excellence? Brügger brings some friends with him on this journey, namely, two young Korean comedians, both raised from a young age in Denmark; they consider themselves Danish, not Korean. They are there to stage a comedy revue for a select audience in the capitol city and that is their guise for being there in the first place. One is a big strapping, tattooed young lad called Simon, the other an 18-year-old spastic with a severe central nervous system disorder which affects his physical movements and speech, making most people think that he’s retarded when he’s far from mentally deficient. This boy called Jacob finds himself in a place where children like him are given away or hidden from the rest of society, or as is intimated more than once, done away with completely.

He is the deepest thinker, the most intensely emotional, most adversely affected subject in this whole shebang, incessantly articulating why following an ironical conformist into a conformist society with no irony can be a bloody dangerous thing. And so young Jacob turns out to be the steadfast baseline of this particular (oddly-shaped) triangle. The triangle is fast becoming my favorite geometrical shape; when something is “triangulated,” both the fixed baseline, as well as the angles that radiate from it, form a pretty damned accurate survey of certain systems and relationships. While Brügger is unscrupulously giving the North Koreans a run for their money, Jacob is questioning the evil nature of his own leader, the man who brought him there to help perpetrate a fraud on a grand scale. This is not a highly nuanced film for the most part; it is broad and slapstick in nature, delivering punch after comedic punch while exposing the underlying disease of an oppressed people.

To Brügger, who constantly compares current-day North Korea with Hitler’s reign (the title references a communist spy cell that operated in Nazi Germany), the mad clapping and smiling and crying and puppeteering that go on like a mass case of Tourette’s amongst its citizens connotes sheer terror, a terror these people live with day in, day out with no respite since everyone is watching everyone else for the slightest sign of unrest or unacceptable actions and thoughts. His earnest wish that the local people accompany Simon singing the Oasis song “Wonderwall” is his own idea of not-so-subtle thought control:

“And all the roads we have to walk are winding / And all the lights that lead us there are blinding / There are many things that I would like to say to you / But I don’t know how. Because maybe / You’re gonna be the one that saves me / And after all / You’re my wonderwall.”

Like the Yes Men and others like them, Brügger is a ferocious cultural insurgent, the camera his most potent weapon. His film will force you to double over with belly laughs. It will also chill you to the bone.

— Pamela Cohn

(La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris will have a two-week engagement November 4-17, 2009, at Film Forum. Go here for details on the Film Forum run, and visit Wiseman’s official website to learn more.)

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet is 79-year-old American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s 38th film and one of the very few to have received some form of a theatrical release in the United States. As in his previous thirty-seven pieces of work, the viewer is, unceremoniously, ensconced in a world that Wiseman has chosen to profile. He’s chosen it because it interests him and because he wants to learn something about this world, however seemingly circumscribed it may appear to be. Wiseman’s special gift is to turn circumscription into common human experience, and in the case of his latest opus (at 158 minutes, it qualifies as a “short” in Wiseman’s oeuvre), he spent seven weeks filming the renowned Paris dance company at work—and how hard they do work!

There is probably nothing more circumscribed than the world of ballet, an art form created, performed and appreciated with a profound, almost religious, devotion amongst both its practitioners and its acolytes. As the formidable Brigitte Lefevre, artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet, says to a colleague, the definition of the dancer by Maurice Béjart, “half nun, half boxer,” means that these artists are “capable of great dedication, endowed with physical strength and energy; they are both. A dancer is both the racehorse and its jockey, the race car and its driver.”

Wiseman, too, is both the physical conveyance and ideological conductor of his work, along with his long-time director of photography, John Davey, his cinematographer for over twenty years, beginning in 1978 with their collaboration on Manoeuvre. In an interview with Gerald Peary, Wiseman chalks up their successful collaboration to a similar “obsessed and slightly crazed” way of working. Like their rapport, one can’t put words on each movement, each nuance of what plays out on the screen in La Danse. And Wiseman doesn’t. In fact, he’s never found the need to in any of his films.

But the evolution of story, of structure, of narrative, is clear. It is clear in the way he captures the language of the choreographer to the principal dancer, of the ballet masters and mistresses to the corps de ballet, tasking them, individually and as a group, to embody the unrelenting drive to achieve a perfection that transcends the human form. Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, we watch pieces move from rehearsal studio to luxurious theater, replete with 2,200 scarlet velvet seats and Marc Chagall ceiling, all lovingly and meticulously vacuumed, scrubbed, and kept in pristine condition by a silent army of maintenance workers.

Interstitially, Wiseman inserts static portraits of the institution of the Palais Garnier, the 19th-century building that houses the company—cold, opulent, and solid like an ancient netherworld, almost ominous in its stillness and emptiness—and the city of Paris, shot aerially for the most part—staid, stony and gray—a bustling place seemingly oblivious to the microcosmic realm where the dancers, the choreographers, the administrative staff, the seamstresses, the food service workers, the cleaners and painters and musicians, live out their days working hard to keep a cultural institution alive and flourishing. These stills flesh out geography and story, and act as counterpoint to the sweating bodies, stretched tendons, pounding feet and corporeal sensuality of dancers entwined in impossible positions to illustrate the lust, vengeance and celestial love of these choreographed dramas. They all make it look “indecently easy,” as one ballet master describes the leaps and pirouettes of one male dancer who can suspend himself in mid-air with powerful lift and grace. Wiseman subtly, slyly, interjects snippets of a larger drama that is, at once, astonishing and exhilarating, routine and mundane, a hallmark of his and something that makes watching his films such a full and satisfying experience. This technique enables a viewer to, as Wiseman says, “think through their own relationship to what they are seeing and hearing.” As one fellow film lover put it to me after watching La Danse, “For the first time, I finally got ballet.”

The seven dances featured in the film, both in rehearsal and in performance, by a slate of the most exciting international choreographers, are: Pierre Lacotte’s Paquita, Rudolf Nureyev’s Casse-Noisette (The Nutcracker), Wayne McGregor’s Genus, Angelin Preljocaj’s powerful and bloody Medea, Mats Ek’s The House of Bernarda Alba, Sasha Waltz’ Romeo and Juliet, and Pina Bausch’s exquisite Orpheus and Eurydyce.

It is a joy and a rare privilege—and not just for balletomanes—to watch these artists perform at the highest level of their craft, all captured in sound and motion by an artist working at the highest level of his.

— Pamela Cohn