Having spent over a decade and a half mining cinematic nonfiction gems on the festival beat, only a handful of doc fests remain on my bucket list (Thessaloniki, I’m available). Which is why it was a bit of a thrill to finally be able to visit the Camden International Film Festival, an impressively content slop-free three-day event (September 17-20) in scenic Maine that takes place in an eclectic array of venues across Camden and neighboring Rockland, a 15-minute ride away. Fortunately for non-drivers like myself, the festival shuttle/school bus connecting the two towns ran frequently between the grand Camden Opera House, which also housed the Points North Forum, and the laidback YETI Lounge at the Yellow Barn in Rockland. (The Festival Hub at the Arctic Tern Sanctuary was also helpfully only a few minutes walk from the outdoor lifestyle brand-sponsored lounge, the spot to hit for free food, drinks and live music between screenings.)
Opening with Alessandra Sanguinetti’s Locarno-winning The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer and Luke Lorentzen’s Maine-set, Venice-premiering Boatbuilders — and closing with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s Venice and Telluride-premiering Everest: The Other Side — this year’s 22nd edition was pretty much packed with prestige. It likewise featured a lineup full of high profile darlings, including Barbara Kopple’s Union Town, Sam Pollard’s Tutu, Alex Gibney’s Musk, William and David Greaves’s Once Upon a Time in Harlem, and Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller’s ICE-invades-Minneapolis short They’re Here. (My trip even came with the added bonus of getting to chat with Poitras on the ride over from the Portland airport.)
And while many of those films lived up to the hype and then some (full disclosure: I’m not a fan of either Elon or Gibney so I skipped out on Musk), it was several smaller, less buzzy and more personal docs that proved most revelatory. Interestingly, two films from very different parts of the world not only tenderly captured fraught family dynamics, but even managed to transform the filmmaking process into an unexpected olive branch.
Grace Harper Brighouse’s Dependence, a world premiere that nabbed the top Harrell Award and is set to screen BFI London Film Festival next, is comprised of footage from the British director’s extensive filmic archive, including from a planned black comedy focused on her dad’s dying dog. Though that ultimately abandoned film, like Dependence itself, was really an excuse for Brighouse to reconnect with her estranged father Richard, a caring family man who was always physically present and did his best to provide for his wife and two kids. The camera is also the filmmaker’s tool to address the unspoken elephant in the room that caused Brighouse, and her brother to a lesser extent, to disconnect from Richard, and her mother to eventually file for divorce — his decades-long addiction to opioids.
Taking some rather shocking and incredibly painful twists and turns along the way, the doc unfolds like a mystery powered by a surprising amount of empathy, compassion and moments of joy. Like an emotional detective, Brighouse revisits old photos and videos, and interviews close relatives, including her godfather, to get at the root of Richard’s drug use and the family’s collective silence surrounding it. Unfortunately, like in life itself there are no easy answers, and high-functioning addiction often makes the situation all the more heartbreakingly frustrating for everyone involved. Salvation, however, can sometimes come in letting go of the need to understand, and in simply placing unconditional love in the center of the frame.
Vietnamese filmmaker Nhật Quang Nông’s Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava, which world-premiered at Visions du Réel and went on to play Hot Docs, is another artistic effort to extend grace to a problematic parent. In Nông’s case it’s his mother Cuc, who struggles with having both a gay filmmaker son and a mentally ill daughter. Nine years older than Nông, Ngoc Mai was bestowed the sweet childhood nickname “Baby Jackfruit” (even though she was the “defiant baby” to Nông’s “flamboyant baby”). As the due date for Ngoc Mai’s own child approaches, the Hanoi-based director decides to return to his rural village to try to restore family bonds. He also mines a trove of photos and diaries to create a cinematic gift to the nervously anticipated “Baby Guava.”
– Lauren Wissot
