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Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2018

My Lineup: The Issue of Mr. O’Dell/ Lovers of the Night; The Farm: Angola, USA;RBG; Owned: A Tale of Two Americas; 306 Hollywood; Three Identical Strangers; Las Nubes/Thy Kingdom Come; The Unafraid; Crime & Punishment.

There comes a time when even the great ones have to hang up their spikes, or—before that—take a day-off now and then.  My wife and I have always considered ourselves among the most avid moviegoers of all time, going to movies in such far-flung locales as New York City (where it could easily be a full-time occupation), Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Cambridge (home of the fabled Brattle Theater).  We’ve also attended every year of our local documentary film festival, and bought passes since the second year.

But last year we felt ourselves starting to falter (feeling such fury at one moronic movie that we skipped the next one and went off to our favorite bar), and this year, in one of those humbling moments that come as we age, we decided to get the 10 movie pass instead of the 15.  I believe there was a time when we actually had a 20 movie pass (unless my memory fails me, which is also quite likely at this age).  Anyway, our list is shorter this year.  We took the afternoons off to take long walks and attempt to clear our heads.

We also found a new category of movie to be grouchy about, in the same way that I created new categories last year.  It’s the Documentary Movie as Selfie, a situation in which the filmmakers make themselves characters in their own movie, and tirelessly show themselves in various intimate situations.  For a generation that seems interested in documenting their every moment, I suppose this makes sense; they can tweet about it and advertise it on their Facebook page.  But however many special effects the filmmaker uses, the movie seems just to reflect unbridled egotism.

I’ll just talk about my favorites, but there are a number.  This was a good year.

The Issue of Mr. O’Dell was one of those short films that feature a single talking head, but the head in this case was so interesting that I could have listened much longer.  Jack O’Dell was a Civil Rights Worker who worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and many other notables.  He was controversial (he had an “issue”) because he had at one time belonged to the Communist Party, but in his youth he felt that was the only organization that was facing the issue of race head on.  By the time he worked with Dr. King, the FBI was trailing him constantly, and President Kennedy demanded that King remove him from his post, even though he had long since quite the Party.  Now living in Vancouver (he grew up in Detroit, where he attended one of the best high schools in the country), O’Dell was 94 as this movie was made and remarkably articulate about race in America.  He’s lost none of his intelligence or his fire.

Lovers of the Night portrays a cluster of aging monks at a Cistercian monastery in Ireland.  The men are down to earth and engaging, speak matter of factly about the decisions that led them to confine themselves to a monastery, and to some form of silence, for the rest of their lives.  One older man is an avid rugby fan and still talks about his rugby playing days.  Another tells us that, when he told his father he was entering a monastery, the man turned back to his newspaper and said, “Go to hell any way you want.”

I wished sometimes that the filmmaker had been more probing with her questions.  And the one “younger” man—probably in his fifties—apparently didn’t want to participate at all, because he hardly spoke, though at one point we see him doing Tai Chi in his robes.  I loved what I saw of this ordinary men who became monks, only wished I could have heard about their reasons more in depth.  What will happen to the monastery as these men die off is anyone’s guess.  The world needs monasteries (and silence) now more than ever.

The Farm: Angola, USA was the most deeply affecting movie I saw; I sat with a knot in my stomach the whole time.  It is not a new film, was made in 1998 and actually showed at this festival around the time it was made, but the theme of the festival this year was Crime and Punishment and Joe Berlinger curated some movies from the past.

So the movie showed us a prison from the late nineties, but the place had the feel of a prison from the forties.  Angola is the largest prison in the country, and it houses inmates in all kinds of situations, from single cells for the Death Row inmates to dormitory style rooms for other men.  All men at the prison have jobs, from working in the fields raising crops to being d-jays on the prison radio station, and we hear from the warden the astonishing news that it costs $10,000 per day to feed the 5,000 inmates in the prison.  So they have to generate income.

As far as prison life went, the most successful men by far—this has been my experience in the little bit of prison work I’ve done—were those who accepted their situation and tried to build a new life for themselves, with no thought of getting out.  That’s easy to say, and fine for the men who committed horrific crimes, but two of the men we met insisted they hadn’t committed their crimes, and the overwhelming number of black men in the prison indicated that more was involved here than just crime and punishment.

The most infuriating scene was one where an inmate had discovered evidence that was not used in his trial—a report from a doctor that the two women who had supposedly been brutally raped were actually still virgins—but the parole board (which included one black man) didn’t even consider it.  We see him plead his case see them listen, then hear their perfunctory deliberations afterwards.  This movie wasn’t as technically adept as some others, but was by far the most powerful one I saw, also the most discouraging.  If it had a message, it would be: don’t be born black in Louisiana.

RBG was the perfect antidote.  A portrait of everyone’s favorite Supreme Court Justice, it shows her working out (the moment we were all waiting for), traces her long career, focuses on her marriage to a remarkable man who was also a gifted attorney but repeatedly put her career first, and speaks of her incredible work ethic, the long hours she spends in deep concentration, the little sleep she needs.  To this day she works at a pace that is astounding.

I didn’t know much about her long career as an attorney arguing feminist cases in front of the Supreme Court, her outspoken defense of abortion during her confirmation hearings (Orrin Hatch, of all people, admitted he didn’t agree with her but said he admired her), her long and apparently happy marriage, the fact that she has survived bouts of not only colo-rectal but also pancreatic cancer.  She was beautiful as a young woman and remains brilliant and articulate as an older one.  The only thing that made me cringe is the thought of her age and how long she needs to keep working to prevent Trump from appointing another judge.  She’s remarkable as a public figure and as a human being.

Owned: A Tale of Two Americas was probably my sentimental favorite of all the movies, from the time the filmmaker—a practicing architect and first time filmmaker—stood in front of the capacity crowd and admitted how wonderful it was for him, after all the years of work and all the difficulties he’d had—to be standing there in front of such an audience.  His subject was home ownership in America, the way that almost every President has talked about that as being a key goal of his administration, also the way blacks have been systematically shut out of the system (either by segregation or by being denied loans) and the way the dream of home ownership nearly brought the country down during the financial crisis of 2008.  That was the situation that compelled the filmmaker to begin in the first place.

My politically astute friends (including my wife) thought he tried to do too much, that he’d thrown everything into this film but the kitchen sink, and I can see their point in retrospect (everything from Levittown, which was segregated in the early days, to West Coast houses that are vastly overpriced, to neighborhoods in Baltimore that are full of ruined row houses).  I understand that he didn’t make one single argument, or a particularly coherent one.  But I learned a lot from this movie, and appreciated all the trouble the filmmaker had gone to, finding countless old TV clips and interviewing various fascinating characters (including an African American in Baltimore who is flipping houses, a former cop and meatball lover in Jersey who lived in the original Levittown).  He tried to do too much and could have made a tighter and more coherent movie.  But I loved it the whole time I was watching.

Three Identical Strangers was one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen at the festival.  Initially it seemed to be one of the great feel-good stories of all time: twins who had been adopted by separate parents were reunited because they both showed up at the same community college (and people kept coming up to one of them and calling him by the wrong name).  After that unlikely meeting, a third guy heard about the situation; it turned out they were triplets, and looked almost exactly alike.  They were Exhibit A in the nature vs. nurture argument; they looked alike, acted alike (on such television shows as Donahue); they even had the same taste in women and smoked the same cigarettes.  They were good-looking, curly haired, and totally winning.

But as the story went on, they gradually found out that they had been separated not by coincidence, but on purpose; someone was doing a study on the nature vs. nurture issue and split up the adopted triplets on purpose.  They had also split up various groups of twins—not informing the adopting parents that there was another child—and kept coming back to interview the children as they got older.  The adoption agency had been in on the scheme, and the resulting study—supposedly thousands of pages long—is sealed until 2066, and the filmmakers have no idea who conducted it.  The lives of the triplets also took some unfortunate turns as they grew older.  By the end the whole situation seemed bizarre, and utterly unresolved.

The final two movies we saw had a similar feeling of irresolution.  The Unafraid focused on three young DACA people, all of whom were about to graduate from high school in Georgia.  In that state, as in many others, they not only didn’t get in-state tuition for college, they had to pay international tuition at the five best institutions.  For the working class families that they belonged to, that created an almost insurmountable obstacle.  One guy managed to get a scholarship to Berea, the famous college in Kentucky; a young woman tried living with a relative in Washington state, only to find out there were similar obstacles there; a third guy kept working at his father’s garage and tried to put together a degree taking one course at a time, his family raising the money by selling food on the side.

These were not necessarily extraordinary individuals, just ordinary young people trying to make their way in the world.  What stood out was the way the current situation systematically handicaps them (at a hearing trying to change the Georgia tuition law, a lawmaker says that a 40 year old Muslim terrorist might try to take advantage of a new law (?); this was an issue of the war against terrorism!).  The bravery of these young people—coming forward and identifying themselves in order to protest the current policy—was both heartening and remarkable.  They act as The Unafraid, but are often fighting down real fears to do so.

Crime & Punishment is a film about the New York Police department.  For some years there has been a law in New York saying that there cannot be a quota system to stimulate arrests; nevertheless, there has been an unofficial system at work, with those who don’t make enough arrests facing demotion and dismissal.  The result is that cops often arrest people for bogus charges that are later dismissed, typically picking up minority guys for multiple minor offenses; some had had five or six arrests dismissed.  This was one more movie that showed the disadvantages that faced minority citizens.

Twelve police officers—mostly minorities themselves—stood up to this system.  They sued the police department for having its unofficial system and trying to force them to make arrests.  It was a Serpico type situation where these cops were shunned by their colleagues and persecuted by the superiors.  They nevertheless continued to pursue their lawsuit.  The film was beautifully made, and the filmmaker had remarkable access to one of the officers.  But the situation was unresolved as the film ended.

I didn’t try to pick movies by themes, but seem to have done so nevertheless.  The overwhelming message that came across for me was what a raw deal immigrants and people of color have in this country, and how difficult it is for them to improve their situation.  Nobody offered particular solutions.  But the way things were stacked against these groups seemed overwhelming.