popsublime: globedocs film festival

The two films selected for the opening nights of this year’s GlobeDocs film festival could not have been programmed any better by the festival’s director Lisa Viola, and it’s rare that a couple of documentaries could be paired as well as these two films were. The festival hosted the world premiere of Isara Krieger’s excellent exploration of educational equity and opportunity, The Highest Standard, which takes an in-depth look at the daily struggles and lofty aspirations of a diverse group of 8^th grade students at Beacon Academy here in Boston, all of whom are taking a year to prepare for applying to high-caliber, private preparatory high schools. The equally superb documentary American Symphony, in its New England premiere at the festival, covers a year or so in the life of the jazz/classical/R&B musician Jon Batiste, who was on the road to winning five Grammy Awards at the same time that his wife Suleika Jaouad was hospitalized to receive a bone marrow transplant and extensive treatments for cancer. The emotional wallop of watching both films back-to-back over two nights at Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline proved to be both intense and invigorating at once.

The Highest Standard is set mostly back in 2017 and focuses on three students in particular, Makai, Meleah, and Exavion, as they attend Beacon Academy day school and bounce between their school’s demands and support systems to their families’ ongoing tribulations and expectations. Given that their entire class of students is spirited and distinguished, I felt that these three individual students were well-selected by the filmmakers. Their stories complement each other and intertwine in deep and often surprising ways. We get glimpses early in the film of their “present day” statuses; Makai attended the post-screening Q&A and said that he was now ready to graduate as a Philosophy major at Tufts University (after having completed high school at St. George’s School in Rhode Island), for instance, while Meleah is an undecided major at Brown University and Exavion is attending a larger public university down south.

Meleah is an especially charming and lively subject throughout the film. She’s down-to-earth and honest about her reasons for being so interested in applying to attend Concord Academy back when she was finishing her middle school years. As someone who focuses on her academics and schoolwork (much to her father’s woe since he thinks it’s stressing her out too much), while still maintaining a social life and her offbeat sense of humor, she had a feeling that she would be teased or bullied if she had attended a public high school in Boston instead. It’s a special moment later in the documentary when her application to Concord Academy proves to be successful, and our glimpses into her life there as a resident assistant in her dorm later in the film are gratifying since we can see the maturity and sense of responsibility that she’s grown into, along with a clear upswing in her feeling of self-confidence, as well as her poise and direction.

Exavion (who goes by Zay once he starts high school) attended a private high school in New Hampshire, and he’s very open about the difficulties that he faced after the death of his grandmother, who champions his directions early in the film as the person who raised him as his guardian, due to his mother’s lengthy struggles with drug addiction. He’s also quite honest about the kinds of quietly racist attitudes that he encountered when he was attending high school in the countryside of New Hampshire, where he felt that white people on his campus were open to addressing racial issues but only in ways that suited or benefitted them. He emphasizes that really addressing the issues more openly at the school and dealing with the messy parts of what still makes something like race a mostly unaddressed issue at such a place needs to change now, so that the lives of all people on his high school’s campus could then be altered for the better.

Overall, however, all three students and their classmates at Beacon Academy are able to see how far they’ve come over time, and how much their lives were able to change in light of the many opportunities that were presented to them. We see them attending a museum field trip and analyzing paintings there side-by-side, and a whole world of ideas (in both the playful and serious senses of that phrase) just kind of opens up visibly for them right before our eyes on screen. Their teachers and administrators must also be commended for keeping them on a tight track to success since these particular students’ life circumstances often threw tremendous hurdles in their way. I was reminded a lot of the students whom I’ve advised and taught for nearly a decade now at UMass Boston, the vast majority of whom had graduated from Boston Public Schools and faced the same kinds of issues that students in The Highest Standard also faced themselves.

I can imagine that those students might also aspire to the sort of widespread success and acclaim that musician Jon Batiste has now experienced. He’s been nominated for fourteen Grammy Awards and won five statuettes, and he’s performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall to the nightly bandstand on Stephen Colbert’s popular television talk show. His music is a strong yet delicate and frequently astounding fusion of sounds, bridging his New Orleans jazz roots to the worlds of pop and soul (on stage, he’s the lovechild of James Brown, Little Richard, and Janelle Monae in a way), alongside a slice of contemporary classical compositions. The close-up look at his artistry in Matthew Heineman’s intensive documentary examination American Symphony is a very unique treat, one that digs beneath the surface of a true artist’s technique, in order to unearth the source of both his aesthetics and his humanity.

My favorite aspect of the documentary is just how real it gets at times. Batiste obviously gave very wide access to the cameras and Heineman’s crew. We have not only a front-row seat at his super-intimate wedding to his wife Suleika, but we also get to crawl right into bed beside him as he tosses and turns while speaking with his psychotherapist on the phone in their marathon remote therapy sessions. At one of his lowest points, he’s been awake for three days straight, deeply depressed about his wife’s physical condition in the midst of trying to prepare for his big Carnegie Hall show. Then right in the middle of that lifetime-highlight show, the electricity on stage goes out. To watch Batiste pause at his piano and plow right into the most incredible improvisational detour around that sudden and unexpected technological snafu is not only incredibly awe-inspiring, but it’s also a ground-level lesson about how we can face and overcome the most unanticipated types of adversity to transform them into being part of what drives our creativity.

I also enjoyed the more artful spins in Heineman’s film craft-wise, such as the framing that finds Batiste alone in natural settings. The movie opens in a freezing cold landscape of breath-clouds and marshes, which Batiste is traversing by himself with an instrument, an early potent metaphor for what he’ll be facing throughout the rest of the film. At the height of Suleika’s illness, we also see him wading out into the ocean when he’s at a stop on tour in Florida, wading out into the waves and crashing tides, again alone, to feel the force of nature push against him and sweep over his body. By the end of the documentary, I felt more respect for him as both a person and an artist than I’ve felt after watching any other documentary about a musical artist, perhaps, and that’s as someone who was mostly unfamiliar with Batiste’s music going into the documentary.

Batiste’s wife Suleika is nearly an equal focus in the movie, someone who’s not just there to cheer her husband on and bask in the Grammy-fueled glory of his musical adventures and successes, but also to closely collaborate with him as well, as a partner and as an artist herself. During her cancer treatments when her vision starts to blur, she turns from words and writing to paintings instead, creations that she shares with Batiste from her hospital bed, visual works from which he clearly draws inspiration and artistic fire when he’s working on his own musical compositions and interpretations. When Suleika is finally released from the hospital and is rolled along in her wheelchair, still in a very fragile state, down a hallway crowded with applauding hospital workers who let her cut a string draped across the exit doors to make her way back out into the world, it’s pretty much impossible for anybody watching the documentary not to be moved to tears.

After watching the opening night films in the festival, I was also glad to stay at the cinema and watch Pedro Almodóvar’s bold new short film Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, which screened with his previous short film The Human Voice, starring Tilda Swinton. (Both short films feature stunning costumes since Yves Saint Laurent’s house of fashion funded the making of these short films.) I loved how unabashedly gay Strange Way of Life is because I still find in 2023 that gay cinema gets shunted off to the side and under-watched, especially if open physicality between male actors is involved. Let’s just be totally honest: the straight world simply does not get it most of the time, even when they think they do. But Pedro Almodóvar does entirely get it, and he lets Hawke and Pascal do ample work as a closeted western sheriff and his long-ago boyfriend, respectively, who weather a reunion night in bed together and a hardcore shoot-out (yes, the kind with guns). The Human Voice, as much as I adore Tilda Swinton, cohered a little bit less for me, more verve and style than substance, with Swinton swooping around swanky interiors swinging a shiny hatchet in the tizzy of a fraught monologue (inspired by Jean Cocteau and microtheatre) and the aftermath of a lost lover. I did appreciate the interview with Almodóvar that’s included with these shorts, in which he admits that while his fellow film directors feel that their future is in episodic television, he’ll just stick to making short films instead. I think that’s because he’s an actual artist and not just a commercial one. I could listen to (or read) him talking about absolutely anything. He’s that intelligent, and that unashamedly gay; it’s never a boring time with Pedro Almodóvar, and neither are these two distinctive shorts, which feel to me like a culmination and a distillation of his whole body of cinematic work at once.

Monday, October 17, 2022

8th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 12th - 16th, 2022)

This year’s GlobeDocs Film Festival had me thinking in kind of opposite directions film by film. I think we’ve reached a tipping point in the culture where virtue signaling has begun to override worthwhile philosophical thought and artistry, though all of the documentaries that I watched in this year’s festival were well-made and enjoyable. What’s interesting is that documentaries are largely observational in their aims, and yet they’re also crafted, so we’re watching something that’s shaped to the political mindframe of the filmmakers, regardless of their intentions in terms of objectivity. As soon as one edits a piece of film, the narrative becomes creative and interpretive, which is where I’d like to see more rigor put back into place regarding how deeply a film is willing to dive into its own material to emerge with more demanding artifacts.

Ryan White’s Good Night Oppy is a good place to start since it was produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin brand and bears all of the classic feel-good trademarks of his own movies. The documentary traces the 15-year journey of the Mars rover Opportunity, a robot that was designed to last only 90 days but just kept rolling along in the red dust of another planet, taking photographs, sending and receiving communications, and being cute enough to garner a faithful following on social media. (At one point we see the robot taking a photo and telling itself not to be afraid because “that’s just your shadow”). I mean, it’s hard to resist a film that starts off with the robot wandering around its long expedition on Mars to the tune of The B-52’s song “Roam.” Like the great animated movie WALL•E, Good Night Oppy anthropomorphizes its central figure as it goes about its daily and nightly business, which is why it ends up moving people. And that’s all very strategic on the part of NASA.

While I don’t question the authenticity of their mission, my cynical side did begin to question a roomful of adults crying over a robot in the guise of teamwork. Try looking around at our current world and its actual problems. It’s an ongoing controversy whether NASA’s colossal expenditure of public money could be used to do something like feed people instead, especially in an inflation economy that’s now becoming unsustainable for most of us here on this planet. For me, this seems bound up with the fact that the general public can now be more easily moved by a robot than by other human beings, though maybe it’s just nice to be reminded what human compassion used to feel like, even if it’s only something people feel for a machine. The most important aspect of the documentary, potentially, is the way that it (somewhat tentatively) emphasizes how vastly alone human beings are in the universe, both individually and collectively. Yet while re-emphasizing that bleak reality, the film also tries to undercut it. Trust me, unless the zoo hypothesis is correct, we’re alone, and no social media campaign driven by public awareness of NASA’s rover missions on Mars (Perseverance is the next iteration of the robot after Opportunity conked out with the message, “My battery is low and my world is getting dark”) can really change that stark truth. Oppy’s final wake-up swan song, Billie Holiday’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” contains some irony perhaps in the sense of how little we really see ourselves and our predicament. The human race won’t be escaping to Mars anytime soon, kids.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras, traces the activist mission of celebrated photographer Nan Goldin to take down the Sackler family for their role in the half-million deaths caused by the opioid crisis in this country via the pharmaceutical company that Richard Sackler funded and ran (Purdue Pharma, developer of OxyContin). About 15 years ago, I met a gay couple at a party who’d been photographed by Goldin together in their bathtub long ago, a photo that ended up being included in Goldin’s famous 1986 artist’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The seemingly accidental quality of her photographic work has made it legendary and deeply influential to the generation of artists since then. She’s an excellent and reliable guide throughout Poitras’ film, and nobody in the audience won’t be pleased to see the Sackler family get its comeuppance when a judge requires them to be present to hear painful and harrowing personal testimonies (if only via Zoom) from parents who’ve lost their offspring to opioid overdoses.

Because the Sackler family also donated millions of dollars to museums worldwide to have wings named after them, Goldin and the activist organization PAIN staged demonstrations and “die-ins” at museums and art spaces in major international cities. Goldin would cancel art exhibitions to protest the Sackler family’s involvement at an institution, so her activism sought to get those institutions to refuse funding from the Sackler family, with the ultimate aim of having their name removed from institutions all over the planet. That footage is carefully interwoven by Poitras with Goldin’s memories of her sister’s tragic death from suicide, a death that she interrogates her own parents’ role in bringing about. By the end, the film becomes a skillful meditation on the secrets we keep, with Goldin’s powerful claim that “the wrong things are kept private in this society.”

While I have total admiration for Goldin’s artistic and activist work, as well as her argument that “survival was an art” throughout her early years as a photographer in places like Cambridge, Provincetown, and New York, I found it a little hypocritical that she’s pictured smoking cigarettes throughout the film, including in indoor spaces with the activists from PAIN surrounding her during their filmed conversations. Perhaps tobacco companies simply aren’t within the scope of Goldin’s activist concerns, though to be honest, those companies have knowingly murdered far more many millions of people than the company that developed and pushed OxyContin on the populace. This culture seems to view cigarette smoking and alcohol abuse as “self-medication” or “comfort addictions” that the rest of us are just supposed to accept as our friends and family members succumb to those addictions and often become seriously ill over time and die from them. Sorry, but that also needs to be fucking challenged in this culture and other societies around the world. I’m not willing to overlook it, and the younger activists working with Goldin should have taken her to task rather than just sitting there breathing in second-hand smoke because it’s supposedly cool.

Ondi Timoner’s Last Flight Home is about as intimate as documentaries come. The film invites viewers into the final days in the life of her father, Eli Timoner, who ran an airline called Air Florida. He’s feisty right up until the very end of his life, a life that he chooses to end due to the pain of paralysis and old age. While getting a professional massage after work one day forty years before, the massage therapist cracked his neck, resulting in an accidental stroke. His life was never the same again, but it’s clear from his extended family who surround him by his deathbed that he remained loving and lucid for the rest of his days. A series of very sweet Zoom calls with his former employees demonstrates their clear devotion to him, even many years after Eli Timoner’s Air Florida airline company had ceased to exist.

The director’s close eye on the proceedings, while refreshingly candid, feels perhaps a bit too close at times, and I think the documentary may have benefited from some editorial objectivity to help distance it from the familial insularity. Yet we do get to know the various characters in the family quite well, especially Ondi’s sister and brother, who respond in nuanced ways to their father’s process of dying; her sister is a rabbi who approaches things cautiously and philosophically, whereas her brother mentions that he never cries except maybe once during a Pixar movie. (We do see him break down by the end of the film.) Eli remains at the movie’s center, appropriately, airing his views about the world at the time of the filming (he really hated Donald Trump), but mostly just being a steady beacon of love and compassion for his family members. It’s definitely one of the sweetest and most layered portraits of a family, and one taken from the inside, that I’ve ever seen on film.

I have quite fond memories of the much-loved, Emmy-winning PBS children’s television show Reading Rainbow, hosted by LeVar Burton. Butterfly in the Sky, a documentary directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb, revived and deepened my interest in the show in a very moving way that I hadn’t really anticipated. We hear many interviews with the show’s creators, including the composer of its well-known and instantly recognizable synthesizer theme song (which was sung by Chaka Khan), who recreates the song in real time to demonstrate how exactly those nostalgic sounds were made. We also see the various “book review kids” all grown up and relishing their chance to relive their years as childhood public television stars. I was reminded, too, of the many celebrities who read books as part of the series: Angela Bassett, Matthew Broderick, Peter Falk, Whoopi Goldberg, James Earl Jones, and Regina King, among others. Even the early hip-hop trio Run-D.M.C. made an appearance rapping on the show to emphasize for kids the importance of reading. But my favorite moments in the documentary were the most surreal ones, like when we’re taken for the filming of one episode into a bat cave in Texas, the floor of which is covered in bat guano, in which carnivorous worms live, who devour to a tiny twist of skeletal bones any bat unlucky enough to fall down from the cave walls. The most powerful aspect of the documentary details just how many important themes Reading Rainbow touched upon, from slavery to gangs to incarceration to war to childbirth. Scenes from the episode about 9/11, with kids in a Manhattan school talking to LeVar Burton about finally being able to return to their school right near Ground Zero, moved me to tears.

LeVar himself was clearly an inheritor to Mister Fred Rogers, who’s featured in the film talking with LeVar at one point. Burton was also obviously a forerunner in highlighting race issues in relation to children’s lives, and he insisted on crafting his own image from season to season, despite pressure from the producers to keep his look consistent. LeVar recalls how, as a black man, he’d always been made to feel that something about his presence wasn’t right, so he rightly demanded his autonomy with his own self-image throughout the show. He also spoke eloquently at hearings on public broadcasting when the show had to fight for continued federal funding. By the time the show finally went off the air in 2006, there were no funders left, and no merchandise to sell to viewers as with a show like Sesame Street. As one commentator says of how adults now feel about LeVar Burton while thinking back to when we all watched Reading Rainbow as kids, “We knew he loved us.”

Another celebrity’s resurgence into public view is the focus of Kathlyn Horan’s documentary The Return of Tanya Tucker, a rousing look at the recent career revival of that particular country music legend, whose artistic trajectory got sidetracked as a result of an attempted shift from country to rock music. Fellow country musicians Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings enthusiastically helped to get Tucker’s superb 2019 comeback album While I’m Livin’ recorded and produced, winning Tucker her first two Grammy Awards in the process, both for the album itself and also for her gorgeous song “Bring My Flowers Now.” Carlile says that she knew from Day One in the recording studio that Tucker’s Grammy Award wins would be coming. That’s some very long overdue recognition for an artist who signed a $1.6 million recording contract way back at age 16.

Despite some initial industry skepticism about Tucker’s renaissance after her long-ago crash and burn due to drug abuse and temporarily hitting the skids, Carlile gently encourages Tucker about just how great the songs and her singing are as they’re recording them in the studio, comparing Tucker’s project to Johnny Cash’s famed American Recordings from late in his life. Tucker’s realness is what makes the movie. Throughout the documentary, she’s open and honest about her anxieties, saying that all she ever wanted was simply to be a singing entertainer. She certainly proves her masterful command at that particular skill during a live concert toward the end of the film, as well as proving the timelessness of her own songs. Tucker owes Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings a lot for plucking her out of a potential early retirement, and she clearly knows that. Tucker glows with appreciation for Brandi’s championing of her music, and Brandi glows with appreciation for having the opportunity to champion her musical hero.

Finally, Wildcat, directed by Melissa Lesh and Trevor Beck Frost, takes us deep into the Amazonian rainforests of Peru, where we meet a young British veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Harry Turner, who’s struggling from PTSD and volunteers to raise a wild ocelot named Khan at a sanctuary for wild animals. Having witnessed children dying in Afghanistan haunts Harry and pushes him into ongoing bouts of depression, which his caring for Khan helps to lift him out of, until Khan gets shot in his front leg by a stationary gun placed in the jungle by hunters, resulting in a tearful and excruciating burial scene. Harry’s colleague and girlfriend, Samantha Zwicker, who founded and later expands the wildlife sanctuary in the rainforest, tries to steer Harry through his spells of suicidal depression as best she can, though it’s a challenge for her since she had also grown up with an alcoholic father whom she loved very much in spite of his own regular harrowing spells of darkness and addiction.

Fortunately, Harry has another chance to raise a second young ocelot, this time one who’s named Keanu. As we watch heavily tattooed, baby-faced Harry frolic with Keanu and guide the ocelot through life in the jungle, it becomes clear just how calming it is for Harry to be with this small creature, and how much love he feels for the animal. “He’s saving me,” Harry says, “and I’m saving him.” And yet he continues to struggle with his PTSD-based depression, cutting himself on his forearm and wrists at his lowest points. “I’m in the most beautiful place in the world, and I can’t be fucking happy,” he laments painfully. Even though his relationship with Samantha doesn’t last, his work with Keanu at the animal rescue facility in Peru clearly prepared him to re-enter society by the time 18 months had passed and Keanu was ready to be released into the wild. Harry returns home to his family in England, and later heads overseas again to do more volunteer service with animals in Ecuador. He also goes a little overboard, perhaps, when getting dotted ocelot stripes tattooed right down the middle of his back, his tribute to the little animal that rescued him and brought him back to life.

Sunday, October 17, 2021

7th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 13th - 17th, 2021)

The return of the excellent GlobeDocs film festival here in Boston this past weekend found the Boston Globe’s annual documentary film festival in its seventh incarnation and its first “hybrid” year, with select films screening in person at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline and the Brattle in Harvard Square, as well as streaming virtually online, so that viewers could watch some additional films remotely at home. The three documentaries that I enjoyed most in this year’s festival are also the films that I’d most anticipated watching, and as always, the subject matter was rich and diverse: from tracing acclaimed pop singer/songwriter Alanis Morissette’s rise to stardom over 25 years ago in Jagged, to exploring the lives and works of celebrated LGBTQ comic book artists and graphic novelists in No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, to movingly recreating via animation the turbulent immigrant journey of a young gay man from Afghanistan in the brilliant Flee.

I’d been curious to watch Alison Klayman’s Jagged ever since Alanis Morissette publicly denounced the film last month and somewhat distanced herself from its depiction of her life from her teenage years to the present, saying that she wouldn’t be appearing at any film festivals or release events in support of the documentary. Alanis is candidly interviewed in her home for a good portion of the movie, and I can imagine that such in-depth interviews do probably get fairly tiresome over time, especially when trying to articulate one’s personal views on such long-ago memories. Then when they’re shaped into a filmmaker’s own narrative, re-sequenced, and subjected to editing, often what the interview subject intended to convey can come across quite differently. Morissette mentioned that being interviewed during the pandemic after the birth of her third child also made it more difficult to feel emotionally steady throughout the filming.

This is especially true when the topic of Alanis’ early relationship experiences with older men who were involved in her career arises. She’s already handled that sensitive subject expertly in the lyrics of her own songs, both in one of her first runaway hits, “You Oughta Know,” and what I consider to be the finest song in her catalog, “Hands Clean.” While she makes a point of saying that she chose never to be vindictive in those songs or to publicly shame anyone in particular, she also looks back and realizes how vulnerable she was when she was still just a teenager. Those songs were intended as a clear warning to younger and underage women about the kinds of predatory dangers that seem to be dressed up in the guise of some romantic pursuits, and in a way, Morissette was a boldly prophetic figure of the #MeToo movement long before it existed as such. In part, this was an aspect of her music that helped shape her appeal to her core audience.

Jagged focuses mostly, however, on the album release and extensive worldwide tour for Jagged Little Pill back in the mid-’90s, and how exactly she became associated with her co-writer and producer Glen Ballard while landing a record deal with Madonna’s Maverick “boutique” label. We see plenty of archival footage of Alanis and the guys in her touring band back in those days. If there’s an aspect of her life that the documentary left me wanting to learn more about, it was her relationships, but for the reasons mentioned above, it’s also obvious why she would now be working diligently to keep those kinds of details about her life strictly private. The film does cover some of Morissette’s family life in her early years growing up in Canada, now perhaps juxtaposed with the shots of a savvy businesswoman speedily handwriting her way through boxes of special-edition autographed vinyl copies of Jagged Little Pill at her home before they’re shipped off to fans. Despite that distancing, the film does close with a very sweet rendition of her recent song “Ablaze” while she’s holding her young daughter and performing the song remotely for Jimmy Fallon’s late-night talk show. I was hoping to see more about that side of Alanis.

For its very different approach to a pop cultural rise into mainstream visibility, I found Vivian Kleiman’s No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics both informative and entertaining. I’ve always paid only peripheral attention to comics as an artistic medium, so the documentary was more of a learning experience for me at times. The film provides a consummate overview of the history of how LGBTQ comics gradually transformed from an underground, anti-censorship driven phenomenon in the wake of the Stonewall Riots into a widespread communal artistic enterprise in the ’80s and ’90s, and finally to gaining mainstream recognition through the event of a cultural touchstone like Alison’s Bechdel’s Fun Home (and its ensuing, Tony Award-winning musical stage adapation) over the past fifteen years or so. A wide array of cartoonists and graphic novelists are interviewed, both from a roster of older, more established comic book artists and a diverse line-up of younger emerging “next generation” LGBTQ figures as well.

I was particularly interested in seeing some of the inner processes of drawing and reproduction that go into making graphic novels, which the interviews with Alison Bechdel detail in fairly intricate fashion, showing elements of her hand-drawn style in close-ups while she’s working. Another figure who’s central to the documentary and whose work was fairly new to me was Howard Cruse. The founder and editor of the Gay Comix anthologies in the early ’80s, as well as his own well-known gay comics creation Wendel, he’s referred to in the documentary as “the godfather of gay comics” and sadly died quite recently near the end of 2019, when the documentary was in the process of being completed. He seemed to be an ongoing fixture in the LGBTQ comic book community that many of his contemporaries and younger artists sought out for advice about the business. We also see some moving domestic scenes of him and his longtime partner hanging out together at home in their older years, alongside corresponding images from a comic book that he created about older gay people who are often left out of the cultural LGBTQ discussion.

I’d heard wonderful things about Flee, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary about his friend Amin Nawabi, who grew up in Kabul as a boy, immigrated with his family to Russia to escape war-torn Afghanistan, and then eventually settled as an asylum-seeker in Denmark. Winner of the Documentary Jury Prize for World Cinema at Sundance, the film certainly lived up to all of its advance notice. In addition to rendering the director’s own extensive present-day retrospective interviews with Amin in a calm animated palette of (mostly) soft pastels, the movie reimagines Amin’s own earliest memories from 1984, when he’s running through the streets of Kabul with his Walkman and listening to the band A-ha’s notorious New Wave classic “Take on Me” in his earphones as a young child, up through roughly 1995, when he finally successfully flees from Moscow to Copenhagen as a teenager after a halting series of attempts to immigrate, harrowing setbacks in dark forests and on stormy oceans, and the various struggles and re-connections with his family. During his adolescence as he’s watching Jean-Claude van Damme action movies on television alongside his older brother, Amin also gradually begins to realize that he’s gay while gazing at the images of the muscular actor. Amin’s sexual identity is an important aspect of the film that underscores and highlights all of Amin’s other qualities and perceptions: his shyness, his melancholy, and his attentiveness, as he starts to grasp his own sense of outsiderdom on numerous levels.

Even in the context of animation, the documentary retains its sweeping narrative scope, yet we come to know Amin most closely through the moments of his smallest but most significant encounters and reminiscences. For instance, late in the film when he secretly flees toward Copenhagen as a refugee, he’s being covertly transported and smuggled in a vehicle with another young man, who’s slightly older than Amin, as his only fellow passenger. The two are talking quietly while lying down side-by-side on the floor of the truckbed so as not to be seen, and the other nameless youth notices that Amin is entranced by his gold necklace, which he then sweetly and generously gives to Amin as a gift just before they part ways to their two separate destinations at the airport. Amin laments that he never even found out the name of the other young man since Amin’s memory of him had such a profound and lasting effect on his life. Amin eventually goes to university, does post-doctoral work at Princeton, speaks at conferences about his experiences, and marries his husband Kasper in Denmark to settle down together in the countryside, when the animation on the screen briefly shifts to an actual shot of the trees and waterfront where they live. In the opening voiceover of the documentary, Amin equates home with safety, and it’s clear by the end of the film that he’s finally found both.

Monday, October 12, 2020

6th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 1st - 12th, 2020)

This year’s GlobeDocs film festival, which also happened to be the festival’s biggest year so far with over 35 films, was my first time attending a film festival virtually. While I did miss the event of attending screenings in person, there’s something to be said for being able to concentrate on documentaries while watching them alone at home, especially when writing reviews of a number of films after watching them for several days in a row. This year’s excellent roster of selections was no less powerful for being viewed remotely, and the Q&A sessions between Boston Globe correspondents and filmmakers, both live-streamed and pre-recorded, were wonderful supplements to the films themselves. The documentaries that I saw ranged widely in topics from indigenous rights and the global climate crisis to the first gay rugby league, from school shootings and gun control to the inner workings of a city hall in a major metropolis.

National Geographic’s documentary The Last Ice, directed by Scott Ressler, focuses on a remote but crucial geopolitical area in terms of climate change and globalization: the far northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, an Arctic archipelago that’s still inhabited today by the native Inuit people. Bordering on Greenland across Baffin Bay, Nunavut is a contentious zone for several reasons. As Arctic sea ice continues to recede, its shipping lanes provide quicker and more direct access to North American trade routes, with over 900 industries currently vying for position, mostly from Russia and China, polluting the pristine channels of the North Pole in the wake of massive icebreaking vessels and cargo ships. Not only does the Arctic wildlife suffer as a result, but the native Inuit people, who often make their living by hunting, have also found themselves at the center of a historical struggle for their rights in their homeland, led by Aboriginal Canadian politician John Amagoalik, who’s often referred to as the “Father of Nunavut.”

Two younger subjects ground the documentary firmly in today’s contemporary realities as well and speak to a current audience among the newer generation. Aleqatsiaq Peary, a musician and hunter, is a descendant of Robert Peary, who’s believed to be the first person to reach the North Pole early in the 20th century. Aleq describes his time growing up on the remote terrain of Nunavut, as well as his unfulfilling education in Denmark, from which he returned in order to resume his hunting life, only to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease a few years later. Despite his disability, he continues to support the ancestral connection of the Inuit to the land and the ritual of hunting. Maatalii Okalik, who lived for a time in Ottawa and also returned to Nunavut after ending an abusive relationship, movingly and eloquently recounts how dreams of her ancestors guided her through a month-long depression that convinced her to reconnect with her native people in her home territory, where she served as President of Canada’s National Inuit Youth Council. The documentary ends on a note of both uncertainty and hope, in looking toward a future where indigenous people persist in trying to retain political control over their own lands.

First-time documentary director Eammon Ashton-Atkinson’s Steelers celebrates the world’s first gay rugby club, the Kings Cross Steelers, founded in London in 1995, as they pursue a victory at the annual Bingham Cup world tournament of gay rugby in Amsterdam nearly 25 years later in 2018. Under the expert and careful guidance of their female coach, Nic Evans, herself a lesbian rugby player, the team meets its many challenges head-on, giving its team members both a sense of community and a way to bond with other gay men while overcoming individual obstacles. The director was also a member of the Kings Cross Steelers until an injury sidelined him and compelled him to pick up his video camera to make this rousing documentary.

The film concentrates mainly on the journeys of four members of the team: director Ashton-Atkinson, coach Evans (whose final season with the team coincided with the making of the documentary), Simon Jones, who struggled through a lengthy depression after he came out to a straight friend he’d been in love with who’d initially rejected him, and Drew McDowell, a club promoter and drag queen on the side. A fun stretch of the documentary finds Drew organizing and hosting an annual drag event at the huge gay club Heaven in Charing Cross in central London, for which most of the Steelers appear in drag themselves for a competition and to do some fundraising. An especially touching aspect of the documentary moves Nic Evans to tears when she describes the hesitancy of many gay rugby players who are successful and confident in so many other areas of their lives but have a harder time feeling at home as gay men on the rugby pitch, and how she pushes them to overcome that sense of inadequacy in athletic arenas.

Us Kids, directed by Kim A. Snyder, powerfully traces the months following the school shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14th, 2018. It’s impossible to watch this documentary and not feel tremendous admiration for the young people who rallied together to pull their community through the grieving process and then demanded immediate change from our government on a nationwide scale, culminating in the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., and a cross-country tour to turn the tide in municipalities where gun violence is in desperate need of being brought under control. Familiar faces like Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, and Sam Fuentes are matched by their own uncompromising personalities as they spearhead demonstrations and debates across a wide swath of our deeply divided (and increasingly divisive) United States of America.

These brave students’ forthright honesty about the traumas that they’ve endured and the deep authenticity of their activism easily dispel any notions that they were lured into being political symbols by national media outlets. Their aims and tactics are specific, as are the desired results. The heartbreaking footage of students’ speeches from the March for Our Lives events unleashes a torrent of sorrow and frustration at the tragic failure of adults in our culture to protect young people’s lives in their own schools and communities. We see David Hogg intelligently strategizing how to build the itinerary for their cross-country tour, in order to visit locations where they can persuade citizens to vote out of office any politicians who’ve taken campaign funding from the National Rifle Association. Very much to the credit of these determined kids, their strategy succeeds almost uniformly, proof that politicians should totally fear the blue wave of the younger generation. After the exhaustions of their travels to places all around the country, I’ll remember the peaceful image of David and Emma coasting on an airboat in the Everglades, the one landscape on the map of Florida that’s undisturbed by shootings and gun violence.

Finally, I was excited to see Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary City Hall, an inside view of government services provided in the city of Boston, where I’ve lived for over 27 years now. Clocking in at just over four and a half hours, the film provides a comprehensive picture, to say the least, especially in its heroic portrait of our current mayor, Marty Walsh, who’s successfully led the city on all levels since 2013. The son of working-class Irish-American immigrants, Mayor Walsh is seen championing all the right causes in all the right ways, promoting a truly diverse and cutting-edge city, despite its somewhat provincial remove from more sprawling metropolises such as New York. We also see many other moving parts in close-up detail: hearings on parking tickets, exchanges of same-sex marriage vows, public testimonials from veterans on Veterans Day, planning for Red Sox World Series victory parades, stocking up the city’s food pantries for Thanksgiving, and a multitude of other complexities that comprise what makes a city’s daily urban life happen.

This is the latest installment in Frederick Wiseman’s series of documentaries about various institutions, which has also included films about the New York Public Library, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the University of California at Berkeley. As noted in his live-streamed Q&A about City Hall with Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, Wiseman resists being called simply an observational filmmaker. Despite the 110 hours of footage that he filmed for City Hall, Wiseman argues that what makes his movies more active than merely observational is his rigorous editing process, whereby he structures the ideas about his subject and determines not just what the film is about, but what the film itself even is. He claims that’s not something he’s aware of at all until he arrives at that stage of the filmmaking process. Similar to his tone in his Norton Lectures at Harvard University back in 2018, Wiseman’s responses to questions are often hilariously matter-of-fact. The stately footage of Boston’s cityscape alone in City Hall shows him to be an artist of the highest order, but it’s the immersive, even meditative structure of his documentaries that demonstrates why his films are finely tuned constructions built by a masterful architect as well.

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Wednesday, November 1, 2023

9th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 25th - 29th, 2023)