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PRE-SEASON SPECIAL - Thurs, June 2
BOBBY FISCHER AGAINST THE WORLD (2011)
Oscar nominated dir Liz Garbus explores the enigma of the chess master from Brooklyn.
Q&A w/ dir Liz Garbus

OPENING NIGHT - Tues. June 7
SENNA (2010)
Sundance audience prize winner looks at dramatic life of Brazilian Formula One race car driver Ayrton Senna.
Q&A TBD

Tues. June 14
BRICK CITY (2011)
Set in Newark, NJ, like a real life version of The Wire. Filmmakers will screen 2 episodes of the acclaimed series and discuss its making.
Q&A w/ Marc Levin & Mark Benjamin

Tues. June 21
BACK TO LIFE (VUELVE A LA VIDA) (2010)
Set in Acapulco, romance blossoms between Mexican scuba instructor and New York model; plus a shark hunt.
Q&A w/ dir Carlos Hagerman

Tues. June 28
THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH (2011)
St Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe housing projects started as model of progress and ended as failure. What went wrong?
Q&A w/ dir Chad Freidrichs

THURS. NIGHT SPECIAL - Thurs. June 30
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (2011)
Tracing the American Jewish debate over Israel, this doc sensitively explores politics, censorship and history.
Q&A w/ dirs Alan Snitow & Deborah Kaufman

Tues. July 5
MISSION TO MALAY (1964)
Rarely seen cinema verite gem from Drew Associates.  Pioneering woman director Hope Ryden follows Peace Corps nurse on island adventure.
Q&A w/ dir Hope Ryden

THURS. NIGHT SPECIAL - Thurs. July 7
YOU’VE BEEN TRUMPED (2011)
Donald Trump meets resistance in small town Scotland when he sets out to build a golf resort on environmentally sensitive coastland.
Q&A w/ dir Anthony Baxter

Tues. July 12
16 IN WEBSTER GROVES +WEBSTER GROVES REVISITED (1966)
Co-presented with Paley Center, two classic CBS documentaries by the late Arthur Barron examine teenagers in 1960s middle America.
Q&A w/ Ron Simon, Paley Center curator

Tues. July 19
STEVIE (2003)
Brilliant, overlooked personal doc by director of Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters, examines his mentoring relationship to a troubled youth.
Q&A w/ dir Steve James

Tues. July 26
BETTER THIS WORLD (2011)
Two young men are arrested for domestic terrorism at 2008 Republican convention. What’s the real story?
Q&A w/ dirs Kelly Duane & Katie Galloway

Tues. Aug 2
SOUL POWER (2008)
Chronicling the Zaire ‘74 concert with James Brown, Miriam Makeba, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, and others from the team behind When We Were Kings.
Q&A w/ dir Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte

CLOSING NIGHT - Tues. Aug 9
TBA

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Stranger Than Fiction: The film starts out idyllic and it takes a turn in a different direction. How did that affect the filming?

Susan Kaplan: I never imagined that I would be filming for eight years, that was never my intention. We were finished with a version of it before the breakup. We were onlining it, and I get a call that the relationship ended. I just had to make the decision to go back out and film, I didn’t want to send a film that was not true into the world. With documentary films, you have to follow, you have to tell the whole story, at least as best you can. So I hung in for three years. They were so devastated that I wanted to end on a more hopeful note.

STF: Did they ever say please don’t film any more?

Kaplan: Just Steven did. Steven agreed to the filming after the breakup, but after a while said, you know what? I’m done, I don’t want to film anymore. So that’s why Steven is a little limited in terms of his growth. We had one really long interview with him and spent a couple of days with him, and then he said he was finished. A do have to say that each one of them had seen the film in a rough cut form, and given it their approval. I would never have sent the film out to the world without their approval.

STF: Did all of them come to the premiere? And what was that like?

Kaplan: We premiered in Toronto, and [the Toronto International Film Festival] sends out screeners to all the press. Samantha is from Toronto, and as you know from the film, her immediate family knew of the relationship, but no one else knew—none of her relatives, her parents friends. It got into the Toronto Film Festival, and our first screening was in a 1,000-seat cinema. It was early in the festival, and before we got there a review came out with their picture on the front page of the Toronto newspaper, with a great review but telling their whole story. I told Samantha that she really should show her family this movie. She said no, I really want them to see it in the theater with a thousand people. Her father was furious that he was outed in such a public way. He wasn’t going to come, in fact he was going to sue us for exposing something he felt was very private. I really was nervous about going to Toronto. Samantha didn’t know if her parents were going to show up, and they did. So much healing went on at that screening because at the end of the movie her parents applauded, and gave us all big hugs and said, I finally understand my daughter. He invited us to a big Indian brunch at his house, and it was very healing for everybody involved.

STF: Did the healing extend to Steven?

Kaplan: Yeah, Steven was there. He wasn’t at the brunch. It was very stressful to have all three of them up on the stage for the Q&A, but they handled themselves well.

Audience: What happened with Sam’s father?

STF: I’ve been in touch, but I haven’t seen the two guys in a few years. Apparently last summer Sam’s father was let out of prison. He’s a very complicated man, but charming in his way. He had cancer and was dying, and he moved in with Sam’s sister in Atlanta. Apparently the Cagnina family had a living funeral, and Sam’s father was part of the funeral. He has passed away, and Sam expressed to me that he had come to peace with his father, and was really happy that his father had gotten to see his kids.

Audience: How did you come to meet the subjects?

Kaplan: If you notice, Miami Beach plays a role in that. I knew Sam when I was a very little girl in elementary school, and Sam was a very charismatic young boy. We would do community theater together. All the kids would follow Sam around. Steven and I were in the same class together, so I knew Steven in high school, and then lost touch with them. I then met this women who was a diversity trainer at a conference in New York. She said, I’m going out with some friends tonight, would you like to join me? She said they were from Miami Beach and that Steven and Sam were married to this woman Samantha. I said, what? I had no idea Steven and Sam had gotten together, let alone that they had this woman in their lives. I said, absolutely, and spent an evening with them. They had been together for about eight years at the time, and I said to them, if you are ever to bring children into this relationship I would love to tell that story. Initially feeling that I would love to tell a story that challenged people’s idea of what family is, because it rocked my world when I met them.

Audience: How do you view the film now, and does criticism of the film affect your other projects?

Kaplan: I probably made a lot of mistakes in making this film, but you follow your intuition and your sense of story. It’s a collaborative effort, I work with really talented people who I would bounce ideas off all the time. Each film is very different, there are lessons to be learned, but they’re more global than specific. Sometimes they’re specific, like I would never shoot in film again. I shot the first part of the film in film, and then the last three years on video. When I watch the story, I get very emotional because it was eight years of my life, and I’m sure everyone who worked on the film probably has that feeling of taking this journey with them.

Audience: Did you or the subjects connect with other polyamorous people?

Kaplan: I naively did not know that these communities existed until the film came out, and then I was like, wow. This film was speaking to whole communities of people who were living in multiple-partner relationships. I wasn’t really focused on that part of it, it was more of an intimate story for me. I don’t even know if they knew about it.

Audience: What was going to happen if the subjects didn’t give their approval for the film?

Kaplan: We always said that if there was something that misrepresented them completely, where we were saying something that wasn’t truthful, that we would change it. Otherwise we wouldn’t change it. Perhaps now, if they were to watch this film—they’re not here tonight. They don’t want to take the journey. This is a period of their life that they don’t want to relive right now.

STF: What’s happening in their lives right now?

Kaplan: It’s very similar to what’s in the film. Sam and Samantha stayed together raising their two children. Steven was a very involved father, and has a very developed relationship with Sienna from what I understand. I think Sienna is 13 or 14 years old, Summit is 10. They’re pretty happy kids. I think just recently Sam and Samantha have moved on, they’re not living together. Sam, I’m almost certain has just recently moved out because he’s fallen in love and has been in a relationship for three years now. It was just time for Sam to move out, the kids are older now. It’s a complicated relationship for their children, therapy I’m sure is in their future. They came from a home of real love, and they were thriving happy kids.

Audience: So much of this film is the subjects discovering themselves. Were you seeing that during the filming, perhaps signs from Steven that he needed space? Were you seeing the tension?

Kaplan: When I see it now, I see it in the film. You almost have to see it a couple of times, it’s very subtle. I think we had questions along the way, we asked really tough questions. I think now how I refer to this film is as a coming of age story. Once all three of them made the decision to go into therapy and really find who they were, that’s when their relationship couldn’t hold up anymore. I wasn’t filming for the period where things really fell apart. It’s sort of there.

Audience: What was the timeline of shooting for the film?

Kaplan: It started in the summer of 1996, and it debuted in Toronto in 2004.

Audience: The subjects seemed very natural, it never felt like they were putting on performances for the camera.

Kaplan: I spent a lot of time with them without cameras to know if I was getting the truth—as much as they were willing to share with me with cameras. I would say that’s really who they were back when they were in their relationship.

Audience: What are you working on now?

Kaplan: I’ve been working for four years on a documentary about the oldest nuclear power plant in the country called Oyster Creek, which is the same model as the Fukushima plant in Japan. I followed the relicensing, and a group of mothers and grandmothers fighting the relicensing and, ultimately, fighting to shut it down. I’m almost finished shooting and have started editing. I looked at those credits and was thinking, it takes an army to make a film.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.]

Stranger Than Fiction: What brought you to the film, the subject, the community?

Anne Makepeace: Back in 2006 I was hired by The American Experience series at WGBH to produce part one of a five-part series about Native Americans called We Shall Remain. Part one was basically about the Wampanoag and the Puritans. It was a historical series, my part started in 1620 and went to 1675. I worked on that project for about a year, I’ve done a lot of work with Native communities and I’m very much aware that it’s all about trust, building relationships with people. It was during that project that I got to know Jesse, Linda, Tobias—most of the Wampanoag people who are in the film. As soon as I met Jesse I was completely blown away by her and the whole story of the language coming back. I did all the interviews for part one, I interviewed Jesse for that. But that series was not a contemporary story, it was historical, so there wasn’t any way to include the resurrection of the language. After working on that for about a year, American Experience and I parted ways in a not very pleasant way. Shortly after that ended I realized, what’s the story I really want to tell here. So many films about Native Americans end with death and disaster. And a lot of the story of what happened with native people in this country does have terrible, tragic endings, but here was a story about rebirth, resurrection, native people’s taking their destiny in their own hands, connecting the past, building the future. In April 2007 I started raising funds—well, first of all convincing Jesse and other people in the language program to trust me to make a film about that.

STF: Was it hard in the beginning gaining their trust, shooting with the camera in these very intimate moments within their community? How did you go about doing that?

Makepeace: The Wampanoag like many native communities have real reasons to distrust people coming in from outside. Over that year that we worked on We Shall Remain I forged really strong bonds with people. We had forged this strong bond with them, but getting permission to make a film about the language was a whole other thing. The language committee had a policy that they would never sell anything with their language, it could never be used in anything that could be sold. They did not want any people outside the Wampanoag community to learn their language until they became fluent in it. So it was a very sensitive thing to get permission to do. There was a meeting I had with the language committee in October of 2007 where I explained what I wanted to do. Jason Baird, Jesse’s husband, spoke for about 10 minutes in which this was perhaps the moment to trust people to represent them. It was an eloquent statement of support for the film and then they gave us unanimous support. But the project wasn’t easy, Jesse from day one said, this film cannot be about me. That’s another part about native culture, it’s about the community. It’s not about the individuals. That was a struggle throughout the film. I said, I can’t tell the story of the language coming back without telling your story. And she would say, it’s not about me. There was a point at which Jesse said, you have enough, and I didn’t think I did, but I somehow made it work.

STF: Did you involve them in the editing process at all, or show them early cuts?

Makepeace: I did show them a rough cut, and Jesse happened not to be there, so she never saw anything until it was finished, really.

STF: Did she like it?

Makepeace: Yes, thank God. She really likes it. In fact, just last Saturday she and I participated in a Q&A at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, and that was the first time she and I had been together in two years. Mae also came and participated, that was really great.

Audience: Where is the music from?

Makepeace: Joel Goodman, fabulous composer, did the music. It was a challenge because he lives in L.A. now. He did the music for a film I did in 2003 about Robert Capa for American Masters. That’s when we first worked together. Then he did another film for me after he moved to L.A. called Rain in a Dry Land. He’s fantastic to work with. My direction to him was that I would like it to have a native flavor—I said no flute, actually, because every Native American film has flute. He actually convinced me there could be flute, so there is a little flute. The process was, we talked it through, he came up with some sketches. He sort of misunderstood what I wanted initially, he really worked at several drafts. I love it, I think he did a great job.

Audience: Do the Wampanoag have their own writing?

Makepeace: They became literate in the 17th century through the instruction of missionaries who taught them to write phonetically with the English alphabet. You were looking at documents written phonetically in Wampanoag by Wampanoag. There are hundreds of them, that’s what Jesse discovered. Deeds, petitions, letters written in Wampanoag all over New England.

Audience: Now that some of them presumably are fluent, will they sell books or other things using the language?

Makepeace: Not yet. There are maybe five people who are fluent. The great news is that Jesse and the other people in the film struggled for 15 years with no funding. But just last fall Jesse got a MacArthur genius award, so that’s a big infusion of cash. I think she insulated her house, but otherwise it’s going into the language program. At the same time they got a big grant from the National Science Foundation. So what they’re doing with that is to found an apprentice program. So she now has three full-time, paid apprentices just learning the language so they can be fluent enough to start an immersion kindergarten. They have a long way to go, they’re hoping to start the school in 2015. I’m selling DVDs, I am sharing [profits] to some extent with the language program. This is an exception, and there are probably others, but I don’t think they’re going to start producing things to be sold, they want to get illustrators to help them make books that can be used in their immersion program, but I doubt they’ll let them out for another decade.

Audience: Do the Wampanoag have a political status, is it a sovereign nation?

Makepeace: The Wampanoag nation consists of different communities, and different communities have different status. The Mashpee Wampanoag just got federal recognition in 2007, after I’d started working on this project. There are other communities in different parts of Massachusetts with varying levels of recognition from the federal and state governments.

Audience: There was a creation myth in the film, is there much mythology left in the culture?

Makepeace: Not a lot. I haven’t heard of other legends and myths found in the documents. There are some in Martha’s Vineyard about how the islands were formed, so there are some. Not a huge amount, we’re talking about 400 years of contact, so it’s not just the language that disappeared, it was a lot of culture. There are no records of songs that were sung then.

STF: One of the things that moved me was the concept that the language is so much more than the words. Just through their relationship with language, they’re able to understand their relationship with astronomy 400 years ago. That’s incredible.

Makepeace: There are a lot of examples I tried to get into the film of discoveries made in discovering the language. Jesse told me that when John Elliott the missionary had Wampanoag people translating the Bible, there were a lot of concepts they didn’t have in their culture, like sin, hell. She told me the way they translated hell, it literally means the house of people with empty heads. She understands that to mean that because the Wampanoag people believe the soul resides in the head, what could be worse than a house full of soulless people. I got in as much as I could.

Audience: Are there scholars that dispute her recreation of the language?

Makepeace: I’ve shown this film to a lot of linguists, and no one has questioned it. She’s working with Noam Chomsky and Norman Richards—well, I guess there are a lot of people who question Noam Chomsky’s theories, but I haven’t heard that. The film’s going to be shown at the Linguistic Society of America’s summer institute, so we’ll see, maybe some people will write to me there, complaining.

Audience: How’s Jesse’s daughter’s development with the language?

Makepeace: She’s completely fluent, but she’s going to school in English now, she watches tv. Her parents still speak to her almost only in Wampanoag. But even filming her it was hard to get her to speak Wampanoag because she knew I didn’t speak Wampanoag. It’s what I call the Heisenberg principle of documentary, just my presence changes what happens. Will she keep speaking it? I hope the immersion school is founded soon enough so that she can be in a community where Wampanoag is spoken all the time. But even Mae could lose it. We’ll see.

Audience: The documents in the beginning, were they already translated?

Makepeace: There’s a book called Native Writings in Massachusett in which linguists, about 15 years ago—Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon—compiled all the Wampanoag documents they found, and did rough translations. But extracting from the Eliot Bible has enabled them to do finer translation of those documents and other ones that have come to light.

Audience: What happened to the children who were taken away to settle debts?

Makepeace: The indenture of children was rampant in 17th and 18th century New England, there’s a statistic that is in one of the documents that in 1712, 75% of native children were living in English homes. Native people would be gotten into debt, often through I think nefarious means, and as Tobias says, the choice is that the parent goes into indenture, or the child is indentured. I think the Puritans thought they were doing these guys a favor by Christianizing them and teaching them English, but the result was that they were taken away from their culture.

Audience: I loved the animation, is that something you had in mind from the beginning?

Makepeace: No, I have never used animation in a film before, and didn’t know how to make it work. But I saw Ruth Lingford’s animation in a wonderful film called Secrecy. I loved what she did because it was dark and beautiful and emotional. I had in mind that I would do super 8 or 16mm abstract dreamlike recreations to represent 17th and 18th century history, because it’s pre-photography. But I couldn’t get enough funding to do that, and I met Ruth when I had a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute to work on this film, and slowly convinced her to do this animation. It saved quite a bit of money, and it’s much better than I could have done the way I originally conceived it. I think a key to making it work is using it right up front, so the audience is not shocked when it happens, and keeping it fairly minimist.

Audience: Were you as a New Englander taught about Native Americans growing up?

Makepeace: No, I never heard of the Wampanoag. I did spend a little bit of time on Martha’s Vineyard as a teenager, so I knew there were Indians there. I was taught what most kids are taught about Thanksgiving. Indians in New England was never taught when I was a kid. This is kind of the other Thanksgiving story. I hope that every person sees it so they realize native people are among us. I think out West there’s more awareness. Very few non-Indian people in the Northeast know that the native people are still with us, still here.

[Photo below courtesy of CulturalSurvival.org]

Stranger Than Fiction: Ian, can you talk about how you met Garrett, and the evolution of this project?

Ian Olds: First, it’s really wild to see a bunch of people I haven’t seen for years, and hearing Garrett’s voice and seeing him those shots of him in that yellow shirt—that’s something. So, Garrett was really stuck with this film, and I was sort of an editor, although I hadn’t really edited anything. I was trying to make my own films and was stuck, and was doing corporate video to make a living. One of my roommates was an editor and Garrett came and left a big stack of papers on the kitchen table, which was essentially a manuscript of a version of the film, and was looking for an editor. So I read this manuscript and it was really strange and really moving in its way. It wasn’t structured in this way, but had many of the same elements. We just worked together out of mutual desperation. He was kind of stuck and didn’t have any technical skill. I had the technical skill as an editor so we just worked together to try to figure out how to put this thing together. He had done so many interviews, so we just waded through this footage for weeks and weeks and had a paper outline that we sent back and forth. We slowly learned a language together. It was through long conversations and playing around with footage that I started to understand what he was saying, and we, together, learned a film vocabulary that in some ways was the beginning of work I did in the future and the work that he and I did together. It was a very confused but wonderful period. The first cut of the film is essentially the finished film, which is a way that I’ve edited all of my films, sort of by accident. We just did a minute or two a day, and then looked at it at the end and said, holy shit, this is a movie. Or there’s something here. There were changes, but…

STF: One of the things Garrett did once you had this film was he sent it to Jem Cohen for feedback. Jem, I’d like to hear what you made of this package that came out of nowhere.

Jem Cohen: First I should tell the whole story of how it got to me. I got a cold call one night, I was at home in Brooklyn, from a guy I’d never heard of, Garrett. To be honest, the phone rings and this guy says, you don’t know me but I’m a filmmaker struggling with this project. My recollection, actually, is that he was getting negative feedback, I think from a professor. So he says, I’ve seen some of your work and I know you don’t know me, but I wondered if you’d look at this thing. To be honest, I remember saying, man, how did you get my number? And he said, the Internet. This was back in the early days when I didn’t really realize that people could do that. I was surprised, I basically hesitated and gave him a little bit of a hard time. I said, what’s it about, and he told me. And I said, actually, that sounds really interesting. So what the hell, send it along. He was obviously very conflicted, and kind of stuck. And he wanted to know what was wrong with the film. So I sat down and put it in. I had a pad on my knee to take copious notes, and the movie ended and I had no notes. I called him back and was like, I think this is great, I don’t think you’ve got a problem here. I was mesmerized. That’s how I came upon the film, and then I did try to kind of push it a little bit. The culmination of that was that I sent it to Chris Marker, whom I greatly revered. Marker got back to me and said he thought it was one of the most interesting things he’d seen about America. He said that he thought it was a masterpiece. At first I was sort of hesitant, I was like, don’t let it swell your head. Sometimes people are just on the right track.

STF: There’s a story about this film that I really love, which is how Garrett came across that footage of the TV newsman going back to the mine.

Olds: That was amazing because we had done much of the film, but that section, we knew we didn’t have enough stuff of the gold mine. Garrett had heard about this footage for years, I think. But no one had it, the TV station didn’t have it, the archives didn’t have it. We were editing and he came back from a trip to San Diego, and he said, hey man, I met this guy on the beach and he said he had the footage. So I gave him $125 and it should be coming soon. And I was like, are you serious? And two weeks later a VHS tape showed up that had that footage on it. The guy recorded news regularly and had that footage. He had had so many bad breaks, Garrett, and no one had supported the film early on, so this was one of those amazing moments where you’re like, holy smokes, something’s gone right.

STF: So if you’re looking for footage you can go to the National Archives, or you can go to the San Diego beach.

Audience: I couldn’t help but keep thinking about Occupation Dreamland. This is like the inversion of that movie.

Olds: There’s an overarching theme of all of Garrett’s stuff, or in his thinking beyond all of the films he made, which is often about labor and about the idea of people caught up in webs of history that they could not see. There’s connections that exist that people are in the middle of, and are experiencing and affected by, but cannot themselves see. When the Iraq War happened and we went there, there was a feeling that there was some crossover of this working class community involved in a job and a labor of occupation. Let’s examine [the war] with a similar sensibility, although more verite and less of an essay. But certainly the same sensibility that you recognize is there. I haven’t seen this in a while too, and it hit me about that when I was watching.

STF: Something that strikes me about this film and Occupation Dreamland is that in a way they were works of self-appointed people. No one was giving you an assignment to make these films. Can you talk about when you and Garrett went to Iraq the degree to which you had no support?

Olds: Because of this film, we got the involvement of Nancy [Roth] and Greenhouse Pictures. We got essentially tape stock, body armor and airplane tickets. We couldn’t even rent cameras because we couldn’t get insurance. So it was again, us just going, doing this and coming back and showing footage to raise the money. This film in a way, proved to me that if you make interesting work it will somehow make a home, a life. I don’t think I would have gone to Iraq with anybody but Garrett. Not because he was expert military man, because neither of us were that. But because I knew that we would make something that I was proud of. You know there is some weird, not healthy urge to go and see what war is like, and I was very skeptical of that instinct. But I knew going with Garrett, we would be able to keep perspective on that. A great person to work with in that regard.

STF: One of the things that prompted us to show Cul de Sac tonight is that Icarus Films has finally brought it out on DVD. One of the reasons so many of you may have heard of this film but never seen it is because it’s never been available. Now it’s available in a very nice package with essays by Ian and Christian Parenti. So, because it’s out there, please continue to spread the word that it’s out there because we want people to discover this film.