In front of a full house, the Stranger Than Fiction spring season kicked off with Craig Lowy’s energizing OXD: One Extraordinary Day. The 2015 DOC NYC alum follows choreographer Elizabeth Streb and her Extreme Action Company as they prepare to catapult, bungee jump, and suspend themselves off famous London landmarks in celebration of the 2012 Summer Olympics. The troupe’s exhilarating performances explore what it means to make a clear, swift choice to act; to jump down the rabbit hole of fear with playful irreverence, unparalleled poise, an intrepid spirit, and the pluck to reemerge and do it all over again.
Through dance, pop action, and stunts that somersault the constraints of gravity, the Streb Extreme Action Company is a troupe of artists redefining the limits of possibility. OXD opens with try-outs for the troupe’s upcoming London event, which will include seven extraordinary and massively challenging performances. To audition, men and women who possess a supreme physical, emotional, and mental grit jump higher and higher off multi-tiered scaffolding. They land face-flat on a mat that has just the right amount of yield to absorb the shock of the fall and facilitate a rapid transition from belly to feet. Present alongside Lowy for the post-film Q&A, Streb said that the concept is about “removing unnecessary preparations and recoveries, you want them gone; I don’t see any reason with action to preempt what you’re going to see next–it’s a way to see the human body in motion that you might not see otherwise.”
Directed by Jeff Malmberg and produced by Chris Shellen, MARWENCOL, the 2010 winner of the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW, is a doorway into the imagination of Mark Hogancamp, a man whose memory was kicked out of him in a vicious attack that left him in a coma. In true Stranger Than Fiction fashion, MARWENCOL is a departure from standard societal expectations of what therapy looks like. Hogancamp’s construction of a miniature and elaborate World War II town and the stories held within were about reconstructing the thing most important to his sense of self: his imagination.
At 38, after suffering severe brain injuries and physical and emotional trauma, Hogancamp had everything to learn over. He didn’t remember that he was once married, and looked and asked for clues about who he was before being attacked. What he found was that vitriol had burned through the pages of his journals, a toxic wildfire of words and illustrations. In the film he recalls asking others what he was like: “Was I mean?”“No you weren’t mean, you were just drunk.” “Did I hurt anyone?” “Just yourself.”
In a special appearance in the IFC Center’s Stranger Than Fiction documentary series, high-altitude director Jennifer Peedom was in town for a screening of SHERPA, a film that follows Phurba Tashi Sherpa as he embarks on his world-record-setting 22nd ascent of Mount Everest.
Known in the Himalayas as Chomolungma, Sherpas, the guides to the highest mountain on earth, revere what Westerners call Mount Everest, as the mother god of earth. Rituals are performed before each summit to pray that nothing bad will happen, essentially asking the mountain permission to climb. In the film, writer Ed Douglas says of the Sherpas’ perception of Westerners, “They may not understand what compels us to climb mountains but they are fantastically good at delivering the experience.”
In an economy of yaks, potatoes, and mountaineering, summiting THE mountain is how Sherpas make their money. Expeditions can cost up to $100,000, and on average companies pay Sherpas $5,000 for a two month trek—treks that have become more and more dangerous particularly by way of the Khumbu icefall, where bus-sized ice boulders crash unannounced, and increasingly so due to warmer climates. Clients pass through the icefall twice, while Sherpas navigate the unpredictable glacier up to thirty times a season, and always at night when temperatures are colder and thus safer.
From 1976 to 1989, a strange tapping noise emitting from a Soviet channel was broadcast over a remote shortwave frequency, fueling Cold War paranoia and conspiracies around the world. Was the Russian Woodpecker, as the relentless ticking sound would come to be known, an attempt at subliminal mind-control, orchestrated by the Russians? Was it some kind of KGB morse code broadcast? For decades, the only thing that the could be clearly proven was that the sound originated from a massive antenna two miles away from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
In director Chad Gracia’s debut film THE RUSSIAN WOODPECKER, he follows eccentric artist Fedor Alexandrovich on a journey to find a connection between the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the mystery of the Duga antenna. Alexandrovich was a child when the Chernobyl meltdown happened in 1986, and has nursed a growing fascination with it ever since, going to great lengths in the film to expose what he sees as a Soviet conspiracy of massive proportions.
Gracia met Alexandrovich while the two were working on a theater production together, and said that he initially thought the Duga film would only be about 5 minutes long. But as Alexandrovich became more obsessed with his theory, interviewing nuclear engineers and former Soviet bureaucrats, and digging into the history of Chernobyl and the Duga antenna, Gracia realized that the story warranted far more than a short film.
“I started this skeptically. I thought Chernobyl was an open and shut case,” Gracia said during the Q&A following Tuesday’s world premiere screening at the IFC Center. “But we talked to people – high ranking, knowledgeable people – and they all told us that something was being hidden.”
“If I could give anyone advice, do not make impetuous decisions—don’t rush into the future.”
–Tomas Young
In April 2004, five days into his service in Iraq, Tomas Young was shot in his spine and paralyzed from the chest down. Directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue, BODY OF WAR chronicles Tomas’s journey as he contends with the agony of his transformation, reconciling his nature as his voice emerges and stabilizes against the far reaching effects of the Iraq War.
The film deliberately juxtaposes the aftermath of Tomas’s injury with the debate of the Iraq War resolution in both houses of Congress. A staunch opponent against the war, Senator Robert Byrd urged the country not to rush into a decision, “I plead with the American people to let your voice be heard, your questions answered.” Senator John McCain and other supporters of the war, all identified in the film, decided that “the longer we wait, the more dangerous he [Saddam Hussein] becomes.” In portraying this bureaucratic juggernaut, BODY OF WAR raises many questions about how action is defined, and how choices to exercise an option are framed. It challenges the audience to investigate what informs those choices, and examine who bears the brunt of war.
