It doesn’t seem possible, yet SXSW has swiftly come and gone, with the festival’s award winners having been announced on Tuesday of last week. Hao Wu’s PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF DESIRE won the Grand Jury prize for in the documentary feature competition, while Charlie Tyrell’s MY DEAD DAD’S PORNO TAPES took home the Jury Award in Documentary Shorts, and TRANSMILITARY by Gabriel Silverman and Fiona Dawson took home the Audience Award. Meanwhile in Denmark, CPH:DOX is just getting started, and unsurprisingly, Basil Tsiokos whipped up a rundown of all the new docs making their debut at the festival over at What (not) To Doc, including those in its international competition for the Dox:Award and its regional competition for the Nordic:Dox Award.
Looking forward, Hot Docs has revealed another wave of titles in its Special Presentations program, bringing the total up to 32 films “showcasing high-profile premieres, award winners, and works by masters or featuring star subjects.” The festival, which runs April 26 through May 6, also revealed the 20 projects set to compete at this year’s Hot Docs Forum. Those that made that cut include new work by Brett Story, Nanfu Wang, Liz Marshall, and Lyric R. Cabral, reports Pat Mullen of POV Magazine. Additionally, the San Francisco International Film Festival unveiled its generous documentary program for this year’s edition, featuring lots of imports from Sundance, TIFF and SXSW.
Tomorrow at IFC Center, our 2018 Winter Season rolls on with Ian Olds and Garrett Scott’s 2005 Falluja doc classic, OCCUPATION: DREAMLAND. Co-director Ian Olds will be in attendance for a live Q&A following the screening. Tickets are still available here.
Film still from Into The Night (Part 1), a documentary film by Helen Whiteny
Words by Maggie Glass, a New York-based film editor and writer.
The theater at IFC Center was packed and vibrant for the screening of INTO THE NIGHT: PORTRAITS OF LIFE AND DEATH, a new documentary by Helen Whitney. Whitney distills an admittedly vast subject into interviews with people who all approach death in remarkably different ways. Some, like mortician Caitlin Doughty, have spent their careers learning about death as a way to face their fears. Others use religion, ritual, music, or literature to help them understand their own mortalities. Astrophysicist Adam Frank, who lost his brother at a young age, finds a comforting certainty in the world of mathematics and logic. And others, like cryonics proponent Max More, view death as a potentially optional fate in the future. In the Q&A after the film, Whitney discussed her fascination with the responses she got during filming. “It’s riveting,” she said. “These are rare conversations.”
With such a sensitive and raw topic, an audience member wondered, what drew Whitney towards it in the first place? “You can’t come to this point [in life] without thinking about it,” she said. She said she was drawn to the idea that we use stories to sustain us as we navigate concepts like death, which is so overwhelming and unknowable. As a filmmaker, Whitney was able to delve deep into these stories — with the camera as her shield: “Camouflage permits you to ask all the questions,” she laughed. As she came to know them deeper, her interview subjects opened up about the most intimate moments of their lives. Pastor Vernal Harris openly sobbed as he recalled the loss of his two young sons to sickle cell anemia. Phyllis Tickle spoke frankly about the near-death experience that left her profoundly changed as a person; it was an experience she could barely even discuss with her husband.
After the screening, Whitney described how the process of making the film itself was an investigation into these tough questions about life and death. Her longtime friend and collaborator, Ted Winterburn, became extremely sick during filmmaking, which unexpectedly brought the process that much closer to home. “Denial is powerful,” she said. Despite working on a film that explored these very issues, she said, “we couldn’t talk about it. We found it very difficult to talk about his sickness.” Winterburn eventually passed away and Whitney dedicated the film to his memory.
Now in the aftermath of reviewing countless hours of footage and experiencing her own painful loss during the process, an audience member asked Whitney what she ultimately learned about life and death. She reflected on the opening scene of the film, which depicts a dying woman’s dream of boats anchored in a dark harbor. While the boats are technically isolated, they are linked by their tiny lights illuminating the sky. The film posits that death is a process that we all go through alone — but also, strangely, together. Working on the project, Whitney said, didn’t make her less afraid or anxious about death. “However,” she said, “it did make me feel less alone.”
Two men are handcuffed by the local police after they were found asleep in their car in the middle of the road. The men had taken some painkillers and passed out with the car in the street. Once woken up the officers, one of the men showed his scar from a recent shooting. He repeatedly asked the officers to call a detective in the department because the man was acting as a witness in the shooting.
Words and videography by Joseph Schroeder, who has managed the production of highly acclaimed educational and informational programming for networks such as PBS, A&E and National Geographic for over a decade. Currently the Vice President of Production and Operations of The Independent Production Fund. Follow him on Twitter and see more of his work on his website.
In the fourth week of its 2018 Winter Season, Stranger Than Fiction held a sneak premiere of the Netflix docuseries Flint Town, featuring the first two episodes of the eight-part series. What followed was more than enough to whet the audience’s appetite to binge watch the entire season the following weekend upon its release.
Directed by Zackary Canepari, Jessica Dimmock, and Drea Cooper, the eight-part series focuses on members of the police department in Flint, Michigan, a city that once stood as the absolute pinnacle of middle-class idyllic living, and now, only a few short decades later, sits as one of the most unsafe and unprofitable cities in the entire country. It experienced a fall like no other city in the United States, taking an incredible tumble when General Motors closed up its automotive plants in the mid-1980s. The residents who remain have experienced extreme poverty, a recent water crisis, and an extreme uptick in violence. As one might expect, this perfect storm of deficiencies causes tensions to run high between the community and those tasked with protecting them. One of the members of the police force, Brian Willingham, explains the challenge early in the series by saying “Show me another group of officers anywhere in America that’s having to police under those set of circumstances. I don’t think it exists.”
The directors, however, aim to show Flint not as a city meant to be abandoned, but rather one worth saving, in particular by those who serve as part of its police force. The first episode introduces us to two of those members, Bridgette Belasko and Robert Frost. In one of her first scenes, Belasko mentions that she “hasn’t seen a dead body that’s bothered me in a long time.” Frost remarks soon thereafter that the officers are just “scraping the bottom of the barrel, trying to keep up.” Even though the situation is dire, belief still exists that things can turn around. Chief James Tolbert remarks that “we have to find a new way to police, we can’t police the same way we did twenty years ago, we can’t police the same way we did five years ago.”
That imperative incites a number of the events of the first two episodes, which witness the election of a new Mayor, Karen Weaver, in November 2015. Weaver immediately embarks on several municipal reforms, one of which is to install a new Chief of Police, Tim Johnson. Johnson aims to completely restructure the department to an earlier iteration, and employ “proactive units, going out there and looking for crime.” Johnson believes the Flint Police Department has “got to be held accountable. That’s the only way the city is going to survive.” As the first episode closes, however, it remains to be seen how the members of the department will react to this severe transition in policing style.
Willingham opens the following episode by remarking, “In one of America’s most dangerous cities, the people who secure the city are less secure than they’ve ever been.” At this point the series takes us home with a number of members of the department, where they confide in the filmmakers their truest trepidations. We see Belasko’s potential promotion removed due to the change in leadership; we also see her share that frustration with Frost as we learn the two are in a serious relationship. Frost, a divisive character who, by Belasko’s assessment, “comes off as kind of asshole,” is actually deeply in love, saying “I have no idea how I am pulling this off. No idea. It’s awesome.” We also see a mother and son, Maria and Dion Reed, go through police academy training together. They share a close bond, and she explains, “He’s always been my sidekick, my little rock. He depends on me, I depend on him.” Dion isn’t as convinced, saying “I feel like I’m going to bump heads with my mom more than anybody else.”
By taking us home with these characters, the opening of the series not only gives us a complete view of the people who protect and serve Flint, but a broader picture of the city itself. In the Q&A after the two episodes, Cooper remarked “When you live in a place like Flint, where joblessness is through the roof, you’re gonna have a situation where it’s so dire, and it’s so intense, that it puts all this pressure on this relationship. So to try to understand that from the point of view of the people tasked with keeping the city safe, so to speak, I think can provide some insight.” Dimmock continued, “When you watch the community feel distrustful of the police, it’s in part because other systems that are there and are supposed to work don’t. So when you have water that’s poisoned, when your schools are shutting down, when the factories that were there abandon you – those are all systems that you should be able to rely on and you can’t. So of course that very much played into the psychology between community and police relationships and that was the thing that we felt like was important to keep there so that people could understand that.”
Both the filmmakers and Netflix sincerely hope audiences do, and that Flint Town will stand beside Making a Murder and The Keepers as yet another impressive docuseries from the streaming giant. All eight episodes are now available on the service.
Sensible filmgoers might hope that with ICARUS and HEAVEN IS A TRAFFIC JAM ON THE 405 winning big last week at the Oscars (read Brian Newman‘s piece on breaking the “rules” to win an Oscar for Short Doc at Sub-Genre Media) and awards season coming to its logical conclusion, we could all take a collective sigh of relief and maybe a ever so short cinematic reprieve, but instead film festivals across the land have either just wrapped, are currently in motion, or are just gearing up. Just last week, Columbia, Missouri’s True/False Film Festival took over the modest college town for its 15th edition, garnering universal praise from Daniel Kasman at MUBI’s Notebook, Ben Godar at Nonfics, and VikramMurthi of RogerEbert.com (my own coverage of the festival will soon be found over at Senses of Cinema). Looking further back, Dan Sullivan covered this year’s edition of the Berlinale for Film Comment, singling out Corneliu Porumboiu’s INFINITE FOOTBALL and Kristina Konrad’s epic ONE OR TWO QUESTIONS, as Eric Hynes dissected a pair of my favorites from this year’s Sundance in Bing Liu’s MINDING THE GAP and Sandi Tan’s SHIRKERS. As I write, four fests around the globe are taking place, each of which Basil Tsiokos wrote previews for at What (not) To Doc: Miami Film Festival, SXSW, Ambulante, and Tempo Documentary Festival.
Meanwhile, both the Tribeca Film Festival and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festivals announced their full 2018 lineups. Tribeca is holding the world premieres of 12 new nonfiction films in its documentary competition, in addition to its closing night film, THE FOURTH ESTATE by Liz Garbus, about how the challenges of journalism in the age of Trump, while Full Frame has 14 world premieres on its docket, including David Schalliol’s THE AREA, Katie Galloway and Dawn Valadez’s THE PUSHOUTS, and Anne de Mare’s CAPTURING THE FLAG.
Tonight night, Stranger Than Fiction continues at IFC Center with a rare opportunity to preview the first two episodes of one of the most anticipated documentary series of the year – Maclain and Chapman Way’s WILD WILD COUNTRY, featuring a live Q&A with the directors and Executive Producer Mark Duplass. Tickets are still available here.
Following the BAFTAs last week, where I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO took home the prize for Best Documentary, it seems the every growing sprawl of awards season is finally about to reach its climactic conclusion with the 90th annual Academy Awards ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. In The New York Times, Cara Buckley dished a wild yarn on how Russia has been leading a smear campaign against two doc Oscar nominees, noting LAST MEN IN ALEPPO as its major target, “In the Russian media, Mr. Fayyad has been accused of being a Western-funded propagandist whose film is a thinly disguised ‘Al-Qaeda promotional vehicle.’ And, in what might catch members of the academy’s documentary branch by surprise, the film’s Oscar nomination was, according to Russia Insider, clear evidence that ‘the Hollywood celebrity industry is now an integral part of the U.S. state’s propaganda machine.'” Not only is the film being smeared, but the US has officially rejected the visas of the film’s producer, Kareem Abeed, and one of its subjects, White Helmets co-founder Mahmoud Al-Hattar, making it impossible for them to attend the ceremony, reports Beatrice Verhoeven at The Wrap. Meanwhile, the International Documentary Association and the Academy itself have published statements in support of the team behind LAST MEN IN ALEPPO.
In the latest episode of a relatively new documentary podcast called The Fog of Truth, produced by Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Summre Garber and Bart Weiss, the trio discuss the Oscar nominees and a whole host of previous nominees. Other Oscar coverage came in the form of interviews by RogerEbert.com’s Matt Fagerholm with ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL director Steve James and EDITH+EDDIE director Laura Checkoway, another interview with Checkoway by IDA’s Akiva Gottlieb, a profile on James in The Los Angeles Times by Lewis Beale, an interview with STRONG ISLAND director Yance Ford with Cara Buckley in The New York Times, and a feature in The Guardian by Charlie Phillips on the fact that the “most innovative factual films are often under 40 minutes long – and the best of this growing genre are easy to find online” – including EDITH+EDDIE.
Tomorrow, we here at Stranger Than Fiction have the rare opportunity to preview two episodes of FLINT TOWN on the big screen, followed by a conversation with the filmmakers (Zackary Canepari, Drea Cooper and Jessica Dimmock), a few days before the series launches on Netflix. Tickets for this special event are still available here.
