The Short Films: Part III

Michael C from Serious Film here to wrap up our look at the short film categories with a tour of the Documentary shorts.

In this field we have that rarest of specimens: the genuine five-way race. I'd go so far as to put it right up there with Lead Actress as the most quality stacked category of the night. Since they are such uniformly strong contenders I'll skip the for/against format I've been using thus far and instead try to pinpoint what edge each film might have to push it ahead of the competition.

the nominees are...

KILLING IN THE NAME - USA, 39 Minutes, Dir: Jed Rothstein

Issue: Terrorism, specifically the killing of Muslims by Muslims

In 2005 Alshraf al-Khaled's wedding was interrupted by a suicide bomber who killed 27 guests including the fathers of both the bride and groom. Since then al-Khaled has devoted himself to confronting the sources of such terrorism and breaking the Muslim world's code of silence concerning Muslim on Muslim violence.

Killing in the Name makes for a powerful viewing experience. The astonishing footage it compiles includes a wrenching meeting with the father of a man responsible for one of the deadliest suicide attacks ever, an interview with an al-Queada recruiter, and, most disturbingly, al-Khaled's confrontation with a classroom full of young people indoctrinated to view these mass-murderers as heroes. Killing might be too impressive a feat of documentary filmmaking to refuse the prize.

Secret Weapon: In Alshraf al-Khaled the filmmakers have found a bona fide hero. His mission, at no small risk to himself, is equal parts inspiring and horrifying. He is the answer to every TV blowhard who seeks to paint the whole Muslim world with a single brush.

SUN COMES UP - USA, Papa New Guinea, 38 Minutes, Dir: Jennifer Redfearn

Issue: Global Warming 

Rising sea levels are slowly but surely sinking the Pacific Island paradise of Carteret. The village sends out a group of young people to the nearby war-torn island of Bougainville to see if they can find a new home for the hundreds of soon-to-be-displaced families.

Carteret Island is portrayed as a place just short of the Garden of Eden and it is heartbreaking to watch the Islanders as their worst-case scenario gradually becomes a reality. The filmmakers choose their moments well to convey the complex series of obstacles the Islanders face in their diaspora. The film is not without a few glimmers of hope at the end, but they are hard-earned and bittersweet. 

Secret Weapon: Even though all the shorts are extremely emotional (watching them back-to-back was a bit overwhelming) Sun Comes Up might just be the most touching of the lot. It is impossible not to be moved watching its inhabitants' sadness and bravery in the face of their loss. Who would have the heart to deny them the Oscar win?

THE WARRIORS OF QIUGANG - USA, 39 Minutes, Dir: Ruby Yang

Issue: Pollution, Government Corruption

The most conventional of the documentary short subjects, Warriors is the portrait of a village of simple Chinese farmers whose community is decimated by the pollution from a new factory. Their fight for change comes up against such obstacles as government corruption and threats of violence. The central figure emerges as one villager with a middle school education who becomes the reluctant leader of the cause. Teaching himself the intricacies of the law, he finds - to his own surprise as much as anyone else - that he is a formidable foe for the forces who seek to crush dissent. There are echoes of the Oscar-winning The Cove in the fight against a government aggressively trying to ignore a problem.

Secret Weapon: Scope. The familiarity of the subject matter shouldn't detract from the achievement of the filmmakers here. Not content to just point the cameras at ruined crops and hulking gray factories, they stuck with this story for years getting the full picture of the story and the society that produced it.

POSTER GIRL - USA, 38 Minutes, Dir: Sara Nesson

Issue: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the Iraq War, The Treatment of Veterans

Poster Girl looks at all its big issues through the portrait of Iraq War veteran Robynn Murray who at the age of 19 went from all-American cheerleader to hard boiled machine gunner roaming the streets of Baghdad. Now, years later, she suffers from crippling anxiety attacks, has trouble coping the memories of war time, and has to navigate a labyrinth of red tape in order to claim her disability checks.

More than any of the other entries of this field Poster Girl leaps off the screen with a burn through intensity, largely due to the riveting presence of Sgt. Robynn Murray. You seriously can't take your eyes off her as she boils with anger, crumbles in pain, and rages articulately with feelings of betrayal at the institutions she trusted. Poster Girl is a tough film to shake.

Secret Weapon:  As much as Academy members can sympathize with the plights facing poor foreigners Poster Girl is going to hit closer to home. For British and American Academy it is going to reopen a lot of wounds.

STRANGERS NO MORE - USA, 40 Minutes, Dir: Karen Goodman, Kirk Simon

Issue: Prejudice

Although the horrors of war exist constantly around the edges of Strangers No More, this is the most hopeful of the documentary shorts. Strangers tells the story of the Bailik-Rogozin school in the heart of Tel-Aviv bringing together displaced children from dozens of countries around the world many who have arrived in Israel fleeing for the lives.

Strangers is perhaps the least impressive nominee from a filmmaking standpoint. Its straight forward account of one school year unfolds pretty much how you would expect. At feature length I would say this doc needed to dig deeper into how this school came to be, but at forty minutes I think they were correct to focus on the children and their harrowing stories. It is a simple film, well executed.

Secret Weapon: All those great kids! It's difficult to overstate the emotional impact of watch a kid go in the space of a year from a wide-eyed refugee completely lost in his surroundings to a student speaking fluent Hebrew and cracking jokes with his friends. I have no doubt that will be enough to get a lot of voters to mark their ballots right then and there. 

Marking Your Oscar Pool: Since all the films can lay claim to social significance - and since there is no World War II focused doc to break the tie - the usual Oscar method of choosing the most important-seeming film won't work here. I could easily see any of the five shorts taking the prize, but forced to predict I'm going to go with the film that would be getting my vote and say Poster Girl is going to barely edge out Strangers No More and Killing in the Name and take the Oscar. All the shorts make an impression but Poster Girl is the one that really gets your heart pumping. 

Part I - Animation

Part II - Live Action

5 Things We Learned on Oscar Nom Morning...

Some of which we already knew but that's splitting hairs.

With 24 official Academy Awards categories and somewhere over 108 nominations announced each year (a few less publicized categories vary in number of nominees from year to year), there is always a lot to parse out on Oscar nomination day. Tuesday, January 25, 2011 was no exception as Mo’Nique, last year’s supporting actress winner for Precious, read out the nominees bright and early in that inimitable voice of hers. You can see the full list of nominees here (more info to come over the next few weeks). With so much to discuss, it’s necessary to break it down into manageable talking points.

5. Genre Bias Remains

Black Swan opened to sensational reviews, huge precursor favor and robust box office in December. The film even had to ramp up its expansion plans to capitalize on demand. In the end, it was still a horror films (of sorts) in which a ballerina sprouts wings and loses her mind. On Oscar nomination morning, it missed in key categories in which most people expected it to show. Inception opened to fanatical reviews and gargantuan box office, ending the year as the only member of the year’s top ten box office hits to be aimed at adults. In the end, it was still a sci-film (of sorts)...

READ THE REST AT TRIBECA FILM
for the other 4 talking points including a peculiar Sundance Festival  trick.

...that is if you're not completely burnt out on Oscar articles.

And if yah are... uh oh Blanche!

Distant Relatives: F for Fake and Exit Through the Gift Shop

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through a common theme and ask what their similarities and differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema. There's a mixed response on the internet in terms of how much of Exit Through the Gift Shop to reveal.  Some people will tell you nothing, some will give you a smattering of plot.  I'll do the latter, though I won't give away any secrets (for I know none) but I will discuss some of the mysteries.

F for Film

When Orson Welles made F for Fake in the mid-70's his reputation was somewhere between visionary director of the greatest movie ever (he'd won his honorary Oscar a few years earlier) and washed up, indecisive, expatriate.  Far removed from the War of the Worlds episode, it's unclear how many people saw him as the master charlatan he proclaims himself as the host of his film.  At the time F for Fake was a strange and new type of documentary.  More essay than narrative, Welles himself serves as ringmaster, telling us the stories of famous art forger Elmyr de Hory, fake biographer Clifford Irving, and others.  When it premiered it was, predictably shunned by a public who didn't know what to make of it, the other bookend to Welles' cinematic career.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is the first film by Banksy, English street artist, man of mystery whose identity is still unknown and whose work has sold for thousands of dollars thus legitimizing the street art movement and thus doing what to it?  The film follows Frenchman Tierry Guetta who uses his ever present camera to chronicle the likes of Banksy and Shepard Fairey before taking up the movement himself to much success, and dismay of his contemporaries.  The major debate sparked by the film is whether Mr. Guetta, who does his art under the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash and is never actually shown creating is, in fact, a creation of the film itself, meant to make some larger point about commercialization or populism.

The joke is on us

Elmyr de Hory - fake

Welles and Banksy are clearly two personalities who enjoy their self-adopted trickster status and relish any opportunity to embellish it.  But is the joke on us?  Is our deception, our infuriation, part of the point?  The idea of passing off something fictional as something true wasn't invented by Welles or Banksy.  They join a large collective which includes Michelangelo's early forgeries, P.T. Barnum's famous claims, Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita prologue, Peter Watkins' films, Andy Kaufman, everything Andy Kaufman, Jonathan Swift's misunderstood commentaries, into modern times with Sacha Baron Coen, the Blair Witch Project, or Joaquin Phoenix (though let's not get into that).
 
Let's talk about Werner Herzog who believes that verite truth is overrated.  In his documentaries he often stages moments and feeds lines to his subjects.  Why?  Because sometimes manufactured reality is more truthful than actual reality.  Truth is something both Welles and Banksy are going for through these films which are works of art.  This is where questions and realities begin to double back on top on themselves.  If art is a fictional representation of the world (even, as Herzog believes, the most untouched documentaries can't achieve objectivity), then what about fictional representations of art?
 
But is it art?

Thierry Guetta - fake?

What is art is a question that isn't likely to lead to any consensus, but it is what Welles and Banksy are asking with these movies.  If Elmyr and Mr. Brainwash have achieved success through their art (in sales, museums and galleries) then what sets them apart from "real" artists?  Perhaps success isn't how we should judge art.  Perhaps it should be up to the critic and the expert.  But as Oja Kodar, Welles' lover and subject of F for Fake suggests, what purpose serves the experts if they can't deciper the fakes?  If the experts disappeared, would the fakes?  These films leave us with more questions than answers.
 
Exit Through the Gift Shop is one of several recent films which have generated a surprising amount of controversey over just how many of their elements are fictional or not (it's hard to generate controversey these days without wading into the pools of political opinion or explicit content).  Here perhaps lies the significant difference from F for Fake to Gift Shop.  Welles' subject Elmyr was well known as a forger.  Clifford Irving was eventually outed as a fraud.  Even Welles reveals his hand at the film's finish, quite a ways after it's gone off the tracks.  But don't expect Banksy to give us any answers any time soon.  Perhaps for him, and for a new generation of charlatan artists, truth need not be revealed as if it's fact.  Truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Best of 2010: Honorable Mentions

Before we begin, new readers take note: This is but the beginning of The Film Experience year-in-review kudos. It goes on for some time because we're giddy and OCD like that when it comes to recognizing great work. The "Film Bitch Awards" title is misleading and an old joke from college. We don't look down at the movies through our noses, but look up at the silver screen in reverie.

Here's a quick overview of well-loved films outside of the top ten (make that a top thirteen, coming tomorrow). Don't we all ♥ more than ten films a year?

Best Documentaries
I don't include documentaries in my top ten -- a personal quirk since they're a different artform with wildly different goals -- but if I did include them, please note that the Kimberly Reed's trans identity essay Prodigal Sons [Netflix Instant Watch] and the Chinese migration family drama Last Train Home, both released theatrically in 2010, would be in the mix. They might be the two best docs I've seen since Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man which you'll understand is the highest compliment I can pay them. I was also intrigued by Catfish, but then I saw it long before it was possible to have it "spoiled."  It's arguably exploitative take on online relationship and virtual identity works whether it's staged or real. And the scene that gives the film its name? Wow.

Exit Through Joan's Gift Shop

Quite by accident I saw more documentaries this year than I ever have. The two other true keepers among the batch were laugh-out-loud goodies: Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work which both stare straight at the lunacy of celebrity and artistic success, one with twinkling eyes and amused disbelief, the other with trembling lip and defiant survival.

Movie I Feel Bad About Missing
I shan't bore you with the details but please know that I did try to see Dogtooth -- most people I trust have urged me to see it -- but was thwarted in my attempts. One for the future. For what it's worth I also missed: For Colored Girls,  Robin Hood, and the French romantic comedy Heartbreaker which was an international hit, finishing in the top 100 globally. How did I miss that one? Grrrr.

The Movies I Can't Count
There is an argument out there that in this new millenium, theatrical release is more or less meaningless and shouldn't be a factor in year-end honors. But, without some sort of structure, how can there be community in movie discussions?

Click to read more ...