Indian Mini-Film Festival

The Seattle Art Museum put on a two day mini festival of recent films by and about Northwest Native Americans. This was part of an exhibit of arts and culture of the Salish people of Washington State which includes at least 39 recognized tribes.



Fry Bread Babes
Fry Bread Babes was a series of interviews with six Native women about their self image, especially their body concept, today, and as they were growing up. Uniformly, the women said that in their youth they aspired to the mainstream, white ideal presented by mass media, but with age came to various degrees of self-acceptance. It is the same tragedy of female socialization we see in mainstream culture, except there are proportionally more overweight Native women, due to the modern diet and lifestyle. In a way, it might be easier for them to find self-acceptance within the Native culture. This accounts for the title. A fry bread babe, it was explained, is a “round” woman, and I got the sense that it is not entirely pejorative.

Some interesting things: I noticed nearly all the women laughed when they were embarrassed, and it was not the nervous, embarrassed laugh you see in Asia, but a genuine giggle that conveys hilarity, but nevertheless was designed to cover up embarrassment. Then afterward they would say “Excuse me.” I did not know that was a cultural trait.

Another interesting point was that none of the women seemed overly concerned about skin color. It was discussed, but it did not seem a critical issue, as it is among African Americans, for example. Hair quality seemed almost more important to them than skin color. The women were generally not aware of Indian stereotypes until adolescence or later. As with all children, they did not think of themselves as “Indian” until they were identified in school. They were vaguely aware of “Cowboys and Indians” movies and short clips were shown from old movies. But these women did not seem deeply affected by the stereotype, perhaps because Indian women were seldom shown in those movies. They were much more affected by prejudice in school.

This film gave some great insight into Northwest Native culture, from a woman’s point of view, and it is pretty impressive how honest and open the women were, a tribute to the filmmakers’ skills. It would be interesting to do the same project with much younger women and girls.

Directed by Steffany Suttle. color, 30 min. See http://www.aifisf.com/aiff/2008/?fMenu=film&q=&fContent=film&id=124


Princess Angeline
Princess Angeline was the daughter of Chief Seattle. Even after the Chief died, she continued to live downtown, selling clams and baskets on street corners until her death in 1896. It was an ignominious end for a princess of any kind. The early white settlers drove the Duwamish tribe out of their homeland, which included the whole Seattle area. Houses were burned, people were murdered, and the Duwamish river, which enters Puget Sound at the heart of the city, was re-engineered for ships, killing the Salmon runs and destroying tributary rivers. This movie gives an honest historical account of the Duwamish tribe’s ordeal, including the treaty that Chief Seattle signed with the territorial governor that essentially gave the Seattle area to the settlers. It is a fascinating and sorrowful history. Princess Angeline refused to leave town, staying in her wooden shack on the waterfront at the base of Pike street until her death.

The Duwamish tribe has never been recognized by the federal government because they can’t prove that they have been a coherent culture through history. As several professors and lawyers pointed out, that is not surprising, since they were willfully dispersed and destroyed as a people by the early settlers. Today the Duwamish have an association with over 500 surviving members but they are still not officially recognized and have no reservation, rights, or government support. Beside the history lesson then, the film is an advocacy piece for formal recognition of the tribe. They did gain recognition at the end of the Clinton administration, but that was immediately reversed by GW Bush.

I enjoyed the historical photographs, especially the old pictures of Seattle, my home town. Actually, Chief Seattle is buried in Suquamish, a small town next to mine, and my house sits where the Chief himself surely trod at one time. The film made me aware of my historical moment. Had I been born 150 years ago, or 150 years hence, I would have very different attitudes and values about the Duwamish and their plight.

One criticism of the film is that it failed to address the significance of getting government recognition for the Duwamish. The people in the film said it was important for their individual and cultural self-esteem, but that begs the question, why? Nobody doubts that the Duwamish are a people. Why do they specifically need the blessing of the federal government to shore up their self-esteem? I think a partial answer was given in a scene showing a group of descendants of the pioneers, all prominent, well-dressed, rich white people, handing over a check to fund a Duwamish tribal center in Seattle. At the ceremony, a bejeweled and sequined woman said, as sincerely as she could manage, something like “On behalf of the pioneers, we are sorry for what we did.” I think that probably goes a long way in helping self-esteem, and maybe that is all the Duwamish want to hear from the feds. But I don’t think that is the whole story.

It is probably more about land, money, and natural resources. If the Duwamish were federally recognized, would that mean they could exercise land claims to most of the Seattle Area? There surely would be legal and financial consequences of federal recognition, but the film focused only on the need for cultural self-esteem. I thought that was disingenuous. I realize a short documentary must have boundaries, but it was just not believable that the only, or main thing the Duwamish would like from the federal government is an apology. I sensed a hidden agenda and was disappointed it remained hidden.

Directed by Sandra Osawa. color, 42 min. See http://upstreamvideos.com/wp/videos/princess-angeline/

Where I’m From
This was a short piece created by students in a workshop by Longhouse Media, a youth program that supports the expression of Native youth through movie making. If I understood correctly, this group of about 10 teenagers designed and produced this film in five days, which is pretty amazing.

The film was nominally designed to address the question, where is home? The question was addressed mainly in voice-over and printed titles. There wasn’t much coherence to the visuals: a girl doing tai chi or some such, interspersed with shots of seagulls, for example. That juxtaposition itself was actually interesting, and even though it did not seem to mean anything, it hinted at a style of visual nonsequitur that could be something new and interesting in the field of editing. Other pictures were of the Pike Place Market and the district there around First Avenue. I think only two of the students were in front of the camera, the rest behind the scenes.

Sadly, the projectionist was tuned out and did not realize that the aspect ratio was wrong for this showing. What a shame for such a sincere effort to not be seen under ideal conditions. It was a respectable effort and I was pretty impressed by what can be done, with expert guidance, in such a short time. They should have had a second crew film “the making of” and tacked that on the end! See http://www.swinomish.org/departments/native_lens/about_native_lens.html


March Point
This feature-length documentary followed three boys, aged about 15 to 17, from the Swinomish Tribe, which is located on Fidalgo Island, north of Seattle, as they learned how to make a video documentary. They interviewed each other about their difficult past, how they got involved with drugs and drinking, got in trouble with the law, and ended up in rehab. During treatment they found the opportunity to learn how to make videos. They took it up with disinterest at first but then became committed to their work.

Their work was to document the circumstances of the Shell Oil refinery on March Point, a peninsula that according to an 1850 treaty, belongs to the Swinomish. The executive they interviewed at the refinery explained that Shell bought the property in the 1950s from the legal, registered owners. It’s an interesting situation in which the land was stolen, but since the thieves’ society is the one that writes the laws, they had legal ownership and Shell’s purchase of it was therefore perfectly legitimate. So the Swinomish claim to the land, while valid, is hopelessly doomed.

Alongside that theme, the film documents the lifestyle of the Swinomish people, whose reservation is right next to the refinery. They are, and always have been a fishing people. They still live on a diet almost exclusively of seafood, including clams, crabs, salmon, and so on. But the water around their reservation has become so polluted that all the fish are seriously contaminated. Yet as a tribal elder says, we can’t stop eating it. We can’t stop fishing. It has been our way of life for a thousand years.

The boys film all this and I felt that I got a rare glimpse of the inside of everyday tribal life on the reservation. It’s one thing to appreciate the art and culture of Native people through museum exhibits and quite another to understand the everyday life. The view this film gave was not idealized or trying to make any political statement about tribal life. Although a lot of it was heart-rending, it was not intended to be. I think only young people could have made this film Any adults would have been far too self conscious.

The boys mount a fruitless letter writing campaign to the governor, about the status of March Point and they travel to the state capitol to interview her, unsuccessfully. Eventually, they do find an audience with Washington State Senator Patty Murray and their representative in congress. They spend a week or so in D.C. with their camera. On a park bench on the Capitol Mall, they agree that they “didn’t fit in,” mainly because they didn’t have suits like everybody else. Upon returning home, one of the boys comments, “When we got back, everything was the same, but we had changed.”

It’s an interesting, competent and inspirational film that speaks volumes about the quality of the support the project had from the Native Lens organization. Of course the boys believe the project was about March Point, unable to see that the real story is their own socialization into responsible adult life, and their journey from hopeless despair to caring about the future.
Color, 60 min. See http://www.marchpointmovie.com/

None of these movies is easily available. I could not find any of them on IMBD, Netflix or Amazon. If you are interested in documentary films about native issues, your best bet is probably to keep an eye on the American Indian Film Institute, which sponsors an annual film festival. See http://www.aifisf.com/aiff/2008/?fMenu=film&q=&fContent=film&id=124

Port Townsend Film Festival '08

I enjoyed the Port Townsend (WA) film festival last weekend, even though I waited too long to book a hotel and had to settle for what was possibly the last room within a 50 mile radius, in a low end place that just barely met my wife’s minimum standards. PT is a charming Victorian seaport on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, fifty miles northwest of Seattle.

The four PTFF founders were veteran attendees of the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, which served as their model. The Port Townsend festival showcases new work and emerging filmmakers, and offers a variety of film education programs, symposia, and training offerings, including a film camp for kids. The Festival organization also maintains a film and book library in Port Townsend, available to members. See www.ptfilmfest.com/participate

The highlight of the festival for me was the first film I saw on Friday night, The Exiles, a 1961 documentary drama by writer and director Kent MacKenzie. It tells, or rather shows, the lives of some working class Native Americans in downtown Los Angeles, over one long Friday night in 1960. The hybrid film is part interview, as the characters soliloquize over gritty black and white scenes of themselves, and part documentary, as the camera just follows them around home and town, and part dramatization, as the characters play out little scenes in bars, on the highway, in their apartments.

The film was shown at the 1961 Venice Festival then immediately fell into obscurity. It was recently restored at UCLA and re-released, and it looks good. There is no story or character development. Rather, the almost nameless characters just hang out, existing for the sake of existing. The men drink beer in a bar, smoke and play cards. Two of them go searching for a poker game. Two others pick up girls and go for a joyride. One of the men’s pregnant wife goes window shopping and then stays overnight at a friend’s house.

The air is saturated with dead, heavy time. All the characters endure it without hope or ambition. One of the men says that he can “do time” in prison or out. It makes no difference to him. Relationships among the men are caring, but without adequate modes of expression become ritualistic. Women are not taken seriously at all. Yvonne, the pregnant wife, talks about how she used to pray every night for some change in her life, but after years of disappointment, stopped praying and going to church.

The film was introduced by Native American author (and recent National Book Award winner) Sherman Alexie, who also provided Q&A afterward. I asked him to comment on the sense of time portrayed in the film. On the reservation, he said, time is poetically cyclical. You live with the land and the seasons. There is always a sense of renewal. But in the city, the cycles of time are just crushing repetition. And poverty is boring. “I was poor,” he said, “and when you’re poor, it is the same shit every day. The same fears and worries and problems. It’s like being in prison.” I was stunned by the honesty, force, and depth of his answer.

He also pointed out examples in the film of androgyny among Indian men. “Indian guys are androgynous,” he insisted. “We are the ones who wear the red feathers and sing. And we cry a lot. It offers a choice for women. What do you prefer, a white guy grinding diamonds in his ass or a drunk Indian crying?”

You could see Alexie authentically struggle with his identity, a process obviously painful for him, but he seems to realize that struggle is also the source of his power and wit. He referred to an earlier time in his life when he could go places without “having to answer questions about Indians.” Now, he appears at festivals like this one, as “The Indian.”

I met him again the following morning and thanked him for his honesty, and asked him this time about the lack of ambition portrayed in the film. I told him I could not get inside it. “Don’t forget,” he said, "to have ambition means to accept the world of the people who destroyed you. In a way, lack of ambition, even drug addiction and suicide, are acts of rebellion.” “Are people really thinking that way,” I asked? “Subconsciously,” he answered. Again I was thrown into silence by the depth of his remarks. My wife came to the rescue and told him how she had read and enjoyed all his books. “Well, thanks,” he said with a smile. “You are helping pay for my car and put my children through college.” But what was on his subconscious mind, I wondered?

We shook his hand and let him be, and we talked about what he had said for hours.

Fix (2008) is another fictionalized docudrama, this time the story of a young man (Tao Ruspoli) and his girlfriend (Olivia Wilde), who try to get his wild, drug addicted brother (Shawn Andrews) into rehab before a court ordered deadline, to avoid a prison term. They also must raise $5,000 to pay for the rehab. The three of them buzz around Los Angeles trying to raise the cash, stopping to hit up acquaintances at Beverly Hills mansions, East LA, and in the Watts projects.

Throughout, the protagonist (Ruspoli) runs a video camera, recording their adventures. The filmmaking is good, individual scenes interesting, editing excellent, and acting more or less convincing. Unfortunately, all the characters encountered are stereotypes, even the three main characters, and little is revealed about them. I never did believe that the brothers were brothers or even that the videographer’s girlfriend was really his girlfriend. The whole thing was emotionally flat, just scenery.

There was a thin theme about helplessness. The younger brother is helpless to change his drug habit; the older brother helpless to control his brother; the girl helpless to affect anything. There is a transient segment about an urban farm in downtown LA that was once lush with food and greenery but is now desolate because of legal maneuvering: helplessness on a community scale. It is a good theme, but since the characters have no inner life, the theme seems didactic rather than organic to the characters’ experience.

There might have been a very subtle commentary about making documentaries, as if the story device of a character carrying a hand-held was the only way you would ever see “the truth” about the inside of a chop shop, an authentic Vietnamese restaurant, a marijuana purchase, or a heroin shooting gallery. But that seemed more an epiphenomenon than a conscious theme. Overall, the film is visually strong and technically solid, intellectually interesting and worth seeing, but not emotionally engaging. As a zero-budget indie, I don’t know how you could see it anyway, but I think it is good enough to eventually find some kind of commercial release.

Petals: Journey Into Self-Discovery, was yet another documentary, this time about the book, “Petals” by photographer Nick Karras (www.nickkarras.com). The “petals” are the inner and outer labia of female genitalia. Karras photographed over a hundred women to get the pictures in order to demonstrate the beauty of the female body (at least that part of it). Most of filmmaker Beck Peacock's documentary is given to reactions of women, and clips of various sex educators, such as Betty Dodson. The photographs find a line between pornography and medicine that could be construed as art.

The film itself is the mildly interesting story of the book’s creation, but its main point seems to be simply desensitization. All the slang words for the female genitals are discussed and women talk frankly about their sex education and early sexual experience. The film is thus like the Vagina Monologues in desensitizing a taboo part of the body. However, unlike the Monologues, the desensitization is not directed to the audience. Instead it shows other people being desensitized, one step removed. Consequently, I thought the whole project was a weak effort. However, in line for another film later, I heard a woman behind me describing “Petals” to her friends in enthusiastic terms. “It made me want to rush home and get a mirror,” she exclaimed. “I have no idea what I look like, and everyone is so different!” So, maybe my evaluation of the film is not correct – maybe it is powerfully cathartic for women viewers. What do I know?

A longish, 35-minute “short” film was Al’s Beef, a tongue-in-cheek homage to the spaghetti western by writer and director Dennis Hauck. Shot in Arizona, it successfully captured the colors, the heat, and the dry open spaces of the spaghettis. A taciturn and mysterious woman (Persephone Apostolou) rides into town and after belting back her drink, pays for a hooker. She immediately throws the hooker out of the room so she can get some sleep. Later, in the bar, she shoots a guy who hassles her, but it turns out she really just wanted his boots. She is searching for somebody and through a series of flashbacks, we learn why. There is the mandatory showdown gunfight.

The film captures the spaghetti idiom to a large extent, although the acting is too obviously comic. Unlike Eastwood’s nameless stranger, the woman seems more goofy than menacing. A lot of that is because most scenes were subtly off tempo. The camera lingered too long on the wrong scenes, and not long enough on others, and was too jumpy overall, so we did not get a sense of the woman’s emotional slow burn.

Toward the end, the narrative moved from a droll but mainly realistic style, to surreal farce. The woman takes five bullets in the chest and the result is only that it makes her limp a bit. The sheriff (Dean Stockwell) empties his pistol into the preacher, lifting him off the ground, soaring backward in slow motion. These elements refer broadly to the spaghetti style, but in parody. The sound of the gunshots was not right, although the music, consisting mainly of a tom-tom, was a fair approximation to Marricone’s austere style.

I ran into writer-director Hauck later that evening in one of Port Townsend’s charming bars and talked to him about the film. In contrast to my conversations with Sherman Alexie, I was unable to communicate with Hauck. After complimenting him on the film, I asked him if the timing was difficult in spaghetti scenes. His reply was about how tough it was to edit the film down to 35 minutes. I asked what was next for him; if he was he committed to westerns. He answered by talking about all the film festivals he had been attending to promote Al’s Beef. I asked him about the transition from realism to farce in the film. He said he thought there was a lot of humor in the spaghettis. I complemented him on the strong story idea, and he replied that it was inspired by Eastwood’s (1985) Pale Rider (an influence only microscopically evident).

It was a strange conversation. I was not anybody who could do anything for him so I guess I did not warrant a genuine conversation. He is from LA, after all. I did learn that he would like to make Al’s Beef into a full length feature, which I don’t think is a good idea, although I said nothing. I suggested he take a look at The Legend of God’s Gun, another recent spaghetti homage, but he said he never heard of it and expressed no interest. The guy is only late 20’s, early 30’s and I give him credit for gumption and a pretty good start to his career with this short film. I wish him well.

Off Off Broadway is a scathing satire of avant-garde theater production and a parody of Waiting for Guffman (1996). I never saw Guffman, so I took “Off-Off” on its own terms, as a satirical comedy, and it was successful. The aspiring but clueless and egomaniacal director hires a cast of naïve New York acting students to stage his 6-hour long play, which has only pre-recorded voices while the actors move about the high contrast stage in crypto-meaningful gestures, expressing the director’s commitment to “specific conceptualism”. The result is so far beyond bad, it is hilarious, perfectly skewering so-called “avant-garde” performances I have endured. Off stage the actors, crew, and director squabble and strut while the pretentious “making-of” video camera rolls. The humor is subtle and for that reason deeply tickling. Audience members, many of them obviously filmmakers, squealed in delight at the subtlest of inside jokes. The writer-producer is Jeff Huston. I think this one should find commercial release at least as an art house film.

Fashion Victims is a German project (subtitled) released in 2007. A middle aged salesman of “classic” women’s clothing is threatened by competition from a younger salesman who has a younger line of clothing that the older man disparages as “cheap fabric from North Korea” that no woman would ever wear. But in fact he is being out-sold. He cannot accept that times are changing, as he adopts a Death of A Salesman combination of bewilderment and denial. As the pressure mounts, he is mean to his wife and cancels his son’s vacation abroad to make him be his driver on the sales rounds. Meanwhile, the son falls in love with a slightly older man, who turns out to be the father’s competitor. The comedy develops as a blend of Marx Brothers and Keystone Cops as the “misadventures” continue. Secrets and rivalries are separated only by coincidental doors closing in time, crossed paths, and overheard conversations, conventions too hackneyed to be funny, although some audience members were hooting, so maybe I am out of touch. The gay romance between the two young men is also a well-worn theme, no longer the least bit shocking, but at least it is handled respectfully and is well-woven into the story. Strong acting and directing lift the film above mediocrity and the Blake Edwards-Peter Sellars kind of storytelling buffoonery will amuse many people. Co-writer and director is Ingo Rasper.

I also enjoyed the “2880” event at the festival. That’s the number of minutes in 48 hours, which is how much time the filmmakers are given to create a 10-minute short film after the constraints are announced. This year the constraints were that the film had to use the phrase, “It’s not over until the fat lady sings;” the required prop was a live animal, and the theme was “trust.” The top 6 entries were shown and although they were highly variable in quality, the scope of creativity was astonishing. They were remarkably well produced for such a short time frame, although they all seemed strained and contrived, which they were, of course. I thought that was because the three constraints were incommensurate. But I guess having them be utterly random can promote creativity as well as contrivance. It was a lot of fun to be in the audience with the screaming, whistling, and hooting crews who made the six shorts.

Well, that’s enough. I saw and heard other things too numerous to describe. Overall, I was impressed with the quality and scope of PTFF. It was awfully long on documentaries and docudramas, and short on feature length, fictional, dramatic work (compared to Seattle’s SIFF, for example). Still, the small town atmosphere is a lot more fun and the offerings well worth the effort. I’m sure I’ll go next year to the 10th annual, September 25-27.

SIFF 2008

The Seattle International Film Festival is the largest in North America. This year they screened over 400 films from all over the world. I’ve attended one or two films during the festival in years past, but generally, I have not participated much. It’s easier to attend a film festival in another city when I’m on vacation. I am too busy and too tired after work to be racing around Seattle in the evenings and on weekends. Also, I just don’t enjoy going to movies. Theaters are expensive, hot, oxygen-deprived, smelly, sneezy, and too loud. Nevertheless, this year I grabbed my earplugs and made an effort to see more of the festival.

My first experience did not auger well. After standing in a quarter-mile line circling the block, I found myself sitting in the balcony of the lovely old Egyptian Theater in Seattle, right under the projection booth. An hour into the film there was a loud thud from inside the booth behind me. I looked up and there was bright white light in the booth window, then the projection room and the screen went dark. Staff swarmed quickly but the booth was locked and nobody seemed to have a key. I assessed that this film was not going to resume any time soon, so I headed for the exit and walked home.

The film I saw an hour of was Mermaid, a Russian Film, starring Anastasiya Dontsova as a girl of 8 living in a shack by the sea, presumably the Black Sea, with her mother and grandmother. She tells herself that her mother was a mermaid, her father a sea captain. She awaits her father’s return, but it is clear to the audience that the father is long gone and this family is abandoned to abject poverty. The girl dreams of becoming a ballerina. We see her again (Mariya Shalayeva ) at 17 in Moscow, trying to make a living at odd jobs in the gritty city. She shows signs of clinical depression (in my humble opinion). She is still slow-moving, uncurious and glassy eyed, and continues to fantasize the ballerina life. She copes with her harsh reality without ambition or hope. She had found a job as a housecleaner when the projector fell over.

Throughout the film there are brief dreamlike episodes of fantasy, sometimes surreal, to demonstrate that her spirit is not crushed by her difficult life. Slick advertisements ironically remind her that all her dreams can be fulfilled. The second revolution in Russia paid off for the gangsters and cronies, but left no place for a young girl's dreams. I don’t know how the story turned out, but I would guess there was no revelation. Perhaps she returns to the sea (her childhood) as an underwater ballerina. The yellow subtitles were often completely lost, against a yellow sand beach, for example. But that hardly mattered since nothing was said of importance. It is a highly visual film, lovely to look at, but aggressively banal in detail. It was interesting to see modern Russia and hear the language, but without narrative drive or character development, it is a slice of life for its own sake. The director was Anna Melikyan.

The next film was screened at the comfortable, airy, SIFF Cinema hall at the Seattle center. Love and Honor is a beautiful Japanese-made film (director Yoji Yamada) set in the Samurai (“Edo”) period prior to 1868. It’s hard to tell just when, but the doctor washed his hands before and after tending a patient, and sanitation was introduced into medicine around 1847, in the West, at least. In any case, this is not your usual swashbuckling samurai movie. The protagonist, (Takuya Kimura) is a food-taster for the local lord, and he goes blind from shellfish neurotoxin and falls into despair. When he suspects his wife (Rei Dan) of infidelity, honor compels him to a swordfight to the death with the other man, even though he is blind! It is a fine, classical story, well told, in beautiful settings and with beautiful costumes. The acting and directing seemed stagey, wooden, and somewhat repetitive, but that may have been on purpose, to convey the classical nature of the story, the well-defined roles participants would have lived back then, especially in courtly life, and to give a sense of distant time and place, much as we get from watching an original Shakespeare. Yet the dialog was colloquial and the characters were humanized, not archetypal forms, and the story was personal. All that familiarity grated with the formality of the acting and directing. Despite that dissonance, it is a satisfying story, well-told, beautiful to look at, with good actors and enjoyable music. I felt that I had been delivered to another era for a couple of hours.

Man, Hungarians can make a dark movie! Opium: Diary of a Madwoman, directed by János Szász, is set in a mental institution around 1900 in Hungary. A doctor (Ulrich Thomsen, who reminded me of a young Kenneth Branaugh) joins the staff at an insane asylum for women run by Catholic nuns. The scenes there are beautifully photographed but it is a dank, dismal, horribly depressing place. This would have been a hundred years after Pinel’s reforms, so the insane were seen as ill and suffering, not possessed, but since psychoactive drugs were still a half-century in the future, there was really nothing that could be done except warehouse these unfortunates. Still, this hospital is progressive for its time, and the very latest techniques in treatment are shown, such as immersion in ice water baths, spinning in a centrifuge, electroshock, and of course, pre-frontal lobotomy. When the camera closes in on the brass rod being inserted beside a patient’s eye, I couldn’t watch, and even though my eyes were closed the “clink, clink” of the director’s hammer on the brass stylus as it penetrated the skull, made me cringe in my seat. Thomsen is assigned to a 25 year old schizophrenic woman (Kirsti Stubø) who writes typical “word salad” madness into volume upon volume of diaries as the only way she knows to deal with her demon. The doctor, we learn, is a morphine addict, and the reason he took the job was have access to his poison. Acting by the two principals, especially Stubo, is utterly gripping. They try to understand each other, and maybe they do, a little.

The best part of the script is having each character talk unwittingly and metaphorically about the other’s demon. She says, “Each day the Devil makes you an offer and each day he takes a little bit of your body until you are his whore.” The doctor nods knowingly yet unknowingly then a little later he shoots up. He writes in his diary that his habit is going out of control and he can’t stop. The woman begs the doctor to “cut out her brain” to relieve her of her torment. Even though the film is extremely bleak, the cinematography is beautiful and haunting, as is the music. The story would be greatly improved by some easy editing, especially some gratuitous nudity and at the end, where it continues unnecessarily beyond the climax. The story of the characters’ developing relationship is compelling. I walked out of this movie deeply shaken.

Transsiberian (director Brad Anderson) has a lot of good talent: Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson, Ben Kingsley, and Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega. An American couple on vacation (Harrelson and Mortimer) take the Transsiberian train from Beijing to Moscow. They are befriended by an American woman (Mara) and her companion, the unpredictable Carlos (Noriega), pseudo-mysterious drifters, possibly drug smugglers. Police detective Kingsley joins the train to add to the suspense, such as it is. But the editing and directing are so overtly manipulative that it ruins the story. We see Carlos with a crowbar in his hand sneaking up behind Harrelson at a stop in Irkutsk, then cut! In the next scene we are back on the train but Harrelson is missing! Meaningful glances are passed around. But wait, it turns out he only missed the train in Irkutsk and he is fine, rejoining the party a day later. That kind of manufactured pseudo-suspense is disrespectful of the audience, actually offensive, and a clumsy attempt to cover up a weak, predictable story.

The first 45 minutes of the movie were obviously added after the main shoot in an unsuccessful attempt to add dimension to the cardboard characters by having them reminisce unconvincingly about previous experiences. If those were important, they should have been shown, not recited. Dramatic helicopter shots of the train moving through Siberia are inserted often to counter the claustrophobia of the train set. Arbitrary blasts of orchestral music attempt to punctuate the waning story line. Lots of “local color” scenes are thrown in to spice up endless shots of people eating, drinking, smoking, and eating some more. An old guy with a gulag tattoo. Wow. Therefore what? Therefore nothing. This movie is a lost opportunity. Mortimer and Kingsley are terrific actors but they can’t save it. The movie will probably enjoy eventual success on cable television.

A film festival is not complete without a documentary feature so I chose Up the Yangtze, by Yung Chang, the Canadian director, who introduced the film in person. His humorous description of the movie (Love Boat meets Apocalypse Now) suggests a documentary better than this disappointment. He took his crew on a luxury river boat up the Yangtze to the Three Gorges dam, and along the way documented some of the millions of people and their cities, environments, and ways of life that will be submerged when the dam is completed. Flooding had already begun in 2003-2004 when he made the film. Poor farmers living on the banks of the river, living in mud-floor shacks, speak of their desperation and hopelessness. They have no plans, no prospects. They reminisce on their ancient way of life, soon to be obliterated by progress. This is important stuff, but it is also old stuff. We should note that these farmers are holdouts who declined to be relocated by the government to safe, high ground. Why? No clue is offered.

Chang has a photographic eye, and we see ooh-aah shots of neon lights reflected on water, plenty of cute kittens, puppies and roosters, charming tableaux of rustic village life. There is some beautiful, layered Chinese scenery, but not much of it. Chang likes shots that draw attention to themselves such as extreme closeups, long flat shots, blurred fast pans. Other shots are offered ostensibly as candids, but are clearly staged. More political, economic, environmental, and sociological detail is needed to justify this documentary. Pretty pictures and fancy camera work are not enough.

The onboard ship scenes are perhaps unintentionally satirical. It looks like an especially tawdry Carnival Cruise, as old people in ill-fitting clothes dance to sappy music. If Chang could have somehow juxtaposed those images more directly to mud squeezing between villagers’ toes, he might have had something. If he could have juxtaposed cruise goers gorging on buffet food against children eating insects… perhaps that would be too obvious. Yet Chang does not shy away from the obvious. City teenagers are shown dancing mindlessly, drinking vodka at a night club, declaring their desire to become rich. With signs overhead showing the future waterline at 175 meters, well above all life going on, there would seem to be ample opportunity for visual metaphor. The film is good-looking and sentimental and was well-received by the SRO audience at Pacific Place Cinema, but I think it has only the most superficial intellectual basis and will have little lasting impact.


Andrzej Wajda is an internationally known director, and Katyn is supposed to be one of his best, the first of his I’ve seen. It is a historical drama with careful, documentary detail about the Soviet Union’s slaughter of 20,000 Polish army officers at the end of World War II, and the subsequent cover-up as Stalin’s army occupied Poland, blaming the massacre on the Nazis. My understanding is that this lie was not exposed until the late 1990s when archival files were released in Russia. So this would be a very emotional topic for a Polish audience.

The film follows a group of Polish officers as they are captured by the Soviets in 1940 and shipped by train to the interior of the Soviet Union, where they were imprisoned for a number of months then systematically executed. The women and children they left behind wait for letters from them or announcements in the papers, hoping to learn of their eventual release, or at least of their survival. The audience knows, because of an English-language announcement at the beginning of the film, that they are never coming back. A sole survivor returns after the war and becomes a member of the reviled, Soviet-run, new Polish army. He argues in favor of collaboration, survival, and life, and against revealing the truth about the massacre, which can only lead to imprisonment or death. It is a compelling argument. The only counter-argument offered is “I choose the murdered, not the murderers.” Is that a good argument or is it stupid, self-destructive self-indulgence?

It is a beautifully photographed story and a fine way to learn about an important historical episode. Wajda’s reputation is well-deserved.


I hadn’t been to the Harvard Exit theater in thirty years and that delightfully funky place on Capitol Hill hasn’t changed much. There I saw a feature-length animation, a staple of any film festival. Idiots and Angels is writer-director Bill Plimpton’s surreal comedy. Plimpton introduced the film himself, explaining that no cameras were used. He scanned his 25,000 drawings into a computer database and assembled the film. Quite a technical feat!

The wordless story is of a lout who goes to a tavern each day where he drinks, smokes and fantasizes about the barman’s wife. He is a violent, self-centered lowbrow. The pencil-drawings are beautifully realized, with minimum but telling detail. Changing points of view are especially interesting and amusing. When Mr. Lout swigs his drink, we are suddenly deep in his throat, looking at the flash flood cascading toward us. Lots of fun.

Without explanation, he one morning sprouts small wings on his back. He is surprised, but sees them as aberrant growths and cuts them off. There is a Groundhog Day theme to this story, so the next day, the wings have grown back, a little larger. He tapes them down. The following day, they are even larger, and so on. He eventually discovers they are wings, and that he can fly, so he swoops around. He tries some purse-snatching from the air, but inexplicably, he is compelled to return the purse. Are the wings turning him into a “good person?”

There are many promising ways this story could have developed, but the writer had no vision of where he was going. Instead, each scene simply attempts to top the previous one in terms of self-conscious creativity for the sake of creativity. And I admit it was very creative. A loosely structured story flows for a few scenes, then is abandoned to some other theme. The ending is arbitrary because there is just no semblance of a narrative thread remaining. It was a shame he couldn’t have gotten a co-writer to lend him some direction.

One interesting aspect of the whole project is the author’s unconscious illustration of Freud’s theory of infant and child development, from oral, to anal, to oedipal stages. The imagery and symbolism are very much open to psychoanalytic interpretation, which no doubt would be quite embarrassing to the author if he were aware of it. It’s probably just as well that I was not able to stay for the Q&A session after the film, because there would be nothing gained by bringing that up. I enjoyed the creativity, but without a narrative thread, it was just amusing, not important.


A collection of shorts is mandatory viewing, and I chose a well-curated batch called The Art of Memory. The first two these nine films were wonderful; one other was memorable; most of the rest only interesting, but all worth seeing, if only to wonder at the diversity of the human imagination.

“Run,” was probably set in a remote coastal town in Australia, judging from the accents. A working class father encourages (commands) his two children to run each day for exercise and health. The preadolescent girl is chubby and struggles to keep up with her younger brother. She also rehearses “Fur Elise” for an upcoming piano recital, but surreptitiously practices a brooding variation she has composed. The children are brown, possibly aboriginal, and on the daily run, white boys delivering milk taunt the girl and throw milk at her. The milk could represent the absent mother, whose picture is displayed on top of the piano, and whose absence might be the source of the girl’s emotional turmoil. She finally expresses herself at the recital when, unable to remember the Beethoven, she plays her own composition to an astonished and mystified audience. It’s a film dense with symbols, emotion, complex family structure, class and race themes, and psychological development, all in less than 10 minutes: a real masterpiece.

Last Day of December was a Romanian production, if I remember rightly. The language sounded more Russian than Romanian to me, but what do I know. A boy of 14 meets his father in deep snow in a birch forest. We gather that the man is on the run. A well-dressed 40-year old watches from the road above. Four pursuers arrive, we assume police, and chase the man through the knee-deep snow, down into a ravine, in kinetic sequence of exhausting energy and dazzling beauty. The pursuers go in the wrong direction, but the young boy finds the man. After a long moment, he yells to the pursuers, who capture the man, beat him, and take him away. Then we discover that this has all been a flashback of the well-dressed man who was not watching, but remembering the action. He goes to his now-dying father’s house, but in a poignant scene, is turned away. Nothing is forgiven. Another masterpiece.

Two of the remaining shorts were animation, one a claymation, proving it still can be done, but not justifying why it should be. One notable short, “PB&J: A Love Story” was a stop-action animation romance between a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jam. They consummate their love in a gooey sandwich. The whole story was no more than 3 minutes long and delighted the audience. The only other short that stayed with me was “Felix,” a German tale about a 14 year old boy who learns sign language so he can have a relationship with a deaf girl he met on the internet. Their budding friendship goes awry when she discovers that he is not really deaf. It is very well acted by the children, but the film only states the theme without exploring it. Could such a relationship work? Maybe for childhood friendship, but not with adults. Now that I think of it, most of these shorts focused on children. That simplifies the ideas and the emotions, but is that really the only way to successfully tell a very short story? Anyway, three hits out of nine is a good ratio so I’d say this package of shorts was a success. [I misidentified “Felix” as a different short in my online review at SIFF.net but it is not possible to edit those posts.]

Young People Fucking: What an inspired title this is for a contemporary comedy of manners centered around sexual relationships! Five relationships are explored: friends, roommates, a married couple, a couple on the first date, a divorced couple. All relationships are hetero, although other tendencies and urges are hilariously suggested. The story rotates through the list of couples to comment on introduction, foreplay, sex, orgasm, and afterglow, to create a set of 5 x 5 = 25 scenes of 5 to 10 minutes each. The camera work and directing are respectful and there is little nudity, because this is really not about fucking, but rather on how twenty- and thirty-somethings understand and deal with sexuality. The writing is brilliant, in a sitcom sort of way, and there are many laugh out loud moments. Afterward however, I realized that I had been manipulated. Virtually nothing about the human condition was revealed or even seriously explored. It was a series of gags, some sophisticated, most sophomoric. There were moments of honesty, as when each of the exes considers returning to the closed door after the tryst, but then each, separately, sadly, wordlessly, turns away from their side of the door. That was wonderful, but most of the scenes were easy gag setups from the beginning, from the “old pal” girlfriend who just wants to be “serviced” to the bored wife who convinces her bored husband to submit to a purple strap-on. The casting was just perfect and the acting truly outstanding, and those considerable virtues made the cliché humor acceptable. The way the audience squirmed, laughed, and groaned, I’d say the subject matter was “very hot” and that sketch comedy was the only way audience anxiety could have been dealt with. I think this Canadian production will enjoy wide release (possibly with an edited title) and will perform an important and much-needed socialization function.

One Hundred Nails
This stunningly beautiful Italian film makes you feel the warm sun on your back and smell the spring grass. A professor of religion becomes fed up with academic theology and disappears from the university for a life of natural simplicity beside the river Po, but not before he takes 100 medieval theology books from the library shelves and nails each to the wooden plank floor with a large (crucifix-sized) iron spike. Out in the country, the peasants embrace him and help him rebuild a derelict stone house to live in, while he tells them bible stories. They take to calling him Jesus Christ. Local authorities levy a huge fine on the town for some infraction and the professor gives the mayor his credit card to pay it, but the police trace the card and arrest him for the library vandalism. In his absence the villagers decorate the town in anticipation of his Second Coming. It’s a long, quiet, and slow film and even the subdued religious allegories are only decoration. Nothing much happens and there is no lesson to be learned. The languid pace communicates the fantasy of spiritual peace one hopes to find in an idyllic village and simple way of life. But if you had the gumption to have acquired a BMW, a university professorship, and an open-ended credit card, I’m pretty sure the ignorant, backbiting civilization of small town life would drive you mad quite shortly. The romantic bucolic fantasy endures best as an imaginary utopia. Even knowing that, this sensuous movie lured me there.

Russian writers and artists often complain that creativity has declined since the lifting of most censorship. Alexandra shows what can be done with a politically sensitive and forbidden topic, in this case the Russian war in Chechnya, right under the noses of the authorities. It is a blatant anti-war film. Or is it? A lovably irritable Russian grandmother visits her grandson at a military outpost in Chechnya. He shows her the inside of a tank and soldiers cleaning their guns. She wanders off-base into the village and befriends some local women there, revealing in mundane conversation underlying class and ethnic attitudes. Russian soldiers are universally transformed from killing machines to boys as each of them shows deference and tenderness to the old woman. Finally she goes home, The End. Who could censor such a banal slice of life? Yet just placing a kindly and feeble old grandmother inside a Russian tank says more than any jeremiad. There are a few pointed conversations, as when she asks her grandson, “Do you enjoy killing people?” He doesn’t answer. I think about several anti-war American films I have seen lately from the stridently didactic Lions for Lambs, to the morally blaming Rendition, or the more intellectually subtle Charlie Wilson’s War. Even at their most indirect, none of those films approaches the artistic audacity of simply juxtaposing a tired, frail old grandmother against roaring humvees festooned with troops. The movie seemed vastly too slow and indirect for an American audience, yet the theater was almost full on a Monday night, so who knows?

The SIFF runs for an astonishing two more weeks, until June 15th. But I am out of tickets, money and time. I feel I took a fair sample of what was offered and I was well-pleased.