AIFF2018: Fishbowl, We Rise Now, and Bad, Bad Winter - Earthquake Damage Becoming Clearer

I liked Fishbowl.  I wasn't sure I would.  But others disagreed.  One person who said he grew up in the South said it wasn't realistic at all.  When I pressed him on that, he didn't want to talk about it.  He did say it was very exaggerated.  That it's much more subtle than that.  What am I talking about?  A Southern father of three teenage girls.  Mom's died.  Their house is owned by the bank, for sale.  He's sent $1000 to a televangelist so he can be saved by the Rapture on September 29.  The girls really are having a hard time.  We never really did learn all that much about any of the characters.

There were two showings of And We Rise Now - a documentary about Sam Johns, an Athabaskan who had a rocky childhood, but at the urging of his daughter, got involved in helping the homeless in Anchorage.  He set up a Facebook page  Forget Me Not to help villagers find their homeless relatives in Anchorage and to get them back into their families.


The room was packed.  And afterward Johns, director Mary Rosanne Katzke, and (I think) cinematographer Nara Garber, answered questions.

It was an inspirational story, and a great Alaskan story.  And there was standing applause at the end

If the third person was Nara, she's the one on the left.  Next Mary, and then Sam.









Finally, we saw Bad, Bad Winter.  I was misled by the background information about this being a French film.  I'm guessing it was a French production, but it was a dark Russian film, a parable almost of how desperate living conditions lead to desperate acts.  It's a debate about the obligations of the rich and whether anyone really can get rich without cheating.  There's ethical debate about right and wrong, and the ending . . .   what can I say?  It was not a Hollywood ending.  I remember an Albanian responding when I invited her to seen an Albanian film once.  "Why?  We know in advance what will happen.  The good guys will lose and the bad guys will win.  And it was true of the Albanian film.  In this film, I don't think there were any good guys. This was the kind of film that you go to film festivals for.

It would be great to have double feature of Bad, Bad Winter and Datsche.  Winter is about a woman who goes to the house in a town she's left long ago, to take possession of the house she's inherited from her grandmother.  In Datsche the lead character goes to Berlin to see the house he's inherited from his grandfather.  In both films an unexpected group of people show up.  Winter is dark, Datsche is bright.


I'd also note that on this 5th day since the earthquake, people are talking about their experiences when they meet.  Everyone seems to have had stuff on the floor, some not much, others a lot.  But there are also stories of structural damage.  The Alaska Experience Theater was originally set up to give tourists a look at the 1964 earthquake, and the smaller of the two theaters is actually set up to shake.

Here's an empty storefront in the mall whether the theater is.  Apparently many buildings with these movable acoustic tiles on the ceiling had tiles fall off.

Festival volunteers spent Saturday cleaning up the Alaska Experience Theater to get it ready as the fallback theater.  It apparently had lots of ceiling  tiles down and broken too.






And today's paper was headline after headline of earthquake related stories.

"Mat-Su area heavily damaged:  Houston Middle School won't open before May, leaving 400 students in limbo"
"Army of engineers and contractors is working to check Anchorage homes, fix damage."

"Recovery progress in Southcentral"
"How to Apply For A disaster Recovery Grant for Earthquake Damage"
"DOT Warns against traveling, Stopping Along Stretch of Seward Highway"
"As cleanup continues in Anchorage schools, only one - in Eagle River - deemed unsafe."
"Alaska Railroad should be getting back on track"

That's just through page 5.

While we clearly came through a very big, very close, and very strong earthquake reasonably unscathed, the stories are slowly coming out.  And I suspect a lot of people had non-life threatening earthquake related injuries.