AIFF2022: Dealing With Dad and Bering Family Reunion

 Watching movies from noon until 8pm leaves me a little spacey.  The wifi was working today in the auditorium at the museum, but there just wasn't much time between events.  There were lots of short films during the day. Please excuse mistakes, it's late but I want to get this up already.

I'm finding I am mentally resurrecting an old evaluation standard for films:  

1. There are films that are technically well made 
2. There are films that have something important to say or to contribute
3. Films that do both 1 and 2 well
4. Films that do neither
5. And most films fall somewhere in the continuum of both those factors

Dealing With Dad did both 1 and 2 well.  The film is technically good enough to easily fit in on Netflix or another streaming channel.  The acting and pacing are all high quality. Yet it's much more than a slick formula film. It's a poignant story told with love and humor. 

What does it contribute? The director Tom Huang said after the film that the story is adapted from his own family experience with a domineering immigrant father who works hard so his kids can have a better life.   After Dad gets laid off and goes into a deep depression, the two older kids fly home to try to deal with this only to find that Mom and the 30 year old younger brother still living at home find life much easier now that Dad just stays in bed all day watching television.  The family reunion reveals old tensions among the siblings.  The younger brothers accuse the older sister of being a lot like Dad.  The younger brother has a long time crush on a high school friend who just returned from the Peace Corps, but is afraid to ask her out until the older sister older sisters him into asking her out. (That was the one part that didn't ring true to me - she had been in three or four different countries.  And while a volunteer can sign up for a second tour of duty after completing one, it's not common, and the way it was described in the film, she seemed to move around from country to country as part of her assignment.) The mother has already set up the middle son, who's having marital problems, with a date.  While there are dynamics that may be more common in a Chinese American family, the story is really a universal one.  It moved along quickly moving from heavy drama to humor and back seamlessly.  The humor wasn't added on, it was just part of the relationship.  Often it was funny to the audience, but often not to the characters themselves.  I think it was easier to watch than The Last Birds of Passage, but Birds, probably had a much weightier story to tell.  

The other full length film was the documentary Bering, Family Reunion.  Bering followed Etta Tall, an Inupiaq woman from Little Diomede as she searched for her relatives from Big Diomede.  These are two islands a few miles apart, Little D in Alaska and Big D in Russia.  Before WWII people from the two islands visited each other frequently and there were many family relations across the two islands.  The Soviet Union, at the beginning of WW II removed the islanders to the mainland and maid Bid D into a military base.  When Gorbachev and Reagan opened the border between Alaska and the Soviet Union, some of the first to travel across the border were Inupiats going to visit their relatives they hadn't seen in many years.  We see how the plans were made, how a family company that arranges arctic travel got asked to look for relatives when in Russia, and slowly how the reunion eventually comes to be.  This film involves families who were cut off from each other by war and geopolitics.  It considers culture, language, and people's undying compulsion to find their families.  A little slow at points, the film nevertheless has very high significance, documenting this story, a story that has been repeated around the world as national governments ignore indigenous and minority people's needs.  

The first question in my mind was "How did a Mexican film maker come to make this story?"  It just seemed odd.  And it was the first question asked of the woman who'd carried a list of names to Russia with her when she went to the Russian far-east, who answered questions after the film. She was a friend of the film director Lourdes Grobet (who passed away in July 2022) who wanted to make this film.  You can learn more about her at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia site where the film was show in October.

There were lots of shorts.  Some were well made.  Some told important stories. Some did both.  Some left me scratching my head.  I'll note a few that I reacted to most.

Queen Moorea had to be the most compelling, and one of the longest.  It told the story of a high school homecoming queen who was born with a genetic condition that made her different.  It wasn't clear to me exactly what her disability was (it was mentioned briefly I didn't catch it.)  The film was another with the theme of people who don't fit in.  Another audience member after the film said that people tend to categorize people with disabilities by the disability and that often keeps them from reaching their full potential.  This film portrayed Moorea was living up to her potential.  

Never Again Para Nadia - shows how the Jewish community in a Rhode Island prison town team up with the local Latino community to protest against immigrants being housed in a local prison.  To be clear, they are protesting that the prison is nearby, but that immigrants are being put into this private prisons for the financial gain of the prison owners and their shareholders.  The film documents the protest, a car driving through some protestors whose driver eventually gets acquitted.  It's an important record as far as it goes, but more statistics on the private prison and its profits and the numbers of immigrants housed in the prison.  

I liked Sunday With Monica - an interesting short story of a movie that left this viewer wanting to know more about.  I'm guessing this could be an early version of a future feature film.  The divorced father picks up his daughters from his ultra-orthodox Jewish ex-wife and takes them to meet his non-Jewish girlfriend who has horses and a riding rink.  One daughter is drawn to the horses and the other is thinking how Mom wouldn't approve.  

Gina is a brief portrait of a homeless woman in LA. We get to know this woman a little beyond what we might imagine of her if we just saw her on the street.  The Pastor who befriended Gina while handing out food to the homeless and eventually is impressed with Gina again reminds us not to judge people through our stereotypes, but to get to know them as people.  

Rain was a beautiful chocolate of a film - lots of beautiful animated images of rain and a little girl who plows through the puddles.  

And then there was Snowflakes another light animated film made for the Make A Wish Foundation, about a little girl with cancer just admitted into the hospital.  Another girl invites her to play but she's not in the mood, but does eventually get enticed.  It was all pretty innocuous, but I couldn't help being struck by the perfect faces - pretty lips, big eyes, and what appeared to me as lots of make-up. Someone connected to the film was there and answered questions.  My wife discouraged me from asking whether these perfect, make-upped images of very young little girls didn't perhaps send the wrong message.  So I didn't.  But someone else asked less directly about how the images of the little girls came about and we were told the animator determined that.  To be clear, their heads were shaved, but they were still model quality.