AIFF 2017: Features in Competition - Pale Blue Dot, Painless, The Drawer Boy, and American Folk [UPDATED] What If It Works?

Features are full length fictional films.  Films in competition are those chosen by the original screeners  to be eligible for awards. 

I'd note that while these are the screeners picks, screeners don't always agree, so some might have chosen other features as the best.  I often disagree with the screeners, but this is a good start as you try to figure out what to watch.  There are always gems that don't make it to this list.  And you might find films on topics that you want to see or from a country you're interested in, even if they aren't in competition.

Features in Competition	Director	Country	Length
American Folk	David Heinz	USA	1:39:19
The Drawer Boy	Arturo Perez Torres	Canada/Mexico	1:37:00
Painless	Jordan Horowitz	USA	1:40:10
Pale Blue Dot	Girish Mohite	India	1:39:00
What If It Works?	Romi Trower	Australia	1:35:00

I'm not making any judgments here except that I'm posting the films in competition - those eligible for an award.  These are just descriptions, interviews, pictures and video I've found on line to give people a sense of what's coming to Anchorage Dec. 1.

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American Folk
David Heinz
USA
1:39:19

Showing: Sunday Dec. 3,  at 8:15pm Beartooth

From the American Folk website:

"When their plane from Los Angeles to New York is grounded on the morning ofSeptember 11, 2001, strangers Elliott (Joe Purdy) and Joni (Amber Rubarth) are unexpectedly thrust together amidst the chaos of that historic day. With little in common but both needing to get to NYC urgently, they accept help from Joni's family friend Scottie (Krisha Fairchild) who lends the duo a rusty old 1972 Chevy Van. The shock and stress of 9/11 quickly threatens to derail their cross country journey until the pair discover what they do have in common: a love for old folk songs. Armed with a pile of guitars left in the van from Scottie’s touring days, Elliott and Joni raise their voices together (and with those they meet on the road), re-discovering the healing nature of music and bearing witness to a nation of people who, even while mourning, manage to lift each other up in the wake of tragedy.?

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The Drawer Boy  

Arturo Perez Torres

Canada/Mexico
1:37:0

Showing:  Monday Dec. 4  5:30pm Bear Tooth

From  Evan Dossey in the Midwest Film Journal:

"The Drawer Boy (Draw-er, as in, a boy who draws) is an adaptation of Michael Healey’s 1999 play about Miles (Jakob Ehman), a traveling actor who shows up at a farm owned by Angus (Stuart Hughes) and Morgan (Richard Clarkin) with the hopes of staying in their house, helping around the farm and learning what it’s like to be a rural Canadian.
Angus takes care of most of the work as well as Morgan, who has severe short-term memory loss. As Miles learns the ebb and flow of a farmer’s life, he also begins to uncover the tragic story that led to Morgan’s condition.
To director Arturor Perez Torres’ credit, The Drawer Boy captures the staging and performances you’d expect from a stage production without sacrificing opportunities afforded by the cinematic lens. It’s a beautifully shot movie. There’s a tendency for stage-to-film adaptations to sometimes come across as something stuck between the two mediums in a way that satisfies neither. That’s not the case here."

 This is probably a movie that you don't need to know anything about.  Just go and let it unfold with no expectations.

The Drawer Boy - Trailer from Open City Works on Vimeo.

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Painless
Jordan Horowitz
USA
1:40:10??
Showing:  Saturday Dec 2, 1:45  AK Experience Small 
                  Friday Dec 9, 7:45pm AK Experience Large


Here's the Painless website synopsis:

"Henry Long was born with a rare condition that leaves him unable to feel physical pain. Life for him is a daily struggle, never knowing when he might become seriously injured without realizing it, or worse, die from an internal injury he never knew existed. He lives in a constant state of fear and is completely alienated from those around him who cannot relate to his daily struggles.
Barricading himself in a world of science, Henry has dedicated his life to finding a cure so that he can one day know what it’s like to feel ‘normal.’ When he discovers a promising drug that he is unable to obtain on his own, he gets involved with a dangerous scientist with a dark past and his own secret agenda. Henry must decide if his need for normalcy is worth paying the ultimate price before it’s too late.
Based on actual medical science, Painless looks at the dark side of life with a rare condition and the challenges both symptomatic and social that people with these conditions face."

You can listen to David Majzlin's sound track for Painless here.

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Pale Blue Dot 

India
Girish Mohite

1:39:00

Showing:  Sunday, Dec. 3  11:45am AK Experience Small 

                      Saturday, Dec. 9, 2:30pm AK Experience Small 

I couldn't find much on this film.  

From Filter Copy - An Indian website reporting on this year's Mumbai Film Festival last month which highlighted 13 of the festival films including Pale Blue Dot.

"Synopsis: Sarvanaam, or the Pale Blue Dot, was birthed when a photograph taken by a NASA Voyager showed the earth to be smaller than a pixel from a distance of 6 billion km in space. The very fact that the Earth is as miniscule as a grain of sand in the eternal expanse of the universe brings forth questions about the weight of our existence and death."

From The Hindu, a page of very short questions and answers at the Mumbai Film Festival dated October 2017.  Directer Girish Mohite was asked

What is your film about?

"It is about the existence of hum life and our fear of death - the eternal question that haunts us all our life"

I can imagine his head rolling back and forth as he gives this answer.
The next question was:  What should the MAMI crowd expect to see?

"I have filmed the entire feature film in natural light without resorting to artificial sets.  I have treated the subject as seen through the eyes of the central character - a man who is struggling with these thoughts about life and death when a person close to him in on the verge of dying."

UPDATE Nov. 23, 2017:  The film maker, Girish Mohite, has sent me this synopsis of the film.

"A specific name underlines the existence of a given individual but Sarvanaam i.e. an Eternity is a collective notion. Even while living this life making an effort to  preserve one's own identity, often the destiny plays its cards in such an incomprehensible manner that one is imperatively left with no alternative but to ignore one's own personal existence or unique identity and dissolve oneself in the mighty oblivion of the Sarvanaam, the eternity.  The film 'Sarvanaam', the Pale Blue Dot makes you aware of this insurmountable truth.  

Thus, the existence of LIFE is PALE BLUE DOT.

'Death' is an ultimate truth. Each one of us is radically aware that at some or the other point of time in life, the death, is going to come to meet us and end our role. But even then every human being feels afraid of the death of his near and dear ones rather than being frightened of one's own death. That is why, every individual gets disturbed when the same death starts lingering around in the lives of your near and dear ones. This close shadow of the death destroys the peace of mind of every individual howsoever invariable truth it may be. An approaching shadow of that evil arouses a feeling of unacceptable injustice in his mind and he leaves no stone unturned to unveil the answer of this riddle. The unbearable sorrow of this inhuman destiny and the agonising journey of every human being's life saga is the gist of the Marathi feature film 'Sarvanaam'."

I couldn't find a trailer for this film. [UPDATE Nov. 23:  Girish Mohite sent me the trailer, so here it is:

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What If It Works?
Romi Trower
Australia
1:35:00

I don't recall ever citing the Catholic Church of Australia, so it seems a good time to check that off my blogger list of things to do.  Here's from their review of What If It Works?

"There have been many films over the years, especially in recent years, about relationships, romantic relationships, potential healing relationships between people who are physically and/or mentally disabled. We don’t always expect to see these stories acted out in the ordinary streets, in the ordinary suburbs of Melbourne. They are acted out here – but, at the end, there is still the question that the title raises, will it work, what if it works?
It takes a few moments to get into the feel of the film We are introduced to Adrian, Ford, a young man in his 30s, driving a fast car, getting into trouble, landing unsuspectingly into a group of drag queens. Who is Adrian? When we see him behave, gloved hands, hands raised in the air, wary of touching anything, fastidious, we realise that he is absolutely obsessive, has a compulsive disorder. Which means that while he is friendly in his way, it is not always easy to like him. Non-compulsiveness will feel very impatient with him. But, as we get to know him, see him in all his foibles, there has to be some sympathy. In fact, he is very intelligent with science and engineering and is able to help people in the art commune, even calling in the aid of the drag queen friends.
He almost runs over a young woman (Anna Samson) who lives just up the street, who walks dogs (which he abhors). When he encounters her on his session with his therapist and she comes to visit, mistaking him for the therapist and pouring out a rather salacious life story, he is upset. He later meets her in the street."

And from FilmInk:

"Giving the leads of your romantic comedy mental health issues is tricky ground to navigate. Jokes built around your characters could be seen as laughing at them, rather than with them. Additionally, in the pursuit of true love, there’s a certain danger of downplaying their daily struggles. What if it Works?, from first time director Romi Trower, not only tackles these issues, it does so with success."

[UPDATE Dec. 18 - I've swapped out a film that is no longer in the festival for one on the list that I didn't see in the first list].

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UPDATE Nov 30, 2017:  I'd note that the film Muse was originally 'in competition' but for some (legitimate) reason, it will still be in the festival, just not in competition.  

"Committing Acts of Journalism" And Other Interesting Ideas From Online Class - Journalism Skills For Engaged Citizens

Somehow I got a notice of a course called Journalism Skills For Engaged Citizens, being taught online from the Melbourne University via something called Coursera.  It's taught by two journalist/academics Drs. Denis Muller and Margaret Simons.  It costs $49 for a certificate or without it's free.  So I thought I'd see what I could learn;  Things to improve how I blog, but also to see what a worldwide internet class is like.

One of the reasons for the class, according to one of the Dr. Simons was that:

"journalism is, without a doubt, probably the fastest changing profession on the planet."  

She also caught my attention with this phrase:

"citizens, increasingly armed with mobile phones and other communication tools, are committing acts of journalism."

Week 1 has been about defining journalism and what a journalist is and a bit on good writing.  Dr. Muller highlighted some tips from one of my own favorites - Strunk and White's Elements of Style. 

We had an interesting discussion question:  Which of the following four do you consider journalists:  Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Jon Stewart, and Oprah Winfrey.

The lectures - they were broken down into four lectures of 2 to 12 minutes - surveyed some definitions and characteristics of journalists.

These were collected, as I understood it, from different sources, and they offer a blogger some things to think about.

• "respect for truth and the public's right to information."
• "public actually have a right to information."
• " Journalists describe society to itself"
• "Journalists convey information, ideas, and opinions. "
• "a privileged role."
• "Journalists search, disclose, record, question, entertain, suggest, and remember."
• "Journalists inform citizens and animate democracy."
• "main duty is to the public,"
• " journalists scrutinise power but also exercise power."
• "Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover and, indeed, from their employers."
• "being impartial or neutral was not necessarily a core principle of journalism. It was the method that was objective, not the journalist."
• "respecting truth begins with the idea of assembling and verifying facts"

Nothing really new, but certainly worth reviewing all together now and then.

What have I learned so far?

1.  To be more persistent when things don't seem the way they should be.  The computer boxes we were supposed to put our assignment in, didn't quite fit the instructions.  It turned out there were two different boxes (only one short assignment) and I should have looked harder.  But, the assignment said no more than 30 words.  The box said no more than 140 characters.  So I had to pare my 'lead sentence' down, which made it more succinct.  But this first week it was only a practice assignment, I'm sure intended to help us figure this sort of thing out before we get the 'real' assignments.

2.  I'm going to learn some Australian.  There's a fictional town - Newstown - with its own website with lots of information that we'll be covering.  It turns out that a crèche in British and Australian is a preschool.  Allotments in a new housing development are what I'd call just 'lots.'  And they use Cr. before council members' names.

3.  I'm going to be doing some thinking about differences between traditional news stories for a newspaper and blog stories.  Some things will probably improve how I write posts.  Others I can ignore because we're doing somewhat different things.  I'm particularly thinking about a recommended structure for a news story and the lead sentence assignment we had where you're supposed to get all the key points covered.  For some posts that's probably a good idea - and I've done summaries or overviews on some long complicated posts.  But for other posts I'm ok with meandering a bit.  And I can always work on getting my prose as clean and lyrical as possible.

4.  Distance learning technology has come a long way from when I first had a student calling in to class from Kodiak in the early 80s.  Of course, I knew that.  Blackboard had already added a lot by the time I retired.  And I watched my daughter preparing for her distance class last spring.  But I haven't been on the student end.  I did keep getting lost, trying to find different parts of the course and going through the wrong doors at first.  I still haven't figured out a simple way to do a one-on-one message to another student.  We do have people from all over - Aussies of course, but also Ukrainians, a Brazilian, and people from Canada, New Zealand, a Tibetan living in Bangalore, and more.  There are supposed to be thousands of students taking the course, but only a tiny fraction have introduced themselves online.  More have participated in the discussions.

Here's a link to the course. And perhaps more importantly for many, to Coursera where you can find a lot more courses in different subjects.  I'll add more about class if there are particularly interesting ideas that come up.

There were a lot of different opinions on who was a journalist.

Common Sense And Cooperation - Passengers Push Train, Free Man Who Didn't Mind The Gap

That's my spin on this one.  Others might label this stupidity, but I know we all could be in this guy's position.  Others might call it leadership, or low tech wins.

[Pictures are screenshots from the station video of the incident, reported at Perth News. (It's winter in Australia.)

Screenshot from Perth News Video

The video shows the train come in, people get off, people get on, then this guy drops as his leg somehow slips into the gap.  [The year in Hong Kong put the warning "Mind the Gap" indelibly into my brain.]  A passenger calls the guy in the orange vest over.
Then the orange vest guys seem to be talking to the man.  A guy with a backpack and a cell phone hovers around.  Is he talking to a friend?  Emergency people?  Train people?

Having no audio lets you imagine who these people are and what they are saying to the men in the orange vests.

There's a woman - I think - who pantomimes pushing the train.  She's in the dark grey coat.

Screenshot from Perth News Video

Does she work for the train system?  Is she just a passenger?  We don't know.  But then she walks down to the next exit and then all the passengers come out. 

Screenshot from Perth News Video

And then they line up and start pushing the train until the passenger is free.

Screenshot from Perth News Video

His getting loose is obscured by all the people.  It appears they put him on the train.  When the crowd thins, he's no longer there. One of the passengers quoted in the Perth News post is quoted:

"The train moved on its suspension enough for the man to get out from the sticky situation.

“He was walking so he was reasonably OK,” Mr Taylor said.

“He seemed to be a bit sheepish, because right where he fell was the ‘mind the gap’ writing.”

This is what people CAN do.  And I'm sure it was out of a desire to help the poor guy whose leg was caught and not just because they wanted the train to get started again.  (No, I don't think I'm a cynic, I just try to think of as many possibilities as I can.)  I think most of us would help willingly and it's a relatively small, but impactful minority, that keeps the suicide bombers active in Iraq and the violence in Gaza going.

You can watch the whole video at the Perth News website.

Can Saudi Arabia Rescue Australia's Feral Camels?

I'm  on page 221 of Tim Winton's Dirt Music.  I have about 180 pages to read before tomorrow night's book club meeting.  So I can't write too much now.  This 2001 novel has been growing on me, but let me focus on just one tiny tangent. 

Georgie is having a recurring dream about Mrs. Jubail.  Just brief mentions until we finally get more explanation.  Much of the book comes to us this way - sort of like life comes to us - in brief snatches that don't make much sense at first until it moves from our subconcious to our conscious minds.  We'd also heard that Georgie had worked in Saudi Arabia.  And on page 141 things come together as we learn that in Saudi Arabia she was a nurse and took care of Mrs. Jubail who had a terminal illness.  At one point,

"She asked was it true the Arabs imported camels from [Australia].  Georgie told her of the wild herds in the north that were the legacy of the Afghan traders." 

I took this picture in India, not Australia

Is it true, I wondered.  Well, it sounds basically true, but the Afghans seem to have been camel handlers. 

Southaustraliahistory  tells us:

Without the Afghans much of the development of the outback would have been very difficult if not impossible. Whole communities, towns, mining establishments, pastoral properties and some well known explorations in the interior have been made successful because of their contributions.

With their camels, who received more publicity than their owners, these cameleers opened up the outback, helped with the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line and Railways, erected fences, acted as guides for several major expeditions, and supplied almost every inland mine or station with its goods and services. These 'pilots of the desert' made a vital contribution to Australia.

The Afghans came first in 1838 and the first camels in 1840 as we learn from camelaustralia:

The first camel in Australia was imported from the Canary Islands in 1840 by Horrock. The next major group of 24 camels came out in 1860 for the ill-fated Bourke and Wills expedition. The first time the explorer Giles used camels he travelled 220 miles in 8 days without giving water to the camels. He later went from Bunbury Downs to Queen Victoria Springs (WA), a distance of 325 miles in 17 days and gave one bucket of water to each camel after the twelfth day. . .

An estimated 10,000 to 12,000 camels, imported into Australia between 1860 and 1907, were used as draft and riding animals by people pioneering the dry interior.

Now it's estimated Australia has about 1 million feral camels and in 2010 the country proposed to spend about $19 million (US$19.80 = Aus $19) to cull the wild camels.  But Saudis have come to the rescue:

The Saudi campaign, which calls on the country's rich to airlift the camels to the safety of the Saudi desert, comes after the Australian government announced it would kill 6,000 camels in the Northern Territory next week using marksmen firing from helicopters. [The fact sheet quoted below puts the number at 650,000.]

The animals are viewed as a pest in Australia, but they are revered in the desert nation of Saudi Arabia.

 It's not clear what happened. There were several references to this in January 2010, I couldn't find any later news whether anything happened.  But over a year later, we learn that an Australian entrepreneur is taking on the government's culling plan and wants to turn the camels into a lucrative business.  Arabian Business reports March 30, 2011:

A Queensland businessman plans to take on the Australian government in a bid to redirect a multimillion-dollar camel cull into a plan to exporting camel produce to the Gulf.
Outback entrepreneur Paddy McHugh hopes to persuade Australia to capitalise on its wild camel population to create a lucrative business, selling milk and camels into the Gulf region.
“We want to turn it around from a negative and produce an industry for Australia to export meat and milk to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. It’s got huge potential,” he told Arabian Business. . .

The feral animals are often labelled a nuisance, competing with cattle and sheep for food and crushing vegetation. In the Middle East, however, the desert animals are an integral part of life, used for food, drink and racing.
“The potential is huge and I just find it absurd that we want to shoot these animals,” McHugh said. “It’s a waste of phenomenal proportions. We believe there is an industry there that will compliment the Australian cattle and sheep industry and make another great export industry.”
Interest in camel produce is growing due to its reported health benefits. Advocates claim the milk contains up to five times more vitamin C than cow milk, less fat and less lactose while its meat is said to be low in cholesterol and high in protein.

The impact of camels on the environment, particularly during droughts, is apparently significant according to the Australian Department of Sustainability, Envornment, Water, Population and Community  fact sheet (updated March 2012):

In central Australia, serious and widespread negative impacts on vegetation have been recorded where camels occur at densities of more than two animals/km², though damage to highly palatable species occurs at much lower densities. In more arid country near Lake Eyre, significant negative impacts on vegetation have been recorded where camels occur at densities of more than one animals/km². Camels already occur at localised densities more than two animals/km² over much of their current range.
The impact of feral camels on native plants and drinkable water is most pronounced during drought, when areas close to remote waterholes become refuges that are critical to the survival of a range of native animals and plants. Feral camels can quickly degrade these areas during a drought to the point where they may no longer provide any refuge for native plants and animals, perhaps leading to the local extinction of these species. The Action Plan for Australian Marsupials and Monotremes recommends that feral camel numbers be reduced at specific areas to help protect the habitat of threatened animals such as the ampurta (Dasycercus hillieri).
Many water places are sacred sites to Aboriginal people, so the negative impacts of camels on waterholes, rockholes, soaks and springs can be culturally significant. Recent periods of drought have resulted in feral camels entering remote communities in search of water, and extensively damaging water infrastructure such as laundries, bathrooms, bores, taps and tanks.

There are tidbits like this throughout the book.  Just passing comments where I say, "I need to look this up."  I'm sure I'll write more on this book.