AIFF - Jan Louter Workshop

I liked "The Last Days of Shismaref" very much. The photography was stunning. The last scene - the all white screen and then two people walk off into the distance was a piece of visual art all in itself. The scenes with the families were real. I haven't been to Shishmaref, but I've spent a few days in Wales. Clearly Jan had gained the trust of the people in the film - not an easy thing to do. The Alaska Native villagers I've met are very open, trusting, and sharing. They have often given to Outsiders who didn't understand that giving was a two way process.

And I've written here in the past about the problems of Outside journalists trying to tell the stories of Alaskan Native villagers. So I had a lot of questions. I had a sense from the film what the answers would be, but I wanted to hear it from Louten himself. I was concerned when he said after the showing last week, that when he first read about Shishmaref, he knew there was a story there. And that Shishmaref was a metaphor for global warming.

The idea of him having "the story" before going to Shishmaref leaves the door open for him to use Shishmaref and its people to tell Jan Louten's story and not Shishmaref's story. To a certain extent, when he began today to say that he scripts his documentaries very carefully before he shoots, that concern wasn't mollified. But overall, what he said and the film itself, suggests to me that he did listen carefully to the people of Shishmaref. He said he took the film to Shishmaref and showed it to the people and told them if there was anything that they felt should be out, he would listen to their arguments. That they had nothing they wanted cut was reassuring.

He talked today about making documentaries almost like making a fictional feature - he does lots of research and then scripts it all carefully. He gave an example of a film he did on American writer, John Fante. He didn't want talking heads, so he had a person he was interviewing drive the car while he talked. This way he could get Los Angeles into the film. And they drove to the cemetary where Fante was buried. This way he could let the audience know Fante was dead without actually saying it. He simply showed the grave stone.

Here are some unedited clips from today's workshop. The film will be shown again tomorrow (Sunday) evening at the Bear Tooth at 5:30, for people who have not seen it.

AIFF - Yellow Sticky Notes Maker Jeff Chiba Stearns

I got to talk to Jeff last night at the museum, just before his video Yellow Sticky Notes was played at the Museum. But we spoke about a previous film - What Are You Anyway? - which is about his growing up half-white (and half-Japanese) in Kelowna, British Columbia. Since I'm on the steering committee of Healing Racism in Anchorage, I found the video a great tool for using in workshops looking at racism. Though I had a question about a part near the end where Jeff says his new girlfriend's behavior showed him that if he was proud of his heritage, the disturbing words and questions wouldn't bother him. I agree that is a good strategy if you are subject to prejudice, but in a training session with people of the dominant ethnicity, you need to discuss that this doesn't mean that the victim should be blamed. This perception on Jeff's part is good in unintended insults based on ignorance, but doesn't address the structural basis for discrimination built into society that causes people to have negative or just inaccurate preconceptions about people of different ethnicities.

You can see "What Are You Anyway" at the link. Trust me, it is well worth it - funny and informative.

Jeff explained that he made the movie as an expression of his own experiences and was suddenly called on to talk about the issues of people of mixed heritage by schools and universities, and that he's learned a lot about the subject. Anyway that's the context for the bit of video I got of our discussion.



Jeff will give the filmmaker workshop

TODAY (Saturday, Dec. 13) at OUT NORTH at 3pm








Here's a link to another YouTube of Jeff talking about making Yellow Sticky Notes.

AIFF - Martini Matinee, The Video

Here are a few clips (unedited so I could get it up quickly) from the afternoon session at the Mixed Grill in the Inlet Tower. People were all having a good time. I'm still having intermittent trouble downloading the video from iMovie to .mov, but if I do it at lower quality, it works. So the quality is even bad by my already shaky standards. But you can get a little sense of how it went.

AIFF - Friday

It's 10:18pm at the Bear Tooth for the 10:10 showing which is going to be way late. The line was long. We got in late.

Started the day's movies at the Mixed Grill where they had the "Martini Matinee". That too was jammed and we saw great animation. They also introduced some of the film makers there and announced that Last Days of Shishmaref won the best documentary. We'd already heard that Streetsweeper won the best feature. Though I'm hearing from some people that they were disappointed. I'll get to judge tomorrow night.

Then to the Museum, with a stop at the PAC to get tickets for Fiddler on the Roof Sunday afternoon. It's the last performance, it's in the middle of the film festival, but I want to see what Christian Heppinstall has done with it. At the museum we saw Rachel: A Perfect Life. It was good, if you like watching brain surgery. Well there was brain surgery, but it was good, despite that. But this is a rush post before the late shorts/animation begins. Then we saw one of my favorite films of the week - The Wrecking Crew. When I first saw it in the schedule I figured it had to be good if just for the music. The Wrecking Crew was the backup band for most of the big hits in the late 60s pop music in California. It turned out to be an interesting movie that filled in a lot of gaps - these guys and one woman - played in literally every big hit. It was sort of like a public television fundraiser oldies show, but much, much better.

Also got to talk to Jeff Chiba Stearns. I'll add some video later.

First Annual 30 Second (More or Less) Film Festival - Part 1

While the Anchorage International Film Festival has been going on, in Mariana Gonzales' Art 257 class - Computer Art and Design - we had our own mini festival. Actually, it was our last assignment. And Wednesday we saw everyone's videos - many of which included animation. So, for the next couple of days, I'm going to post a couple of the class videos. These are from art students (except mine) most of whom had not done animation or video before. I was impressed with the variety of things people did, though it seems for my fellow students, the music video is a pretty strong influence.







More tomorrow. Mine's not in this bunch.

AIFF - Sky in December Discussion

I guest lectured at a class at Wayland Baptist University this evening, so I missed the 5:30 films and barely got to the Fireweed to see Sky in December. The students seemed bright and I'm sorry I had to rush off. I don't have the energy, nor am I ready, to write about the film now. Suffice it to say, I'm glad I went. The black and white look was jarring in a new movie, but the characters were engaging, and a slow (by US standards) moving pace was a nice change. Peter Porco, writing for the Anchorage Daily News, does a good job of giving the basics of Sky in December.

After the movie I got a little of a discussion among three people with somewhat differing ideas about the film.

AIFF - Annetta Marion talks about short films

Monday night I met Annetta Marion and she did a brief video pitch for Donut Heaven. The next day I got to see Donut Heaven and briefly discussed it in a post that also talked about short films and why people do them. So last night after Dream Boy I ran into Annetta again. I'd also written that I wished I'd seen her after I saw Donut Heaven so I could ask her about whether the main character wore a fat suit at the beginning (she more delicately called it a prosthetic). So, yes, she did. And it was heavy and hot in Florida in July. When they took it off, water gushed out.

But she also answered some of my questions about why people make shorts. Here's a snippet of our conversation.



Donut Heaven plays again Saturday, December 13 at 8:00 PM - Anchorage Museum as part of Subjective Subtleties.

AIFF - How To Be and Dream Boy

How to Be didn't work for me. I'm sure there are people like the main character whose father doesn't pay attention to him and whose mother is constantly saying things like, "There was always something odd about you." The kid is trying hard to overcome this, but he's whiny, kicks things a lot, and just doesn't fit in anywhere.

Lots of people have made good movies about people like that. And the story line - the kid finds a book called "It's not your fault" and invites the author to move into the house and observe the family as part of his therapy - is original. But the film just didn't come together for me. There has to be (for me) some reason to sit and watch this basically decent, but thoroughly childish, character rant for an hour. That reason never came. I didn't get any real insight into what was wrong with him or what sorts of things might help. The self-help author was - in my mind - a total quack.

If this had been a documentary, documenting someone's psychological issues it might have worked. If we got some insight into something (more than the mother saying the boy reminded her of her obnoxious older brother) it might have worked. And I don't mind a plotless movie either, except then the parts have to be worth watching and these, for me, just weren't. There was scene after scene - the skateboard park, some of the bar scenes - where I have no idea what those scenes added to the movie.

But then we saw Dream Boy. This was a beautifully made film, lush as its Louisiana setting, about young gay love - sweet and genuine - in a hostile environment. I was immediately sucked into the story. At first I wondered if this could be told just with film. It seemed there was so much inside Nathan's head that we needed to know for this to work. But somehow the story was all revealed - only a bit through few flashbacks. [Dream Boy picture link -pictures rotate.]And James Bolton, whom I got very briefly on video the other night, answered questions after the movie. Some questions he addresses:
How has the film been received in Europe?
How could the 17 year old drive the school bus?
How'd you get Rickie Lee Jones in the movie?
Was the cast preselected, or did you open it up, or?
Were the lead actors gay?

Viddler was down, so I've uploaded this one on YouTube.





This YouTube clip I found has a couple of scenes from the movie.

AIFF - Streetsweeper named Best Feature at Festivial

I'd been hearing rumors while I was checking on the festival about which film had been chosen for the best feature award. The festival people were caught between getting promotion for people to see the best feature at the Saturday night showing and keeping it secret until the awards ceremony. Publicity won out. I knew the winner was supposed to be posted today, so I emailed to check. I had to decide if I was going to Dream Boy or Streetsweeper at 8pm tonight. If Streetsweeper was the winner, I'd go to Dream Boy. They were going to post the winner on the website at 6pm. I checked with Tony before the 5:30pm movie tonight so I'd know which movie to watch and wrote a post announcing the winner to go up at 6:15pm.

But after the first movie, How To Be, I checked the website and there was nothing there. So I took my post down. But I talked to Rand and he said he was so busy with visiting film makers and doing Bear Tooth business that it didn't get up. But apparently it will be in the ADN tomorrow, and he said to put it back up.

So Streetsweeper was named the best feature. That means it will show again Saturday night at the Bear Tooth at 8pm.

I understand the director Neil Mansfield was supposed to arrive from Australia today and should be at tonight's showing of the movie at 8pm at the Museum. But I'll catch it Saturday night, because tonight is the only time I can watch Dream Boy.

Congratulations Neil.

AIFF -Dilemmas for film Critics

We met RA at the Fireweed to see the Singaporean movie, Carrot Cake Conversations. (The website - at the link - is clever and worth a look.) When I proposed this as the movie we go to see together before dinner, he responded that he was looking at the same one as a good choice. Well, he is originally from Malaysia and Singapore borders Malaysia. It also turns out his sister lives in Singapore and she said it had been released in Singapore to decent reviews, but she hadn't seen it. As an added benefit we saw the short Donut Heaven before the movie. I have a short video from the director of Donut Heaven, Annetta Marion, in the previous post.

I'm struggling with the role of the movie reviewer. As a retired professor, my main experience with 'reviews' was grading papers. It seemed to me that the point of commenting on papers is to let the student know what you thought they did well (everyone needs outside confirmation that there work is good) and to show them ways to improve the parts that need work. I wrote about my criteria for evaluating movies last year, but there are other issues - like the purpose of the review and the relationship of the reviewer and the reviewed.

So Peter Porco's Anchorage Daily News review of the shorts he saw the other day, while pithy and more or less accurate, were sometimes pretty stinging. "Tepid acting and a lame script kept this film's amusement at the level of a groaner." That's like a punch to the stomach of the director, and while I'm afraid it is more true than not, I don't know that it will help the director do a better job next time. Granted, in a newspaper article that reviews six short movies, you don't have much space to say anything. But Porco spent more time in his review of the film "One-Two Punch" on a synopsis of the story, which ruins the movie for people who haven't yet seen it, and doesn't enlighten people who have seen it already.

But this also raises the issue of how relationships between reporters and their subjects affect what the reporters write. I met Tim Anderson, who made "One-Two Punch" (there's a video of Tim here) the second day of the festival. And I was able to talk to him briefly after I saw the film. I told him that I thought the acting was weak at times, but we also talked about the dilemma of capturing ordinary speech without being boring. The opening phone conversation between a couple having relationship problems is not brilliant conversation, but it is probably what two people might actually say. To what extent should writers elevate everyday conversation to a more literate level of talking? (People raised those issues about vice presidential candidates too I recall.)

The issue also came up in Andrew MacLean's filmmaker workshop. His film portrays a day of seal hunting. He said actually it was three days. And the killing of the seal, which happens at the end of the film, took place early in the first day. But the story narrative, influenced by his New York University faculty, required that the killing had to come at the end. I asked if an Inupiaq narrative style would have done the film differently. Andrew said, probably the end result was his own combination of those two styles and his own mix of cultures. When I asked if he would have made a different movie had it only had Barrow as its intended audience, he paused and explained in some detail why it would.

One issue here then is how our predetermined story lines and narrative styles cause us to reshape reality to fit culturally defined standards. And if we do that enough, do we create a separate reality in our recreations of reality, ones that cause us to see what isn't really there?

Porco could, rightfully, respond, "Hey, this is the bigtime. People who throw their films up for the world to see, need to be ready to face the fact that some of their films aren't very good." (Of course, while I'm making like I'm being fair to Porco, I'm also creating his lines which may not be nearly as good as what he himself would offer.) And I'd respond, first, film festivals are a venue for new film makers, and second, Anchorage's film stage is hardly the bigtime.

Now if the point of the criticism is to serve as triage for potential viewers, then one could argue one should be pointing out the gems AND the dogs so viewers don't waste their time with a bad movie when a good one is showing in the next theater. But that assumes that any one reviewer represents the tastes of all film goers.

Another role of the critic is to help film makers improve or at least think about how they might improve or the impacts of their films that they may not have considered. That tends to be my style. Rather than talking with the voice of God, it seems more appropriate to raise questions, point out areas which "from my perspective" seem weak seems both more humane and more productive than passing judgment from on high. I don't think my former students would say I was a pushover at grading, but I think most would say that my purpose was to point out where they could do better rather than to humiliate them. (For some it took longer to reach that perspective than others. And not all stuck it out long enough to get there.)

All this is a preface to why I haven't done any serious reviewing so far for this Festival. A good movie takes a while to parse. A bad movie takes even longer to constructively critique. When I talked to Tim Anderson about his film we talked about the basic theme - when the truth is so bizarre that people don't believe you. I asked if he knew why he wrote the film. He didn't have a ready answer, hadn't delved into his childhood for a clue, but did say that there was a time when he often picked up friends at the airport. (The main character assures his girlfriend in the phone call that he'll be their to pick her up when her plane comes in.) And sometimes he would think of what might be legitimate excuses if he couldn't make it. Being tied up by two men in bunny suits who invade your home and then invite their friends over to party wasn't one of them, though that's what ends the relationship in the movie. Writing a short review doesn't let you get into this level. Writing a review doesn't give you a chance to hear the filmmaker's side either. Now you can say the piece of art should stand on its own. But what is a short film for anyway these days? There isn't really much of a market for them except as parts of a television show, maybe, and film festivals. Perhaps theaters can be convinced to add them before features, like they used to do with newsreels and cartoons. But now that they've crossed commercial line, that isn't likely. So I suspect that shorts are often done by people without the resources to do feature length films. They are a chance to try out some techniques less expensively than in a feature length film. They can be a showcase for up and coming film makers. And some things don't need more than ten minutes to say, but this can be a pretty expensive project if there are few ways to pay your costs. MacLean said his second film cost $30,000. Tim Anderson said "One-Two Punch" cost $800, if I recall correctly. I think it is not unreasonable to have one way of evaluating films is against their costs. For $800 "One-Two Punch" is a helluva film compared to some Hollywood movies with multi-million budgets.

Of course, there is at least another purpose of criticism - to show off the cleverness and hipness of the reviewer. And certainly any decent reviewer wants to write the review in a way that provokes thought and redounds positively on the reviewer. But ultimately the focus should be on the subject of the film, the ideas that the film raises.

[picture from Donut Heaven website]


So, with that said, what can I say about the two movies tonight? I liked "Donut Heaven." I wish I had talked to Annetta after seeing the film instead of before. Was the weight loss of the mother real or was she just wearing a fat suit at the beginning? (Now that gets right to the deep psychological issues of the film doesn't it?) The basics - the photography, the acting, etc. worked for me. (One of my grading criteria for papers was "writing." Generally this was something you lost points for if there were more than a couple of grammatical or spelling errors or the style was particularly clunky. Sometimes if it was really outstanding you could get points. Points being more figurative than literal here. The basic technical parts of the film, for me are similar. You need to avoid gaffs. Ideally, the technical parts should be good enough that you don't notice them. And they shouldn't draw attention to themselves and away from the story - the way some music and photography can do.) The characters were real to me, though I'm a little skeptical of the mom's ability to suddenly curb her eating. The daughter's sneaked smokes was more realistic. It was also a good mother-daughter (parent-child) movie - where both wanted to be better to the other, but couldn't help but dig into the other. Especially those things they didn't like in themselves.

Dare I attempt Carrot Cake Conversations? Having spent five days visiting my son in Singapore last April, (he's back in the US now) I did want to see this film set in Singapore and made by Singaporeans. It was an Altman like style of four main characters, plus a few more folks, whose paths, in the course of 16 hours or so, cross in different ways. Carrot Cake from what I learned in the film, is a stir fry dish with lots of soy sauce and chili. While my son took me to eat at the Newton Hawker Market, where they ate in the film, I didn't have carrot cake. There's a video of the hawker we bought from here.

There wasn't anything special about this movie, except that it had a Singaporean setting and point of view. But I did like all of the characters, despite their flaws, and for me things dragged a bit. At times I saw the actors (meaning they seemed to separate from their characters enough that I saw them as actors reciting lines) but I thought Adrian Pang who played Matthew was right on the money all the time. The issues covered were universal issues - relationships (husband-wife; mother-daughter), the link between career success and happiness, and control vs. spontaneity. Nothing terribly new or insightful, but perhaps some of the ideas would seem fresher for someone much younger them I.

RA, J and I went to Tofu House afterward to talk about the movie and life. We've got several more inches of snow this evening and we passed the cyclist on Fireweed. He did have a light on his backpack, but it needed a new battery, which we were able to tell him as he caught up with us at the light.

I spent most of the day finishing my video for class tomorrow. I was working on the animation and then the sound. It came out ok - the music helps enormously to fill in the slow parts. The assignment was for 30 seconds with an understanding it could go over. Mine is just under 90 seconds. And I'm still having problems saving from iMovie (o6) to a .mov file. The second clip freezes the video as the audio goes on its merry way. I guess I'll have to get out the old iMovie disk and reinstall it.

[Carrot Cake pictures from the website.]