The program just ended. All of them were definitely worth watching. Some were excellent. I'm sitting in the theater during the break until Magic Utopia. So let me just ramble and see which ones I remember.
The Story of a Rainy Night - was amazing and so sad. A man in his Iranian apartment (more people should see Iranian films and see how well many Iranians live) on a rainy night. He feeds a cat we never see. Then there's a knock on the door and a daughter arrives with kids and husband. The old man acts surprised she came. Two more kids arrive, there's lots of commotion. Someone brought a birthday cake. There's talk about not seeing the kids very often. They also brought some pizza. We see the man from the back of the head mostly. Sometimes from the left side, sometimes from the right, but never fully from the front. Until near the end the camera comes around and examines him fully and closely and the audience realizes that all the visitors were an illusion. He's been home alone on his birthday. He lets the cat out. When all the kids were there the subtitles were flying and it was hard to read and a linguistically talented friend said it wasn't Farsi, maybe Iranian Azerbaijani.
Nkosi Coiffure - Terrific. Belgian lady and her boyfriend are fighting on the street and she slips in a door to escape him. She's in an African hair salon. One of the ladies goes outside to talk to the boyfriend and the others talk to the lady. Wonderful film.
The Bravest/The Boldest - This one's been on the circuit a long time, but I understand why. Two military chaplains go to tell a woman her husband's been killed. She's in the elevator coming up from the laundry room when they get in. She senses they're there for her. When they get to her floor, they let her go out first, but she says not her floor and pushes another button. The rest of the movie she avoids them as she deals with her grief. Excellent film.
Zawadi - A Kenyan girl is sick so her mom has to stay home to watch her, so Mom tells her son he has to collect twice as many bottles today to make up for her staying home. And the neighbor girl is upset because it's her birthday and her mom doesn't remember. Beautifully done.
The Call - A pregnant South African prostitute, the taxi driver who's the father, a cell phone left in the cab, and a funeral. Terrific acting.
Mike - A young man drops his brother off at the barber shop and waits in the car for him to come back. He finally goes in to check and the receptionist says there haven't been any little boys. Also good, but not quite at the level of the others for me.
Merry Xtmas - This one stood out because it starred Dick Van Dyke, Valery Harper, and Matthew Modine, was full Hollywood production levels, and was short, sweet, and funny. And a good ending to a set that started with a man waiting for his kids to come for his birthday. It somehow seems like it shouldn't be in the mix with these other, more budding filmmakers. But it was great.
OK, I've gone back and I missed three, but that's not a reflection on the films. One of them - The One Minute Time Machine - was one of my favorites. I'll talk about
[UPDATE 11:44pm - the new film was starting and I had to shut down my computer and I wasn't even sure this got posted.
One Minute Time Machine - was a romantic physics sci-fi short, with good imagination and characters. Very clever and well executed.
The other one I forgot was Unleaded about and armed robbery that went wrong, at least from the robbers' perspective. It was well done, fun, but again, like Mike, not quite there with the others.
Picking the best will be hard. For me, just based on the one I enjoyed the most, it would be One Minute Time Machine. But I also really liked Nkosi Coiffure. plus The Bravest/The Boldest had great acting and a good twist. And I know I'm going to see that cab driver's face from The Call in my head many times in the next week or two.
Congratulations to those who put this whole package together. All the films were worthy, and, as I said, starting with the imaginary birthday dinner and ending with the manipulated Christmas dinner was a great touch.
Everything except the After School Special and the Quick Freeze (which are more like local contests) is in competition. Circus Without Borders looks at acrobats in the Arctic who team up with acrobats in Guinea. Jasmine is a Hong Kong based murder mystery.
Screenshot - click here for actual schedule with links
I've been told that Japanese made Magic Utopia is the feature to see. But it's not an easy film they say. My early perusal of the features in competition led me to believe that Creditors is also an interesting and complex film. You can see details and trailers of both (and Jasmine) at my overview of the features in competition.
I'm going to pass on Creditors tonight (it's playing again Friday at the Alaska Experience Theater at 8pm) so I can see the Shorts Jury Selection. This program has all the short narrative films that are in competition, plus a few more. I haven't seen any of the shorts programs yet because of the way things have been scheduled. Tonight's the right time for me to start.
The Quick Freeze films are always fun. The groups get three prompts that somehow have to be incorporated into a film and then have six days to make a film. This year's prompts are:
VHS tape
Kiss
Dolly/slider shot.
Each year these productions have gotten more and more clever and professional. These should be good, for those of you who can sleep in late on Friday.
I'd seen the trailers for this enough that I was getting a bit jaded, but I had high hopes for this film. What could go wrong? People find tsunami debris on Alaska and Canadian beaches and track down the owners and take the things back. International cooperation, returning lost items to disaster victims, all good fodder for a movie. Generally the movie was good and I felt the people in the movie were sincerely trying to do some good.
But somewhere along the way it got a little cloying and annoying. I think the underlying issue for me is the construct of helper and help. Being a helper means you have the power to do something for another who, in this situation anyway, has less power. That doesn't mean we shouldn't help others, but we should understand our motives and not get carried away with what we've done. I posted long ago about charity and included some Jewish thought on charity that is relevant here, though not sufficient, I'm sure, for some to get my point about the power relationship in giving. Part of the issue is that in Japan there is a very strong culture of gift giving and thanking. So the degree of thanks became a bit embarrassing.
After all, these people where doing what they enjoy doing - beach combing. They found some stuff an said, wow, wouldn't it be interesting if we could find the owners? So far so good. But then they get on planes and fly to Japan and become the recipients of this overwhelming level of thank you. I get all this. It's my nature to try to find the person who lost something, to get something back to a rightful owner. But I also know that it's what I enjoy doing and I'm not making any big sacrifice to help out. I'm not interrupting my life or giving away money that I can't afford to give. I'm just doing what I enjoy doing and if that makes someone else happy, then that's a bonus.
Kevin and kids answer questions after Lost and Found
So I was sitting there watching the film end and thinking about whether I'm being overly picky and critical. But my gut was telling me this was a bit over the top.
And then the movie ended and one of the finders, who's from Anchorage, and his kids went to the front to answer questions. Two things he said stood out:
Some people weren't interested in getting stuff back or even talking to us. Wow, that certainly wasn't in the story. We were told about a signed volley ball whose owner hadn't been found, but not about people who weren't interested, who didn't want to be 'helped.'
That he'd been contacted by the film makers and they were interested in his story and that they paid for his trip to Japan.
OK. That made more sense, because the returning of the found items and the meetings between the losers and the finders were all filmed. So maybe that was my problem. This was the story line for a film and the filmmakers found the folks to fit their story line. Japan experiences disaster. Debris crosses Pacific. People find the debris and track down and return the debris. What a wonderful heartwarming story. But at least some of these folks wouldn't have gone to Japan on their own if they hadn't been encouraged and financed by the film makers. And the film never mentioned the people who didn't want their stuff back and didn't want to meet or even talk to the people who found it. Including that would have made this a much richer film. But instead we got an, apparently, artificially sweetened feel good story.
It makes Ruth Ozeki's novel, A Tale For The Time Being, all the more remarkable with its richness and darkness. This story, completed just before the tsunami hit, tells the story about a Japanese-Canadian who finds a teenage Japanese girl's diary on a beach in British Columbia. She too wants to find the owner and return the diary. But the story doesn't have the Disneyesque happily after after quality of Lost and Found. The diary tells us very dark tales of life as a teenager in Japan.
That said, I have no criticism for any of the beach combers. My sense was that they were each doing their thing and genuinely wanted to be helpful and that they all learned a lot and grew from these experiences. What I saw in the film makes me think the people returning stuff to Japan were themselves a bit overwhelmed by their reception. And it's up to the filmmakers to decide how to tell their story. It's just that they told a story that didn't sit all that well with me. Their story put happy makeup onto a situation that wasn't nearly so happy.
Interesting, strange characters in a small dying (dead?) town in rural Turkey. Beautiful shots. And the end left me, and apparently others, perplexed. My assumption is that Turkish films today, especially if they are sent to festivals abroad, have a political and/or social meaning that Turks would get, but that is more obscure to foreigners not paying close attention to Turkey. The images from this film will definitely be floating around my skull for a while.
But this one will stay with me.
The Japanese Counsel-General is now introducing the film Lost and Found - a documentary about earthquake and tsunami debris washing up in the US and Canada and the search for the Japanese owners of some of the things found.
[The wifi at the Bear Tooth wasn't getting this post through when I tried to post it.]
Three venues today: Bear Tooth, the Anchorage Museum, and Alaska Experience theater.
Everything tonight is worth getting out and seeing.
This is a Screenshot so links don't work, but go to the original here to see details of each film
The green represents documentaries and the blue is for feature films. Grey is Alaska Made.
A quick overview:
AK Experience offerings:
Madina's Dream is video of the lives of Nuba people who have been forced out of their homes in southern Sudan's Nuba Mountains. We see and hear from the women and children in a refugee camp in South Sudan (a new separate country) and their men still is the south of Sudan (the country South Sudan was split from) who are fighting the Sudanese government in an attempt to regain their land. A powerful documentation of the kind of thing that is happening in too many places around the world.
The Descendants is an Iranian film about a father who goes to Sweden because the family hasn't heard from their son who is there studying. It looks at the problems of poorer student trying to study in Western countries. It's a good film with strong acting. One of my favorites so far among the features. The audience Saturday enjoyed it too - here's a link to a video of audience reaction I did.
Storis: The Galloping Ghost of the Alaskan Coast - from the official description:
"STORIS: The Galloping Ghost of the Alaskan Coast is a documentary that chronicles the nearly 65 year history of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter STORIS and examines the roles it played during World War II, the Cold War, and throughout the post-Cold War era. The documentary will introduce some of STORIS's many officers and sailors as they recount the STORIS's most famous mission that helped define the Coast Guard's mission in Alaska and beyond."
The director Damon Stuebner will be there for Q&A - always a bonus.
All three films are in competition for an award in their categories (documentaries and features and Alaska Made.)
Museum
Two more strong films.
Children of the Arctic - is a very well made documentary about some high school kids growing up in Barrow and the pull between maintaining a traditional lifestyle and going to college and becoming modern. The director and some of the people featured in the film were in attendance the other night, as you can see in the picture at the right when they were answering questions. Probably the best documentary I've seen so far, though it's close.
Eadweard - a feature that looks at the life of the man who tried to stop motion with a camera in the 1880s. He made the famous pictures of horses running to show there's point where all the hooves are off the ground at once. A well made and interesting film of his work and also his life, both of which, it's implied were impacted by his having hit his head badly in a coach accident. Definitely worth seeing.
Bear Tooth
The Circus Leaves Town - This is a Turkish feature which I haven't seen yet. It should be good. I've got more details and trailers of it (and The Descendants) on my overview of the features in competition.
Lost and Found - This documentary also promises to be good. It's about debris from the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan drifting over to the US and people finding it, then looking for some of the owners. See a trailer of Lost and Found and for Children of the Arctic and Madina's Dream at my post on Documentaries in Competition.
2015 Top States – Per Capita (# of volunteers per 100,000 residents)
#1
Vermont
8.3 vols per 100,000 residents
#2
District of Columbia
6.5
#3
Washington
Montana
Alaska
4.5
4.5
4.5
#6
Minnesota
Maine
4.1
4.1
#8
New Hampshire
Oregon
4.0
4.0
#10
Colorado
3.8
This doesn't really come as a surprise to me. Alaska is the state that is the most like a Peace Corps assignment and Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) are working throughout the state in all sort of roles. Former Borough Mayor Jack Roderick is an RPCV, though his Peace Corps service in India happened after he was mayor. Another RPCV from India is retired Native Law attorney David Case. Scott Goldsmith, Professor Emeritus in Economics at ISER served in Malaysia, as did, if I recollect correctly, UAA Chemistry professor John Kennish. Former UAA Chancellor Lee Gorsuch and his wife Ann served in Paraguay. Retired doctor Jeffrey Lawrence and his wife Sharon served in Brazil. Anchorage assembly member and former state legislator, Pete Petersen, served in the the Dominican Republic. And there's a guy connected to this blog who served in Thailand.
2014 US House candidate and JAG attorney Forrest Dunbar served in Kazakhstan. 2014 Lt. Gov. candidate, petroleum engineering grad, and an Alaska teacher of the year, Bob Williams, served in Gambia.
In total, there have only been about 220,000 Peace Corps volunteers since President Kennedy started the program in 1961. And 4.5 residents per 100,000 in Alaska comes out to something over 300. [UPDATE: A sharp eyed reader noticed that I added an extra zero to the number here. I suspect I messed this up because I know there are way over 30 RPCV's living in Alaska and I think the number may be closer to 300 than to 30. Perhaps they are only counting the people who have joined the national RPCV group.]
In contrast, there are about 71,000 veterans in Alaska, about one out of ten, or 10,000 residents per 100,000 residents.
The US sends a lot more people out to wage war than it sends to wage peace.
[UPDATE: Short Doc Program time has been changed to 7:45, which allows people to see either Vanishing Sail or From This Day Forward before seeing the Short Docs Program.]
I realized last night that there was a scheduling problem at the festival. Look at the grid for Tuesday night. Am I the only one who can see this flaw? And I admit, there was a problem Monday night too, just like this, but I didn't catch it. And if you don't look at this view (this is the grid view, there are several other options on the SCHED page), you probably won't see it at all.
Unless you want to see the Short Docs program AND something else.
Basically, the Short Docs program overlaps all four other movies showing Tuesday night.
All they had to do was move it earlier so you could pick between the two 8pm offerings OR move it later and you could pick between the earlier offerings.
This is a problem for Wednesday night, Thursday night, and Friday night as well. I've emailed the festival honchos. I understand that making changes at this point is problematic because people have already begun to schedule.
But now that they have this fancy Scheduling technology, which even tracks who has planned to attend, they should be able to make changes and notify people. If most people are like me, they don't know what they're going to watch until the day it happens, so they won't even notice the change.
Or, they could move Short Docs up to 6pm and play it twice. So if people come at the previously scheduled time, and thus miss the first hour, they could just stay and see it the second time and catch what they missed. And then people who wanted to see a different 6pm film, could also see the Short Docs. It's win/win.
This kind of thing drives me nuts every year, but usually it's because films I want to see are just playing at the same time. Here, they are unnecessarily playing at the same time. Grrrrr!
I've already told some folks I want to be involved in scheduling next year. Just to make sure this sort of screwup doesn't happen. That was before I saw this!
I know, from years to blogging about the festival, that scheduling glitches like this just aren't obvious until you're trying to see a particular film and it overlaps with another.
I understand overlapping at the Alaska Experience theaters because you want to stagger the audiences a bit, so everyone isn't buying a ticket at the same time. But the overlaps also mean that one film starts before another ends and so it limits the number of films a person can see, without missing the end or the beginning of a film to catch the next one.
TONIGHT:
The Short Documentary program has two docs that are in competition. Bihttos (Canada, 14 min.) Superjednostka (Poland, 20 min.) (This will also show Thursday afternoon at 2pm at the Martini Matinee) I've covered these and the other docs in competition here.
Technically, you could stay long enough to see these two and make a dash to the Bear Tooth to see the Gayla feature at 8pm. But just because something is in competition, doesn't mean other films in the program aren't good or even better. The screeners all have different tastes and frequently films that are in competition are not the ones I would have chosen.
The Gayla feature at 8pm at the Bear Tooth is The David Dance. From the EdgeMediaNetwork
"I'll be honest. I had some misgivings when I first began watching the "The David Dance." At the start, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the film, but once I reached the end of the movie I was overwhelmed with all different kinds of emotions and plenty of tears. This is truly one of those movies that gets to the heart and soul of a person.
If you have ever felt love of any kind, this movie is for you. If you have ever met someone who was "the one," but you just didn't know it at the time, this movie is for you. If you have ever come across someone who has had a different view-other than your own -- and didn't know how to establish common ground -- "The David Dance" is the surprise of the LGBT film circuit. . . ."
The Gayla documentary at 5:30pm at the Bear Tooth is From This Day Forward. From The Star:
"As Sharon Shattuck planned her wedding two years ago, she recalled her father’s unsettling request, made when she was about 13 on the drive to school: “Whenever you get married, I hope that you’ll let me wear a dress when I walk you down the aisle.”
Now 32, Shattuck has made From This Day Forward, a personal, insightful and gently humorous documentary about love, marriage and growing up with her transgender dad, Trisha. . . "
I mentioned this film earlier today and the lawsuit between the competing leadership groups in the village of Newtok. Well, it's pretty clear the courts have sided with the new leadership and told the old leadership to clear the offices and make the village documents available to the new leaders.
The film didn't mention the conflict. There was a fair number of folks (I'd guess 50-60) and lots of questions at the end. Most were about technical issues about moving a village and which agencies are involved. One question did get filmmaker Brian McDermott mention something about political conflict, but since he couldn't figure out who was telling the truth, he decided to leave it out.
I caught up with McDermott in the lobby and asked him about that decision to leave it out, and after pushing him a bit, he said he had put something in about the dispute in an earlier version and it killed the film. One of his local advisors on this told him it didn't really matter because there were 180 villages facing this same problem and it's the bigger issue that matters.
I guess it all depends on what your intent is as a filmmaker. To be an advocate for a cause or to be a good journalist? And it's reasonable to take either stand. Personally, even as an advocate, I wouldn't want to do a film (or a blog post) that left out the proverbial elephant in the room, which would let opponents pounce on that omission.
And to his credit, McDermott listened and acknowledged my criticism as fair. I did suggest at least a note written at the end of the film that acknowledged the dispute, the difficulty in covering it in the film, and while it might have delayed things a bit, it wasn't the key factor that was preventing Newtok and 180 other villages from being moved.
I'd not that McDermott is from Pennsylvania, connected with someone from Newtok on Facebook and came up to make the film. One could say that was gutsy or a little naive. Having spent a little time in Wales, Alaska, I think that McDermott at the very least gives non-Alaska a little sense of the living conditions and of the connection of the people to their land because of their subsistence lifestyle. It does personalize what otherwise are rather exotic places that most people in the Lower 48 can't imagine.
And he does have some of the characters in the lawsuits up on the screen so you can see who they are. But this is a version of what local reporters call parachute journalism - where outsiders fly in for a few days, get their stories, and leave without really knowing the history and context of where they've been or the stories they're telling.
And if you compare it to the time Nick Brandestini spent in Barrow to get Children of the Arctic filmed right, you can see the huge difference. But Nick has more film credits and had a much bigger budget - enough to fly the subjects of the film to Zurich and Anchorage for the showings of the film.
People have to start somewhere, but telling a village's story is also a giant responsibility. I think his intentions were good, I don't suspect this film will do much harm, and it may even do a little good.
I also think that the Anchorage International Film Festival needs to think long and hard about what Alaska movies it accepts. Just because a film is about Alaska doesn't mean it should be in the festival. Should this film have gotten in? Probably. Should it win any awards? I think the omission of any mention of the local dispute is a big flaw. It's such a huge factor of what's happening in the village, I just can't see how it could be ignored completely. Especially since the title and some of the film content makes it all seem like 'we're one big happy family.'
On one side, opposing the extension of the road through the university land where moose and other animals traverse, where cross country skiers ski, and nature reins, mostly, were all the surrounding community councils, the people who live near by. Also opposed were the local Assembly members representing the area where the road would be and the state representative for that area and the state senator for that area.
On the other side, supporting the road, were the Department of Transportation, that ignored all the public comment over a several year process to continue to plan for a road. DOWL Engineering that had the contract for the citizen participation process. And apparently lots of builders and developers who were big supporters of former Mayor Sullivan who requested the state keep the road and got it along with a $20 million allocation into the state budget at the last minute several years ago. Providence Hospital, the University of Alaska Anchorage, and Alaska Pacific University in meetings closed to the public gave support, though we aren't sure how strong it was and what incentives they were given.
Even though the state state budget was facing drastic cuts for school and many other essential services due to falling oil revenues, the state kept this project that was opposed overwhelmingly by people in the neighborhood.
Along Northern Lights very near where the road would have gone
Lots of people fought long and hard to stop this unnecessary road which would have cut through what I've been calling Anchorage's Central Park. It's a big green swath in midtown by the Universities, that is wonderful recreation site, and a natural infrastructure project that cleans the air and the water,
as well as preserving water that would otherwise end up in sewers and go out to see. It quiets the region and provides refuse for moose and other animals and birds. Think I exaggerate?
Read E.O. Wilson's The Future of Life.
I thank him for keeping this campaign promise. This is a big deal for the future of Alaska.
The people who want to connect every gap in every road, the people who make money from cutting trees and building things where they were and the politicians they support will be back on this sooner or later. But for now, we're ok. A big victory in the many battles for preventing Anchorage from looking like every other overdeveloped urban center and for preserving the reason that many of us live here.
