Full Frame Festival Review
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011) describes recently discovered footage of a Swedish film crew who sought to document the evolving Black Power movement. In addition to refreshing long cuts with people like Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Stokely Carmichael sharing their perspectives, modern commentary is included by people like Cornel West and Harry Belafonte. Burma Soldier (Annie Sundberg, Nic Dunlop, and Ricki Stern, 2010) tells a fascinating story about a man who fought for the repressive Burmese government, and then became a human rights activist against the government, eventually fleeing and now taking refuge in the United States. It was an inspiring film and very exciting to have Myo Mint, the soldier, in attendance for a post-film discussion. Many of you may have enjoyed James Marsh’s Oscar-winning film Man on Wire about the French tightrope walker who walked between the two World Trade Center Towers. His 2010 film Project Nim was shown this year at Full Frame. As a parent, I almost couldn’t bear witnessing the cruelty of a baby chimpanzee who, at a few days of age, was ripped from his mother’s desperate embrace. The chimpanzee, Nim, continued to face sudden separations in a Columbia University scientist’s experiments in the 1970s to see if a chimpanzee, raised as a human, could master sign language. It is even more heartbreaking to see how, after a childhood in a rich and stimulating environment, Nim is returned after the experiments to a bleak laboratory environment of cages where the “inmates” wait their turn on horrible medical procedures. I enjoyed hearing the questions and answers of first-time filmmaker and lawyer Susan Saladoff, whose 2011 film Hot Coffee was a moving documentary about civil justice, tort reform, and binding arbitration. A number of disturbing stories, such as of a woman who was brutally raped and then not allowed to seek justice because of a binding arbitration clause in her employment contract, are used to illustrate very well laid-out legal concepts. For those of you who enjoy contemporary dance (the American Dance Festival, also in Durham, is put on each summer), A Good Man (Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn, 2011) enjoyed its world premiere at Full Frame about choreographer Bill T. Jones. A highly political artist, this film describes how Jones creates a commissioned dance theatre “Fondly do we hope . . . Fervently do we pray” about Abraham Lincoln. Every year, a film in the first time slot on Thursday morning is offered for free especially for school groups. This year that film was Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie (Sturla Gunnarsson, 2010). It tells the story of famous Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. An acclaimed scientist, he has, it seems, always had a strong social conscience and interest in conveying science ideas in a language appropriate for the interested public. There are so many films to choose from each year at the Festival that I inevitably miss ones that I would have loved to have seen. Durham-based Rodrigo Dorfman’s One Night in Kernersville won The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short. It is about jazz bassist John Brown, director of Jazz Studies at Duke University. It focuses on the John Brown Jazz Orchestra’s recording session in Kernersville, NC (between Winston-Salem and Greensboro) for a CD that will be released later this year. All told, about a hundred films representing 23 countries were shown from about 10am till past midnight Thursday-Sunday. Many included question and answer sessions or panel discussions with filmmakers and/or people in the films immediately after the screening. You may wish to bookmark www.fullframefest.org not just for next year’s Festival, but to be aware of their year-long programming, including a number of free film screenings. Note: Full Frame logo and photograph courtesy of the Full Frame Film Festival. All images are used with permission.
By Dilip Barman The fourteenth annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, held a few weeks ago in mid-April in Durham, NC, featured hundreds of films. As of press time, numbers were still being finalized, but it seems to have been even better attended than last year. I was delighted to meet several Saathee readers at the Festival! I may have at least one more in-depth review in a future issue of the magazine. This month, I will briefly highlight some of my favorite films. Those readers who attended are lucky, as some films get distribution years later, if at all, so this may be the only opportunity, at least for a long time, to see some of the films. However, some of the films I will describe here do in fact have distribution already in place, so you may see some in theatres or on television.
Last month, I wrote about two films of particular interest to South Asians. Michelle Coomber’s Buriganga is a 12-minute poetic and optimistic depiction of Bangladesh’s Buriganga River. Phil Cox’s feature-length The Bengali Detective provides a fabulous portrait of a man, Rajesh, who leads a detective agency in Kolkata – more than the agency, it shows the glowing humanity of Rajesh, a model employer, father, and husband. Some of my other favorites that I saw include The Loving Story, just released in 2011 by Festival founder Nancy Buirski. The premise of the story itself, that a married couple could be arrested in 1958 simply because they are of different races, is troubling and interesting enough. It turns out to be of particular historic importance, because the Lovings’ case went to the Supreme Court in 1967, where, with little deliberation, the Virginia law was unanimously overturned. This served to immediately overturn similar miscegenation laws in other states. For me, this was one of the most poignant films that I have seen in my many years of having attended the Festival; it seemed that many tears flowed after the screening when the daughter of the Lovings, whom we had seen in the film as a child, as well as the key lawyer who took their case, came with the filmmakers to the stage for a question and answer session. We Still Live Here (Âs Nutayuneân; Ann Makepeace, 2010) was a compelling and emotional story about an ancient language that was almost lost and is now remarkably being regained. The Wampanoag Indians first welcomed the Pilgrims when they arrived in the New World in 1620 but deliberately were cleared of their land and even had children taken away sometimes for decades without seeing their parents. The Indian language was almost extinguished, but, as the film documents, Jesse Littledoe Baird has worked to rediscover the Wampanoag language. Saathee.com
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May 2011