Docs In Progress is pleased to offer more reflections on films at Silverdocs from guest reviewer Matthew Radcliff.

In a previous summary I wrote about the films that had a core theme of “family.” A second thread running through the festival focused on characters who used art as a means of liberation or escape. Many of these subjects felt compelled to practice their art. Beyond the level of a hobby or even a job, the physical and mental actions kept them healthy, happy, and in at least one instance, sane.

The most unexpected artists in the festival were the workers at the recycling facility depicted in Tessa Joosse’s delightful short Plastic and Glass. The camera follows the path of the garbage through the facility along the maze of conveyor belts from which the workers must sort out the different materials. Paper products in back, plastic containers here, and glass bottles there. After a few minutes, the sounds of the machinery settle into a rhythm and the workers begin moving in time. The faint sound of humming can be heard, just barely rising above the clank of the factory. As the bales of crushed plastic are moved via forklift, the driver begins to sing, “Plastic and glass, paper, rocks, and scissors.” Director (and composer) Tessa Joosse described the film as a blend of Alan Lomax’s field recordings of folk music and Jacques Tati’s playful films of daily life. The song functions similar to a work chant, to coordinate movements, but also to alleviate the boredom of sorting recyclables. One month after the festival, I still find myself singing the song.

Another short, They Are Giants, conflates work and art, chronicling the creation of a miniature book by retired publisher Guus Thurkow. Director Koert Davidse captures the passion and pride that Thurkow invests in creating his miniature books and in collecting other specimens. The film opens with establishing shots of Thurkow’s very classic-looking library, the Bibliotheca Thurkowiana Minor, with hardwood floors and shelves lined with leather-bound books. A hand reaches in to adjust a row of books throws your perceptions for a loop: the finger is bigger than each book. As the camera pulls back, you realize that it is a dollhouse-sized library, full of more than 2,000 miniature books in a space eight feet long and four feet high. Over the course of the film, Thurkow puts together a miniature book that is one chapter of Don Quixote, the fight against windmills mistaken for giants. Thurkow informs us that Don Quixote is the patron “saint” of libraries, because in the novel, the burning of his library, supposedly for his own good, instigated Quixote’s quest. Thurkow’s miniature books are full of tiny details, and require a high level of competence and patience. Due to the small size, any mistake is comparatively large, although it is not noticeable to the film’s audience. Therefore, it is an extreme shock at the end of the film when Thurkow chops his book in half because it did not meet his level of perfection.

One of the best films at the festival, and the winner of the Cinematic Vision Award, was Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol. This well-told story also featured a protagonist whose art used miniature objects, although instead of classic literature, Mark Hogenkamp takes superb photographs of Barbie and Ken dolls. It is difficult to write too much about Marwencol without giving away too much information. The power of the film comes in part from how it is constructed, and how Malmberg carefully parcels out the details of Hogenkamp’s story. Each scene continually hooks the audience again, keeping everyone in their seats anxious to hear the rest of the story. What can be told is this: several years ago, Hogenkamp was the victim of a serious beating which left him physically and mentally traumatized. He suffered serious amnesia and numerous physical injuries. His minimal insurance did not provide enough therapy, and so Hogenkamp works with his dolls to develop patience, dexterity, and his imagination. Before the attack, he was a talented artist, often sketching fantastic scenes from his imagination. He was also a severe alcoholic. After the attack he no longer felt any desire to drink, but neither was he able to express his imaginative side as well.  So he began to practice a kind of homemade therapy, creating elaborate storylines set in a fictional World War II era European town. The Barbie dolls are the town’s denizens, named for Mark’s friends and neighbors, and he photographs them. In essence, he is creating a sort of graphic novel based upon these photographs; although mostly once the photos were developed he just stored them in a shoebox. The need to create and continue the story was the main goal, not finishing and displaying the art. As the story unfolds, Mark’s photos are noticed by a gallery owner in New York City who sets up an exhibition. The preparation and visit to the exhibition is when a lot of the back-story gets revealed to the audience. The film should be in theaters this fall; don’t miss it.

Bill Cunningham, the star of Bill Cunningham New York, is a photographer for the New York Times. He has two columns in the Styles section of the Sunday paper, “Evening Hours” and “On The Streets.” The former is photos of the attendees at the many charity events around town. The latter is a chronicle of the fashions seen on the city’s streets. Each week, Bill’s photos expose the similarities in how we dress: one week everyone seems to be wearing blue, the next it is stripes. One of my favorite columns shows more than a dozen examples of using black trash bags to stay dry. At 80 years old, Bill is still active. It is clear that his work (or play, as he refers to it) keeps him young at heart. He is constantly working, using his bicycle to get around town and photographing seemingly everything. However, he will tell you that he doesn’t photograph everything and is very selective. During one scene in particular he chooses not to photograph a famous actress, in contrast to the dozens of other photographers around him, because “she was not wearing anything interesting.” In many respects, Bill Cunningham New York, is a typical profile of a character with an interesting job. The film is produced by the New York Times Company, but does not give the impression that it is a commercial for them. Bill celebrates fashion as a bit of beauty that anyone can indulge in with any budget. He is just so delightfully cheerful and nice that the film is an uplifting and joyous experience.

Two short films also featured main characters who maintain their youth through art. The two dancers in Keep Dancing, Marge Champion and Tony Saddler, are both ninety years old and still dance three times a week. After a lifetime of dancing in Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows, they refuse to stop. Partners since 2001, their weekly rehearsals of new choreography keep them active and alert. Most of all, it keeps them happy. The short film includes numerous clips from earlier eras, particularly Marge, who was in the movie musical Show Boat and had been the real-life model for several Disney characters, including Snow White.

Corner Plot profiles Charlie Koiner, a Silver Spring native who is, perhaps, an artist of the soil. He farms a one-acre plot inside the Beltway around Washington, DC, the last urban farmer – or the first, depending how you look at it. The short film, by local filmmakers (and Docs In Progress alums) Ian Cook and Andre Dahlman, shows Charlie harvesting his crops, chatting with his neighbors, and tending the stall he has at the weekly farmer’s market. Assisted by his daughter, farming is his retirement career. At one point in the film, he mentions that buying the extra land for the garden may not have been financially worthwhile, but was extremely in keeping him active. This raises the excellent point that staying active in old age is actually a financial savings. If Charlie calculated how much money he is not spending on health care due to his active lifestyle, then I’m sure that buying the extra land would clearly be seen as a great financial decision. Like Marge, Donald, and Bill, Charlie is an exceptionally likeable character and clearly enjoys his own “artistic” outlet.

The British filmmaker and main protagonist in Men Who Swim, Dylan Williams, finds himself turning 40 in Sweden, where he lives with his Swedish wife and their children. Unable to find work, he joins a men’s synchronized swimming team for the chance to meet people and get a little exercise. The camaraderie of the team has its ups and downs, as any group of people will, but the friendships that develop are strong. The team members commit to improving their routine once they learn about the All Male World Championship being held in Milan. Because the synchronized swim team is a hobby for all of them, they struggle with finding the resources to travel to Italy and to hire a professional coach, whose help they desperately need. Dylan, who films the progression of the team, is not the only member who finds a way to resurrect artistic talents. Another member of the team, Lars, had formerly been a rock musician, and finds a renewed sense of purpose composing the score for their routine. He also falls in love with Jane, their original, volunteer coach. With the personal satisfaction that their journey has engendered, it almost doesn’t matter whether they win or lose at the World Championship, so I won’t reveal how that turns out!

The most literal example of using art as a means of escape is in This Chair Is Not Me, by Andy Taylor Smith. The film is an impressionistic telling of a personal story by Alan Martin, a dance- and movement-instructor who suffers from cerebral palsy and must use a computerized “vocalizer” to speak for him (similar to the machine that Stephen Hawking uses). Alan tells the story of when he got his first vocalizer, appropriately dubbed, “The Liberator.” As a young man, homebound and confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, he felt incredibly stifled. When his father, in punishment for some infraction, took away Alan’s CB radio, Alan felt that his only link with the outside world had snapped. So he left, rolling himself out the door and down the street. This new world, so alive and new, energized Alan; however, he was unable to order an ice cream cone or a basket of french fries. The next day, when he returned home, the situation was realized to be unlivable, and a collection was begun to buy Alan a vocalizer. Since then, he has gone on to choreograph and perform dances, and even has been an actor on BBC sitcoms. The short film beautifully captures both Alan’s sense of confinement and his joy at being set free, through the power of words.

The dancers and performers in The Faux Real are escaping from convention and expectations of gender. Sort of – they are faux drag queens, women pretending to be men pretending to be women. It is an exaggerated performance of “womanhood” and “femininity,” often purposefully designed to be transgressive of gender expectations. At least some of the women in the film maintain the identity of a drag queen offstage, however. For them, it relates to the way they think about their bodies and their manners, and definitely serves to circumvent the roles and styles that society prescribes for women.

We Don’t Care About Music Anyway . . ., about Japanese “noise rock,” showcased artists who seek to escape from conventions. Their music (I will call continue to call it that, even if they might object) uses traditional and modern instruments alongside electronic devices and well, anything that can make a sound. One performer tapes tiny microphones to various parts of his body, and turns himself into an instrument. For instance, he amplifies his heartbeat, and even uses it to control the lighting for one dramatic show. Every beat of his heart was a pulse of light in the room, which was amazing to see. At the same time, he had a microphone attached to his nose, so that his breathing became another part of the rhythmic track. On top of these two microphones, and others, he spoke-sang through the piece. The film features almost a dozen musicians, and in between performance pieces, we see snippets of a roundtable discussion amongst them. They discuss each other’s work, in a very self-deprecating and humorous way, and also get very philosophical about their intentions. While not necessarily a “pleasant” listening experience, it is a fascinating documentary about a vibrant sub-culture in Japan, and growing in the US, too.

Silverdocs this year included a number of films with photography as a central element. I have already mentioned Bill Cunningham and Marwencol in this post, and Arsy-Versy in my previous post. Additionally, The Woodmans and Camera, Camera, neither of which I got to see, focused on photography. The former film explores the titular family, all artists, whose youngest child, Francesca, tragically killed herself at the age of 22. She was a photographer and her work is still shown in exhibitions. Her mother, father, and brother all provide perspective on the artistic life. The latter film explores the snapshot: photography, not as an art, but as travel memento. Does looking at a foreign culture through the viewfinder of a camera change what we see? I look forward to another opportunity to see this film, which looks like it raises more questions than it answers.

Space Tourists, while primarily about the “space-industrial complex” to paraphrase President Eisenhower, does feature a documentary photographer who spent time roaming the former Soviet Union taking pictures of the crumbling infrastructure remaining from their once large space program. Now, reduced to ferrying tourists to the International Space Station to cover the costs of launching rockets, many of the buildings in the town surrounding their “cosmonaut city” lie abandoned. I have already written about this film previously, for the Silverdocs blog.

I cannot end this summary of films about art at Silverdocs without mentioning Lucy Walker’s Waste Land, which I did not get to see. (Too many films, not enough days…) In this film, a Brooklyn artist travels to Brazil to create large artworks out of trash from what may be the world’s largest garbage dump.

And lastly, a film that I did get to see and thoroughly enjoyed was the David Byrne concert film by David Hillman Curtiss Ride Rise Roar. The music, naturally, was fabulous and sounded great in the big theater at the AFI Silver. What made this film unique was its focus on the dancers on the tour with Byrne and his band. Instead of primarily showing the band members playing their instruments, Curtis crafted the film around the three dancers, including the audition process, which was cool to see. For each song, we see a short intro of the band and dancers learning the choreography, and then we see the final product performed on stage. In all the songs, David Byrne also has a role in the choreography, which is not surprising since he is front and center on the stage. What are interesting are the songs where the back-up singers and the band members must also perform and dance. The result was a thoroughly enjoyable film that sheds an interesting light on the process of creating modern dance.

With over 100 films, the 2010 AFI Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival was loaded with great documentaries. There was too much to see, making it impossible for one person to see everything. But what I did get to see, I enjoyed very much. It has been a great opportunity to review and relive the experience as I write these summaries.

Docs In Progress was lucky this year to have not one but two people on the ground at Silverdocs. Matthew Radcliff who has been contributing film reviews throughout the year to our blog filed his own report on the festival.

Looking over my notes from Silverdocs, I noticed themes that were woven through the program. What stood out the most for me were the large number of films about family, both the one that we are born into and the one that we make for ourselves. A number of the films were about parents letting go of their children. The film most obviously following this theme was The Kids Grow Up, directed by Doug Block and taking place during his daughter’s final year in high school. Block filmed his daughter throughout her life; as a documentary filmmaker, his home movies involved a lot of interviews, and they are woven throughout the film in a way that I imagine mimics his own memories of her childhood. For the film is not about his daughter growing up, but about Doug coming to terms with her having already grown up. It is a wonderful meditation on parenthood, and does what good documentaries should do: it lets the audience see the world from another person’s perspective. I don’t have children of my own, but The Kids Grow Up let me understand a little better my own parents.

Last Train Home centered on a family in China, living in an entirely different world than Doug Block. Yet at its heart it was also a story of parents struggling over being apart from their children. The Zhangs have two children they are trying to take care of, and to do so have spent the last sixteen years working in factories thousands of miles away. After their daughter, the oldest, was born, both parents left their village looking for work in China’s industrial centers. The girl, and later her younger brother, was left on the family farm with the grandparents. Working long hours and living in very frugal dorms, the parents only return to the family during the Chinese New Year holiday. But of course, the 130 million other migrant workers in China are also trying to get to their homes at the same time. This causes some chaos, as you might imagine. Director Lixin Fan did an incredible job capturing the massive crush of people waiting days for a train to appear, as well as the meager conditions in the factories and back on the farm. The Zhangs see all their efforts possibly come to naught as their daughter, angry at their constant absence, leaves school to take a job as a migrant factory worker herself.

The separation of the migrant worker from her family is also the heart of Familia, which is about a poor family in Peru when the mother travels to Spain to take a job as a maid. Her young son is left behind with the father and their older children. We see the burden this places on the mother, spending months and years away from the family. But we also see how the absence of his partner affects the family who stays behind. The filmmakers achieve a very intimate observational style in this film.

I did not get to see Monica and David, but I heard director Ali Codina speak on a panel at the conference. She pointed out a secondary theme of “letting go” in her film about the marriage of two adults who both have Down syndrome. The two mothers are caught in the middle ground of supporting and guiding their children, but also letting them live their own life. Like all children, but maybe more than most, Monica and David are independent yet still need a lot of help. Can you let someone go yet still hold them close and safe? I am looking forward to seeing how this film, which will be on HBO in an upcoming season, addresses this question.

The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan was another film that I missed. Directed by Henry Corra, it is the story of a family still hoping for the reappearance of McKinley Nolan, an Army soldier who was MIA in Vietnam. What lengths will the family go to when an Army buddy, forty years later, thinks he sees McKinley walking down the street? But there is a question of whether or not it is McKinley Nolan, so his family travels to Vietnam and Cambodia looking for answers.

The death of a child is a tragic event that demands a private acceptance and grieving process. Director Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story, the closing night film for Silverdocs, documents the saga of the Tillman family as they resist government efforts to dictate how Pat Tillman, who was killed in action in Afghanistan, would be remembered. Pat was a pro football player who enlisted in 2002, joined the Army Rangers, and was killed in 2004. The administration portrayed Pat as a hero, and used him as a symbol of support for the war, while hiding the fact that he was killed by friendly fire. Bar-Lev’s film investigates what really happened, and shows how the family fought to learn the truth. Their only goal was to allow Pat to be remembered for the totality of his personality, rather than the government’s uni-dimensional façade.

One of the short films, The Space You Leave, focused on three parents whose children have gone missing. It has been two or three or ten years since they were last seen, and the parents have no idea why they are gone. Did they run away, will they return, are they even still alive? The elegiac images captured the mood of expectant waiting that seems to permeate each parent’s life. Another short, Arsy-Versy, took the opposite tack, focusing on a mother whose son wouldn’t leave home. Lubos, the son, is a free-spirited fifty-something who lives in his own world. He studies bats, among other equally unusual hobbies, and his mother understandably worries about what will happen after she is gone. His happy-go-lucky take on life is a very refreshing antidote to our modern desire to be constantly moving forward.

Some of the films looked not at letting go, but building up. How do you create a family? In particular, Beyond This Place was a personal look at the developing relationship between the filmmaker, Kaleo LaBelle, and his father, Cloud Rock. Other than two short visits, they had not been together for thirty years, and throughout the film we see them work to build a relationship. However, it must be said that Cloud Rock, an idealistic hippie devoted to psychedelics and bicycling, does not do much of the work. Refusing to look at the past, nor to admit to any responsibility as a father, he makes for a tough character to like. But through Kaleo’s acceptance of his father’s lifestyle, the audience also comes to respect Cloud Rock, or at least not hate him. Beyond This Place is another film that led me to reflect on my own family, and well worth seeing.

The winner of the Sterling US Feature Award, Wo Ai Ni Mommy (I Love You, Mommy) was also focused on building a family relationship, in this case, through adoption. Director Stephanie Wang-Breal embedded herself with a family from Long Island. With two biological sons and an adopted Chinese toddler, the Sadowskys decide to adopt another girl from China, but this time it is an older girl. Renamed Faith, the 8-year old must learn English as well as how to become a part of the family. At times the director helps by translating for Faith, but when she is most upset and therefore most in need of translation, Faith speaks Cantonese and not the Mandarin that Wang-Breal knows. The communication troubles are clearly heart-breaking for Faith and Donna Sadowsky, but also at times it becomes aggravating for the audience. The film does not underplay the difficulties in adding a new link to the family chain.

In Mrs. Birk’s Sunday Roast, the title character is a Japanese woman married to an English man. In order to make him feel comfortable, she had learned proper English cooking. In fact, she went on to teach English cooking, including hosting a TV show. She received a lot of resistance to her teaching traditional English cooking; surprisingly, the opposition was due not to her ethnicity, but because English food was not considered worthy of being taught! To my mind, the central question in the film, was to what lengths will a person go for their family? For Mrs. Birk, learning to cook and enjoy an entirely new style of food was necessary to support her family.

The Ponce family in Circo owns and operates a small circus in Mexico, appropriately named Circo Mexico. They travel from village to village, putting up and taking down the big top almost every day. As outsiders in nearly every place they go, the family becomes very insular, with an attitude of us (circus people) against them (the settled majority). It is owned by the grandfather in the family, but primarily operated by his son, Tino, causing tensions within the family. Tino, his wife Ivonne, and their four children do most of the work at the circus: putting up the tents, announcing the circus to the local town, and even perform the acts themselves. Three of the grandfather’s other sons each run their own circuses, and when the extended family gets together to celebrate the Day of the Dead, money is a large topic of conversation.

It is clearly difficult to maintain the separation between travelling and settled peoples, as several members of the Ponce family have left the circus life to marry. At the same time, those who remain have spouses who have married into circus life (Ivonne literally ran away to join the circus and Tino) but are still treated as outsiders by the grandparents. One of Tino and Ivonne’s young girls is actually their niece, whose mother left the circus for settled life. Tino’s brother, Tacho, leaves and takes a regular factory job to stay with a woman he loves. At the end of the film, he is back, but Ivonne has left along with all but Cascaras, the oldest child. How long Cascaras will stay is a question, though, judging by the encounters we see between him and local village girls, who seem quite taken with him.

Sometimes, a family is what you make it. In The Housekeeper, a very close relationship has developed between a very elderly Orthodox priest and his almost-as-elderly housekeeper. In this short, the devotion is similar to that of long-married couples, as the woman goes through typical domestic chores and the priest spends his days studying and praying. Another short that I did not get to see was The Veil, a small portrait of life in a convent. The description I heard from other festival-goers indicated that it showed how the nuns had developed a family atmosphere. One scene in particular caught my attention, when they are welcoming a new person into the group, preparing a young woman about to take her vows.

Quadrangle, one of the short films, pointed out the tensions that exist even in families that we choose for ourselves. Back in the 1970s, two families became close – very close – and ended up merging in a “love quadrangle.” At first it was simply a risqué situation of swapping spouses, but when a fire forces the two families into the same house, they merge into one large family. As in every family, tensions flare, and the quadrangle splits into two new family units, with the spouses permanently swapped. Quadrangle shows that a family is what you make it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier.

For a portrait of a unique group “marriage,” Silverdocs also featured Stones in Exile, a new documentary about the making of the Rolling Stones album, Exile on Main Street. Recorded at an estate that guitarist Keith Richards was renting in the south of France, during the band’s “tax exile” from Britain, Exile was a landmark album for the Stones. Unfortunately, the midnight screening was too late for me, so I had to miss seeing the film.

Guggenheim Award honoree Frederick Wiseman chronicled another contentious pairing during the 1970s in his film Sinai Field Mission. The film was set on the Sinai Peninsula, at the border station that the US used to monitor the truce between Israel and Egypt after their 1973 war. The US mission was composed of diplomats and electronic technicians from the State Department and a Texas company, E-Systems, Inc. Living and working together at the US base in the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula causes the two distinct cultures, good-old-boy and government-bureaucrat, to learn to co-exist. Juxtaposing scenes of processing paperwork and drinking out of a cowboy boot, Wiseman captures the ebb and flow of tensions within the US mission. Simultaneously, we see the protracted interactions between Egypt and Israel, who use the US diplomats as go-betweens. Outside of the film, the mission was a success, leading to the landmark 1979 peace accords negotiated by President Carter.

One film that must be mentioned is Family Affair, and sadly I was not able to catch any screenings at the festival. Director Chico Colvard probes the complicated dynamic in his own family, after it was revealed that their father abused his sisters for many years. While Colvard had cut off ties with his father, he learns that his sisters have maintained a familial relation with their abuser.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of the festival was this resonance between films that on the surface do not appear related. Of course, family is one of the most universal human experiences and will therefore make an appearance in most stories. Coming next, I will summarize the films that fit the theme of “using art as an escape.”