Fishing community, focused on blonde girl Lucimara who catches crabs on the rocks, and smiling poet Ismail. Indigenous community riverside rain forest movie, reminded Katy of A River Below, while kids left to their own devices wiith dangerous tools gave me a La Cienaga feeling. Flash forward at the end, Luci in the city, and the first time I thought the movie had really shown us something, Luci older and more mature after we’d been getting to know her at age 11.
Tag: true false
T/F-ish Shorts 2021
The Coyote Shorts Program:
Department of Injustice (Travis Wood & Chloe Gbai)
Didactic anti-racist dialogue in an ironic-jokey automated phone tree framework. Looks like street and news photography mapped into a 3D gaming engine, which is neat at least.
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Spirits and Rocks: An Azorean Myth (Aylin Gökmen)
Opens with b/w volcanic rock photography, so a good pairing with last night’s Rock Bottom Riser. The stock footage scenes announce themselves when the widescreen frame goes square. Smoke and trees and rock, textures and landscapes, really great looking.
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VO (Nicolas Gourault)
Former Uber self-driving test riders tell all, circling around an accident that killed a bicyclist in Arizona while the human operator was watching TV episodes on a cellphone instead of looking at the road. Along with news footage and camera views inside and outside the car, we get repeated radar-view driving scenes, what the car “sees” of its environment.
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Maat Means Land (Fox Maxy)
Takes the game-engine mashups of the first short to the next level… also this and the second short featured lizards, and there has been a theme of image manipulation – overall a well assembled shorts program. This film has everything at once, too many to start listing, all kinds of distorted music and styles and presentations, returning to scenes involving indigenous people and land. A sign about killing the colonizer in your head cuts straight to Tupac, extremely reminiscent of the latest Adam Curtis.
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The Truth About Hastings (Dan Schneidkraut)
And finally the Adam Curtis connection brings us to a Nebraska-set numerology-obsessed conspiracy-theory voiceover over shots of a conference-room family gathering full of meats and Husker games, the picture gradually shimmering and smearing to reveal the alien intelligence underneath. “A Runza restaurant exactly nine minutes away – think about it.”
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Plus some non-Coyote shorts we watched over the course of the week…
The I and S of Lives (Kevin Jerome Everson)
Simply a guy rollerskating around the Lives in DC’s Black Lives Matter Plaza… Sicinski compares Everson’s films to Lumiere actualités, I dunno, I find them especially pleasant to watch and hope they become regular, comforting presences in T/F programs. I’m even leaning towards checking out Park Lanes, or at least the shorter Tonsler Park.
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Brontosaurus (Jack Dunphy)
This guy’s name kept coming up – I think he was in the online game show with the Beasts of the Southern Wild director and an especially good MC, and this made us decide to check out his film. I was pretty sure I’d remember an eight-minute short i watched late at night (which somehow offended Katy so we watched the Everson afterwards as a palate cleanser) but now it’s a month later and I’m afraid I do not… the only letterboxd review just says “Raw,” which is no help. I can see I rated it 3.5 stars, that ain’t bad!
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Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse (Pablo MartÃn Weber)
Another forgotten short, but apparently well loved and referenced in my All Light, Everywhere notes. Fossils vs. creationism, artificial images and Syrian war.
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O Arrais do Mar (Elisa Celda)
The one where we could barely see anything happening, filmed late at night on a Portuguese beach. Some fishing was involved, some hanging out – a long and sleepy movie.
Delphine’s Prayers (2021, Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam)
No music, little camera movement, background noise from others in the house or from a laptop tuned to Nollywood TV, otherwise all focus is on Delphine. Raped + pregnant at 13, prostitution to get by in Cameroon and Belgium, proposed to by two white men and due to circumstances she married the one she’s not in love with. Shunned by family after a sick niece died in her care, but that’s all forgotten after she moves to Europe and they assume she’s rich. She speaks English with a heavy dialect and French mixed in – Katy thinks it’s shady that the subtitler rephrased her dialogue when we can hear her speaking different words. All the titular prayers come at once, in a breakdown near the end. Better than most single-subject monologue films I’ve seen, still not my preferred mode.
Rock Bottom Riser (2021, Fern Silva)
I’d meant to play this movie again the next day at work, just listening in the headphones, because the unexpected music and the way every interviewee had a different sort of audio processing on their voice was striking. But the rental expired and I had to settle for the Smog song.
Definitely on the avant-garde side of the documentary spectrum, but with terrific sound. Some very joyful edits. Before watching I read the Sicinski Cinema Scope article twice, and now want to watch all of Silva’s movies. Already by the time the opening title hit, the movie’s physical nature was nothing like I’d imagined. The talking heads are never shot in standard doc style, and he talks around the issues we imagined it’d confront head-on, but productively. The island/ocean nature calls back nicely to our last T/F movie of 2020, and still the last movie we’ve seen in theaters, MaÅ‚ni. Volcanic lava and disputed native lands, with Rat Film levels of digression.
By showing us a collage of discontinuous moments from a given lifeworld, Silva expresses the density of any given social formation, its atmospheric pervasiveness and resonance. As such, his films show us things that serve to emphasize just how much we cannot know … What Silva shows quite clearly through his oblique strategy of creative nonfiction is that the radical flattening of culture and history on which global capital thrives actually has its limits.
T/F/ND/NF/ETC 2021
True/False announced their May 2021 plan for outdoor screenings back before we had any idea of vaccine rollout schedules, so we opted for the “Teleported” home experience, which included a giant box of goodies sent to our house. Of the 16 feature selections this year we were only offered 7 – plus the shorts programs, so that’s 11/20. Miffed as I was not to have Summer of Soul as a viewing option, we still did better than the in-person crowds, who could only watch one outdoor screening per night for a maximum of five. But five (or seven) movies in five nights is not how we do True/False – so I also rented multiple titles (including T/F films not included in Teleported) from the concurrently running New Directors/New Films festival and some earlier docs from elsewhere, to curate our own particular festival. The final schedule:
B’s pre-screenings:
Aleph (ND/NF)
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (ND/NF)
Tue:
Rock Bottom Riser (T/F via ND/NF)
Wed:
Delphine’s Prayers (T/F)
Coyote Shorts (T/F)
Thu:
Metaphor or Sadness Inside Out (2014, from a T/F director)
No Kings (T/F)
Radiograph of a Family (ND/NF)
Fri:
A Thousand Suns (2014 T/F)
Town Bloody Hall (1979)
Songs That Flood the River (T/F)
A So-Called Archive (2020, from a T/F director)
Sat:
From the Wild Sea (T/F)
All Light, Everywhere (T/F via ND/NF)
Now Something is Slowly Changing (2019 T/F)
Sun:
Gunda (2020, from a T/F director)
Faya Dayi (T/F via ND/NF)
The Grocer’s Son (T/F)
Plus four shorts from the other T/F programs.
Did Not Finish:
We / Nous (ND/NF)
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010)
Unwatched T/F:
Dirty Feathers
Homeroom
Inside the Red Brick Wall
Petit Samedi
Sabaya
Summer of Soul
This Rain Will Never Stop
The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman
Users
The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga (2014, Jessica Oreck)
Religion and superstition.
Storybook motion stills of the Baba Yaga tale.
Hangout photography of modern day areas where the legends came from.
Tons of mushrooms, a mushroom-heavy movie.
The Viewing Booth (2019, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz)
After watching Boys State and Dope Is Death with Katy, I rounded out the trilogy of True/False catchup movies with one she didn’t want to see.
The concept is based on a Virginia Woolf quote about people looking at the same war images and perceiving them differently. The filmmaker shows a curated set of Israeli/Palestinian youtube scenes to students then narrows down to a single student with Israeli parents who sees unexpected things in the images, sometimes to the point of absurdity, and questions her about her perceptions. It appears to be raw footage shot on cellphones, but she thinks everything here is staged. “They have the kids cry in the background as an added effect,” as if it’s unrealistic that kids would cry on their own while soldiers tromp through their house. The kids’ mom is being “overdramatic” and the soldiers are even criticized for not searching the house well enough. When Israeli kids are just pelting a Palestinian home with rocks, “This doesn’t look good for Israel,” then she self-corrects, imagining an inciting event from before the camera was rolling, “Arabs throw rocks all the time.” In the second half, the director calls her back to watch the videos again alongside her own responses (so, the first half of this movie). “The viewer also has control… Film is only so real, you’re not there.” A good experiment, but I resent having to spend this much time with an overthinking college student.
Dope is Death (2020, Mia Donovan)
Portrait of a NYC clinic that sticks pins in your ears to treat stress and addiction. Through interview and archive footage it delves into the history of how Black Panthers and other associated groups studied Chinese acupuncture and brought it back to help their community, then keeps returning from the archives to the present-day clinic and its patients. The founding leader was Mutulu Shakur (below) – I’m behind on the ol’ blog, no surprise, and now we’re watching the new Adam Curtis movie, following the story of Afeni Shakur, so really covering Tupac’s roots this year. The fatal armed car robbery that gets Mutulu imprisoned for life came out of nowhere in this story, and it’s not interested in explaining much about acupuncture itself, more of a history lesson and community portrait.
Boys State (2020, Amanda McBaine & Jesse Moss)
I can’t tell if the movie pulled a fast one on us when the kid on the poster loses the climactic governor race to a kid we’ve never even seen before by distracting us with the speeches and strategies of the competing campaign leaders. Pretty impressed that the lowest-common-denominator guy lost running on a platform of dick jokes and then confessed to having underestimated the group and turned himself around. Really professionally assembled doc, and for once I mean that in a good way. Ultimately wouldn’t vote for any of these gun-rights Texans for any office, but after avoiding politics-in-movies for the last year, this turned out to be more harmless than we’d feared.