Silverdocs: Thursday Preview

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Malcolm Murray's 'Camera, Camera'

Director Malcolm Murray premiered this new film at the Los Angeles Film Festival last month. A sort of meditation on travel and the omnipresence of digital photography, it was inspired by a trip he took to Laos, and most of it is shot along the Mekong River. The film's subject appears first to be the poverty faced by most Laotians, shown in footage of men harvesting seaweed from a stream. We then arrive at the theme of the rising tourism industry in Laos, as writer Michael Meyer interviews various Western visitors taking advantage of the relaxed lifestyle and cheap cost of living for tourists. The trend of sexual tourism is discussed but never ultimately condemned (but also not really defended), and footage of a young woman showering in a hotel room seems like a first-person view of prostitution. Unlike many documentaries, Camera, Camera does not take a clear, shrill stand on any side of the issues it broaches.

Eventually the film's main concern, as implied by the title, materializes as we hear foreigners speak about the pictures and video they have shot, often holding up their cameras to show grainy images to Murray's camera. A homeless man, a disabled child, a procession of monks accepting alms from the Buddhist crowds lined up to help them: all are fodder for tourists looking to take home that special digital memory. Adventurer college kids, spouting self-important, rambling monologues, search for images that remind them of "what southeast Asia looks like in Vietnam war movies," and take pictures of one another in a series of bars along the river that all cater to huge crowds of Western tourists. Murray and Meyer are not exactly criticizing this photo-colonial exploitation, and with good reason, since their documentary consists mostly of beauty shots of the Laotian countryside and artful images of people they encountered in their travels.

View the trailer
Premieres tomorrow at 5 p.m. in the AFI Silver Theater 1, and screens again on Saturday at 1:15 p.m. in the AFI Silver Theater 3.

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The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan

Even as two (well-documented) wars continue to rage on, the ghosts of Vietnam continue to linger, exerting a quiet dominance over lives it forever altered. In The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan, a former Lieutenant named Dan Smith returns to the small village where he fought decades earlier in an effort to provide some closure that continues to elude him. In the midst of his sojourn, Smith spots a mysterious stranger he recognizes as an American. Startled by his questioning, the unidentified man quickly disappears, and Smith gets drawn into a puzzle that leads him to the curious case of McKinley Nolan, a soldier who left for Vietnam but whose whereabouts remain unknown. After approaching McKinley's loved ones following his encounter, Smith travels back with director Henry Corra and Nolan's brother Michael to search for answers.

What follows is an uneven "mystery" that never quite capitalizes on the intrigue of its premise. As the sobering details slowly come to light, two very different narratives begin to emerge. Michael, tentative yet engaged, tries desperately to make meaning from the confusion whereas Corra takes a more clinical tact. While the filmmaker deserves kudos for allowing his unsightly displays of hyper rationalism into the narrative, his lapses of empathy are almost as off-putting as his insertion of distracting high school history class stock clips. 

Yet The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan succeeds as a character study, not stuffy didacticism. The combination of hope and resignation McKinley's loved ones have faced now for almost 40 years is palpable every moment they're on screen.  When McKinley's wife Mary admits how confusing it might be to have him return after all these years, she professes an unconditional love for a man she's known longer as a memory than as a husband.

View the trailer
Premieres tomorrow at 9:30 p.m. in the AFI Silver Theater 2, and screens again on Saturday at 5 p.m. in the AFI Silver Theater 1.

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Freedom Riders

Instead of just focusing on the plucky, integrated core of heroes who kept riding buses together in spite of an unimaginable outpouring of hatred and violence, Freedom Riders takes a very realistic look at the connections between media, government, and nonprofit organizations by which brilliant and committed people won the first significant victory of the Civil Rights movement. If you want to feel what it means to love this country for all of its blemishes, this film shows exactly how it's done.

Without coming off as cynical or elitist, Freedom Riders shows a day when neither Martin Luther King, Jr. nor John F. Kennedy knew that America was ready for change. While those great, martyred leaders waited for their time, an upstart group called the Congress Of Racial Equality trained its members in nonviolent resistance and sent them to integrate our nation's segregated highway system.

Of course, the movement wasn't about highway travel, but about the fundamental equality of all human beings and the promise of liberty and justice for all on which our Union is founded. The movie is about that, too. It's also about how much suffering people can take for a cause they believe in. With more head trauma than a Saturday morning cartoon, more death-defying escapes than a James Bond film and more non-violent resistance than The Passion, Freedom Riders shows the meaning of heroism.

It also shows that even the most wildly optimistic statements can come true if enough people are willing to put in the work. At just the moment when viewers give up hope of finishing the movie with dry eyes, Bobby Kennedy delivers a radio address to the world on Voice of America. Then Attorney General, Kennedy tells audiences in sixty countries that the mobs that have attacked the freedom riders represent only a small minority of Americans. He then confidently states that America could someday have an African American president.

View the trailer
Premieres tomorrow at 10:45 a.m. in the AFI Silver 3, and screens again on Sunday at 6:15 p.m. in the same theater.

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My Perestroika

What was it like coming of age as the Soviet Union collapsed and transitioned into a democratic Russia? That's the question posed by director Robin Hessman in My Perestroika, as she looks at the pasts and presents of five Russian classmates who were part of the last generation of Russians to remember what it was like to live in the Soviet Union.

Hessman gains access to a vast amount of archival footage, both of Soviet propaganda films that were part of the social backdrop for those who came of age in the 80s, as well as home movies of some of her subjects when they were younger. It makes for a rich viewing experience, made richer by the diversity of group: there is the married couple who are both history teachers, and who come face to face with their pasts in the classroom; the businessman who has fully embraced the opportunities afforded by capitalism; a former punk rocker and self-professed outsider who now spends much of his time as a banjo-playing busker on the subway; and a lower-middle class single mother struggling to get by. Through the archival footage, we not only hear about their pasts, we see them.

Without exception, each of these people seems happier with the current system than with Soviet rule, but not without reservation. Democracy has brought with it more freedom, but capitalism has brought with it a surge in materialism that many of them are uncomfortable with, even the businessman who has become successful selling fancy French shirts.

They laugh nostalgically as they remember their conformist youths, their membership in Communist youth groups and immediate and enthusiastic singing of Soviet anthems, as well as their rebellious adolescences, taking advantage of the gradually loosening restrictions that saw them wearing U.S.A. t-shirts and dropping out of those same Communist groups. But the transition has not always been a smooth one; not for Russia, and not for them. Hessman's film probes these difficulties skillfully and sensitively, in a film that is as deftly shot and edited as it is though provoking.

View the trailer
Premieres tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. in the AFI Silver Theater 3, and screens again on Saturday at 1:30 p.m. in the AFI Silver Theater 2.

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Waste Land

Vik Muniz is among the most celebrated artists to come out of Brazil. Immigrating to Chicago in the 1980s, and later moving to New York, he became known for his odd choice of media, ranging from peanut butter to garbage. With a successful international career, Muniz wanted to continue his art using everyday people and objects as inspiration, while seeking a more socially conscious approach to his work. Waste Land, a film by Lucy Walker, chronicles Muniz's return to his native country as he embarks on a new project.

His journey takes him to Jardim Gramacho, a massive landfill that is the final resting place for much of São Paulo's garbage. His subjects are the waste land's "pickers," the poor slum dwellers who collect recyclables from the mountains of trash for dollars a day. The film tracks Muniz as he interviews pickers to find good subjects, photographs them, recreates these portraits as large scale sculptures using material from the landfill, and finally photographs the massive pieces from above.

But the art and artist are not the heart and soul of this film. They are the pickers. Yes, they may live in squalor, images familiar to anyone who has spent time in a developing country. But these are proud people who want what we all want: a safe home, love, and respect. The film unashamedly tugs at heart strings, and might invite some Westerners' guilt, but the viewer who feels nothing is a person whose company is probably not worthwhile.

View the trailer
Premieres tomorrow at 10 p.m. in the AFI Silver 1, and screens again on Saturday at 7:45 p.m. in the Discovery HD Theater.

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The Woodmans

C. Scott Willis is not the first director to take an interest in American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958–1981). Willis relates the basic information, already familiar to most art school students and other artheads: the arresting and dreamlike compositions often focusing on the female nude (herself or other models), the struggle with depression (and suicidal thoughts, seen by some in her work's themes of identity and absence), and her suicide at age 22, when she leapt from the window of a New York loft.

As the title of this thoughtful and beautifully shot documentary implies, the real subject is not only Francesca but the history of a family of artists, especially Francesca's parents, painter George Woodman and ceramicist Betty Woodman. In few families would neither parent raise an eyebrow when their daughter took up photography as she departed for boarding school and then art school. In even fewer would neither parent be alarmed when their daughter's principal photographic subject became her own nude body.

Along with Francesca's parents and brother, who is also an artist, the film features interviews with Francesca's friends from childhood and art school, one of her models in Italy, a former boyfriend, and other artist friends. A much richer understanding of her family life — her parents' obsessive work habits (which she inherited), the family's homes in the United States and Italy, all filled with art, readings from her journal — comes gradually into focus. Most hauntingly, there are a few recorded excerpts of Francesca's voice, which bears the high-pitched inflection of a wide-eyed naïf. It seems to match the child-like wonder of many of her photographs, even ones that deal with decidedly adult topics (the thing that separates her from contemporaries like Nan Goldin or Cindy Sherman, whose work is often grouped with Woodman's). The beauty of the film is rounded out by a subtle, gamelan-like score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, played by the So Percussion ensemble.

View the trailer
Premieres tomorrow at 5:15 p.m. in the Discovery HD Theater, and screens again on Saturday at 8:30 p.m. in the AFI Silver 3.