A selective guide to some of the features screening at the festival this weekend. Tickets to all screenings are $13.
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(Drafthouse Films)A group of middle-aged friends gather round singing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Cotton Fields” in D.C. native Joshua Oppenheimer’s fascinating documentary. Are they gracefully aging entertainers? Yes, but no: They’re mass murderers. Oppenheimer gave Indonesian death-squad leaders the chance to reenact their crimes in studio, with results both harrowing and alarmingly surreal. August gangster Anwar Congo and his friends come off like rebukes to Tarantino’s glorified killers, colorful, larger than life figures who among them have killed thousands. The filmmakers keep a cooly observational, non-judgmental eye to avoid facing the horrors of their subjects, who suffered no legal consequences for their crimes. But are there other consequences? Documentary legends Werner Herzog and Errol Morris signed on as executive producers, and their endorsement is completely earned. I’ve only seen a handful of films on this year’s AFI Docs slate but I’m certain none is better than this, and I know I won’t see a better and more powerful movie anywhere this year. Stay tuned for its commercial run at Landmark E Street Cinema starting July 26.
View the trailer.
Saturday at 8:30 p.m. at The Goethe-Institut; Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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The Korean graphic artist Jung was five years old when he was adopted by a Belgian family. This combination of animated memoir and live-action documentary, directed by Jung and Laurent Boileau, looks at Jung’s complex feelings of identity. Alienated both in his adopted land and the homeland he left as a child, he never feels quite at home, and is fruestrated in his attempts to find out about his birth parents. There are great themes here but the animation and live action work at odds with each other, distractions and avoidances not unlike the childhood misbehaviors that Jung documents as part of his self-loathing coming of age. The banal English translation of the title doesn’t help; the film’s French title is Skin Color: Honey, from Jung’s adoption form.
View the trailer.
Friday at 3 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Sunday at 6 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut.
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The photojournalist Donald McCulin’s portrait of a shell-shocked marine is a classic image of the war in Vietnam. But the subject’s thousand-yard stare may not be far removed from the emotional distance needed to capture the horrors of war and famine. McCullin covered so much wartime atrocity, traveling to wartime Vietnam fifteen times, that he began to seek it out at the expense of his sanity and his marriage. His images are powerful, the lightning strike of art in times of near mortal crisis. McCullin grew up in a London tenement and takes pains to talk about the humanity of his subjects, but there’s something cold about the man’s personality, as if he had to steel himself against feelings and family in order to keep his sanity on the battlefield where he thrived. And a casual discussion of the famine in Biafra, where a starving young girl was presented to the photographer as a potential client, leaves an uneasy feeling despite McCullin’s dignified picture. The directors, Jacqui and David Morris, assemble a harrowing portrait of McCullin the professional, but it is that subject’s own professional reticence that keep them from getting to know his humanity.
View the trailer.
Saturday at 12:15 p.m. at the Newseum; Sunday 6 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
Director Tinatin Gurchiani put out a casting call for young people in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. She followed the selected candidates to document their lives. But the struggles and dreams of youth in a faraway land are not enough to make a compelling narrative, and as uncharted as this territory may be for many viewers, the stories are uninvolving when they’re not intrusive.
View the trailer.
Friday at 12:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Sunday at 1:15 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut.
A budding filmmaker is little brother to a rock star. This is the story of Tom Berninger, whose big brother, Matt, is lead singer for The National. Matt takes Tom on tour as a roadie, but little brother has bigger ambitions, even if he’s not entirely clear what those are. If you really want a documentary about The National, I wouldn’t blame you for completely hating Mistaken for Strangers. But the schlubby director and baby-brother-of-the-lead singer is on the poster for a reason. This is not a music documentary but an awkwardly funny movie about an uncomfortable sibling dynamic, so at odds with the band’s bombast that you suspect it’s a self-deflating put-on. Viva la creative difference!
View the trailer.
Friday at 10 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre; Sunday at noon at the National Portrait Gallery, McEvoy Auditorium.
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Deep in the heart of the Ozarks lies an entertainment industry that boasts more theater seats than The Great White Way. Branson, Mo. has a resident population of 10,520 and attracts 7.5 millions visitors a year. What brought those pioneering entertainers to this distant valley in the 1960s? How has Yakov Smirnov established a foothold in this rural American outpost for over twenty years? Directors A.J. Schnack and David Wilson don’t answer these questions, focusing instead on selected performers and their lives. The film makes note of the divisive politics in an area where a significant gay population lives alongside Bible-thumping Republicans, but the filmmakers come off as patronizing to liberal and conservative alike, while missing out on what I imagine were more fascinating and less divisive stories. My wife and I visited Branson in the dead of winter one year and took in the run of the Lawrence Welk resort, where we startled a lonely young clerk whom we caught looking at pictures of women in bikinis on the Internet. I’d love to see a documentary that addresses without judgement that kind of wholesome alienation, and the storied history of this gaudy mountain retreat. This is not that movie.
View the trailer.
Friday, June 21 at 3:45 pm at the AFI Silver.
