Washington has become a town of film festivals, some of which may fly under your radar. Now in its third year, Double Exposure: The Investigative Film Festival and Symposium, deserves a place on your movie calendar. The only film festival dedicated to investigative reporting, this compact but dense program is a project of the news organization 100Reporters, and features local and in some cases world premieres of documentaries that seek out the truth. DCist previewed some of this year’s fascinating titles. The festival runs from October 19-22. See the complete schedule here.
(Double Exposure)
Whether fiction or documentary, films that explore the narcotic pipeline between South America and the States tend to focus on the street-level crime drama at the tail ends of the beast: traffickers and dealers versus fiends hooked on product. Cocaine Prison follows a young man named Hernan trapped in one of Bolivia’s worst jails, surrounded by other men caught in the middle of the vice world. His family grows coca leaves legally, but when Hernan takes on a mule job for a big trafficker, in order to pay for instruments to start a band with his sister Daisy, he gets pinched. Indigenous filmmaker Violeta Ayala gave Hernan and his inmate peers cameras to document their experiences, providing a raw look at an element of the drug war few think about.The film splits its time between Hernan’s incarceration and Daisy’s tireless efforts to free her brother, but like pure powder before it hits the streets, this is an uncut product that hasn’t been pruned or modified much for consumption. It’s unflinching, yes, but it doesn’t feature much editorializing or storytelling. Just a harrowing image dump of a foreign world. A more carefully curated film might pack more potency, but as it stands, it’s difficult to look away.—Dominic Griffin
Watch the trailer.
Friday October 20 at 6 p.m. at Naval Heritage Center, 701 Pennsylvania Ave., NW.
(Double Exposure)
Directors Eric Matthies and Tricia Todd previously produced Killing The Messenger: The Deadly Cost of The News, a documentary about the high price of censorship across the world. The lean End of Truth is more focused, primarily exploring the rise of ISIS and the trend of kidnapping journalists in the Middle East. Starting with the 2012 abductions of John Cantlie and James Foley, they follow other kidnapped writers and photographers, tracking how these incidents shaped terrorist propaganda from the early 2010s to the present. Running just under an hour, the film might be too brisk, its second half featuring snippets of larger stories that whet the appetite for more. The tale of Toby Lopez, a car salesman from Spokane who tried to negotiate with alleged Jihadists on Twitter for the safe return of a former classmate, piques interest, but quickly fades into the background of the larger narrative. Similarly, the way Cantlie resurfaces as the face of future propaganda videos is touched upon but too briefly. End of Truth functions best as a useful primer on a disquieting motif in the war on terror, a great surface scratcher for further films to build upon.—Dominic Griffin
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, October 22 at 7 p.m. at Naval Heritage Center, 701 Pennsylvania Ave., NW.
(Netflix)
New York’s Hasidic community grew from the aftermath of a Holocaust that devastated their numbers in Europe. In order to survive, they have maintained a highly orthodox existence that leaves little room and even less patience for outside influence. The community was the subject of this year’s compelling fiction feature Menashe, and now falls under the documentary lens in a film from directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp). One of Us observes a handful of people who have left or are trying to leave the community. Luzer has become less religious and is trying to build a career as a Hasidic-type actor, but Etty remains faithful and has simply struggled to escape an abusive husband. The filmmakers follow their subjects as they attend meetings of Footprints, a support group for the ex-Hasidic, but among scenes in which people try to navigate a secular world for which their upbringing left them unprepared, the most fascinating scenes observe interactions between the moderately faithful and more orthodox rabbis, some of whom may well understand the conflicted emotions of their straying flock.—Pat Padua
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, October 19 at 7 p.m. at the National Portrait Gallery, 8th & F Sts. NW.
(Double Exposure)
Serbian director Mila Turajlic (Cinema Komunisto) grew up fascinated by the locked door in her family’s Belgrade apartment. In this impressionistic documentary, Turaljic observes her mother, activist Srbijanka Turajlić, as she prepares to open a room that was long ago locked up by Communist officials who seized the bourgeois family’s property. The divided space reflects a divided country; a guest at a family dinner notes that while other nations and ethnicities form a united front, ask two Serbs a question and you get three opinions. Srbijanka Turajlić was a vocal opponent of Tito and communism, but she found Slobodan Milošević perhaps even worse. The film cuts frank interviews with the aging activist with vintage news footage and views of contemporary Belgrade protests that may seem to temporarily affect change but never seem to get anywhere near a permanent solution; the current President of the Republic of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, was a censor for Milošević. The matriarch tells her filmmaker daughter that it’s up to her generation to stand up to the powers that be, and the film symbolically ends on an open door, but one senses that it’s simply a passageway to a still hopelessly divided world.—Pat Padua
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, October 22 at 4 p.m. at Naval Heritage Center, 701 Pennsylvania Ave., NW.
Recy Taylor (Double Exposure)
Some documentaries resonate thanks to expressive filmmaking techniques and carefully employing visual storytelling to engage an unsuspecting audience. But in director Nancy Buirski’s The Rape of Recy Taylor, the subject is so potent that little extra flare is necessary for it to make an impact. On September 3rd, 1944, on her way home from church, Recy Taylor was kidnapped and brutally raped by six white men. None of the men were ever charged, despite being identified. She was never able to have more children after the horrors inflicted upon her and she’s still alive today, at 97 years old, living in a world where race relations haven’t improved nearly as much as they should have. Buirski cuts between talking heads—mostly historians and those close to Recy—while interjecting haunting, nondescript footage of the South with foreboding tree branches as soul-stirring music fills in the terrifying blanks between plain-spoken remembrances of the pre-Civil Rights era. Footage from old race films and smartly curated present-day news draws a clear line from Taylor’s fight for justice to the tragic murder of Sandra Bland. There are fascinating diversions along the way, like documenting Rosa Parks’ involvement in the case and how it eventually laid the groundwork for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or how most of Taylor’s rapists would go on to join the armed forces as decorated heroes. It’s a depressing story with small respites of aspiration and hope, but above all else, it’s a reminder that the most transformative moments in progressive history are often built on a foundation of a black woman’s pain.—Dominic Griffin
Saturday, October 21 at 6 p.m. at Naval Heritage Center, 701 Pennsylvania Ave., NW.
Gerald Foos and Gay Talese (Netflix)
Journalist Gay Talese found one of his most fascinating subjects in Gerald Foos, a Colorado motel owner who constructed a system that allowed him to spy on his guests for decades, leaving him privy to all manner of sexual activity—and perhaps a murder. But is this story too juicy to be true? Directors Myles Kane and Josh Koury followed Talese as he prepared to write a story that was 30 years in the making, and the plot took turns nobody expected. Even without the twist, this is a fascinating, stylish portrait of two voyeurs: An inveterate peeping tom and a veteran investigative journalist. The movie makes its point about voyeurism a bit too obviously (of course, we peer into Talese’s life too, and his amazing New York brownstone) but with expertly edited interviews and a scale model of the infamous motel, this is a thrilling and not too salacious window on a couple of legends. Voyeur premieres on Netflix in December, but here’s your chance to get a sneak peek, as it were. —Pat Padua
Watch a clip.
Saturday, October 21 at 8:30 p.m. at Naval Heritage Center, 701 Pennsylvania Ave., NW.
