HollyShorts Film Festival has plenty of documentaries. Today I look at some from the documentary section, and from a new section they have this year: Sports (which are also docs).
Whitney Houston in Focus (34 minutes, US, directed by Benjamin Alfonsi) is pretty much what the title says. Beginning when Whitney Houston was still a teen, Bette Marshall took Houston’s picture. The film is built around a number of photo sessions (some are recording sessions or auditions) before Houston became famous. Marshall relates the stories of these shoots and her impressions of the young Whitney.
XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture (44 minutes, US, directed by Ferne Pearlstein) is an episode of MSNBC’s The Turning Point series. It looks at the way “Cancel Culture” (which is hard to define) acts as censorship or accountability depending on how you look at it. It’s not an easy thing to figure out when it is appropriate or when there should be grace and forgiveness. It is a fast-paced discussion which would have profited from giving us some time to reflect on what we were being told.
Born from the Dust: The Art of Richard Wilks (6 minutes, US, directed by Simone Staff and Nick Paskhover) is a too brief look at a multi-media sculptor who makes some large and impressive works, many of them at Burning Man festivals. We only get to see a few of his works—just enough for us to wish for more.
Death and Taxes: The Life and Times of Sunny Garcia (12 minutes, US, directed by Michael Oblowitz), introduces us to one of the greatest surfers in the world, but with a tragic side. There are intimations about racism in surfing, but it never really rides that wave. It also never quite gets into the tragic aspect fully.
In Plain Sight: Race and Surfing (7 minutes, US, directed by Claire Pinegar and Jeremy Ash Lynch), makes a nice companion piece to Death and Taxes above (although they played in two different sections). This is an animated look at the way racism has affected surfing, first by colonizers in Hawaii, later by exclusionary practice in California.
And1 Presents Chosen One: The Ben Wallace Story (14 minutes, US, directed by Samtubia and Samgoma Edwards). This chronicles the career of basketball player Ben Wallace, who is the first undrafted player to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. At about the midpoint the films morphs into a brief commercial for And1 shoes, which Wallace wore.
Out of the Dark: Cal Calamia (8 minutes, US, directed by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason) tells of how a transgendered man used running to escape many of the pressures in his life. He lived most of his life as a woman, but came near to suicide before he found a way to live his life more fully.
