• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Film
  • DVD
  • Editorial
  • About ScreenFish

ScreenFish

where faith and film are intertwined

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Home
  • Reviews
  • Interviews
  • News
  • OtherFish
  • Podcast
  • Give

AFI Docs festival

Audible – Teen Angst in Silence

July 1, 2021 by Darrel Manson Leave a Comment

The teen years can be a challenge. It is a time when people struggle with their identity and their place in the world. Even for the most “normal” of teens, these years can be a struggle. Add to that having to deal with a disability. In Matthew Ogens’s documentary short Audible, we meet a young football player at a school for the deaf as he struggles with teen angst, deafness, and the loss of a friend.

Amaree McKenstry-Hall plays for football for the Maryland School for the Deaf. At the beginning of the film we see the team losing its first game against a deaf school in sixteen years. It also breaks the 42-game winning streak against all teams. For regular high school athletes, this would be a difficult time. We watch as Amaree and his schoolmates deal not only with the defeat, but with the struggles of facing a world as a deaf person. When school is over Amaree and his classmates will face discrimination and isolation.

As we get to know Amaree, we learn that his father left when he became deaf, and the two are working on rebuilding a relationship. His father, a onetime drug dealer, is a minister in a local church. He also is a bit unsure of his relationship with a girlfriend. Amaree’s biggest emotional challenge is dealing with the suicide of a classmate.

All of these are issues that many teens face. As such this is very much a look at coming-of-age in America. But when you include the challenges of getting ready to move into living fully in a hearing world, it all becomes multiplied.

Because it is a short (running time:39 minutes), it doesn’t have a chance to go very deep into Amaree’s stuggles, but we do see enough to understand that like all teens, he has many pressures. But we also see that he has qualities that may be helpful as he moves on in life.

AUDIBLE/NETFLIX © 2021

Audible streams on Netflix.

Photos courtesy of Netflix.

Filed Under: Film, Netflix, Reviews Tagged With: AFI Docs festival, coming-of-age, deafness, documentary shorts, Football, grief, suicide

The Best of AFI Docs 2021

June 29, 2021 by Darrel Manson Leave a Comment

Now that AFI Docs has wrapped up, it’s time to see the winners and to make note of my favorites.

Here are the award winners from the festival:

AUDIENCE AWARD: FEATURE

STORM LAKE

DIRS: Jerry Risius and Beth Levision. For 30 years, in Storm Lake, Iowa, Art Cullen and his family have been publishing a Pulitzer Prize-winning local newspaper. But, with newspapers everywhere going extinct, how long can they keep it up?

AUDIENCE AWARD: SHORT

SHELTER

DIR: Smriti Mundhra. A verité documentary that follows three young children and their families as they grapple with housing insecurity in Los Angeles.

SHORT FILM GRAND JURY PRIZE

RED TAXI

DIR: Anonymous. As protests in Hong Kong escalate, taxi drivers experience a city in upheaval driving the streets day and night. Anonymously filmed by locals.

SHORT FILM SPECIAL JURY PRIZE

THE COMMUNION OF MY COUSIN ANDREA

DIR: Brandán Cerviño Abeledo. Andrea’s First Communion ceremony lacks glamour. For Andrea, things without sparkles are meaningless.

SHORT FILM SPECIAL JURY PRIZE

S P A C E S (M E Z E R Y)

DIR: Nora Štrbová. A multi-textured animated exploration of memory as a container of identity, based on the personal story of the filmmaker and her brother who was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

I have my own personal favorites. Storm Lake was among my favorites, along with My Name Is Pauli Murrayand the episodes that were shown of 9/11: One Day in America (that one was a surprise to me).

Among the Shorts, my favorites were When We Were Bullies, and two that I think need to be paired together: Under the Lemon Tree and Mission:Hebron.

It was a very good set of films throughout the festival. My thanks to AFI and to all the sponsors for allowing me to cover the festival.

Filed Under: AFIFest, Film Festivals, News Tagged With: AFI Docs festival, awards, short documentaries

Day 5 at AFI Docs

June 28, 2021 by Darrel Manson 1 Comment

Often when important events happen, those involved pay homage to the past by talking of standing on the shoulders of giants. (This actually goes back to before its attribution to Sir Isaac Newton, so there are obviously lots of giants.) Today’s films look back at a couple of those giants upon whose shoulders others have stood and may still stand. One is well known. The other will likely be someone you haven’t heard of.

Celebrities often take part in social causes. In Andre Gaines’s film The One and Only Dick Gregory, we get a look at a comedian, a civil rights and anti-war activist, and healthy lifestyle activist. His humor was often built around race. He could play a room full of white people and have them laughing while at the same time making biting commentary. He was a friend to Medgar Evers and Dr. King. He was arrested frequently. He was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover. It was not enough for him to be rich and famous. He wanted to change the world.

In the film his autobiographiy coauthor Robert Lipsyte says, “He had a mission to accomplish, and it wasn’t just making jokes.” Indeed, very little of the film deals with his comedy, which was impressive in its own right. That comedy opened the door for many more Black comedians (some of whom pay a bit of homage in the film). What we see over and over is a man who was committed to the causes that affected people—racial injustice, the war in Vietnam, and later nutrition.

I was aware of Dick Gregory as a comedian/activist, but was never really connected to his work. This film, gives a very full picture of a man who was indeed a giant in many ways. The One and Only Dick Gregory will be available on Showtime July 4.

“I want to see America be what she says she is in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America, be what you proclaim yourself to be!”

When filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West were making the Oscar-nominated RGB, they came across a citation that Ruth Bader Ginsberg had in her brief arguing for women’s rights before the Supreme Court. They thought it was worth finding out who this person was. My Name Is Pauli Murray is what they discovered. Fifteen years before Rosa Parks, Pauli Murray was arrested for not moving to the back of the bus. Decades before the Wilmington Lunch Counter Sit-In, Murray and other students desegregated restaurants in DC. Murray was one of the founders on the National Organization for Women. Essays Murray wrote were part of the arguments laid before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. Murray made the case that the Fourteenth Amendment could be used to protect women’s rights (as Ginsberg argued). And yet, so few of us have heard of Pauli Murray.

Murray was something of a polymath. She was an author, lawyer, poet, and eventually a priest. (Murray was the first Black woman ordained in the Episcopal Church.) You may note my lack of pronouns here. Murray was gender non-conforming, and in today’s language would probably identify as transexual. Murray often practiced confrontation by typewriter, writing letters to people of power. When writing to FDR, Murray would copy Eleanor Roosevelt, which lead to a friendship.

Much of the film is made up tape recording of Murray reading from an autobiography as it was being written. It is important that we can hear that story in Murray’s own voice. It is also important to hear the stories of people who knew Murray and who have continued build on that legacy. Pauli Murray truly was one of those unknown giants upon whose shoulders people are still standing seeing a future that can be made better.

For today’s shorts, I want to make special note of When We Were Bullies. Filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt coincidentally meets an elementary school classmate decades later, they recall a bullying incident they were part of. Rosenblatt tries to contact all those involved to see if they remember it. It’s a difficult thing to realize that one has been a bully. (I made that realization some time ago.) In a way, that may be a typical part of growing up. But does that absolve us of what we have done so long ago. An excellent short.

Other shorts for today include Lydia Cornett’s Party Line, which show scenes from the very long line on the final day of early voting in Columbus, Ohio, last year. Ohio law only allows one early voting site per county, and 117,356 people voted early in that county. We see lots of masked people waiting in the snow to take part in democracy. In Halpate, directed by Adam Piron and Adam Khalil, we see Seminole allegator wrestlers in Florida with a bit of background as to why they have done this.

Photos courtesy of AFI.

Filed Under: AFIFest, Film, Film Festivals Tagged With: AFI Docs festival, antiwar movement, bullying, civil rights, documentary, LGBTQ, storks, women's rights

Day 4 at AFI Docs

June 27, 2021 by Darrel Manson Leave a Comment

Today’s films range from the mundane to the worlds of power and money. Documentaries are ways to mark points in time, to see life in new ways, and to broaden our knowledge. That happens in these films.

The HBO Documentary Series Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union premiered the first two episodes at AFI Docs. Directed by Peter Kunhardt, this series focuses on President Obama’s life with special emphasis on the role race played in shaping his life and his politics. Part One of the series covers his early life through his election to the U.S. Senate. Part Two overs his run for the Presidency in 2007-08. The film relies on archival footage and selected interviews with people who have known him.

This is a very conventional telling of the President’s story. It lacks an intimacy and personal understanding of the events in his life. The first part never really asks questions about the events in his life. In the second part, as he runs for the presidency, there are more insightful comments made about the tightrope of being a Black candidate and being a candidate for all the people. Questions of too Black or not Black enough come up. There are times that Black commentators critique some of the things he said in speeches as not resonating with the Black experience. The series will add another perspective for those seeking to understand the historic nature oif Obama’s election.

We (Nous) from filmmaker Alice Diop is a look at life in the Paris suburbs. There is no through story, just looks at the mundane world. We see a mechanic as he works on a car and gets a phone call from his mother in Mali. We see the filmmaker’s sister as she makes her rounds as a visiting nurse to elderly patients. We see kids in a park. We visit a Holocaust museum. There are no contexts given, we simply observe.

A title card at the end of the film the filmmaker mentions having learned “to see and love what is before my eyes.” That is very much what this film is about. It’s not about the narrative. It is about seeing these little bits of life as they happen.

Never mind “Antique Roadshow”. Suppose that old painting you have is really a Leonardo DaVinci. That is the crux of The Lost Leonardo by Andreas Koefoed. It traces the history of a painting found at an obscure auction in New Orleans, that was later restored and attributed to (not without controversy) Leonardo. The price paid at the New Orleans auction: $1175. The Price eventually paid at a Christies auction: $450,000,000. And, oh, by the way, you can’t see it because the current owner, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, refuses to exhibit it.

The painting, “Salvator Mundi”, becomes the focal point for looking at the art world and how it operates. It’s not just about art and collectors, but about finance and even global politics. The film brings in many of those who were involved in the story of the painting as it advanced through the art world, but also some outside people, who add knowledge about other aspects, including a former CIA operative. There is a sense in which what the film is about is truth. What makes truth? Can we know the truth? Does truth become just a matter of belief? Or does $450,000,000 buy truth? The Lost Leonardo will arrive in theaters in August.

Shorts for today include The Game, directed by Roman Hodel, that shows a bit of a soccer game. We see the crowds in the stand, the TV control room, everything is ready to go. But it’s not the game we watch, but the referee. Having officiated high school football in the past, I know that no one goes to the game to watch the referee, but he (or sometimes these days, she) is a key part of what happens. Another of the shorts is Eagles (Águilas), directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Maite Zubiaurra. That film chronicles the work of volunteers who search the Arizona desert for immigrants who get lost, or to find their remains to bring peace of mind for their families.

Photos courtesy of AFI.

Filed Under: AFIFest, Film, Film Festivals Tagged With: AFI Docs festival, art, Barack Obama, Documentarty, France, shorts, sports

Day 1 at AFI Docs

June 23, 2021 by Darrel Manson Leave a Comment

Welcome to the real world.

Documentaries take us into the world to show us lives and issues that we might otherwise not know about. AFI Docs is a festival filled with documentaries to challenge us to see the world around us from a new perspective.

In the current American political environment, it seems like no one wants to talk to people they disagree with. The First Step, from Brandon Kramer, follows CNN political commentator Van Jones as he works for prison reforms. This is a story of strange political bedfellows. Jones, who was angered by the election of Donald Trump, found an ally in the issue in Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose father served time in federal prison. Together they worked for the passage of The First Step Act (which eventually was supported bipartisanly and signed by the President).

Much of the film is Jones trying to bring very opposite people together. For example, he creates a group made up of people from South L.A. and West Virginia around the common issue of how addiction has affected those communities. But there were many who were appalled that Jones would have anything to do with the Administration. Many in the Black community saw his work as a betrayal. They thought he gave validation to Trump and his people. The main point of the film is that such dialogue is essential to the working of a democracy. When we refuse to meet with those we may view as “the enemy”, it only adds to the polarization and the effective paralyzation of the political process.

The US Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) has been wildly successful. They have one four World Cups and four Olympic gold medals. The Men’s Team, not quite as successful—by any measure. But the Men get paid at a much higher rate than the women. Yeah, that’s not fair. But is it legal? LFG, from Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine, is the story of the USWNT’s legal battle against the US Soccer Federation over equal pay. While the film offers some wonderful soccer action as the women continue to win, the main focus is the legal process as it plays out over more than a year. (The case still is ongoing at the appeals level.)

When we think of professional athletes, we think that those who have made it to the highest level probably get paid in ways that reflect that. That certainly doesn’t apply to women athletes. The lawsuit reflects the basic pay disparity between men and women in the US. The film is filled with the personal emotions of the women who are fighting this battle. It also shows the arguments on both sides of the issue, although it certainly favors the USWNT’s perspective. (It should be noted that the US Soccer Federation opted not to be part of the film.) LFG is available to stream on HBO Max.

Fathom, by director Drew Xanthopoulos, focuses on two women scientists who are separately working on the calls and songs of Humpback whales. Dr. Michelle Fournet and her colleagues are trying to communicate with whales off Alaska, testing an hypothesis that a certain sound (a “whup”) is a greeting/introduction. Dr. Ellen Garland is trying to follow the pathway of how a song moves across the ocean to different groups.

Whales, especially humpbacks, are highly intelligent. The film notes that these animals had developed a culture before humans walked upright. Their sounds may not be what we would think of as language, but it seems to have a social and cultural aspect that connects the whales to each other.

Among today’s shorts were Audible, the story of the football team at the Maryland School of the Deaf, as they come with the end of a winning streak and the death of a friend; Bug Farm, about some people who work on a farm that raises crickets, mealworms, and roaches for sale to pet stores and zoos as feed; and Invisible Monsters and Tomato Soup, in which twenty people have shared some of their dreams from early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Audible will be available to stream on Netflix in July.

One of the industry forums that was held in conjunction with AFI Docs was “Breaking the Silence: How Documentaries Can Shape Conversation on Racial Violence”. It focused on a study by that name done by the Center for Media and Social Impact, which used the documentary about lynching, Always in Season, as a focal point for conversation in several locations in different parts of the country. The key point is that such a documentary can be a helpful beginning to conversations, if done properly. The report and resource guide can be found at https://cmsimpact.org/report/breaking-silence-documentaries-can-shape-conversation-racial-violence-america-create-new-communities/

Photos courtesy of AFI.

Filed Under: AFIFest, Featured, Film, Film Festivals Tagged With: AFI Docs festival, Football, shorts, soccer, whales, women's rights

Looking Ahead to AFI Docs

June 21, 2021 by Darrel Manson Leave a Comment

One of my favorite film industry events is the annual AFI Fest in the fall. It always has a collection of the best films of the year. The American Film Institute has another important festival each year, AFI Docs, that centers on documentary films. AFI Docs usually takes place in Maryland (close to Washington, DC, since political issues are often central to documentaries), but this year it is a hybrid festival with live screenings as well as online availability of the films.

AFI Docs is a bit shorter than AFI Fest. The program begins Tuesday night, June 22 with a showing of Naomi Osaka. A full set of films begins releasing on Wednesday, with the festival finishing on Sunday, June 27. Some of the feature films I’m planning on taking in are  The First Step, a story of the workings of the political world, Fathom, about humpback whales, LFG, focusing on the US Women’s Soccer Team’s lawsuit for equal pay, The Lost Leonardo, about a surprise discovery of a DaVinci painting, Pray Away, a look at those who try to “cure” homosexuality, and many others over a wide range of subjects.

There are also a few documentary series that will be previewed at AFI Docs. 9/11: One Day in America looks at one of the darkest days in American history. Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union looks at Barak Obama’s journey from the Illinois State House to the White House. Some of the episodes of these will be shown.

There are also industry forums that address issues facing documentary filmmakers and the changing landscape for the industry. One I’m looking forward to will speak of how documentaries can help shape the conversation about race in America.

There will also be several programs of short documentaries covering sports, science, everyday life, war and peace, and the kinds of dreams people had during the COVID-19 pandemic. Shorts can always bring incredible insights. Each day when I report of what I’ve seen, I’ll include of few notes on some of the shorts.

But wait, you don’t necessarily need me to tell you what has happened at AFI Docs. As I note above, this festival is virtual! You can watch some of these films at home. Some of the screenings and all of the industry forums are free (but you must get a ticket). Go to https://docs.afi.com/how-to-fest/ to learn more about being part of AFI Docs this year. Then we can compare notes.

Filed Under: AFIFest, Film, Film Festivals, News Tagged With: AFI Docs festival, Documentarty, documentary shorts

Primary Sidebar

THE SF NEWS

Get a special look, just for you.

sf podcast

Hot Off the Press

  • SF Radio 8.29 Reboots and Reputations in CHIP ‘N DALE RESCUE RANGERS
  • New Trailer for THIRTEEN LIVES gets Underground
  • GIVEAWAY! Advance Screening of PAWS OF FURY!
  • Rise: Another Disney Slam Dunk
  • The Long Rider: The Long Journey Inward
Find tickets and showtimes on Fandango.

where faith and film are intertwined

film and television carry stories which remind us of the stories God has woven since the beginning of time. come with us on a journey to see where faith and film are intertwined.

Footer

ScreenFish Articles

SF Radio 8.29 Reboots and Reputations in CHIP ‘N DALE RESCUE RANGERS

New Trailer for THIRTEEN LIVES gets Underground

  • About ScreenFish
  • Privacy Policy

© 2022 · ScreenFish.net · Built by Aaron Lee

Posting....
 

Loading Comments...