ScreenFish

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autism

Still more from Slamdance 2023

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Here are more films that are playing at Slamdance Film Festival. You can see these and others at https://slamdance.com/festival.

Sweetheart Deal, directed by Elisa Levine and Gabriel Miller, is one of those documentaries that turns into something entirely different than it sets out to be. The film focuses on four sex workers in Seattle and a man who goes into Aurora Avenue area where they work to provide a safe place for them to come and rest, eat, or kick their drug habits. The women face danger in their work. They are all also involved with drugs that are often the reason for them doing this work, but also make their lives tolerable. “Eliot”, seems to be a wonderful friend. When one of the women is kidnapped and escapes, he helps her find the place she was, so she can take the information to the police. But the last third of the film has such an amazing revelation (both the to the audience and to the women) about “Eliot” that it takes the film in a new direction. The betrayal we discover just adds to the many ways that these women are abused and debased. Although it is a very dark topic, there are signs of hope in the end.

In case you think Slamdance is only about dark movies, let me tell you about Love Dump, directed by Jason Avezzano. This work was created by Leila Gorstein and Jesse Kendall, when they worked together in an improv theater. It is a parody of Hallmark romcoms. Jessica Dump runs a vintage garbage store. One day in the park, she is trampled by Todd Barkley, a lawyer who defends dogs. Sparks fly immediately, but then fifteen years pass. Through various misadventures, the two struggle to find each other again, hitting all the romcom beats you expect to find. The humor is broadly over-the-top as one might expect from its improv background.

One of the finds of the festival, from my perspective, is OKAY! (The ASD Band Film), directed by Mark Bone. Slamdance has sections of both features and shorts that they label “Unstoppable”, which focuses on overcoming the obstacles of life. OKAY! is the story of a band made up of four musicians on the autism spectrum. Autism has become a subject of entertainment in recent years. (E.g., The Big Bang Theory, Atypical, As We See It, and Extraordinary Attorney Woo.) Perhaps it is time to see those with autism in reality. A program helping people with autism learn social skills brought together these four gifted musicians. We may think that people with autism cannot connect to other people, but that is not what we see here. They are working on making their first album, and writing songs that reflect their lives, and collaborating to make each song something special. We meet their families, as well as some other people with autism who have greater struggles than these. One of the songs they perform has a line that is a wonderful statement of the thesis of the film: We’re different, but not less.

The Last Right – Acts of Grace

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“It’s the first right thing I do for him, and it’s the last.”

Doing the right thing is central to Aoife Crehan’s premier feature film The Last Right. But right for whom? And how do we judge the right among multiple values that all have a claim as right?

Daniel Murphy (Michael Huisman) is a New York tax attorney heading back to Ireland for his mother’s funeral. Next to him on the plane is Padraig Murphy (no relation), who is taking his estranged brother’s body back to Ireland after 30 years with no contact. He says that at least they can be together in death even if not in life. When just before landing Padraig is found to have died, it’s discovered that he has listed Daniel as his next of kin.

When Daniel gets home for the funeral, we discover he has a brother, Louis (Samuel Bottonley), with autism. Daniel’s plan is to take Louis back to the US and place him in a special school. But when the authorities seek Daniel’s help dealing with Padraig’s body, a series of unlikely occurrences leads to Daniel and Louis driving the family Volvo the length of Ireland with the coffin strapped to the top of the car so that he can be buried along with his brother. Also along for the ride is a women they have just met, Mary (Niamh Algar).

At the same time, the authorities have decided to hold on to Padraig’s body. The Garda is after them for bodysnatching. When the story becomes national news, many people see what Daniel is doing as a kind sacrifice. By the time he gets to the church, just ahead of the Garda, many have turned out for the funeral of these two lonely brothers.

Along the way there are revelations (including a major one about the relationship between Louis and Daniel) and a budding romance with Daniel and Mary. All of which must turn into conflicts before the right thing to do is finally achieved.

The film is about 50% road movie, 40% romantic comedy, and 10% Rainman. The romcom aspects are the least compelling part of the film, especially when you consider that this trip and the resulting relationship happens in two days.

This is a film that shows how grace can come from unexpected sources. Daniel, although under duress, acts as a grace giver in hauling Padraig’s coffin to be joined with his brother, just as Padraig acted with grace to bring his brother’s remains home. But Daniel also is the recipient of grace in many ways along the way. And it is important to remember that grace is by definition unmerited. Daniel, who essentially operates from selfish motives, finds his life open up in new ways as he comes to know and appreciate Louis. It allows Daniel, who finds grace so frequently in the film to become a gracious person who can set aside his own selfish ways to welcome others into his life.

The Last Right is available in theaters and on demand.

Reporting from Slamdance – “Unstoppable” filmmakers (part 2)

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Diversity is being recognized as an important goal in the film industry. Many voices and many perspectives are needed in every art form, and that is very true of film. This year’s Slamdance Film Festival has made an express effort to bring the idea of ablism and the perspective of people with disabilities (PWD). There is a special section of shorts called “Unstoppable” that focuses on films by or about peoples with disabilities. It has a wide range of styles, tones, and content. There are documentaries, music videos, and narrative films. There are 22 films in the section, so I’ve divided my comments into two reports. This is the second report. The earlier report can be seen here. The Unstoppable section is presented by Hulu.

On the Outs. (37 minutes, directed by Jordan Melograna). This documentary follows three inmates with disabilities as they prepare for their release and reenter the world. One has mental illness, one has brain damage and has had hip replacement, one has visual impairment. Their disabilities certainly complicate the process, but even more that film shows the way the system falls far short of preparing even those without disabilities for a time after their sentence.

Safety Net. (12 minutes, directed by Anthea Williams.) A thirteen year old boy living with a disability has just entered emergency care after his mother was arrested. He is staying in a seedy motel with a guardian present. The first guardian is compassionate and encouraging. The relief guardian is stern and demanding. The boy’s future may well depend on this care and which guardian will dominate his time.

Single. (16 minutes, directed by Ashley Eakin). A young woman born with one arm faces the world with an attitude. She doesn’t want to be pitied or thought of as disabled. She responds to most people with anger when they note her missing arm. She’s been set up on a blind date, and discovers that her date only has one hand. She is irate at the person who set them up. Her date convinces hre to come to his rooftop and throw eggs at the wall to take out her anger at all those who have slighted her. A good therapy session for her.

Stilts. (7 minutes, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams) A young man who, like the rest of his family, lives with very large stilts attached to his legs. Because he’s so tall, he can’t get through an exit to the outside world. He seeks surgery to remove the stilts and be set free.

The Bin. (15 minute, directed by Jocelyn Tamayao). A father and his hearing impaired son are at odds over getting cochlear implants versus using sign language. The father wants to make his son “normal”; the son wants to live his own kind of normal.

The Co-op. (7 minutes, directed by Cameron S. Mitchell). A thief attempts to hold up a market late at night, but his plans hit a snag when the store is filled with PWD.

Union. (19 minutes, directed by Julia Neill). During the Civil War a woman returns home for Christmas, she brings with her a Union soldier to meet her family. They met when she, a surgeon, amputated his arm. Now they come for her father’s blessing. But how does he know the man will be able to take care of her? Perhaps it is his own insecurities that cause him to hesitate.

Unspoken. (27 minutes, directed by Emma Zurcher-Long, Julia Ngeow, and Geneva Peschka). Emma Zurcher-Long is a fourteen year old girl with autism. After years of not being able to communicate, it was discovered she could write using a keyboard. She shares information about her world and how it differs from ours. She breaks down the stereotypes and prejudices that surround her.

Verisimilitude.  (14 minutes, directed by David Proud). An actress who can’t get roles because she is in a wheelchair is hired for a movie to teach an abled actor how to act disabled. There are also several abled extras in wheelchairs. This film serves as a bit of judgment on an industry that often fails to see beyond a first appearance.

Road to Zion. (16 Minutes, directed by Andrew Reid). A undocumented Jamaican young man and his family (which includes a brother with a intellectual disability) struggle to make ends meet. Without a green card it is hard to get the kind of job that will bring the money his family needs. A local drug dealer makes it know he can work for him. What will he do to take care of his family?

A truly appreciate Slamdance and Hulu for making this special section possible. Of course, not everything suited my taste, but the voice that comes through from many of these shorts is important. It also shows how valuable it is to have diversity in filmmaking.

My top favorite from the section is Feeling Through. Others that I deeply appreciate are How Much Am I Worth?, On the Outs, and Unspoken.

The Reason I Jump – Inside Autism

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Films have to ability to take us into unknown worlds—maybe through science fiction, or a setting in a different culture or time period. When I’m in a theater (ah, those were the days!) and the lights go down I feel a bit of excitement about where we will travel to today. The Reason I Jump, a documentary by Jerry Rothwell, tries to take us inside the world of autism. It’s probably an impossible goal to fully achieve, but it succeeds in giving us some understanding of what that world is like.

The film is based on book of the same title written by Naoki Higashida, when he was thirteen years old to try to explain what it was like for him to live with autism. Part of what makes this so impressive is that Naoki does not speak, yet he has written an amazingly elegant book to describe his life. Naoki does not appear in the film. He wanted his words to be enough.

The film uses his words to give us his insights—his way of experiencing the world that is so different from our own. It mixes these perceptions with glimpses into the lives of five people with autism, in India, the UK, the US, and Sierra Leone. Each of them is non-speaking. Yet we learn that they are not without thoughts and feelings. Between these glimpse Rothwell also includes shots of a young Japanese boy wandering various landscapes full of visual diversity.

The result is at times poetic (both verbally and visually) as well is eye-opening. We discover that as strange and challenging as the world of autism may seem to us, our world is just as strange and challenging to the people we meet. Early on, we hear Naoki’s words as he describes the difference in how he imagines we see things (first noticing the whole of an object and then the details), and how he experiences all the details and then must interpret that into the overall object. The film does a wonderful job of visualizing that difference.

For some people with autism who do not speak, it may be because they have so many words and thoughts in their mind that they have a hard time bringing order to them. For others it is just something that stands in the way of the words and the speaking. But all those we meet have words and ideas that they find ways of bringing forth—perhaps through art or by using an alphabet board to point letter by letter to form the words they cannot speak.

The film also touches a bit on the stigma that often accompanies autism. This is especially true when we meet the young woman in Sierra Leone. There (and elsewhere through the ages) people with autism were treated as possessed, witches, or sub-human. They have been locked away in institutions and even killed because of their differentness. The Reason I Jump helps us to understand autism as a very different understanding of reality that these people live in. And it allows us to hear what they cannot say.

The Reason I Jump is available on virtual cinema through local arthouses.

Photos courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Jack of the Red Hearts – Finding Self by Caring for Others

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In Jack of the Red Hearts, a castoff from the foster system finds a place to belong through dishonesty, ending up with a sense of self, responsibility, and care for another person to move to a better life. Hmm. When I put it like that doesn’t it sound so bad. And to be fair, it has won awards at festivals. But it never quite worked for me even though thematically, it has a bit to commend it.

Jack (AnnaSophia Robb) has aged out of the foster care system, but her sister, whom Jack calls Coke, is still in the system. Jack hatches a plan to get enough money to get a place to live and “rescue” Coke. With a bit of identity theft, she cons her way into a job of caregiver for an autistic child, Glory. Obviously this is a job she has no qualifications for, but she manages to stumble through it. Glory’s mother Kay (Famke Jannsen) sees in Jack (whom she knows as Donna) as a substitute daughter that she can talk to and relate to. Glory’s teenage brother Robert (Israel Broussard) has a crush on Jack, thinking she is older than she is. Eventually, of course, the truth will come out with feelings of betrayal. But can Jack save the day by getting Glory into a special school? There is a strong Lifetime Channel vibe to the film, which some people appreciate.

I should start with the things that didn’t work for me. (But I’ll go on to the parts I find valuable.) It really is a bit implausible for Jack to have any ability to connect to Glory, especially since her sole training is watching The Miracle Worker after Robert suggests she’s acting like Anne Sullivan with Helen Keller. I wondered how many times of Glory getting lost it would take before Jack knew she had to keep an eye on her. That everything manages to go well for as long as it does really does strain credulity.

However, the film also has a strong emphasis on the healing that can come by opening oneself to others. Jack’s whole world is self. Even her attachment to her sister really is just an extension of her understanding of who she is. That is why she refers to herself and her sister as Jack and Coke—a mixture in which both sides compliment the other to create a whole. She only begins to grow as a person when she begins to connect to Glory and her family. I don’t think it is incidental that Glory is autistic—a range of disorders in which people cannot relate to other people in various ways. Jack enters the relationship without caring for anyone other than herself and her extension Coke. Just as she learns to pay attention to the needs of Glory, she also learns that by serving another she serves herself. That plays itself out in her other relationships as well, even with Coke who may well be better off, at least for now, with a family that cares for her. Although things look very bad for Jack at films end, they also seem very hopeful because of the changes that have happened within her.