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Slamdance 2022 – More shorts (including some award winners)

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Yes, there are more films to cover from Slamdance, especially short films, so let’s catch up on some of them. The festival awards have been announced, and I note some of the winners here.

Little Berlin (15 minutes), directed by Kate McMullen, is based on a true story. When Germany was divided after World War II, the village of Mödlareuth was split between the East and West. This resulted in Peter, the only bull in the village, being cut off from his 40 cows. Through wonderful editing, and narration by Christopher Waltz, the story becomes a symbol of the pain of division and separation. Even after the Iron Curtain fell, there are still those separated by walls (think the southern US border, and Israel/Palestine) and political barriers. Little Berlin is part of the Department of Anarchy section.

Also from the Department of Anarchy is What’s My Name? (6 minutes), directed by Arthur Studholm. This is a nightmare for a man at a party who can’t remember the name of someone he’s met before, and the ensuing unpleasantness that just keep getting worse.

See You, Garbage! (18 minutes), directed by Romain Dumont, is the story of a trio of sanitation workers who are invited to have dinner with the Prime Minister for Christmas. The class structure of a society that supposedly believes in equality is laid bare, with humor and insight. See You, Garbage! was awarded Honorable Mention in the Narrative Short section.

South (13 minutes), directed by Patrick Case, is the story of a young man on the autism spectrum who has found his way of encountering the world in making models out of clay. His family’s home is filled with his dolls. It allows him to be creative and to share is life with others. South is part of the Unstoppable Shorts section.

Beyond Is the Day (26 minutes), directed by Damian Kocur, is the story of Pawel, a man who spends his day running a small ferry across a river in Poland. One day, he finds a man struggling in the river. While the man recovers, Pawel has companionship and the other man has safety from the immigration officers. But it is a difficult situation that can’t last.

Meat (16 minutes), directed by Asher Rosen, tells the story of a Batwa woman in Uganda. When her village is destroyed to make a conservation park for tourists, she must do what she can to provide food for her son. Even subject herself to the very tourists who have displaced her.

The Jury Prize for Narrative Short was awarded to Ratking (20 minutes), directed by Eric Colomma. A young woman and her boyfriend are having a less than perfect day as she wants to escape it all by heading to the beach.

The Jury Prize for Animated Shorts was awarded to I’m Here (15 minutes), directed by Julia Orlik. This is a look at a dying woman (who cannot speak, but who dominates the scene) and her elderly husband who is trying to care for her, with the help of their daughter. It is a contemplation of mortality and love.

 Walls Cannot Keep Us from Flying  (13 minutes), directed by Jonathan Haff Mehring, received Honorable Mention in the Short Documentary section. This is a  film about skateboarders in Palestine who find freedom through their skating, and are teaching younger children (both boys and girls) how to skate as an act of revolution amid the occupation.

Day 2 at AFI Docs

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The films I’ve chosen for today are very much focused on issues that touch the lives of many people. These are films that in many ways are “ripped from headlines”. It’s worth noting that two of the films include coverage of issues dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, even though that is not the main point of the films.

Pray Away, the feature debut from documentarian Kristine Stolakis, looks at the history for the “pray the gay away” movement in the church (mostly the evangelical church) over the last several decades. The film focuses on some of the founders and leaders in the movement who have now denounced that approach because of the injury they saw they had inflicted on so many people. These are people who were very visible on TV and active politically. Those that we hear tell their stories have now all discovered fulfillment by embracing their sexuality, but they also deal with guilt over the pain they created through their actions over the years. The film also includes a look at a current ex-gay leader, but those sections are a bit less engaging, in part because it is hard to give credence to his story.

More than 700,000 people have undergone conversion therapy seeking to change their sexual orientation. That process has been nearly universally rejected by the medical and psychiatric fields. This film allows us to see how that became so popular within many churches. It also shows how that has harmed not only the happiness, but the spiritual life of many LGBTQ people. Pray Away is a Netflix Original Documentary and will be available to stream later this summer.

Journalism is recognized as a key element of a democratic society. Yet in many places around the country there are huge “news deserts”, places with no local news source. Beth Levison’s and Jerry Risius’s Storm Lake shows a little over a year in the life of the Storm Lake Times, a twice-a-week newspaper in rural Iowa with a circulation of about 3000. The editor of the family run paper, Tom Cullen, won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017. The paper covers local life in this rural, but increasingly diverse community. It covers high school sports, city council meetings, and hosts Presidential Forums ahead of the Iowa Caucuses. The film continues into the paper’s coverage of COVID-19 and the financial difficulty that brought.

While the film is a very personal portrait of the Cullen family as they strive with deadlines and looking for advertising, it is really about the ways journalism touches the lives of the community and what is lost when there is no local journalism. In the last fifteen years one out of four newspapers has closed. There are over 300 news deserts with communities of 20,000 or more with no newspaper. While there are regional news outlets, they pay little if any attention to life in smaller communities. In the Q&A following, Tom Cullen noted that they were having to find a new paradigm that was reader support rather than advertising support. That is true of many newspapers. Storm Lake will be in the upcoming season of “Independent Lens” on PBS.

White Coat Rebels, from Greg Barker, seeks to make the case (and does so very well) that the for-profit health care system, especially as manifested in Big Pharma, has not provided good care for many people. The film begins with a group of medical students in a White Coat ceremony as they take the Hippocratic Oath, promising to put their patients’ needs first always. Much of the film looks at the work of medical students who are part of Universities Allied for Essential Medicine, which seeks to have schools make ethical commitments about the drugs they help develop. There are also practicing doctors who make the point that the medical care that many people need is not available to them because of the way the US health care system is structured.

The conflict that comes up frequently in the film is if the system should be about patients or profits. The film began in the fall of 2019 and continued into the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which only served to exacerbate and illustrate the rich/poor and racial dichotomies involved in health care. The film seems to circle around on itself from time to time, but it is an important and highly timely examination of key issue.

For today’s shorts, I have put together something of a double feature. Under the Lemon Tree, from Noor Fawzi Alasswad, shows us an older Palestinian woman living in exile as she makes a simple breakfast under a lemon tree and lovingly remembers her lost home and land after she has been away for many decades. A companion piece is Mission: Hebron, from Rona Segal. This film has interviews with six former Israeli soldiers as they talk about their tours in Hebron, a town of about 30,000 Palestinians and 1000 Israeli settlers. The soldier’s job is to protect the Jewish citizens. All speak with a bit of guilt for the things they did (and didn’t do).

Photos curtesy of AFI

No More Masks; Israel Conflict; The End for the Church?; Resident Evil 8

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In this jam-packed, lightning round episode of the Your Sunday Drive podcast, we cover four fascinating topics in just one hour!

First, mask mandates go away as we seem to be approaching the end of the pandemic. What’s our experience so far and how do we handle the inevitable cultural friction of the moment?

Next we talk about the renewed conflict in Israel. What’s the history and context of the current violence and, most importantly, how can Christians respond?

Church membership is down and deconversion stories are on the rise. We dig in to these trends and how, counterintuitively, there may be good news afoot.

Finally, we spend some time discussing our current fave books, shows and games. Resident Evil Village (Resident Evil 8) is the focus, with a surprising connection made between fandoms and the church.

Come along for Your Sunday Drive – quick conversation about current events, politics, pop culture and more, from the perspective of a couple of guys trying to follow Jesus.

Hosts: Matt Hill and Nate Polzin. Presented by the Church in Drive of Saginaw, MI, as often as possible. Please visit churchindrive.com and facebook.com/thechurchindrive

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A Look at the Oscar® Nominated Live Action Shorts

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When it is time to award the best in films each year, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences include three categories of short films in their Oscar ® presentations. Most people don’t get to see many shorts. They play at festivals, and occasionally in front of a feature film. But short films are an art form worth attention. Many (probably most) feature filmmakers started out making short films. To tell a story in such a brief format takes skill. All the Oscar-nominated short films will be playing in theaters and on virtual cinema in special programs.

Let’s take a look at the Oscar ® nominated live action shorts.

Feeling Through (19 minutes, directed by Doug Roland). Tereek, a homeless teen helps Walter, a blind-deaf man (played by a deaf-blind actor), find his bus to get home. He learns to see the man as more than a problem, and also gets perspective on his own trials.  This is a very moving story. In just a few minutes of screen time, we see tremendous growth in Tereek’s character. For him this is truly a life changing experience.

The Letter Room (33 minutes, directed by Elvira Lind). When a sensitive prison guard gets transferred to the mail room, his job is to read all the incoming and outgoing mail. He is enthralled with the very personal letters sent to a death row inmate. But perhaps the reality is less than he imagines. Nice performance from Oscar Isaac as a man who strives to be kind, even in an unkind environment.

The Present (25 minutes, directed by Farah Nabulsi). This Palestinian film is the story of a man who sets off with his daughter to go into town to buy an anniversary gift for his wife. The way is complicated by checkpoints, hostile Israeli soldiers, and segregated highways. It becomes a trial by humiliation. Can the man get the gift home and still maintain his stature in the eyes of his daughter? This look at life within the occupied Palestinian territories shows some of the injustice that people must face, with no real rights or power. The Present is currently streaming on Netflix.

Two Distant Strangers (29 minutes, directed by Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe). When a man wakes up in his girlfriend’s apartment, he sets off home to take care of his dog. But when he runs into trouble with a racist policeman, it ends tragically. Then he wakes up again…. This is something of a Black Lives Matter version of Groundhog Day. There are lots of different scenarios, but it always ends in the police killing of a black man.

White Eye (20 minutes, directed by Tomer Shushan). In Israel, a man finds his bike stolen weeks ago. It now belongs to a Somalian immigrant who bought it at bus station. When the police get involved it becomes far more complicated than the man wanted. The film moves from being about what rights a person might have to what is the right thing to do in a difficult setting.

My favorites among these are Feeling Through,because it brings hope out of darkness in a touchingly human way; and Two Distant Strangers, for the way it uses the time loop trope to emphasize the way the killing of black people seems be something we wake up to anew each day.

To see where you can see these shorts, go to https://shorts.tv/theoscarshorts/

Saturday at AFI Fest 2017

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The first full day for the festival took me on a trip around the world. That’s one of the values of film festivals, we get to see other lands and cultures without the expense and time of travel. (Not that I wouldn’t love being able to go to so many places.) We also get to see through different eyes. Four of the films for today were from women directors. Some have lived in more than one culture and so can compare and contrast. To see such films encourages us to see our own world and culture as others might.

From Spain comes Summer 1993 (New Auteurs section). Director Carla Simón tells a story based on her own childhood. After her mother’s AIDS-related death, young Frida moves into the Catalan countryside to live with her uncle and his family. She is surrounded by loving family members, but she has not yet come to grips with the enormity of the change in her life and discovered how to deal with the grief she holds inside. The beautiful, sunny countryside creates a contrast for the pain that Frida has. Summer 1993 is Spain’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Joachim Trier’s Thelma (World Cinema) is a nicely creepy film coming out of Norway. Thelma has grown up in a religious family, but has now set off to university, where she finds new ideas and experiences life in new ways. She is strangely attracted to another student, Anja. But when she starts having unexplained seizures strange things begin to happen. There are secrets from her past that come to bear on her life and a chance for her to find happiness. Thelma is Norway’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film. It is slated to open in theaters on November 24.

Wajib (World Cinema) is a father/son story from director Annemarie Jacir. Shadi, an architect living in Rome, returns to Israel, to help his father Abu Shad hand-deliver wedding invitation for Shadi’s sister’s wedding. As the two men drive around Nazareth and visit friends and relatives, their differences create tensions. For Shadi, a Palestinian living an affluent life abroad, there is a culture clash in returning. The relationship between the two is very complex, at once loving and fractious. Has Shadi abandoned his family and people (as his mother did many years ago)? Has Abu Shadi compromised his principles to advance his career? As a father and a son, I found this a very universal reality of the difficulty in understanding a generational difference, yet being bonded by a lifetime of love. Wajib is the official Palestinian entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

In Iram Haq’s What Will People Say? (New Auteurs) a 1.5 generation Pakistani immigrant lives a dual life: the perfect Pakistani daughter at home, but a normal Norwegian teenager among her friends. But when Misha’s father discovers her with her boyfriend in her room late one night, everything changes. The story is a clash of important values. For the West, where Nisha has grown up, freedom is perhaps the highest value. But for her family, both in their new country and back in Pakistan, honor is paramount. It may seem that her parents are only concerned with how they are perceived, but at the same time it seems they are acting out of love for their daughter, trying to provide her with a life that fits their worldview. Of course, I watched this through western eyes, so some of the responses by her family seem extreme, but at the same time I could empathize with their desire to raise their daughter in what they considered a proper life. Mark this down as one of my favorites of the festival.

I traveled to South Africa with Jenna Bass’s High Fantasy (New Auteurs). Four friends (three women, one white, one colored, two black) go to an isolated farm for a camping trip. But when they wake up in the morning, they have somehow swapped bodies. This is more than Freaky Friday. As they struggle to understand what happened, they must also struggle with the difficulty of what it means to live in a “rainbow nation”. The racial and sexual differences are not something that can be covered up by just “walking a mile in another’s shoes”. The resentments of generations of apartheid and oppression are too deep. South Africa continues to be a country that struggles with racism—as does the U.S. This film is not about finding easy answers for how we live together in racist societies, but rather it raises some questions that need to be addressed if we are ever going to find ways to move forward.

 

Colliding Dreams – The Evolution of Zionism

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The root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be found in the history and development of Zionism. Colliding Dreams is a documentary that traces that history “as seen through the eyes of the inhabitants of the land.” It provides a good introduction to some of the issues that drive both peoples and the way those issues have shifted through the decades.

The film is organized into chapters that show various stages in the development of Zionism. Chapter I is entitled “The Jewish Dilemma.” It shows the ways Jews in Eastern Europe really had no place in society. When pogroms began in the 1880s some suggested moving to Palestine and resettling. The first such settlers began going there in 1882. Bu the end of the 19th Century a Zionist Congress began meeting to promote this as a political idea.

Kibbutznik_Picnic

Chapter II, “One Land, Two People,” begins with the 1917 Balfour Declaration by the British Government supporting a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. (It is of note, that Britain did not possess Palestine at that point.) Immigration of European Jews continued, and it began to create some friction with the inhabitants of the region. This chapter continues through Israeli Independence and the War of Independence, which set the boundary between Israel and the Arab areas. At this point talk of Zionism went away because its goals had been accomplished.

Chapter III, “Another Zionism,” begins following the Six Day War in 1967. After that war, when Israel began occupying the West Bank, some more conservative religious groups began to talk of Zionism in messianic terms. They proposed that Israel should settle all the lands of ancient Israel (which reached well into Iraq). This is a time of a political shift within Israel.

Three_Arab_men_in_front_of_cafe_AlBirra_WestBank

Chapter IV, “Recognition,” focuses on the ongoing hostilities that grow out of the dispossession of the Palestinian people, starting with the First Intifada. The film ends with a Coda, “The Zionist Dilemma” which outlines the basic reality that the occupation has been a major transformation from original Zionist principles and that there seems no just and politically acceptable way of dealing with the issues that Israelis and Palestinians face.

As the film says at the beginning, all of this is related by “the inhabitants of the land,” both Jewish and Palestinian. It includes people whose families were among the early settlers to come from Europe, soldiers from various wars, academics, and people from all walks of life. They have wide ranging understandings of the problem that Zionism has created, even though they may recognize the need for the original idea of Zionism. The film is balanced in its approach and brings insight that bring the current situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories into focus in ways some may not have considered.

Photos courtesy of International Film Circuit