Sunday, 11.06
First up on Sunday was a series of short documentaries from Russia. Alina Rudnitskaya's "Amazons" is a curious piece about a band of teenage girls in a Russian city who eke a rough living out of what sounds like every little girl's dream: playing with horses. They hire their animals out for pony rides to little kids, and they get a lot of joy out of riding the animals through the city streets (the cops leave them alone, says the filmmaker, who was there for a Q&A after the film, because they're well bribed), but they all look tough and hardened: this life isn't easy, even if it kinda looks like it might be fun.
Then there came Ivan Golovnev's charming "Tiny Katerina," a slice of life of a two-year-old Siberian girl, whose family lives in a tent on the frozen tundra and raises reindeer for a living. There's no translation of what is clearly everyday dialog of the housekeeping variety, and no narration, just the universal truths of toddlers: helping Mom around the yurt is good, but babbling to oneself (or, perhaps, to the bemused reindeer) is better. On the sly, the film is also a warm tribute to a traditional lifestyle that -- as the film makes poignantly clear -- is on its way out, whether its participants want it that way or not.
A child is the focus of Sergey Bosenko's tragic "Wait," too: a dear little seven-year-old girl whose alcoholic parents have abandoned her to an orphanage -- they're just not interested in taking care of her. Masha is sweet and heartbroken and desperate to understand what is happening to her -- in one deplorable sequence, she pretends to talk on the phone to a friend of her parents, as if not to let the kindly orphanage caretaker nearby know that Masha knows that no one cares about her fate. This is a powerful portrait of a pitiful child forced to face what no child should ever have to face: the fact that her parents don't want her. I wanted to hop on a plane and bring Masha home with me and smother her in the love she deserves. Thankfully, Bosenko told us after the screening that she has been adopted by a family who loves her, and she's doing well.
From there, I ran into "Science & Cinema II: From Natural History to the Unconscious," the highlight of which was a series of short-shorts by Catherine Chalmers, from her American Cockroach Project -- she was quite the most fascinating person I encountered during the festival, an artist who uses the American cockroach in her art as a way of exploring "all we hate about the natural world." I was particularly struck by her four-minute film "Burning at the Stake," which purports to show a cockroach being roasted to death (she doesn't kill the bugs, she assures us, though she does feed them to her reptiles... circle of life, and all that). The film opens with a roach trussed up on a stake, though it's not clear that's what we're looking at at first -- all that's obvious is that we're getting a close-up of an icky bug, and indeed, the audience gasped a collective "eww." But then, as flames appeared to lick around the critter, the disgust turned to discomfort, and the audience could be heard shifting uncomfortably in their (our) seats, whimpering slightly. Why is it that this creature that we have absolutely no hesitation about crushing or flushing or spraying should suddenly engage our sympathy? This is what the best film -- the best art -- does: makes you reconsider prejudices you never even realized you held.
I also very much enjoyed Hanna Rose Shell's 13-minute "Locomotion in Water," which was like a filmic version of what Nick Bantock does in books -- just as his books, like Griffin and Sabine, captured the romance of letters and postcards and correspondence, this lovely little film is nostalgic for the scientific past when gentlemen scholars made important discoveries as a hobby.
Other highlights included the charming CGI short "Moss Reproduction," by Arlene Ducao, the title of which is an accurate description of the film's content -- it's like a science-y greeting card designed to delight a moss geek; and Paul Bush's "While Darwin Sleeps," a montage of 3,500 insects that leaves you breathless with the endless creative variety of nature... even as it barely skims the surface of what the natural insect world has to offer.
Last on Sunday: a series of three films of household anthropology. First was Harvey Wang's "Vault Keys," a poignant tribute to the filmmaker's father and his slightly obsessive insistence on letting his son know how he should deal with the ephemera of his father's life after he's gone. Then, Jay Rosenblatt's "Phantom Limb" was an achingly intimate exploration of grief over the death of his brother, when both the filmmaker and his sibling were young children that juxtaposes family pictures and found bits of film with secret stories of family life and discussions of the grieving process. One sequence that continues to haunt me features a sheep being shorn naked while a narrator discusses the realities of grief, from the idiotic things unthinking people will say to the fact that you will never, ever complete get over the loss of a child -- grief sweeps you bare, Rosenblatt suggests, and anyone who's experienced that difficult emotion will nod in recognition.
Finally for the day: John Canemaker's "The Moon and the Son," an autobiographical animated story about the filmmaker's criminal father and the impact his life had on his son. Angry and bitter and seeking for understanding and reconciliation, this is a film so personal you almost feel you shouldn't be watching... but the jumble of hand-drawn styles lends a lively, resilient personality to the tale -- there's hope and healing to be found in this filmic quest.
[coming up: more screenings from the weekend of 11.12-13]
