Among the offerings at FilmFest DC is Norway’s Kon-Tiki, nominated for an Oscar this year. Photograph courtesy of Filmfest DC.
Filmfest DC returns for its 27th year— April 11 through 21—and after almost three decades of reviewing more than 300 submissions annually, founder Tony Gittens has a definite idea of what makes a good film: “Ultimately, it comes down to the story. The stories seem to be pretty much about the same thing—people understanding their place in the world, trying to have connections with other people, and finding themselves with obstacles to overcome.”
This year’s roster encompasses 81 features, documentaries, and shorts from around the world. Films are grouped thematically, including an espionage-and-thriller category called Trust No One. Among the festival’s highlights are the US premiere of Underground: The Julian Assange Story, an Australian movie starring Alex Williams as the WikiLeaks founder and Rachel Griffiths as his mother. Also on the roster: Stories We Tell, an autobiographical documentary by Canadian actress turned director Sarah Polley (Away From Her, Take This Waltz); Kon-Tiki, the Oscar-nominated Norwegian drama about Thor Heyerdahl’s groundbreaking voyage across the Pacific Ocean; and The Attack, a Lebanese film about a middle-class man who learns his wife is a suicide bomber. “A number of things have changed in 27 years,” Gittens says. “We’re seeing a lot more variety and more diverse voices. But we have a loyal audience and they’re very knowledgeable. To know we’re making a contribution to the city’s cultural scene is a good feeling.”
Filmfest DC. April 11 through 21. For schedule, venues, tickets, and other details at the festival’s website.
This article appears in the April 2013 issue of The Washingtonian.
Just one of the beautiful shots you’ll see at FotoWeek DC exhibitions. Photograph by Nadia Shira Cohen.
Know your Arthur Elgort from your Ansel Adams? Your X-Pro filter from your 1977? FotoWeek DC, the annual weeklong festival dedicated to showcasing photography, kicks off today with exhibitions, competitions, seminars, portfolio reviews, parties, and more. Here’s our guide to five things you shouldn’t miss.
FotoWeek Central
Each year, the festival bounces around among different home bases. In 2011 it was
mainly located in the empty Borders space at 18th and L, with exhibitions on two different
levels. This year FotoWeek takes over the Warner Theatre at 1299 Pennsylvania Avenue,
where there’ll be ten different exhibitions on display, from the Pulitzer Center on
Crisis Reporting’s “Global Goods/Local Costs” show to the Instagram exhibit. A $7
admission fee ($5 in advance) gets you access to all of the shows and most of the
additional lectures and programming.
Corcoran Gallery of Art
To coincide with the festival, the Corcoran has two major photography exhibits on
display this weekend. “Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters
I-XVIII” is a vast, thought-provoking look at heritage and humanity, in which Simon
photographs members of different family trees to explore their bloodlines and legacies.
“Ivan Sigal: White Road” reveals black-and-white photos taken of former Soviet Union
towns from 1998 through 2005 by Sigal, a Washington resident and nonprofit director.
A still from Detropia, playing Thursday and Friday. Photograph courtesy of Silverdocs.
Playing Friday, June 22, at 5 PM and Saturday, June 23, at 10:15 PM
Plenty of filmmakers have turned their cameras on New Orleans in recent years, realizing that a unique American city was almost lost to nature. Given the forecast of less optimistic climate change models, it could well be lost for good should the waters rise up and take it back for the sea. Whether it’s Spike Lee’s incisive documentary When the Levees Break or David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s blend of drama and cultural history in the HBO series Treme, there’s something special about the city—in its food, its music, its nonstop party vibe—that filmmakers are desperate to communicate. But for a city so sensuous, the two senses that film reaches probably aren’t enough; for some things, you just have to be there.
Tchoupitoulas, the new documentary from directors Bill and Turner Ross, may come as close as is possible to replicating the experience of a night spent walking the streets of New Orleans. That’s because that’s essentially all that the film does. The Rosses take three adolescent brothers who live just a ferry ride away from the French Quarter and follow them as they go on a nighttime trip through the city after they miss their ferry home.
By Washingtonian Staff
A still from Oma & Bella, screening Thursday and Saturday. Image courtesy of Silverdocs.
Playing Friday, June 22, at 1:15 PM, and Sunday, June 24, at 12:45 PM
Have a sullen, detached, troubled, or rude teenager at home? Care to commiserate with another parent over coffee? This is the film for you—though you’ll have to supply the coffee, and it won’t be your turn to talk for an hour and a half.
In Photographic Memory, director Ross McElwee—best known for the 1986 documentary Sherman’s March, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes—offers a self-effacing and sympathetic guide to the trials of watching a sweet, companionable child turn into a hostile young adult. His son, Adrian—whom we see in both the present day and home movies—is a creative, smart, but angry kid who has managed to finish high school and is living with his parents and younger sister. A writer, videographer, and extreme skier (among other talents), Adrian nevertheless seems to have no direction or interest in college when the film begins. In an effort to understand his son, McElwee undertakes a journey into his own past “to try to remember what it was like to be in my twenties and have most of my life ahead of me, as Adrian has now.”
By Washingtonian Staff
Charles Bradley: Soul of America plays on Friday and Sunday. Photograph courtesy of Silverdocs.
Playing Thursday, June 21, at 10:45 PM, and Saturday, June 23, at 10 PM
Few punk bands have come to define the hardcore punk and post-punk scene in DC more than the exploding supernova of a sound that was Bad Brains. The group was born when four jazz-trained musicians who were spending most of their time in bands doing Earth, Wind, and Fire and Parliament Funkadelic covers suddenly discovered the Sex Pistols and the Dead Boys, and figured they could do the same thing as those bands but faster and louder, and with intimidating precision and control.
Directors Ben Logan and Mandy Stein’s Bad Brains: A Band in DC manages to get access to a treasure trove of archival footage from those early days, and does well to use as much of it as possible. Henry Rollins, who saw the band as a teen long before becoming an icon with the likes of Black Flag and his own band, says of his first Bad Brains show, “That was kind of the start of my life.” Other testimonials, from the likes of Ian MacKaye, Dave Grohl, and the Beastie Boys (I’ll admit to getting a little misty seeing Adam Yauch on film so soon after his untimely death), match that intensity. And even if the archival footage can’t necessarily replicate the powerful experience of being at those shows, the frightening intensity of the band still shines through, despite the filter of years and video of iffy quality. Bad Brains play so fast it seems impossible that human musicians could stay together at that speed, and have a hell of a frontman in lead singer H.R., who sings like some sort of spastic, shamanistic, demented auctioneer.
The filmmakers juxtapose this early footage and a gradual chronological history of the band’s entire career with film about the band’s 2007 reunion tour, during which the ragged edge of disaster the band’s music seemed always to be riding started to apply to their interactions as well, and they weren’t as able to keep from falling over the side. The film opens with bassist Darryl Jenifer telling his singer that he never wants to see him again, after a show in Chicago that finds H.R., an enigmatic, hippie-ish figure in his more recent years, standing with a serene grin and essentially refusing to perform,
The question of what’s going on with H.R., who has been notoriously inconsistent during the band’s sporadic reunion shows, is the one area of the film that feels frustratingly incomplete. Speculation about the state of his mental health has long been a subject of conversation within the punk community, and it seems obvious from some of his actions in the film that something is simply not quite right with the man. But the filmmakers seem reluctant to delve into this subject in any detail, leaving his erratic behavior hanging out there as an unanswered, largely unaddressed question. That leaves A Band in DC as a vital document of the band’s rise; but when it comes to their later years, the film, like H.R. himself, is a little messy and frustratingly obscured.
—IAN BUCKWALTER
By Washingtonian Staff
Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present plays this Friday and Saturday. Photograph courtesy of Silverdocs.
Playing Thursday, June 21, at 7:15 PM and Saturday, June 23, at 3 PM
In Ai Weiwei, 27-year-old first-time filmmaker Alison Klayman has a subject most documentarians and journalists can only dream of. The Chinese artist and activist is eccentric, chatty, an iconoclast, has a tangled personal life (three years ago he had a son with a woman who isn’t his wife), and is utterly, inexplicably charming.
In 2011, Chinese authorities arrested him, raided his studio, and held him prisoner for 81 days, during which time museums worldwide organized protests and petitions to have him freed. Ai became a global symbol of the lack of freedom in modern China, and his personal fame skyrocketed.
Klayman first starts following the artist in 2009, while he’s investigating the casualties of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and infuriating authorities by helping compile a public list of the 5,000-plus students who died thanks to shoddy “tofu” construction in the city. Ai, it immediately becomes clear, is a world-class troublemaker as well as a visionary artist. “I consider myself more of a chess player,” he tells Klayman, who displays pictures he took of himself giving the finger to locations such as Tiananmen Square and the White House.
Ai is also that rarest of beasts: an artist who understands social media. He blogs daily, takes hundreds of photographs a day, and is greatly enamored of Twitter, which he pronounces, rather sweetly, as “Tweeter.” Seemingly insulated from the Chinese government by his fame, he nevertheless admits to Klayman that he’s afraid of repercussions. “I am so fearful. That’s not fearless. I act more brave because I know the danger is really there.”
The film follows Ai to London, where he attends the opening of his groundbreaking exhibition “Sunflower Seeds” at the Tate Modern. We hear about his life as a young artist in New York and his early work before he started outsourcing much of it (in one scene, Klayman films Chinese artists crafting “Zodiac Heads,” currently on display at the Hirshhorn).
Ai himself is a compelling enough subject to fill a movie several times over, and all Klayman really has to do is let him entertain us. But her narrative is taut, and when Ai is unexpectedly arrested, seemingly as a warning to other outspoken artists, she captures the campaigns and the demands from high-profile people such as Hillary Clinton for his freedom.
She’s also there when he returns home, strangely muted, telling reporters that regrettably he can’t comment, as he’s technically on bail. The sight of such a sadly chastened Ai is hard to watch. Thankfully it isn’t long until he’s blogging again. Inspirational, curious, and optimistic in various degrees, Never Sorry gives us an insightful, weighty look at one of the most fascinating figures in contemporary art.
—SOPHIE GILBERT
By Washingtonian Staff
A still from Virgin Tales, playing Tuesday and Wednesday. Image courtesy of Silverdocs.
Playing Thursday, June 21, at 5:30 PM and Saturday, June 23, at 1 PM
A Girl Like Her opens with a series of iconic ’50s- and ’60s-era scenes: We watch a hand pour a Campbell’s soup can full of water into sludgy soup concentrate, three smiling boys race towards a powder blue station wagon, and a pretty woman with a shellacked hairdo slide a foil-topped pan into an oven. Gradually, the jaunty orchestral soundtrack gives way to voiceover, but the archival footage just keeps on coming.
In fact, it never stops. Up until the last few minutes of Ann Fessler’s documentary, we never see the 100 women she interviewed for the film, all of whom gave up children to adoption between the years 1945 and 1973. The subjects tell their stories of being pregnant and unmarried in that era—the parents who worried more about neighbors’ opinions than their daughters’ wellbeing, the teachers who treated pregnant girls like cautionary tales, the revolving-door hospitals where young mothers would go to give birth then head home and jump back into their lives, as if returning from summer camp or a church retreat.
A scene from Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey. Image courtesy of Silverdocs.
Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey
Screens tonight, June 18, at 7 PM, and Sunday, June 24, at 12:15 PM
Picking the opening-night film for a documentary film festival is no easy task. With festivals that specialize in narrative film, it tends to be about whose name will look best on the marquee opening night. But documentary filmmaking has precious few celebrity directors, so that changes the rules a little. Add to that the fact that such a large percentage of documentaries focus on extremely depressing socio-political issues, and that reduces your options further; after all, these screenings are usually followed by opening-night parties, and no one’s really in the mood for hors d’oeuvres and small talk after watching a vivid two-hour dissection of brutal genocide in a Third World country. The mandate: Keep it light.
In that spirit, the opening night of the annual AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs festival this evening offers up a film that follows in the tradition of recent opening-night picks like The Swell Season and More Than a Game, sidestepping politics for music/sport and offering a film that’s light on insight but big on emotion. This year’s selection, director Ramona S. Diaz’s Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey, documents the rock band Journey as they assimilate a new lead singer, Arnel Pineda, into the mix for a new tour and new albums. The hook? Pineda was but a poor, struggling cover band singer in the Philippines when Journey discovered him via YouTube—and he’s now suddenly the frontman of one of the most iconic touring bands in the world.
By Washingtonian Staff
A still from Ann Richards’ Texas. Image courtesy of Silverdocs.
Playing Tuesday, June 19, at 8:45 PM, and Wednesday, June 20, at 2:15 PM
There are no talking heads in The Waiting Room, Peter Nicks’s artful tale of an ER waiting room in Oakland’s Highland Hospital. There are no voiceovers either, and no statistics flashing up onscreen; no animated segments or archival footage. Instead, Nicks lets the patients tell their own stories, and the result is a powerful but ultimately gloomy statement about American health care—with the inevitable conclusion being that it’s broken, perhaps beyond repair.
Most of the patients who arrive at Highland’s ER aren’t emergency cases. But without health insurance or a regular medical practitioner to consult, they’re forced to go to the ER when they get sick. Nicks reveals that for many, it’s a last resort after self-diagnosis, drugstore remedies, and even prayer (one family pleads to Jesus to take their brother’s pain away while he’s suffering from a gunshot wound). As a result, the waiting room is packed, and patients without severe illnesses can wait five to ten hours before they’re seen.
“I’m at the doctor’s,” say several patients, while they’re talking on cellphones. The doctors they do see are harried, overworked, and frequent targets of abuse. Their cases vary from people who need refills on their prescriptions to people beyond help. One 15-year-old is brought in unconscious, and the team is unable to revive him. Nicks’s camera focuses on the boy’s foot, limp and unmoving, while the doctor who tried to revive him is seen to be visibly shaken.
The movie’s lack of punctuation is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you’re obliged to draw your own conclusions. On the other, the action can occasionally feel tedious. And despite a lack of commentary, Nicks still finds ways to editorialize: In one scene his camera focuses first on a doctor’s salad, and then on a patient’s fried chicken, seeming to enjoy the contrast.
This is undoubtedly a tricky subject, and the endless bureaucratic obstacles patients face are carefully emphasized, meaning the film can feel inevitably frustrating. Nicks focuses on one man with back problems who jokes with an administrator about the cost of his treatment. The camera stays on his face, and just seconds later his smile fades, and the anxiety etched on his features is palpable. A doctor spells it out thusly: “We’re a public hospital; we’re a safety net in society. We’re an institution of last resort for so many people.” But Highland, The Waiting Room reveals, is also often as powerless as the people who turn to it for help.
—SOPHIE GILBERT
By Washingtonian Staff
A still from China Heavyweight. Image courtesy of Silverdocs.
We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
Playing Thursday, June 21, at 6 PM and Saturday, June 23, at 10:45 PM
To the news-consuming public, “Anonymous” is a dangerous group of Internet hotheads who unleash online attacks against any company or government that pisses them off. Back in 2010, the loose-knit group made headlines for disabling the websites of PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa in retaliation for the companies’ decision to stop processing donations to WikiLeaks. But in Brian Knappenberger’s fascinating new documentary, We are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, members of Anonymous aren’t cyber bullies; they’re heroes.
Through interviews with Anonymous members and observers, Knappenberger—who previously worked for Discovery, National Geographic, and PBS/Frontline—plots the group’s unlikely ascent from an obscure Internet chat room to the lead story on the evening news. Along the way, Knappenberger explores the divisions that form within the community: Some members of Anonymous are just in it for the laughs, while others see a higher-minded calling—like going to war with the Church of Scientology after it tried to prevent a video of Tom Cruise discussing Scientology from being widely disseminated on the Internet.
Knappenberger presents a much more flattering portrait of Anonymous than you’d find in the mainstream media. In the film, Anonymous members are garden-variety Internet jokesters who only learn to harness and detonate their power when governments and other institutions—like the Church of Scientology—take steps to limit the freedom of the Internet. In We Are Legion, Anonymous members aren’t the ones bullying; they’re sick and tired of being bullied themselves.
It’s a fascinating approach to the subject. And even viewers who rage when they can’t log into their credit card accounts may find themselves pulling for Knappenberger’s hackers as they unleash denial-of-service attacks and leak personal information onto the Internet. To be sure, Knappenberger does explore the dangers of a having a group of fearless computer hackers roaming around the Internet, but his heart is clearly with Anonymous.
Still, it’s just that perspective—which is largely absent from the popular media—that makes the film so compelling. Anonymous is far too decentralized and complex to be understood in a sound bite. And although some may take issue with Knappenberger’s often one-sided portrayal, We Are Legion does a great deal to further our understanding of Anonymous. The film is a must see for anyone interested in Internet technology or current events, or simply struggling to figure out what Anonymous is all about.
—LUKE MULLINS
