Nate Hood on Commander Arian - A Story of Women, War & Freedom (2018) Camden International Film Festival

Ever since the rise of Daesh as an internationally destabilizing threat in 2014, documentaries on the so-called Islamic Caliphate have been a constant on the festival circuit. Some like Bernard-Henri Lévy’s dreadful Peshmerga (2016) immerse the audience into the actual fighting, examining on-the-ground battlefield crises and the day-to-day struggles of the freedom fighters. Others like Matthew Heineman’s superb City of Ghosts (2017) examines the plight of the displaced and/or terrorized populations suffering under their rule from the perspective of the scant few who’ve escaped. Alba Sotorra’s Commander Arian: A Story of Women, War, and Freedom is both, mixing unnerving battlefield footage with introspective examinations of the psychological and physical toll suffered by the soldiers.

The film centers on the eponymous Arian Afrin, a commander in the Women’s Protection Unit (YPJ), a resistance army of Syrian-Kurdish women that arose in 2013. During an operation, Afrin’s unit was ambushed and she was shot five times by a combatant hiding in a hencoop. The bullets entered her spine, elbow, lung, and sacrum, necessitating a series of gruesome operations leaving her with a ghastly stomach scar not unlike one left by a cesarean. Several feet of intestines needed to be removed, and her bowels never fully healed, leaving her perpetually leaking urine and other fluids. The film opens with Afrin nearing the end of her convalescence as she reintegrates back into her unit as they begin their final push to retake the captured city of Kobane. Though she still hasn’t regained full use of her arms and retains a limp, she still joins her sisters-in-arms in deadly firefights. But the film is mostly interested in the still, quiet moments in between the fighting where Afrin sits, listens, tends her wounds, and eats her meals with her fellow women soldiers.

As the title explains, this is a story of women, so even more than the combat footage—which Sotorra clearly risked her life for—the film concerns itself with their fears, memories, and hopes. What is it like to not just be a woman soldier, but a WOMAN in a world gone topsy-turvy from sectarian violence? Pointedly, there’s no sense of triumph at the end of the film, even when they retake Kobane. Instead there’s merely a sense of relief that it’s over and a tired determination that there’s still much more to do.

Rating: 7/10

Camden Capsules: GOING SOUTH, FAUSTO, and VIRGINITY

Going South
Modern age of the version of the TV clip shows that some comedy and movie theaters show casing weird things found on TV, though this time out the clips are all from the internet. From rock shows, to weird weather, a transgender woman talking about her life, to burning trees and bizarre rants and behavior this film has it all. A visual and aural assault on the senses or seemingly random bits it is broken into six parts as if that means something. I couldn’t find any, as the steady stream of clips forced me to sit up and struggle to engage.
Does it mean anything? I don’t know. After a while I tuned out because it was simply too much random information coming in with too little time to process.

Fausto
People sit around and tell stories.
Kind of experimental film is interesting as long as I let the film wash over me but once I tried to piece things together I started to feel hopelessly lost.

Virginity
Several young girls try to use sex as a way of making money and getting ahead including selling their virginity and working in the sex industry. Grim and grimy documentary about the desperation of some women who will do anything to make their fortunes. A decided walk on the seedier side of life, it is a sad reminder that life is a terrible place for most people.

Nate Hood on First Stripes (2018) Camden International Film Festival (2018)

You can’t sneak Wagner’s Prelude from Das Rheingold into a film about soldiers and NOT be making some kind of statement. The piece—one made ubiquitous by countless movies and TV shows in need of stock classical music denoting triumph and majesty—was used by Wagner in the first scene of the first part of his Nibelungen cycle to represent the very creation of the cosmos itself. So when Jean-François Caissy uses it to accompany footage of new recruits in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) on patrol, the only interpretation possible is that we’re watching the birth of something powerful and great, something mighty and eternal. That’s not the kind of message that mixes well with what otherwise aspires to be a strictly cinéma-vérité exploration of the 12-week basic training of new recruits into professional soldiers.

Seemingly heavily influenced by American documentarian Frederik Wiseman, a filmmaker who’s turned his persistently objective gaze on his own country’s social institutions for the better part of sixty years, Caissy seeks to not only examine his young recruits but the CAF themselves and how they produce a sterile environment that psychologically strips the individuality away from its trainees for replacement with a collectivized, self-sacrificial mentality. (“It’s Canada before yourself,” one officer booms.)

But unlike Wiseman who liberally turned his camera on the administrators and bossmen of the institutions he probed, Caissy rarely shows the commanding officers, even during training exercises, choosing instead to focus on the steely-eyed, blank expressions of the soldiers as they receive orders, reprimands, and assignments. Sometimes this is used to great effect, such as a scene where the soldiers are taught the byzantine, labyrinthine differences between orders and directives from various agencies like the DAOD, the CFAO, and the CBI: they struggle to stay focused and awake as their unseen instructor drones on and on about protocol. In other sequences such as a recruit getting interrogated by his sergeant for accidentally leaving his cell phone on during an inspection, the creative decision seems arbitrary. Perhaps Caissy was uncomfortable with doing anything that might humanize the officers over the recruits—doing so could have easily made the film less an exploration of humans under difficult conditions then a recruitment tool advertising the CAF.

But the choice of music—not just the aforementioned Prelude but other classical flourishes—tip Caissy’s hand in way he probably didn’t intend.

Rating: 6/10

Angels Are Made of Light (2018) Camden International Film Festival 2018 Toronto 2018

Angels Are Made of Light follows the lives of several students and teachers in a Kabul. We watch as they go through their daily routine and ponder their lives and futures.

Good but kind bland film about life in a country at war. We watch the daily life of the various subjects while listening to their thoughts in voice over narration. It gives us insight into what is going on in their hearts but it never quite generates the necessary level of excitement, at least to support a two hour film.

The problem is the film is so very earnest in what it is doing and seeming so intent on being good it ends up being bland. In a weird way I got the sense that it wants to be a purely observational film and it stands back and outside a lot of what it is documenting. And yet there wasn’t enough insight into the various people so they added the voice overs. It’s beautiful to look at but it never is quite compelling.

While I like the film, watching it I get the feeling that the film has gotten slots at festivals such as Camden, Toronto and New York not because the film is truly great but because the festivals have respect for James Longley the film’s director. I say this because there are so many other better films out there that have not gotten a shot at the big stage but should have.

Recommended for those with interest in the subject but not for general audiences who are advised to look elsewhere.

Nate Hood goes into THE ANCIENT WOOD (2018) Camden International Film Festival 2018

Mindaugas Survilla’s The Ancient Woods might be the first time I’ve ever seen a movie and thought that a theater would be the wrong venue for it. It’s not because the images don’t demand the gigantic dimensions and clarity of a theatrical space—they do—but because a large, empty room cannot do justice to the film’s use of sound. Perhaps more than any other film I’ve seen so far this year, The Ancient Woods demands to be HEARD, not just seen, as its portrait of one of the last remaining old growth forests in Lithuania is as much aural spectacle as visual feast.

My suggestion? Laptop, darkened room, and headphones. Consider the first minute and a half where Survilla presents us with a Kubrickian black screen à la 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But instead of a wailing choir, we hear the rumblings of the forest: the swaying of trees, the snapping of twigs, the low rumble of unseen thumpings and thuddings. Soon the black fades into the night sky and little moths dance among the stars. Then comes the sound of gurgling water as schools of tiny fish slowly appear on screen shimmering among submerged tree roots. And in the distance, unseen, wolves and birds. The effect is hypnotic and key for acclimating oneself into Survilla’s method of sculpting time which is so highly reminiscent of Tarkovsky there are moments when you could imagine the cast of Stalker (1979) wandering into the frame. I shudder to think how a theater, even one with superb acoustics, might butcher the highly nuanced sound design.

Survilla presents a truly untamed wilderness in which one can see/hear echoes of an ecosystem still unmolested by humanity—there is only one human shown, a wizened farmer who appears in exactly two scenes, first to chop firewood, then to watch an incoming thunderstorm.

However, with the exceptions of the brilliant opening sequence and a chilling scene where he repeats footage of a family of cranes devouring an army of frogs, first in normal speed and then in slow-motion, he does precious little with what he finds other than present it to us in a deadening succession. The effect can sometimes come off like a nature documentary sans David Attenborough’s narration. Survilla clearly wants to evoke the otherworldly mood and timelessness of an antediluvian nature, but it comes off too frequently as frustratingly repetitive.

Rating: 6/10

Camden Capsules YOURS IN SISTERHOOD, EASY LESSONS, EXIT MUSIC and YOUNG SOLITUDE

YOURS IN SISTERHOOD
Women today read letters from Ms Magazine from the 1970's
Very good time capsule revealing how far we've come and how far we have to go. This is going to pla best for people who know what Ms was and stood for. I love bits of this such as the woman who reads the letter sent in from her 16 year old self. While I like the film a great deal I think it's a bit long at 100 minutes or so thanks to pretty much every reader being bookended by silence. uibble aside definitely worth a look.

EASY LESSONS
Kafia, a young woman from Somalia  tries to find the balance between life in her new home in Hungary and he Somali Background. If you've ever wondered what its like to leave everything you know for a better life somewhere else this film will give you an idea. While Kafia would seem to have an easier time than most, her struggle to balance this new world and it's new opportunities make this a compelling film. Also helping is the fact Kafia is a charming young lady you can't help but like.  Worth a look.

EXIT MUSIC
Ethan Rice is a young man with cystic fibrosis. A filmmaker and musician we watch as he navigates his final days. A film of mixed emotions will leave you both sad at what it shows and happy at having met Ethan, a wickedly funny young man with a one of a kind outlook on dying- its not death tat scares him its the road there. I really like the film but it made me sad, and as such I will not write alot on the film because I don't want to be in that headspace.

YOUNG SOLITUDE
Various 17 year olds talk to each other about their lives.
I have no idea what I think of this film. While billed as a documentary the film feels more like a work of fiction, perhaps docufiction as things see to be set up and not natural occurrences. The sense of unreality crashes into the reality for an uneasy partnership.

Nate Hood and COMMUNION LOS ANGELES (2018) Camden International Film Festival

On its surface, Adam R. Levine and Peter Bo Rappmund’s Communion Los Angeles seems like the kind of dry experiment in cinematic form only consumed and appreciated by ivory-tower critics and semiotic theoreticians who discuss the films of Isidore Isou, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow in hushed, reverential tones. At only 68 minutes, it charts the length of Interstate 110, the oldest freeway in California, as it snakes its way south from San Pedro through Los Angeles towards Pasadena. It has no plot, no story, and though there are one or two passersby interviewed, no characters. It’s simply a cinematic record of a freeway and its presence in the communities and environments it passes through.

This is cinema as imagined by Guy Debord and his band of Continental psychogeographists: an examination of the symbiotic relationship between people and places. If this sounds dull, it’s only because you haven’t witnessed Levine and Rappmund’s mesmeric kino-eye: shot entirely in still shots and rapid stop-motion photography, the film transforms even busy highways into semi-static landscapes. Combined with the random unseen chattering of those found along its route—street poets and street perverts, homeless dandies and radio hosts—the effect is at once hypnotic and terrifying, ecstatic and spellbinding. Before long the film lulls you into a stupor as the freeway slithers past palm trees poking up behind empty reservoirs canals and rusty old pumpjacks in the middle of parking lots; quaint one-story homes in the shadow of factory smokestacks and rundown two-story houses decaying in the California heat; dead birds smashed on the pavement, dusty horses wandering construction sites. Soon the rhythm of the cities reveal themselves to us in subtle ways—at night when the shops and banks lie shuttered like corpses and the tail-lights of midnight traffic blaze like neon lettering, the solitude of empty bus-stops and the noise of crowded taco trucks feel like enigmas into unseen, unspeakable patterns.

In many ways the film feels reminiscent of Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko’s Kuro (2017), another work that juxtaposed invisible narration with urban landscapes to create something meditative and ephemeral. Communion Los Angeles is by design not a documentary for everyone—many people might scoff at the idea of it being a documentary at all. But to those with the right eyes to see and the right minds to understand, it’s a revelation.

Rating: 8/10

Nate Hood on Young Men and Fire (2018) Camden International Film Festival (2018)

Alex Jablonski, Khalil Hudson | USA| 77 mins

Among the woodland firefighters of Grant’s Pass, Oregon, there are single fathers, ex-prisoners, and former addicts. Some feel called by God, some by the money, and some by the work. “I wanna feel things,” one of the new twentysomething recruits explains, “I wanna get scrapes and cuts and I wanna sweat. I wanna feel my legs burn when I get to the top of a hill. I wanna feel it. Those are the things that make me feel alive.” But whatever their motivations, these men come together for the sole purpose of defending lives and wildlife from the wildfires that threaten the west coast of North America every dry season.

Supposedly named after the Norman Maclean book about the deadly Mann Gulch fire of 1949, Alex Jablonski and Khalil Hudson’s Young Men and Fire follows the recruiting, training, and first missions of a new generation of hotshots. If Joseph Kosinski’s magnificent retelling of the doomed Granite Mountain Hotshots’ last mission in Only the Brave (2017) was the fact made fantasy, then Young Men and Fire is the fantasy made fact as it strips away all the inherent romanticism of man vs. nature with a ceaseless succession of backbreaking labor and stultifying monotony.

Right off the bat the recruits are told that it’s not unusual to work 100-hour weeks; twelve hour days are the norm and fourteen, sixteen, and even twenty-four hour shifts aren’t uncommon while in the thick of things. One of the trainers mentions casually that during one particularly nasty deployment she lost twelve pounds in the three days. So we watch them train and work and train and work until they can barely stand or speak. And only then are they sent off to fight actual fires.

It quickly becomes apparent that the biggest danger they face isn’t the fire, but boredom, both in a metaphorical and literal sense: if you slack off and don’t pay attention to your surroundings, you’ll probably end up dead. But the tedium hardly bothers the men—this is the work they were born to do, and they love it.

In an unusual stylistic twist, Jablonski and Hudson frame the film with quotes from an audiobook of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, his novel about growing up in the midwest. The comparisons are unmistakable: firefighting is a crucible that turns boys into men and broken lives into new and whole ones.

Rating: 7/10

DAWNLAND (2018) Camden International Film Festival 2018

A look at the Maine Commission for Truth and Reconciliation which sought to look into the State's treatment of indigenous children who were often taken from their parents and put into foster care of put up for adoption under the assumption that the kids would be better off not growing up on the reservation.

This is a bracing and eye opening film that is going to open your eyes to a whole world of pain inflicted on the North American people by "well intentioned" (outright racist) stupid white people who broke up families and cultures for no really good reason. I did not realize this was happening even today and I left the film feeling more than a little pissed off.

While the subject matter is important and vital, more so in that I know that the vast majority of Americans don't realize that the separations happened and are still happening, the presentation is a little too matter of fact for such a vital subject. While the film enlightens and enrages I wish it was a tad more in your face so more people would be moved to get off the couch and try to right a very big wrong.

 Recommended when the film plays the Camden International Film Festival

Nate Hood goes to the Science Fair (2018)

If on the night of the 91st Academy Awards ceremony, directors Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster walk onstage the Dolby Theatre and accept the Oscar for Best Documentary, it will hardly be a surprise. Their new film Science Fair is exactly the kind of crowd-pleasing, heart-warming story Academy voters are instinctively drawn to during years when the ballot isn’t stacked with true crime exposés.

Following the fortunes of a number of plucky young people competing in the 2017 International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF)—referred to as “the Olympics of science fairs”—it’s an inspirational story designed for soaring musical swells and tear-jerking postscripts.

Understand, none of this is to the film’s detriment: it’s very, very good at getting the audience heavily invested in the stories of these various kids. There’s the headstrong genius-level fourteen-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky with a new sensor for detecting arsenic levels in drinking water who inexplicably keeps losing during national competitions; there’s the duo from a desperately poor city in Brazil who’ve developed new techniques for detecting the Zika virus that’s ravaged their community; there’s the programmer wunderkind from nowhere West Virginia who taught his school calculator to generate Shakespearean insults and his computer Kanye West lyrics through a home-grown neural network; there’s the team of immigrant Chinese students in New York state marshaled by their loving yet imperious science teacher, herself the child of Caribbean immigrants; and there’s the shy hijabi from South Dakota who wants to develop technology to figure out why so many of her classmates descend into alcoholism and drug abuse. The methods with which they and their stories are presented are intimately familiar to anyone whose ever watched an episode of American Idol, Top Chef, or, heaven help you, American Ninja Warrior: interviews in their native trailer parks or favelas; their preparations for the Big Day; their eventual success or failure. It's tried and true and predictable.

The film's true virtue, then, is its tireless sense of optimism, both in science as a means for fostering international cooperation and for inculcating self-confidence and self-agency among young people from disenfranchised backgrounds. Watching the film, it's obvious which subject will win Best in Show (hint: it's the one seemingly added as an afterthought), but for a moment we truly believe that all these young people are winners in their own way, for themselves, their countries, and our species' future. And the winner's envelope please...


Rating: 7/10

Science Fair opens in select theaters today. It also plays at the Camden International FIlm Festival this weekend.

Camden Capsules: SURVIVORS, MY FATHER IS MY SISTER'S BROTHER, PIPELINE, PUTIN'S WITNESSES and WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS

SURVIVORS
This is a portrait of the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone as told by the survivors and the filmmakers who filmed it. Focusing on what happened and the work that was done by those who walked into the fray the film reveals what happened in ways that most of us have never seen before. While we no doubt seen the news stories and perhaps even some of the films turned out on the crisis, I don’t think any of us really could have understood what it was like to be there. Featuring footage shot as things went down as well as interviews who were there and who survived the film paints a portrait that only someone from in the thick of the crisis could do.
Very recommended

MY FATHER IS MY SISTER'S BROTHER
Portrait of a musician who takes custody of his young niece after his sister’s health declines. An observational look at a man and his defacto daughter is deeply moving. Dropping us into things in the middle the film just goes as we watch as the pair go through their paces and while dad tries to maintain his career as a singer. This is a super little film that is about life as lived and not as we want it to be. That’s the result of the film being very much there and in the moment. Cheers to director Vadym Ilkov for allowing the sequences to play out in real time because it adds a sense of reality that many docs don’t have.

PIPELINE
Portrait of the people and villages around the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline is a gorgeous look at various people most of us know nothing at. A mix of travelogue and informational doc the film demands to be seen on the big screen thanks to beautifully framed images that put us into the landscape.

PUTIN'S WITNESSES
Record of the transition of power from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. Its an unvarnished look since director Viyali Mansky was there and filmed it all as it happened. We get snide comments from the directors family and we see everyone without their perfect media faces. And it is a lear view about how tyrants gets into power It is an intriguing look behind the carefully controlled Russian media machine

WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS
Thought provoking look at race in America through the all white city of Ferguson  and the all black Kinloch which were physically separated by a roadblock in the 1960's. You will forgive me if I don't say a lot about this film other than go see it because  as I write this piece the Camden deadline looms and I find I'm still pondering the film and trying to come up with what exactly I want to say. That is high praise because director Jane Gillooly has made a film that forces you to ponder and feel it and not simply react. One of the best of the festival and maybe 2018's as well.

Nate Hood on Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)

Time works different in small Southern towns. When there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go, the mind sinks into a stupor and fixates on tiny, insignificant details, blowing them up to the size of the world around them.

I remember growing up in Bartow, Florida, a tiny town of 15,000 people in the dead center of the state. Every Sunday after church my family would go to a barbecue shop for lunch. On the way we’d drive past a billboard advertising something or other with a photo of the desert, and each time we went by the desert would become my world, wrapping around all sides of the car until I could smell the sand and feel the heat.

Hale County, Alabama also has about 15,000 people and is similarly located near the middle of its state. If RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening is anything to go by, there are no desert billboards, but the area is drenched in the same drowsy slowness that makes the mind wander and summon mirages. The miracle, then, of the film is how successfully Ross captures this sense of spatial-temporal otherness that leeches into the life of small Southern towns.

Filmed over five years, it ostensibly follows the lives of two black youths—Quincy and Daniel, the former a worker at the local catfish plant, the latter a wannabe basketball star. And though they drift in and out of the film, Ross’ focus is on the act of the community seeing itself. Rarely does Ross fix his camera where we would expect, such as the backs of cheerleaders during a basketball game, sunlight stabbing through the smoke of a trash burn near an old plantation house, a nervous little girl in the shadow of her mother. Interviews with his subjects are sparse and seem like afterthoughts; one wonders if Ross ever felt the urge to eliminate his subjects entirely and create a pure cinematic tone poem. But the lure of making a statement on black American life must have been too strong, as the advertisements for the film boast its making a statement on rural blackness.

Fair enough. But the film does more. It’s introduces us to a different way of seeing and experiencing the world, one pregnant with poetry and hope born in the shadows of schools, churches, hospitals, and graveyards. It’s Faulknerian prose made manifest through images.

Rating: 9/10

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING hits theaters tomorrow including BAM's Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn and the IFC Center in Manhattan. It also is playing the Camden International FIlm Festival this weekend.

Of Fathers And Sons (2018) Camden International Film Festival 2018

Deeply troubling and disturbing look at the father son dynamic in a group of jihadists in Syria.

Director Talal Derki fled his home country when the war in Syria stated and the jihadists moved on his home town. While living in Berlin he decided he needed to go back and see what had become of the place he had grown up. Pretending he was a true believer wanting to spread the word he went back home to film daily life. What he returned with was a portrait of a people who believe in their cause and are raising their children to carry on their fight- while at the same time revealing that they are still very much like us.

I was left reeling by OF FATHERS AND SONS. While most definitely about a bunch of people who would have no qualm about killing everyone I know for their belief, the film also shows us a tenderness between family and between friends that is missing from the vast majority of films about the jihadists. It’s the little moments, jumping in a pool, playing games and the showing of affection that runs counter to the talk of death and destruction in the name of Allah. It’s as if it is a grand other dimension of a world that is like our own but not.

What also makes it kind of trippy is that for the most part everyone is aware the cameras are filming. Everyone is playing to the cameras and putting on a good show. It makes for odd viewing, not like the recruiting videos we’ve seen , but “let’s put on a brave face” even as a limb is lost and things go on.

As the film went on I just stared at the screen, not reacting outwardly but coping with a torrent of emotion inside. What was I supposed to feel? I don’t know- but I do know that three weeks on since I saw the film the film still haunts me making me ponder things I don’t want to think about.

Disturbing nature or no, I highly recommend OF FATHERS AND SONS when it plays at te Camden International Film Festival this weekend.

Young Men and Fire (2018) Camden International Film Festival 2018

In an age of unending forest fires Young Men And Fire is a timely and vital film. It is a sterling little film about a group of men training to fight forest fighters. Coming from a diverse sampling of people they all come together to become a team.

Having been raised as a fire brat who lived and died fire department stuff because my dad was a volunteer fire fighter, this film was a return to the eight year old version of myself. Had I known that I could have trained to fight fires like this I would have been all over it.

Following guys from orientation through to their deployment in the field we really get a sense of what it takes to do the job. We are with the guys every step of the way and it pays off with a connection that we don’t often get in many films. We like these guys and by the end they kind of become family, if not to have home for Thanksgiving then to hang out with and have a beer.

I really like the film a great deal, so much so that I am kind of hoping it shows up at some more festivals or on TV so I can have an excuse to see it again without any sort of guilt.

CIFF 2018 Goes Observational: FIRST STRIPES; HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING,THIS EVENING and THE ANCIENT WOODS

I have had a blast watching the films at the Camden International Film Festival. The films have delighted me in ways I hadn’t thought possible. In the course of going through the the festival slate I ended up programming a mini-side bar for myself of three sterling observational documentaries. If you can see any of them you will find yourself completely enraptured at not only the films but the sheer expanse of the form.

FIRST STRIPES
From the first long take image of a group of new graduates from the Canadian Military Academy to the final shot which is a variation on the first FIRST STRIPES delights.

A look at a class of cadets as they arrive to when they graduate this film is a you are there delight of the sort that would please Frederick Wiseman. Shot in perfectly framed widescreen images this film sucks you in and carries you along with the cadets, making you a de facto member of the group. Events play out in extended takes giving us a wonderful sense of what the life is like.

 I was absolutely enraptured.

 Recommended, even more so if you love the work of Frederick Wiseman

HALE COUNTY THIS MONING, THIS EVENING
RaMell Ross’s masterpiece look at life in Hale County via images take at various times of Ross’s days. People talk, drive cars, bowl, play basketball, sit and whatever else they do.

Beautifully shot and deceptively simple this is a film that crawls into your soul and sets up a home. It is such a magnificent portrait of life as it is lived that it is the film that I would hand it to aliens if they ever landed and wanted to know what is life like.

Wow. Just wow.

Just see this film.

Hands down one of the best films at the Camden International Film Festival its destined to appear on my Best of 2018 lists as well.

Documentary filmmaking doesn’t get much better than this. 

Highly recommended.

Not only is HALE COUNTY playing at Camden this weekend it is also beginning a regular theatrical run in theaters including BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn and the IFC center in Manhattan. More theaters will follow.

THE ANCIENT WOODS
The sights and sounds of a forest.

Slow meditative, gorgeous and spectacular. This is like taking a slow walk in the woods without any electronics. All we hear is the sound of the forest, the wind, the rain, the occasional person working to survive.

If yhou want to go on a trip and totally relax and reset this film is for you.

If you can see this on a big screen with great sound. You’ll take a vacation in 90 minutes.

If you end up seeing this streaming or on home video watch it in the dark, with no distraction s and headphones. The sound is that of nature and you don’t want the sound of modern life to intrude.

Magical and highly recommended.

Nate Hood on The Gospel of Eureka (2018) Camden International Film Festival 2018

Its arms are too short and its face is eerily dead-eyed and cold. But Christ of the Ozarks—the largest Jesus statue in North America—looms above the tiny town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Erected in 1966 by Gerald L. K. Smith, nationalistic right-wing clergyman and white supremacist, the statue was intended as the centerpiece of a religious theme park.

But only the statue and a massive 4,100-seat amphitheater hosting The Great Passion Play, a five-times-a-week reenactment of the death and resurrection of Jesus performed with live animals, special effects, and costumed extras, remain of Smith’s vision. (Since its first performance in 1968, organizers have removed Smith’s anti-Semitic speeches from its original script.) It’s a monument, figuratively and literally, to that specific brand of biblically literal American Protestantism that sees little difference between patriotism and religious piety.

Yet elsewhere in the town lays Eureka Live, the self-styled “hillbilly Studio 54” where drag queens put on bawdy nightly shows. Incredibly, this too is a center of worship in Eureka Springs, as the bar is owned and operated by Gregory Lee Keating and Walter Burrell, a married gay couple who both identify as devout Christians. “Just because you’re Christian doesn’t have anything to do with who you’re fucking. It has to do with who you’re loving,” they explain as drag queens lip-synch Laura Bell Lundy’s “You Can’t Pray the Gay Away.”

All three of these things—the statue, the Passion Play, and the drag shows—are acts of sincere, if unusual, Christian devotion.

The brilliance of Donal Mother and Michael Palmieri’s The Gospel of Eureka is its argument that all three are perhaps equally valid demonstrations of faith united by a shared sense of defiant camp. None of the people who maintain the statue, run the show, or operate the bar are ashamed of their lifestyles or abnormal devotions: they see them as natural expressions of their sincerely held beliefs. It’s this brilliant juxtaposition that makes the film one of the more fascinating examinations of American religion and the meaning of faith in recent cinema. The second act where the Passion Play is cross-cut with drag queens putting on their boobs and faces for a show is worthy of Errol Morris, and its sympathetic warmth towards its motley assortment of weirdos is more Christ-like than any number of Pure Flix monstrosities.

Rating: 8/10

Maiden (2018) Camden International Film Festival

MAIDEN is one of my favorite films of 2018.

This is the story of Tracy Edwards and the crew of women she put together to compete in the Whitbread Around The World Race. While women had been part of crews, Edwards herself had been one, they were always reduced to being cooks and not sailors. Edwards wanted an al women crew so there was no doubt that they could do it without men.

An amazing story that begins when Edwards happens to meet King Hussein of Jordan on a boat where she was working. When he asked what she would rather be doing she told him about the race. He then convinced her that it was something that she had to do. It was a struggle but Edwards fielded a crew and made the race…and it’s one hell of a tale.

The is the story of a grand adventure told in grand style. As much as I and my fellow critics may bitch about how a documentary is put together, more often than nor not we’ll complain if the film doesn’t do something new or exciting with a story, sometimes if you have a great story and great people telling it then you can just let the story tell itself. In the case of Maiden, director Ale Holmes has a group of characters who are master storytellers and he simply lets them talk. They spin one hell of a tale just by telling what happened. What takes the film to the stratosphere is the fact that the stories are supplemented with footage of the events. It’s amazing and it makes this a must see on the big screen because the shots of the ocean will make you wonder what sort of crazy person would do that.

I don’ know what else to say. I was held on th edge of my seat from start to finish. And when the finish came I was just as misty as the people on screen telling the story simply because I felt like I went too and shared  the trip.

Highly highly recommended. One of my most favorite films of 2018. A must see.

Commander Arian - A Story of Women, War & Freedom (2018) Camden International Film Festival 2018

Haunting film about Aryan, a young woman who was wounded while fighting with her all female military unit to retake a village in Syria.

Aryan knew that she had to do something so she left home and joined and group of women fighting in Syria. As the film opens we see her recovering from the wounds she received during the fighting. Her wounds were so bad that the doctors thought she would die, but she told them she wasn't going to die because she "had things to do".

Following Aryan before and after her injuries, we come to know and love her and her resolve to do something important. She knew from an early age that the typical life of marriage and family wasn't for her and we watch as she leads her troops and makes a difference in the fight for Syria.

Showing us  a side of the war we have not seen before, director Alba Sotorra puts us into the life of her subject in a way that few documentaries ever manage. Not only are we in the physical space but also the mental as Sotorra makes sure we are always focused on Aryan's face so we are always aware of the thoughts and emotions flashing behind her eyes

This is a truly great film on so many levels that it is heartily recommended when it plays this weekend at the Camden International Film Festival

(Note the title of the film spells the name as Arian, the subtitles as Aryan)

Science Fair opens Friday

Most high school students participating in this competition do not have the opportunity to earn a varsity letter, even though their work could save lives and alter the future. That isn’t an exaggeration. The projects brought to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) are amazing. Not to belabor the obvious, but imagine what these kids could accomplish (for our benefit) if science fair competitions enjoyed roughly comparable support and prestige to what most schools bestow on football and basketball. Regardless, the young scientists and engineers keep plugging away in Cristina Costantini & Darren Foster’s kid-friendly documentary, Science Fair, which opens in theaters Friday.

As is the case for typical high school athletic tournaments, students qualify for ISEF by winning various state and regional science fairs. To do so, they produce real research and original inventions. For instance, Anjali Chadha invented a compact detector for Mercury contamination in bodies of water. Costantini & Foster also closely follow Myllena Braz de Silva and Gabriel de Moura Martins from a hardscrabble rural district in Brazil, who have developed a low cost, scalable method for diagnosing Zika. We’re not public health officials here, but these sound like useful projects to us.

Like football or College Bowl, science fair competitors need coaches. Frustratingly, none of the science faculty at Kashfia Rahman’s gridiron-centric South Dakota high school were particularly keen to coach her, but the football coach was happy to support her (good for him, but frankly, most viewers will want to see those so-called science teachers get called out on camera). On the other end of the spectrum, Long Island’s Dr. Serena McCalla is a hands-on coach and dogged motivator, who has an impressive nine students qualify for ISEF.

The students Costantini & Foster follow run the gamut from popular Zenned-out surfer dude to the driven first-generation sons and daughters of immigrants, but they are all wickedly smart and have genuine screen presence. These are good kids, whom the audience will fully and deeply invest in, on an emotional level. With the help of editors Tom Maroney and Alejandro Valdes-Rochin, Costantini & Foster balance their large cast of character with remarkable dexterity. We get a very good sense of who they are as people and decent thumbnail understanding of what their projects are all about. They also keep the pacing peppy, while building towards the suspense of the ultimate best-in-show announcement.

Forgive the cliched term, but Science Fair is indeed a “feel-good movie.” Cheers to Sundance for programming it in its kids section, because has the potential to get youngsters fired up about science. If it could even get science teachers at Rahman’s public high school interested in science, then it would really be getting somewhere. Enthusiastically recommended

The awesome Camden Film Festival opens Thursday

Thursday is the start of the Camden International Film Festival in Camden Maine and we are better for it.

The festival is a glorious celebration of documentaries from across the globe. It’s a perfectly programmed festival that rivals some of the bigger festivals but in a smaller more manageable dose. I’ve seen close to thirty of the features screening and while there are some I like more than others, there are really no bad ones. (There are only ones that look weaker compared to some of the best films of the year.)

Yes, the festival is screening some of the best films I’ve seen this year. There is a full list of recommended titles below, but films like MAIDEN, HALE COUNTY… and SCIENCE FAIR are titles people will be talking about for the Oscars and years to come. There are so many great titles that keeping our must see list was nigh impossible.

The festival is a fantastic collection of documentaries and if you like or love the form the fest is the perfect way to see a lot of films in a short amount of time. It is as if the programmers found out what was going to play at all of the big name fests and then hand chose the best ones.

And you have to go. I was speaking with one of the PR people about how great the festival was and they said I should try to come up because of all of the guests who were going to be there. I serious considered it until I realized I couldn’t manage the time off on such short notice. (Next year I’ll give it a shot).

While I can’t go, there is no reason you shouldn’t.

To help you pick what you see when you go here are some films you should see- First up are the films we saw at other festivals earlier this year. They are all good and recommended. Click on the links to go to our original review

THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED chronicles the surveillance of her Muslim community by the government simply because they were Muslim

THE PROPOSAL- one of the best films at Tribeca was a wonderful unexpected delight about director Jill Magid's quest to do a project about architect Luis Barragán and how the woman controlling the estate thwarted her (and everyone else) at every turn. A one of a kind masterpiece about creativity and turning adversity into art.

SCIENCE FAIR – Joe Bendel saw and loved this look at a science fair at Sundance and loved it. It’s a film about which there is some Oscar buzz.

THE ISLAND OF HUNGRY GHOSTS- brilliant (but not for everyone) look at how human migration is criminally restricted while we go to great lengths to aid animals in their marches. Deeply haunting and visceral. And director Gabrielle Brody is going to be at the festival and having met and spoken with her at Tribeca I highly suggest you go. She is a delight and even should you not like her film you will gain vast respect for her and her film after talking to her.

BLOWIN UP- a look at a specialized court handling cases of women charged with prostitution.

And here is our list of films we saw as part of the coverage of the festival  and strongly suggest you get tickets to (reviews for all are coming starting tomorrow):

COMMANDER ARIAN-A STORY OF WOMEN, WAR & FREEDOM- great portrait of the leader of an all woman fighting unit in Syria who is wounded and yet refuses to give up the fight. This is the story of a great soldier, a great human and the very definition of Girl Power. One of Camden's and 2018's best.

EASY LESSONS- Portrait of a young woman who fled from Somalia and now is trying to make make a life in Hungary. It movingly reveals how difficult it is to balance one's old and new lives while a refugee.

THE GOSPEL OF EUREKA- the varieties of religious experiences in Eureka Springs, Arkansas marvelously revealed in a loving portrait.

FIRST STRIPES- Frederick Wiseman would be jealous of this portrait of life in the Canadian Military Academy. It is a must see on a big screen.

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING- snippets of life is as good as documentary filmmaking gets. If one wanted to know what life was like I would show them this film. This haunting film is becoming one of my favorites of 2018

MAIDEN- Another one of my favorite films of 2018 is about Tracy Edwards who put together a crew of all women to sail in the Whitbread Around the World race to prove women could be more than cooks. Glorious for so many reasons, not the least of which is it is a hell of a tale

OF FATHER'S AND SONS - haunting tale of the relationships of fathers and sons in jihadist controlled Syria

SURVIVORS- a look at the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone shot by filmmakers in the country. Its "you are there" quality trumps any other similar docs.

THE ANCIENT WOODS- 90 minutes in the quiet of the forest.

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY- as democracy seem to erode thanks to people in Washington who want to use the desire of a few to trump the good of the many, this thought provoking look at what democracy really is is a timely must see.

WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS- a look at race in America through two cites, one black and one white, separated in the 1960's by a roadblock that will hang with you for days after.

YOUNG MEN AND FIRE- as the Western United States burns, this is a look at the men and women who put their lives on the line to stop the fires.

Those are our picks- now it's time for you to go buy tickets and see some great films. For tickets and more information on the festival go here