Cambodia, India, and the Cloud: SFIFF Documentary Sunday

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

I saw three films at the San Francisco International Film Festival on Sunday–all documentaries. That wasn’t planned. It just worked out that way.

B+ A River Changes Course
Kalyanee Mam’s ethnographic documentary follows three struggling families in imagemodern-day Cambodia. And while no river literally changes course, the modern world forces the film’s protagonists to severely alter their lifestyles. Corporations are chopping down the forests, fishermen are getting smaller catches, and young people leave for the city in a futile hope of raising their families out of poverty. Visually striking and deeply sad.

Unfortunately, I had to leave before Mam’s post-screening Q&A.

A River Changes Course will not play the festival again. However, it is on the list of files that "have secured U.S. distribution or are in negotiations with a U.S distributor," so you may get a chance to see it.

B Salma
This is in no way a well-made documentary. It’s poorly shot, and often leaves you imageconfused about many details. But the basic story is so strong you can forgive it almost anything. Salma, a Muslim woman born in a small Indian village, was effectively under house arrest for 25 years–first by her parents and then by the husband she was forced to marry. Her crime? Being female and passed puberty. But while imprisoned, she became a famous poet, and then a successful politician, fighting (not surprisingly) for women’s rights. It was only after she was elected that her husband let her out of the house. I would love to see this story better told.

Salma won’t screen again this festival. I’m not sure if you’ll ever have a chance to see this film.

A Google and the World Brain
In this wonderfully entertaining documentary, Ben Lewis takes us through Google’s attempt to scan every book in every library, and the copyright lawsuits that at least for imagenow have derailed it. Along the way it covers privacy issues, other digital archives, and the magic of an old-fashioned, paper-based library. Among the people interviewed are Wired’s Kevin Kelly (who gave the Festival’s 2008 State of the Cinema Address), an executive from Google Spain (the American headquarters refused to cooperate), an angry Japanese author, and a French librarian who seems to personify every annoying stereotype of the snooty Gallic intellectual.

The film manages a light, snappy feel despite the serious undertones. Computer-generated cityscapes, a server farm built into what appears to be a medieval cathedral, and animated interview subjects keep it visually lively.

Lewis is clearly worried about Google’s growing power and willingness to violate your privacy. But Google and the World Brain is no simple piece of propaganda. Both sides in this issue are treated fairly.

Lewis was unable to attend the screening (he lives in England and he has a new baby), but he was interviewed afterwards via Skype. Some highlights:

"Three or four years ago, I became interested in a study of the Internet, around issues of monopoly, free market, and privacy. I was looking for a story."

He considered a story about music piracy, but "Nobody sympathizes with musicians. We assume they don’t make any money."

"Just as we’re entering this knowledge economy, the people who are making this knowledge are told that we’ll give it away for free."

"Google makes money from what we produce."

On Google’s response to the film: "They didn’t want to take part in it. After it came out, they said they were deeply disappointed by the tone of the film."

I saw the last festival screening of Google and the World Brain. It’s not on the likely-to-be-released list, which surprised me. With it’s lively and funny presentation, immediate subject matter, and reasonably happy editing, this is about as commercial as a documentary gets.

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SFIFF Saturday: Koreans in Japan, Geek Nostalgia, and a Surreal Documentary

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

Here’s what I saw Saturday at the San Francisco International Film Festival

B Our Homeland
For second-generation ethnic Koreans living in Japan, going "home" was once very important–even though "home" was the living nightmare of North Korea. In this calmly imageheart-breaking drama, a man in his early 40s who migrated to a Korea he’d never known 25 years earlier, returns to Japan and his family for a three-month medical leave. He’s withdrawn and frightened, perhaps because of the tumor eating his brain, but more likely because he’s spent most of his life in a place where there are choices and doubt are not allowed. He must adjust to his family–including his true-believer Communist father–and they must adjust to him.

Autobiographical, Our Homeland is told through the eyes of his much younger sister, Rie–a stand-in for writer/director Yang Yonghi.

But many of the film’s cultural and political aspects are opaque to those not already in the know. I wasn’t even sure what year–or decade–the film was set.

You’ve got one more chance to see Our Homeland at the festival: Monday, 1:00, at the New People Cinema. There are no plans for a regular American release.

B- Computer Chess
This reasonably funny mockumentary follows a computer chess tournament in 1980. imageAssorted geeks and nerds (including one "lady") show up at a hotel to test their hardware and software’s chess skills. The winning algorithm will then face an actual human chess master. To add color, a bizarre new-age group has its own gathering at the same hotel. The whole thing is shot in standard-def black-and-white; it looks awful but that’s the point. The jokes range from the clever to the obvious, and I have to admit that most of the audience laughed more than I did.

I saw Computer Chess’  last festival screening. However, it’s on the list of films that "have secured U.S. distribution or are in negotiations with a U.S distributor," so you may have your own chance to decide how funny it is.

A The Search for Emak Bakia
In 1920, surrealist artist Man Ray made a short film called  Emak Bakia. In the Basque language, that means something like "Go away!" or "Leave me along!" Far more recently, Oskar Alegria set out to discover the short’s history, inspirations, imageand locations. (As I write this, I have yet to see Man Ray’s original; I intend to fix that soon). The result, The Search for Emak Bakia, is an appropriately surreal documentary. In addition to conventional detective work–such as looking for a house with the right columns in the front–he follows a plastic glove blowing in the wind and turns his research to clowns on what could only be described as a irrelevant (but interesting) whim. Amongst the more conventional detective work, he finds an old woman who lived in the house as a young girl. The result is much more than informative; it’s magical.

After the film, Alegria stepped in front of the screen for Q&A. Some highlights:

"I loved the mystery [of the original film's creation]. If you see Man Ray films, you can’t see where they were made. I love mysteries, and mysteries have to be good if you want to make a long film."

"This is my first film and my last. I’m a journalist."

"When I was following the plastic glove, that’s not being a journalist. I had to put aside the journalist and be guided by chance."

About the woman: "We were trying to find the same house at the same time, using the same method, without knowing each other. And now we have become friends. She’s now 95 years old."

On its commercial prospects: "This is not a commercial film…I don’t want to make money with it."

"My mother taught me to have faith in magic."

You’ve got two more chances to see The Search for Emak Bakia this week. It plays the Kabuki Monday at 8:45, and the New People Cinema Thursday at 3:30. Since you’ll probably never get another chance to see this picture, I’d make it a top festival priority.

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The Source Family

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

B+ Documentary

  • Directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos

Hippies, drugs, free love, meditation, spiritual quests, and Los Angeles-based vegetarian restaurants. You’ll find all of that in The Source Family. For me, the movie was downright nostalgic.

No, I was never a member of Jim Baker’s “family,” called The Source and the subject of this narratively-driven documentary. But I lived in LA in the early ’70s–a young, long-haired vegetarian in love with almost every aspect of the hippy culture. I ate at Baker’s restaurant, The Source, many times, and worked for a year in another LA vege eatery, Natural Fudge. I hitchhiked a lot in those days and met all sorts of people. I’m amazed that I never even heard of this group. (If I had heard of them, I would not have joined. Even at that age, I knew enough not to put total faith in a guru.)

Baker was a World War II vet with a history of violence and a good track record in the restaurant business. He started The Source, a very successful vegetarian restaurant on the Sunset Strip, in 1977. (Remember the scene near the end of Annie Hall where Alvie and Annie meet one last time at an outdoor restaurant? That was The Source, years after Baker had sold it.) He began experimenting with different religious traditions, and molded them into his own. Soon, he and his followers were living in a rented mansion and running the restaurant together.

You’d expect a documentary about an early 70s LA-based cult and hippy commune, centered around such a charismatic leader, to be an exposé–names like Charles Manson and Jim Jones come to mind. But The Source Family is a surprisingly the_sourcebalanced view of Baker’s “family.” Told almost entirely from the point of view of former commune members, the film paints a largely positive picture of early new age spirituality and anti-materialistic idealism. Decades after his death and the commune’s end, many of his followers still think of him as a holy man and refer to him as “father.”

Yet they, and the filmmakers, don’t hide his shortcomings. The hero worship went to his head–and to a less intellectual body part. Although his original rules for the group sanctified monogamous marriage, he took on multiple wives and put together a harem of very young, female admirers. Wille and Demopoulos don’t shy away from these negative character traits, or the disastrous decisions that left the community broke and despised in Hawaii.

Structured like a three-act narrative feature, The Source Family tells its story efficiently and engagingly. And musically–The Source had its own band, whose old recordings drive the movie’s soundtrack. If you’re interested in alternative lifestyles or new religions, or are just nostalgic for the Age of Aquarius, you’ll want to catch this one.

When I saw this documentary at the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival, it was called simply The Source. You’ll find more about it at SFIFF Report: Vegetarian Restaurants, Hippy Communes, and The Source. It opens Friday at the Roxie.

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SFIFF Sunday: Fishy Documentary & Resisting the Nazis

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

Much of what I end up watching at the San Francisco International Film Festival is a matter of pure serendipity. I pick the film that’s about to start playing. But there are also times when I very much want to see a particular movie.

Saturday afternoon and evening, I did one of each. And serendipity won.

After the Animated Shorts screening, I took a longer-than-usual break, skipping such promising titles as Big Sur and Big Blue Lake for a documentary on fishing that had received some interesting buzz.

Big mistake.

D Leviathan
One could make an fascinating and informative documentary about a fishing boat that plows the choppy waters off the Massachusetts coast, but Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel chose not to. Leviathan consists almost entirely of badly-framed close shots of objects, waves, pieces of the boat, and so on. You get some idea that imagelife is difficult and dangerous on these boats, but that’s conveyed in the first five minutes. There’s no narration and we never get to know any of the men we fleetingly see (there are far more close-ups of dead fish than living humans).  With the exception of one shot near the end, we never get a sense of the vessel as a whole. The film contains some visually striking shots, but it lingers on them way too long, turning visually striking into boring. I’m happy that people push the cinematic art with daring experimentation, but sometimes, the experiment fails.

You have two more chances to miss Leviathan at the festival. It’s screening tonight at 8:45 at the Pacific Film Archive, and will be back at the Kabuki on Thursday, May 9, at 5:30. Amazingly, Leviathan is on the Festival’s list of films that "have secured U.S. distribution or are in negotiations with a U.S distributor."

After that torturous experience, I randomly picked a movie starting at the right time, and found a gem:

A In the Fog
Think of this as a rural, Eastern European version of Army of Shadows. In Nazi-occupied Belorussia, two resistance fighters set out to execute a man whom they believe is cooperating with the Nazis. Things don’t go as planned, and the three men imageare trapped in ways they didn’t expect. Each man gets his own flashback, which tells us more about him and how he ended up in such a dangerous line of work. Writer/director Sergei Loznitsa (adapting a novel by Vasil Bykov) creates a suspenseful story in a way that’s unknown to today’s commercial filmmakers. He rarely cuts and moves the camera sparingly, giving us the chance to examine the characters and their environment as they work through their impossible situation.

Unfortunately, I caught the Festival’s second and final screening of In the Fog. But it’s been picked up by Strand Releasing, and will play in American theaters. Don’t miss this one.

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SFIFF Friday: Chilean Black Comedy, Russian Whodoneit, and American Rockumentary

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

Here’s what I saw at my first almost-full day at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. I caught all of these films at the Kabuki.

B- Night Across the Street
Writer/director Raúl Ruiz was dying of cancer when he made this strange, surreal comedy. Not surprising that it’s all about death. A moderately elderly man faces retirement and a seemingly pre-ordained violent death with a matter-imageof-fact calmness. Such calmness permeates the film and adds to its deadpan humor. Beethoven and Long John Silver pop up, mostly in scenes of the protagonist as a young boy. In the film’s funniest moment, Beethoven disrupts a movie screening. Ruiz lit almost the entire film with an amber glow coming from one side of the screen–as if everything was shot at what photographers call golden hour. Wonderful at first, Night Across the Street eventually drags. Had it been a half hour shorter, it would have been a much better movie.

Night Across the Street has two more screenings scheduled, at the Kabuki this Monday at 6:00, and at the Pacific Film Archive on Saturday, May 4, at 6:30. It’s also on the Festival’s "Hold Review" list, which means that it will likely receive an American theatrical release.

A- The Daughter
A serial killer is lose in a small Russian town, targeting teenage girls. That’s not a good time for Inna to go through the usual problems of adolescence. What’s more, her mother is long dead, imageher stern father is cold and strict (although there is a sense that he loves her), she’s responsible for her little brother, and her new best friend is a "bad" girl out to seduce the local priest’s handsome son. The film uses the mystery genre to  take us on a tour of post-Soviet Russian life as the protagonist and the community deal with raging alcoholism,  religious conflict, and corpses turning up in the mud. While in many ways deeply depressing, The Daughter also celebrates the resilience of youth, the genuine magic of first love, and the healing power of humanitarian religion.

One big problem: The subtitles appear to have been written by someone who barely knows English. Bad grammar and malaprops  provide unintended laughs that take us out of the story. If you watched Hong Kong films in the 1990s, you know what I’m talking about.

The Daughter is not expected to receive an American theatrical release. But you have two more chances to catch it at the festival. This Sunday at the Kabuki at 1:00, and at the Pacific Film Archive Monday, May 6, 9:00.

A Twenty Feet from Stardom
Now I know why almost all backup singers are African American. They learned to sing in church. Morgan Neville’s wonderful documentary covers the full history of rock and roll from the point of view of the women who stand behind the stars, adding vocalimage texture to the music. We meet the amazing Merry Clayton ("Rape! Murder! It’s just a shot away!"), relative newcomer Judith Hill, and Darlene Love–who actually did quite a bit of lead singing without getting credit for it ("He’s a Rebel"). Big name stars (Springsteen, Jagger) prop up among the talking heads, but this time, the spotlight points to the artists who made it all work. And for once, we get a musical documentary that’s filled with music–and joy, laughter, and inspiration. A celebration of the human voice as a musical instrument.

After the movie, Tata Vega and Merry Clayton came out and sang for us, followed by a brief discussion with the filmmakers. Some highlights:

  • Merry Clayton: All of our fathers were ministers. We were in Church all the time. We lived that. We knew that God was in charge.  I didn’t start cursing until I met Ray Charles.
  • Director Morgan Neville: Church was the perfect training for the phycology of being a backup singer. You learn to serve a greater good.
  • Merry: Darlene Love was the mother of us all. We all love each other and support each other.

Twenty Feet from Stardom will not screen again at the Festival. But it will receive a full theatrical release in June.

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The Central Park Five

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

A documentary

  • Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon

In 1989, a white woman was brutally raped and left for dead in Central Park. New York’s finest arrested five black and Puerto Rican teenage boys, all of whom confessed under police interrogation. Their confessions contradicted each other, and they all contradicted the physical facts. What’s more, none of their DNA could be found near the crime scene. Yet they were all convicted, and spent many years in prison before the real culprit, also incarcerated for other crimes, confessed.

Ken Burns made The Central Park Five (with two collaborators), but it is unlike any other Burns documentary. The events it chronicles are recent–and not entirely over. Burns’ usual, slightly nostalgic style would have been totally inappropriate for a story UNITED STATES - AUGUST 18: Accused rapist Yusef Salaam is escorted by police. (Photo by Clarence Davis/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)that feels ripped from the headlines, so he went for a tougher, grittier style. No movie stars supply the voices of long-dead historical figures. There’s no voice-of-God narration. The camera never glides over still photographs, although Burns does use that signature technique sparingly with court illustrations. And, of course, this is a theatrical feature, not a multi-part PBS miniseries.

But in one way, this is very much a Ken Burns documentary: It focuses on American racial issues. Burns has always been fascinated with our country’s original sin, slavery, and it’s still searing after-effects.

Burns and his collaborators start with a grim view of New York City in the 1980s. The crack epidemic had turned the city into a teeming cauldron of violent crime. The white, often affluent population was terrified, even though the vast major of victims, like most of the perpetrators, were black or brown. The city seemed ungovernable.

In that atmosphere, this particular rape produced shockwaves, and offered a high-profile way for the police to prove their worth. According to The Central Park Five, the police pressured and intimidated the scared, young boys into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. Once they had the videotaped confessions, the prosecutor made sure the boys were convicted first in the press, and second in court. Needless to say, their parents couldn’t afford the type of lawyers who could have gotten them off.

Not surprisingly, the police and the prosecutor (who made her reputation on this case) deny these charges.  The only legal investigation into police misconduct here found them innocent of all wrong-doing, but that investigation was conducted by the New York City Police Department. Neither the cops nor the prosecutor agreed to be interviewed for this film.

The five themselves, all extensively interviewed, come off as intelligent, decent men who have suffered from the theft of their youth. Their personal stories (which are hardly tales of angels), and the stories of people close to them, give The Central Park Five heart. The rush to judgment that ruined their lives gives the film a sense of purpose.

Most Ken Burns documentaries help us understand how we, as Americans, got to where we are. This one shows us exactly where that is.

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The House I Live In

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

B Documentary

  • Directed by Eugene Jarecki

The United States has 5% of the world population, but 25% of the world’s incarcerated prisoners. African Americans make up 13% of the country’s population, and an estimated 13% of its drug users, yet 90% of those jailed for non-violent drug offenses are black.

Those are just some of the unsettling statistics in Eugene Jarecki’s sobering and extremely opinionated documentary on the War on Drugs, The House I Live In. And statistics aren’t half of the story. We also hear from dealers, addicts, prisoners, cops, historians,and prison guards, all of whom are sick and tired of a "war" that has cost the American people over a trillion dollars and has done far more harm than the drugs, themselves. We also get to know the maid and nanny who helped raise Jarecki, and listen to an excellent overview of the problem by The Wire‘s David Simon.

Make no mistake about it: This is a major American problem, and one that’s set up to be self-perpetuating. Cops are judged by how many arrests they make, and the easiest way to arrest people is to sweep through a poor minority neighborhood and search anyone who looks suspicious. Mandatory sentencing laws force judges to put people away for decades, and thus feed an industrial prison complex that many small towns and big companies depend on economically. When the prisoners get out, their officially banned from public housing and effectively banned from getting a job, so they go back to dealing–or using–drugs. And no politician would dare open themselves up to charges of being soft on crime.

image

But I’m here to tell you about a movie, not a social problem.

No reasonable person could possibly call The House I Live In unbiased. In traditional agitprop fashion, Jarecki takes a clear stand and lines up his interviews and images to support that stand. The other side’s arguments are simply not considered. I’m giving this film a B because the film is reasonably well made, Jarecki’s argument is strong, and one that I believe in (hey, I get to be biased, too). But I won’t pretend that there is nuance here.

When I call the film "reasonably well made," I mean that it’s briskly edited, seldom boring, and that many of the interviews reveal the humanity of the subjects. But  nothing in Jarecki ‘s technique stands out. You won’t find the humanity of  Werner Herzog or the historical perspective of Ken Burns. Or the humor that makes Michael Moore’s equally biased docs so entertaining.

A bigger problem: The House I Live In leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Jarecki points out that drug use hasn’t gone down since the "war" officially began in 1971, but he doesn’t ask anyone if drug use might have gone up without the war. Nor does he examine how other advanced democracies manage the same problems without our huge incarceration numbers. At no point does he point his camera at a law-and-order politician and get his (or her) side of the story.

Jarecki only seems interested in his side of the story. He wants you to agree with him and hopefully become an activist for the cause. It’s a worthwhile cause, but the result is a limited movie.

The title, a metaphor for America, comes from a left-wing patriotic song written during World War II. Paul Robeson’s recording of the song plays during the closing credits.

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My Day at the Mill Valley Film Festival

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

I spend Sunday at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Here’s what I saw and what I thought about it:

New Movies Lab: Industry Panel

I started the day not with a movie, but with a panel discussion on how independent filmmakers can promote their films and get people to see them.  Much of it concentrated on digital presentation and promotion, the later involving social media.

Some highlights:

On promoting your film:

Filmmaker, Webby found, and panel moderator, Tiffany Shlain:  You have to spend 50% of your time and energy getting your film out. It’s mind-blowing how many filmmakers don’t think of this…When I do my budget, it’s half to make the film, and half to market it.

Producer Steven Menkin: There are literally dozens of tools for filmmakers where you can distribute your own films. Marketing should be part of every budget.

Milyoni founder and VP David Raycroft:  It’s never been easier to get going with art. You have Kickstarter for financing, and social media for marketing. When you start creating, you’re creating a community as well as [a work of] art. With more people being able to create, awareness is the hardest part. With The Invisible War, we attracted enough of an audience through community [social networks) to get it noticed.

[The panelists used the word community so often that they began to apologize for it and joke about it.]

On theatrical presentation vs. home viewing:

Pacific Film Resources Principal (and former Landmark executive) Jan Klingelhofer: I have an affinity for historic theaters. I’m determined that the form of watching content that matters to people is the community experience [of going to theaters]. I’d hate to have them [young people] see some of the beautiful art designed for a movie screen on their phone.

Shlain: A lot of theaters wouldn’t play it if it’s already on Netflix. They don’t like Day and Date [when the theatrical and other releases happen simultaneously]….I get distracted watching movies on Netflix. As a filmmaker, that’s not how you want people to see your movie. But you have to give up control, knowing that people will experience your film in different ways and being okay with that.

Menkin: Some filmmakers would rather have their films in theaters than make money. The challenge is: How do I get my film into a theater and how to I get people to show up? Many [independent] films that get theatrical releases now have a Q&A with the actors or directors..the concept of community.

Rights

Shlain: So many filmmakers just give them up. All you have is the rights to your films. Find someone who can help you [keep them].

Maelstrom

This was my first experience with a Rob Nillson film, and frankly, it will probably be my last. I’d give it a D.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a young, attractive, European couple staying in a lovely house in the woods (shot in Marin county). Their hosts are an aging but still fit athlete and his grown son. This is the sort of place where the bathtub and shower are both out of doors.image

So you have four characters: a woman, her lover, and two other men hitting on her. And she’s hitting back with heavy flirtation. And it’s all tied up with references to Greek mythology–specifically the story of Electra and Orestes.

The lack of story didn’t bother me, but the lack of motivation did. People did what they did–which was often pretty weird–for no apparent reason other than to have something to do in front of the camera.  Aside from the lovely setting and attractive-looking actors, I can think of no reason for anyone not related to the filmmakers to see this movie.

The film was followed by Q&A with Nillson, the cast, and key members of the crew. Some choice comments:

Nillson: We started with a room and the people who entered the room. The people then suggested things [to do].

The Editor: Editing is where a lot of magic gets unlocked. A big part of the Greek mythology part was added on [in post production]. You just have to kind of dance in the editing room.

The Cinematographer: Rob told me we were gonna go up to Marin. If we ever get a film out of this, that would be nice.

Ricky on Leacock

With collaborators such as Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers, and documentaries such as "Primary" and "Queen of Apollo," Richard Leacock helped invent cinema vérité. Now, one of Leacock’s protégées, Jane Weiner has created a documentary about him. I’m giving it a B+.

In theory, cinema vérité (truthful cinema) captures reality. The filmmaker follows the subject as unobtrusively as possible. The final film generally contains no narration, simply showing what was and allowing the audience to make their own conclusions.

Weiner presents Leacock’s work in roughly chronological order, giving us a full imageoverview of a very long career. She uses film clips, interviews with Leacock and some of his collaborators (but mostly of Leacock), and some–yes–cinema vérité-style footage. Weiner first started recording Leacock’s life and interviewing him in 1972, using a super8 camera of Leacock’s own design. She returned to that project in recent years, providing us with views of the filmmaker as a middle-aged and an old man. The result is entertaining and informative.

But her respect for her mentor gets in the way of her objectivity. The film never addresses the basic criticism–even the basic lie–behind cinema vérité. In making choices of what to film and how to edit it, the fimmaker inevitably creates a subjective work that isn’t necessarily truthful. Some vérité filmmakers have been known to stage scenes, although I don’t know if Leacock has done this.

Nevertheless, everyone interested in the history of documentaries should see this one.

After the screening, Weiner came up for Q&A. Some highlights:

  • I was asked to teach at Syracuse in 2003. The students all thought that Michael Moore invented documentaries.
  • [When asked if Leacock saw the film before he died in 2011] He did see a work in progress in 2010 at Telluride.
  • We can’t release [this film commercially] until we’ve paid for the rights. And there’s something like 87 clips in this film.

You get one more chance to see Ricky on Leacock. It plays tonight, at the 142 Throckmorton Theatre, at 9:15.

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Somewhere Between

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

B- Documentary

  • Directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton

Approximately 35,000 Chinese girls have been adopted by American families since 1985 (reference). Linda Goldstein Knowlton, herself the new mother of an adopted Chinese daughter, follows the lives of four now-teenage adoptees to discover how their split Chinese and American identities work out. Her uneven film is often flat, and skips over a lot of issues, but has moments of sublime grace.

Full disclosure: I have two adopted Asian daughters, one of whom is from China. My wife knows one of the girls featured slightly .

Somewhere Between does little besides glide along for the first half of its 88-minute runtime. We meet the girls, all of whom seem surprisingly well-behaved and well-adjusted for teenagers of any nationality. Some of them have had to deal with the somewhere_betweenoccasional stupid, racist remark, but they all seem capable of shrugging that off.

Much more interesting are the abandonment issues they all have to deal with. China instituted a one-child policy in 1979, and a great many couples desperately wanted that child to be a son. Thus, parents gave up their daughters to orphanages, and eventually to Western parents. It’s not easy knowing that the mother that bore you rejected you because of your gender.

But the picture really takes off in the second half, when it latches onto two amazing stories. One of the film’s subjects, Fang Lee (who is, by the way, local), visits a Chinese orphanage and falls in love with a baby suffering from cerebral palsy. Over a period of years, Fang helps the little girl from a distance and in visits to China. Eventually, she helps arrange for an American family to adopt her.

The other amazing story involves Haley Butler, who wants desperately to find her birth parents–something that’s considered almost impossible. Through detective work on various visits to China, posters with her baby pictures, and eventually DNA testing, she succeeds. The reunion is both amazing and joyful, and sad. To meet her birth mother is to confront her own abandonment.

These scenes hit you on a gut level, and will make Somewhere Between worth seeing for many people, but the film barely touches many aspects of adoption. You learn nothing here about the organizations, email lists, and summer camps that nurture both the adoptees and their parents, and help the girls know more about the culture they were born into but probably don’t know. Nor does the film address the many adoption problems, such as birth parents who see their abandoned and now Western children as a source of income.

Knowlton’s upbeat approach shouldn’t surprise anyone; she says right at the start that she made this film for her own, very young adopted daughter. But her choices limit the picture’s scope. She made an affecting documentary, but she could have made an intelligent one.

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More on Samsara, 70mm, and 4K Digital Projection

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

I got a chance this morning to talk briefly with Samsara director Ron Fricke and his primary collaborator, producer/co-author Mark Magidson. With little time set aside for me, we agreed to stick to the technical, format aspects Samsara’s production and presentation.

Some background: Samsara is the first film since 1996 to be shot in the 70mm format, which, strictly speaking, actually uses 65mm in the camera. Traditionally, these films would be shown in 70mm prints, as well as conventional 35mm. However, Fricke and Magidson have decided against making 70mm prints, and are recommending 4K DCP (Digital Cinema Package) as the best way to see the film. For more on the technology, see When You Least Expect It: The Return of 70mm. For more on Samsara, see my review.

I started by asking them how the decision to shoot in 65mm effected the complex production. They told me that it made shooting the film in so many countries "a lot more difficult…Getting film in and out [of various countries] has never been so difficult."

You can well imagine. Airport security is much more intense now than it was when they completed their last film, Baraka, and cans of undeveloped film cannot be opened under regular light nor passed through an X-ray machine.

Could they have shot it digitally. "We started shooting in 2007. [Digital camera technology], which was 2K, really wasn’t ready then."

I asked if it would be possible now. "In another year or so, there could be [cameras with] 8K or 10k sensors. It’s not there yet, but it’s getting close."

They made the controversial decision to skip the expected 70mm prints "after seeing it projected in 4K. All the fidelity of the 65mm negative was there. It’s rock steady, and never gets scratched. There’s a dimension to it that’s unique."

And if 4K isn’t available? "The 35mm prints are pristine. It’s a toss-up between them and the 2K [DCP]." Having seen the film in 35mm, I can agree. I can’t recall seeing a better-looking 35mm print. Currently, in the Bay Area, Samsara plays only in 35mm, at the Embarcadero and Shattuck. They didn’t know about future bookings

Personally, I wish they had made one or two 70mm prints. The film will eventually play at the Castro, which can show 70mm, but not 4K DCP. Of course, I would like it even better if the Castro–or another local large-screen theater run by people who really care about cinema–had 4K digital equipment. But I understand why that isn’t happening. Converting a theater to digital projection is expensive enough without going to a premium technology. (And, of course, releasing an art film is expensive enough without making 70mm prints.)

By the way, another film shot in the 70mm format, The Master, opens later this month. This time, 70mm prints have been struck, and the Grand Lake will get one. I assume that this film will also be available in 4K DCP. I would love it if a Bay Area theater capable of showing both of these grand formats could do an open-to-the-public side-by-side comparison.

Filed under: Digital Projection, Documentaries, Large Formats, Technical | 2 Comments »

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