Full Frame is one of few documentary-only film festivals. Because everyone is on the same page – and almost everyone knows one another – it also functions as a professional conference. In between films, there are panel discussions on “The State of the Doc” and people have intense debates on jargon. Should it be “documentary” or “non-fiction film”? What, really, is the different between “reality TV” and documentaries aired on television? It was nice to know that there are other people out there who care.
But, like all other film festivals, you just gorge yourself on movies. While overdosing on fiction films might seem like an indulgence, watching 16 documentaries in four days makes you feel a little bit sobered, and very informed.
There was a huge range in the topics, of course, but there were a number of portraits of artists. Steven Soderbergh screened his first non-fiction film “And Everything is Going Fine” a profile of the monologist Spalding Gray, who committed suicide a few years ago. It was a fine movie, but Gray makes it too easy. When the subject of a film is so enthralling that people would travel from all over the world to watch him sit on blank stage and recall childhood memories, it’s hard to go wrong. Gray’s monologues are edited together so he tells the story of his life chronologically. Every now and then we watch Gray slip up – he tells different versions of the same story back to back – and you start to sense just how manic he was. But Soderberg didn’t make this movie to expose Spalding, but rather to eulogize him. The film is entirely composed of Gray’s world – rarely does another person appear on screen. It’s little more than a “Best of Spalding Gray” compilation reel.
One of my favorite films of the festival was “I am Secretly an Important Man” a profile of the poet Steven Jesse Bernstein. The so-called, “godfather of grunge,” Bernstein lived in Seattle in the nineties and opened shows for bands like Nirvanna Mudhoney, and Sound Garden. (He, too, committed suicide – another reoccurring theme of the festival. There was one documentary at the festival – The Darkness of Day – on the topic.) His poems are crude – sometimes he performed them with a mouse crawling along his tongue. His lyrics are about our everyday interactions with grime, noise, and pain; Bernstein does not mourn these landscapes or glorify them, he just has this sweet, yet compulsive fascination with them. Bernstein was manic and delighted, which comes across in the many interviews with people who knew him. Bernstein broke some hearts, tattooed his name on a friend’s forearm, but everyone seems oddly forgiving of him. He was that charming, that inspiring, qualities that are true of the film, too.
Waste Land, by Lucy Walker, won this year’s audience award. Walker accompanied Vik Muniz, a world-renown artist originally from Brazil, to Jardim Gramacho, the largest landfill in the world. While there, he creates portraits of the pickers out of garbage – he uses aluminum cans for shadows, discarded pieces of plastic to make a nose. The art itself is colorful and cinematic; mammoth in size, Muniz had to rent out a neighboring warehouse to piece the portraits together. He promises that, if he sells them, all proceeds will go back to the community. More beautiful, even, than the art, are the stories of the people whose portraits he makes. The pickers, who spend their days rummaging through heaps of trash to see if anything recyclable has been thrown in there, assist Muniz by collecting trash and arranging it as he directs. Their work shifts – if just temporarily – from monotonous labor to an art practice. This change in outlook shifts their perceptions of themselves – one woman leaves the dump to work at a pharmacy, another man is able to mobilize the picker’s union. It’s all so euphoric – Art really does change lives! – that you almost don’t want to question it. But frankly, I wish the filmmaker asked us to. What happened to these people after Muniz left them for the art markets of New York and Berlin? And how about Muniz? How did this experience shift his understanding of the art market, and who and who isn’t able to participate in it?
Another theme of the festival was political documentaries. There weren’t many activist films – not a single movie I watched concluded with an intertitle suggesting “things you can do.” But there were many terrific, and quite subtle, political films screened over the weekend. I’ll be writing longer reviews of each of these films closer to their release dates, but highlights included 12th and Delaware, named after the intersection shared by an abortion clinic and a pro-life group. The pro-life volunteers harangue the woman as they walk into the abortion clinic and try to sway them – literally – to come to their side. Many women mistake the pro-life center – it’s called “The Pregnancy Care Center” – for the clinic and they are unexpectedly subject to gruesome videos and lectures about the supposed dangers of abortion. The filmmakers, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, whose previous film, Jesus Camp, was nominated for an Oscar, received unfettered access to both facilities. There’s nothing judgmental about their perspective; like in Jesus Camp, they make inroads with extremist groups and just let them do the talking.
Another highlight was The Oath, by Oscar-nominee Laura Poitras. The film is a portrait of Abu Jandal, Osama Bin Landen’s former bodyguard. Jandal is charming and candid and speaks openly with the filmmaker about his religious and political views. Meanwhile, Jandal’s brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, awaits a verdict in Guantanamo. The film is about the psychological toll of prison, the misconceived interrogation tactics during George W. Bush’s administration, as well as a thoughtful portrait of a man who manages to be both an Al Queda extremist and a U.S. ally.
Jessica Weisberg
Jessica Weisberg is a writer currently living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, n+1, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and newyorker.com, among other publications. She worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker ...
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