The City Pages Documentary Film Festival

All the coolest documentaries of the past two years--How's Your News? , Chris Smith's Home Movie, a full version of The T.A.M.I. Show, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town--premiered locally here in Minneapolis at Get Real: The City Pages Documentary Film Festival, now in its third season. So this year I decided to post the complete seven-day schedule with summaries from the official site (written by currator Rob Nelson) and add my own commentaries and links. The films screen at Oak Street Cinema (click here for tickets--or here for online $25 festival passes, t-shirts included). At the very bottom, I've included the forthcoming introduction to the festival guide, also by Rob Nelson. Consider this your cheat sheet and gateway until you pick up the real thing in print (and read Dylan Hicks's overview) on Wednesday.

Thursday, November 6

7:30 p.m. An Injury to One Travis Wilkerson, director. 53 minutes. With Wilkerson's "Superior Elegy" (see previous post), both presented by the director in person.

Hailed in Film Comment as "the anti-Ken Burns," former Minneapolitan Travis Wilkerson digs deep into the soiled history of Butte, Montana, to uncover the connections between a union organizer's mysterious murder in 1917 and the suppression of labor movements in the U.S., the political function of official histories, the dimensions of a grave, and the economic and spiritual demise of Butte itself. With stirring music by the Duluth-based Low and others (including copper miners of the period), Wilkerson's film is at once dense and concise, accessible and experimental�the activist work that the victim himself couldn't complete. Wilkerson will appear in person to introduce the screening, which will be followed by the world premiere of "Superior Elegy," a half-hour documentary shot in Duluth last year with the members of Low.

Complicatedfun.com note: I've always thought the band Low would make a great movie soundtrack (bassist Zak Sally told me in 2000 that he pitched his pal Daniel Clowes on the idea of scoring Ghost World, but was turned down). So I'm happy to see the trio providing music for An Injury to One, about the notorious 1917 killing of IWW organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana. This was the place and period that inspired so much of Dashiell Hammett's violent noir (Hammett even claimed that he was offered a fee to murder Little while working as a detective), and the dirty class-war history in Butte recalls that of Duluth, Low's adopted hometown.

Friday, November 7

7:30 p.m. The Fog of War Errol Morris, director. 95 minutes. With Al Milgrom's "Red Barn"

This latest film from Errol Morris (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control) is a dazzling cinematic dialogue with the conscience of Robert S. McNamara�WWII military strategist, auto executive, and, most famously, secretary of defense during the escalation of the Vietnam War. Morris asks the question: How can a mere mortal come to terms with history, particularly one who has done so much to shape it? For the all-too-human McNamara, past haunts present, hindsight is stopped dead in its tracks by the lingering reality of military and human catastrophe, and apology and self-justification keep trumping one another. Morris appears to let his octogenarian subject lead the way, then offers a subtly ironic counterpoint. What emerges, finally, is a haunting, crystal-clear portrait of human error in action. The eight-minute film "Red Barn" by Al Milgrom will be shown prior to the feature.

Complicatedfun.com note: "Red Barn" is long-awaited, to say the least. The short is edited by U Film founder Al Milgrom from his voluminous footage of student street protests in the early 1970s. This was back when rioting meant something. (I'm coming strictly for this before cutting out early for my DJ set this evening...)

9:45 p.m. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Kim Bartley, Donnacha O'Briain, directors. 74 minutes. With "The Luckiest Nut in the World"

The distinction between television news and documentary cinema has rarely been drawn as sharply or with as much purpose as it is in this startling portrait of last year's Venezuelan military coup, shot in part from inside the besieged palace of president Hugo Chavez. A former army officer and self-proclaimed "Bolivarian revolutionary," the democratically elected Chavez had initiated an audacious plan to address rampant poverty in Venezuela by redistributing the nation's wealth. The filmmakers persuasively connect criticism of Chavez by the U.S. government and CNN to his country's status as the world's fourth-largest oil-producing entity, though they're forced to suspend their investigation when the coup has them trapped inside the palace alongside Chavez and his advisers. The 24-minute film "The Luckiest Nut in the World" by Emily James will be shown prior to the feature.

Complicatedfun.com note: Fulcrumtv.com calls the "The Luckiest Nut in the World", the animated short by Emily James, "a whistle-stop tour through everything-you-need-to-know about free trade."

11:30 p.m. Breakfast With Hunter Wayne Ewing, director. 91 minutes.

A verité trip into the wild world of gonzo journalist Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, this rollicking documentary chronicles the author's battle with the Aspen cops who arrested him on a bogus DUI charge and the Hollywood filmmakers who will stop at nothing to bring his classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to the big screen. As in any Thompson narrative, the supporting cast in Breakfast With Hunter is downright surreal: Johnny Depp, Roxanne Pulitzer, P.J. O'Rourke, Warren Zevon, George McGovern, and George Plimpton all show up to pay their respects to the most flamboyant of New Journalism pioneers�a man who prefers to be known as "the most elderly dope fiend in America."

                        (Breakfast With Hunter, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised)

Saturday, November 8

1:00 p.m. What America Needs: From Sea to Shining Sea Mark Wojahn, director. 93 minutes. With a trailer for the Wellstones documentary "Carry It Forward!" Wojahn will appear in person.

Traveling by train, motor home, and car from New York to Los Angeles, his trusty DV camera in tow, the Twin Cities-based Wojahn stopped to ask more than 500 people: What do you think America needs? Their diverse responses�which include "a new president" more often than not�collectively relate a surprising story of hope in the wake of the (s)election of 2000 and the terrorist attacks of 2001. Wojahn, whose short "What America Needs: An Interior Expedition" (co-directed by Matt Bakkom) was screened to great acclaim in 1996, considers his new film to be "an advertisement for the democratic ideal�a State of the Union address by everyday people whose viewpoints are rarely sought or heard in conventional media." Wojahn will appear in person to introduce the screening, which will be preceded by the 15-minute trailer for "Carry It Forward!", the forthcoming documentary about the lives of Paul and Sheila Wellstone directed by Lu Lippold, Laurie Stern, and Dan Luke.

3:30 p.m. Free Directors' Panel!!!

The following filmmakers will appear in person at Oak Street Cinema for a panel discussion of their work (no admission fee):

5:15 p.m. Anonymously Yours Gayle Ferraro, director. 88 minutes. Presented by the director in person.

With the clandestine help of a social worker, Ferraro gained access to four young women who had been sold into prostitution in Myanmar (formerly Burma), and who agreed to address the camera only on condition of anonymity. Their stories reveal a horrifying institution�the world's fastest-growing industry�that enslaves as many as 40 million women. Ferraro builds on individual accounts without introducing the subjects' families, some of which are directly responsible for selling their relatives into slavery. At film's end, one hopes for a positive outcome as the women strive to create new and better lives. But given the realities of extreme poverty in Myanmar and throughout Southeast Asia, only the audience is changed for certain. Ferraro will appear in person to introduce the screening.

7:30 p.m. Hitler's Hat Jeff Krulik, director. 50 minutes. With Krulik's "Obsessed With Jews" and "I Created Lancelot Link." Presented by the director in person.

Krulik, who loitered with Judas Priest fans in his cult classic "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," explores a more momentous brush with infamy in this offbeat winner of the Best Documentary award at the recent New York Underground Film Festival. Richard Marowitz, a Jewish American GI, was present at the search of Hitler's Munich apartment in April 1945. Finding a black top hat, Marowitz flew into a rage, stomping on the hat and then donning it in imitation of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator. That same day, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. Absurd and poignant in equal measure, Hitler's Hat follows Marowitz to a reunion of his division after 55 years. Krulik will appear in person to introduce the program, which will also include two of his short documentaries, "Obsessed With Jews" and "I Created Lancelot Link."

9:30 p.m. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer Nick Broomfield, Joan Churchill, directors. 89 minutes.

Broomfield, whose Biggie & Tupac and Kurt & Courtney confirmed his position among the world's most compelling and controversial documentarians, returns to the story of America's first known female serial killer�a story he began to tell in 1992 with Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Subpoenaed to appear at her last appeal hearing in Florida, Broomfield observes Wuornos's startling decision to plead guilty to the first-degree murders of seven men, intervenes in the efforts of governor Jeb Bush to execute Wuornos during an election year, and captures her haunting final interview on camera. Writing in Film Comment, critic Amy Taubin calls the movie "a furious indictment of the social and criminal justice systems that not only failed a woman but drove her out of her mind while claiming the legal and moral right to put her to death."

11:30 p.m. Festival! Murray Lerner, director. 95 minutes. With Mike Rivard's "The Sound of Sculpture"

Another vintage concert-film rarity in the "Get Real" tradition (cf. Blue Wild Angel and The T.A.M.I. Show), this Oscar-nominated but scarcely seen landmark documents the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 through 1966, a period that Bob Dylan abruptly divided in two by plugging in his electric guitar for a searing rendition of "Maggie's Farm." That astonishing moment is captured here, along with legendary performances by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Son House, Howlin' Wolf, Judy Collins, and the late Johnny Cash. Long out of circulation due to rights-clearance complications (and never available on home video), Festival is a priceless musical time capsule that also contains plenty of evocative banter between songs, as when Baez offers, "If people don't get back to the important things like truth and love, then there's no sense living." The short film "The Sound of Sculpture" by Mike Rivard will be shown prior to the feature.

Sunday, November 9

1:30 p.m. Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property Charles Burnett, director. 58 minutes. With Burnett's "Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland."

Though the rebellion of Nat Turner is a watershed event in America's long and troubled history of slavery and racial conflict, this film by the great American director Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep) isn't simply a chronicle of that violent uprising. It is also about the multiple ways in which that moment has been remembered and interpreted by historians, novelists, dramatists, and artists. Burnett adopts a highly innovative structure, interspersing documentary footage and interviews with dramatizations of different versions of the story, using a new actor to represent Turner in each version. As critic Henry Louis Gates explains in the film: "There is no Nat Nurner to recover; you have to create the man and his voice." Burnett's 15-minute film "Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland" will be shown prior to the feature.

3:30 p.m. The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia Jennifer Baichwal, director. 70 minutes. With Mike Rivard's "Still the Same."

For nearly 30 years, Shelby Lee Adams's portraits of Appalachian mountain families have been called exploitative and macabre for their alleged reaffirmation of regional stereotypes. Does it matter in this assessment that Adams grew up in eastern Kentucky? That he appears to have an intimate and respectful relationship with the people in his pictures? That his work, whatever the artist's conscious intent, compels others around the world to debate not just the implications of his photographs, but of art itself? The True Meaning of Pictures investigates these questions by following Adams on several shoots, and by positing the diverse reactions of critics in relation to revealing comments by the artist's friends and subjects. The short film "Still the Same" by Mike Rivard will be shown prior to the feature.

5:30 p.m. The Same River Twice Robb Moss, director. 78 minutes. Presented by the director in person.

A sort of documentary Big Chill in the buff, this rich portrait of cultural metamorphosis and ordinary aging measures the gap between the late-'70s and the present�as well as that between twentysomethings and fortysomethings�by juggling two sets of footage that Moss shot of his five close friends. It begins with grainy 16mm images of the left-leaning pals enjoying a monthlong rafting trip down the Colorado River with a dozen other baby-boomers�all in their birthday suits. Then it skips ahead two decades, as Moss's digital-video camera finds the former free spirits�now fully clothed�dealing ambivalently with kids, careers, and mortgages. Moss will appear in person to introduce the screening.

7:45 p.m. How to Draw a Bunny John Walter, director. 90 minutes. With Mike Rivard's "The Toxic Avenger" (NOT the Troma film).

Considered the most famous of New York's countless "unknown" artists, the late Ray Johnson was a man whose life and work were so purposefully, playfully enigmatic that even his closest friends were hard pressed to figure him out. Thus the Rashomon-style approach of this award-winning documentary seems entirely apt, with conflicting appraisals given by Christo, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Judith Malina, and the Sag Harbor detective who investigated Johnson's mysterious death in 1995. An extraordinary Pop Art collage in its own right, How to Draw a Bunny combines photos, letters, archival footage, recent interviews, and an original Max Roach score for an innovative portrait of a man who thought of himself as a work in progress right to the end. The short film "The Toxic Avenger" by Mike Rivard will be shown prior to the feature.

9:45 p.m. Bukowski: Born Into This John Dullaghan, director. 130 minutes.

A figure of countless and disturbing contradictions, the late Charles Bukowski is regarded as a brutal misogynist, as the victim of a merciless father, and as an author whose poetry and prose merit inclusion among the greatest writing of the 20th Century. A decade in the making, this definitive documentary portrait hardly shrinks from exploring the darkest aspects of Bukowski's personality even as its fluid mix of archival material and recent interviews reveals an artist whose exceedingly coarse temperament may have disguised an odd variety of humanism. The film's vivid historical backdrop suggests that the various cruelties of the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan eras found suitably raw expression in the words of a man who simply didn't have it in him to lie.

(Bukowski: Born Into This, La Commune (Paris, 1871))

Monday, November 10

7:00 p.m. Domestic Violence 2 Frederick Wiseman, director. 159 minutes.

Screening in conjunction with Walker Art Center's month-long Wiseman retrospective, this latest work by the legendary documentarian returns to the Hillsborough County, Florida, setting of Domestic Violence, though, as Variety notes, "[f]amiliarity with the first film is in no way a requisite for appreciation of what Wiseman does here." Beginning with the response of Tampa police to a 911 call, the film follows a series of domestic abuse cases into arraignment, misdemeanor, and injunction courts, where lawyers and judges elicit riveting stories of couples' conflicts and the ensuing violence that led them to the judicial system. Proceeds from the screening will benefit the St. Paul Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, whose executive director Shelley Johnson-Cline will lead a discussion afterward. (Please note that Walker series passes and membership cards will not be accepted for this screening.)

Complicatedfun.com note: Frederick Wiseman directed one the most radical documentaries ever made about the banal evil of schooling, 1969's so-subtle-it's-beautiful High School, which aired last year on public television for the first time in years. That film screens Thursday (in case you can't make it into the Get Real premiere) as part of the Walker's Wiseman retrospective, and this one looks to be just as great...

Tuesday, November 11

7:30 p.m. La Commune (Paris, 1871)�Part 1 Peter Watkins, director. 345 minutes. (You will only pay one ticket price of $7 for this two part screening) With Spike Lee 's 10-minute film "We Wuz Robbed."

In the spring of 1871, a group of radical Parisians led an uprising against the national government. In the late 1990s, director Peter Watkins (The War Game) began work on an epic film about the event, a film designed to challenge existing notions of objective journalism. Blatantly anachronistic, La Commune has a reporter for Versailles Television broadcasting the official view of events in 1871, while, left of the dial, a "Commune TV" provides the perspectives of the Parisian rebels. Citing it as the year's best film, J. Hoberman of the Village Voice calls La Commune "contagiously exciting...the sort of collective political psychodrama that supposedly lost all credibility after 1972." The film will be screened in two parts over the course of two consecutive evenings. Spike Lee's 10-minute film "We Wuz Robbed" will be shown prior to Part 1.

Wednesday, November 12

7:30 p.m. La Commune (Paris, 1871)�Part 2

By way of intro:

(from the Get Real program guide, available in Wednesday's City Pages and at Oak Street Cinema starting Thursday)

"We Wuz Robbed" is the name of Spike Lee's short documentary about the 2000 (s)election. But that title could reasonably apply to a lot of things--including a much longer documentary about political bamboozlement called La Commune (Paris, 1871), the first half of which screens November 11 at �Get Real� (along with Lee�s aforementioned joint). Seems to me that we�ve been stripped of a great deal over the past few years--including Paul and Sheila Wellstone, Johnny Cash, Warren Zevon, Aileen Wuornos, the NorShor Theatre, the World Trade Center, the twin towers of democracy and freedom, and the illusion that the fog of war was lifted in �75.

The chance to lament those losses in particular--and others more generally--would seem afforded by a number of the films in this year�s festival. And in the flicker of light that reanimates the past, perhaps there�s something else to be gained. On opening night, for example, former Minneapolitan Travis Wilkerson--whose enormous talent we lost to the West--will be back to screen two of his films, An Injury to One and �Superior Elegy�: one long and one short; one looking back and one looking forward; the injury and the elegy.

Is this the true meaning of pictures--that they help us heal our wounds? If the revolution will not be televised, can it at least be seen some other way--like in a theater near you? (And while we�re at it: Can anyone tell me how to draw a bunny?)

No question that we wuz robbed. But maybe what America needs--to borrow another �Get Real� title--is to take that troublesome property back. And then carry it forward.

                   --Rob Nelson, Curator, "Get Real"/Film Editor, City Pages

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