Documentary - Page 13 of 14

The Fabulous Ones – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

The Fabulous Ones is a warm home-made story featuring real friends reuniting to relive their memories from 30 years ago. The drama comes from a fictionalized will of one of their old friends, but the personal, real stories provide the substance for this docufiction.

From the tone of the film, it feels like most of this film is a documentary. The characters all get along too closely for it to feel fictionalized. However, the director uses different film types to blur the past and present, and also reality and fiction. Sepia-tinted film makes some shots feel old – as if shot 30 years ago in the character’s past – and these are edited alongside clearer shots to indicate the present. Some scenes also alternate between these two types of film to make it unclear what is fictionalized and true to reality, such as the seance and re-enactment of their ‘dead’ friend. The blurring of reality and fiction and past and present through the type of film also fictionalizes their pre-transition lives. Home footage and photos of the characters pre-transition, look like the scenes of the seance, making their pasts feel less real than the present.

Whilst their pre-transition lives are made to feel like the fictionalized parts of this documentary, The Fabulous Ones doesn’t shy away from sharing the characters’ real experiences as Trans-women. Throughout their reunion, the camera focuses on each character to hear their queer coming of age experience and how their individual families and the society around them reacted. These scenes draws you closer to the characters by sharing their more intimate experiences, and in doing so, holds the film back from going full happy-dream with the fictionalized elements of the film. These moments ground the film in the unfortunate reality that not everyone is able to be who they are without prejudice.

If you’re looking for a quirky docufiction that lightly explores some heavy personal experiences through a fictionalized will left by a ‘dead’ friend, this film is for you.

Stateless (Dominican Republic) – Pan African Film Festival 2021

In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity or a homeland. Stateless follows Rosa Iris, an attorney with family who have been exiled by the country’s recent laws, as she mounts a grassroots electoral campaign to advocate for social justice. But it also follows her antithesis, Gladys Felix, an outspoken supporter of the nationalist movement, fighting for for stricter immigration control.

Like Softie, Stateless is an observational documentary that captures an activist from outside of the system fighting against corruption. Through Rosa’s story we’re exposed to the emotional trauma of the country’s recent anti-immigration policies. Simply put, they’re racist, and this is obvious right from the opening scene in which Rosa is representing a client in a government office. Her client is applying for an updated citizenship card but is being denied by the officer because “he doesn’t speak clear Spanish”. This is not an isolated incident. Rosa’s activism is also justified by her personal stakes. She has the same Haitian lineage as the people she’s representing that the country is persecuting. So she runs for government to represent people like her exiled because of their race.

However, unlike Softie, which focuses solely on Boniface’s family life and his campaign for government, Stateless also documents the other side of the fight against racism by following Gladys Felix, a member of the country’s anti-immigrant nationalist movement. We follow her as she spews racist rhetoric about the nature of Haitian immigrants and gaslights the experiences of Haitians she meets at a government built camp for sugar cane workers near the border. Whilst it feels odd to have their stories running alongside each other, it makes Stateless stand out. It allows us to see how present the threat is – not just to Rosa and her cousin Teofilo, but to all Haitian immigrants and Black Dominicans. Gladys adds a face (and very present reality) to the sometimes invisible state sanctioned racism of the Dominican Republic. She gives the audience something visual to root against.

If you’re looking for a documentary that examines racism in the Dominican Republic’s past and present through two women campaigning at either end of the political spectrum, this is the film you’re looking for.

Check our Pan African Film Festival 2021 page for more reviews coming out of the 29th edition of the festival.

Andorre (Andorra) – A Dystopian Vision of the Modern City

Andorre Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Andorre presents a dystopian vision of Andorra without dialogue in twenty minutes. The city is constructed with slow pan shots of glass buildings, duty free shops, and skiers backed by a futuristic electronic soundtrack. It’s a commentary on the vapidity of life in Andorra and a critique of the culture draining effects of globalization.

From: Andorra, Europe
Watch: IMDb, YouTube
Next: Androids Dream, Ascension, Notturno

Andorre – The Breakdown

This observational documentary short reminded me of Jessica Kingdon’s Ascension. Like in Ascension, Andorre features a lot of still and pan shots of everyday situations to create a picture of their subject country. In Andorre these pan shots focus on icons of globalization, such as duty-free shopping shelves (cigarettes, alcohol, candy) and fitness centers. These shots are book-ended by shots of people entering and leaving the country at the border, highlighting the transient status of the people in the city. Add in the lack of dialogue and there is no sign of local life or culture.

It’s not just local life that is absent, but human life is also overlooked in this short. Commercial products are the focus of most of the pan shots. We’re shown aisles of duty-free shopping (cigarettes, alcohol, candy, jewelry) complemented by commercials for the same type of products. Culture has been sucked away in this place and replaced by commercials.

The spacey-electronic soundtrack completes the short’s dystopian globalist portrayal of Andorra. It sounds eeire and futuristic, like a Bladerunner soundtrack composed by a knock-off Vangelis which sets the tone of the shots we’re shown. The only other sounds that we’re allowed to hear are the ambient sounds of cars, footsteps, and a few words from a tour guide. They’re always heard at a distance, behind the spacey-electronic soundtrack, making reality feel further away. The sound completes the short by adding a dystopian tint to the vapid globalist images we’re shown.

Conclusion

The director, Virgil Vernier, creates a dystopian vision of Andorra by editing together a range of everyday shots of the city alongside a futuristic electronic soundtrack. It’s simple, but very effective. If you’re interested in visiting Andorra, watch this before or after you go.

Three Shorts From SBIFF – Tribes, Kopitiam, Mochitsuki

Here’s a quick round up of three shorts from SBIFF.

1. Tribes – SBIFF Shorts

Tribes is a short film in which an African-American man, an Arab-American man, and a white man rob a subway car in New York. Problem is, they don’t want to rob people from their own race.

It’s a funny concept, but the tone is diluted. Tribes starts off seriously before breaking into a funny argument between two of the robbers. However, their hold of their hostages and the credibility of the film quickly dissipates when the passengers start adding to the robbers debate. It feels like they’re interrupting the film by adding unnecessary quips.

The rest of the credibility is seriously lost when one of the robbers starts siding with the hostages and starts a long monologue. Monologues can work, however, unfortunately this one is backed by a crescendo of uplifting music that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Pepsi commercial. It just makes it feel fake. It’s a good message but it feels way too preachy and fake like the ‘I voted for Obama’ dad in Get Out.

That being said, I believe this script is perfect for the stage. The setting, monologues, and arguments would fit it perfectly. Plus it would feel much more authentic without the music.

2. Kopitiam – SBIFF Shorts

Kopitiam is a short documentary about a coffee shop owner in NYC and her experience living as a Malaysian in the U.S.

It’s interesting to hear about how we live through food. The coffee shop owner raises some interesting points about how everyone has a cooking blueprint which allows cooks to live on after their death. Also how food and how you cook it is one way of passing down your culture – but you have to accept that your work will be adapted

However, I wish Kopitiam focused on one thing. You hear fragments about her shop, her dad, her partner, growing up, cooking, maintaining culture, but they’re only communicated in short sentences. It doesn’t give her enough time to truly share her life and experience. Because it’s quick, we don’t get enough time to identify with her and walk in her shoes.

3. Mochitsuki – SBIFF Shorts

Mochitsuki features a Japanese American family in California getting together for New Years to partake in Mochitsuki – an annual gathering to make mochi. Like Kopitiam it features an Asian American family using cooking and food as a way to pass on heritage, legacy, and maintain their link to Japanese culture.

However, in contrast to Kopitiam, Mochitsuki passes on tradition through their own family gathering, rather than by sharing it with anyone interested. It shows the eldest generation of the one family partaking in the ritual with the newest generation of the family – old and young working together to show the direct transmission of culture from generation to generation. It’s a testament to the strength of Japanese culture in this family that has survived through the adversity of internment. Maybe that shared hardship has created a stronger culture.

Mochitsuki is engaging because it focuses on one thing (the mochi making ceremony) and uses it to tell a brief story about this Japanese American family instead of trying to cover lots of different stories.

Zinder (Niger) – CPH: DOX Film Festival 2021

In the city of Zinder, Niger, in the heart of the Sahel, young people form gangs to deal with the lack of work and prospects. These groups called “Palais” come from the Kara Kara district, historically home to lepers and outcasts. Zinder-born director and activist Aicha Macky returns to her hometown to tell the story of this disenfranchised youth. She talks with these men, whose bodies and the territory in which they live are scarred by the violence that has passed through them – a pervasive violence – the roots of which go back to the time of colonisation.

Zinder focuses on Siniya Boy, a member of the “Palais Hitler”, who wants to set up a security company with his fellow bodybuilders; and Bawa, a former Palais leader who turned taxi driver, haunted by memories of the atrocities committed. They live off black market petrol, smuggled from the Nigerian border.

The first scene is intended to shock the western viewer. It’s not everyday you see black men flying Hitler’s name surrounded by swastikas. That’s exactly what the “Palais Hitler” gang does, however not for the reasons we’d expect. They ‘heard he was an invincible warrior from America,’ which if it were true would make him a pretty good choice for weightlifting gang’s mascot. The director doesn’t correct them on their oversight. Just as viewers from outside of Africa probably don’t know much about Niger, it’s weirdly refreshing to find out that these Nigeriens don’t know much about U.S/European history and aren’t stuck on the U.S./European news cycle.

They’re definitely not perfect people. The taxi driver recounts his memories along the lines of the Indonesian genocide perpetrators in The Look of Silence. He speaks of the terrible crimes he committed and the young girls he and his gang raped. However, they’re also portrayed reformatively in the present. In this sense, the characters are a bit more like the life imprisoned inmates in The Prison Within. We see them for the crimes they committed as well as the reformed person they are now. By entering their feared neighborhood and giving them space to talk, Aicha Macky humanizes them.

In the present, they’re still being imprisoned, but imprisoned for their identity: both their past life and where they come from. They’re labeled as criminals because they’re from the Kara Kara neighborhood. The scars they carry from their previous lives only help the police and others to mark them. They inhibit their ability to get medical treatment, move across the city in taxis, and find work. Just because they were born in a rough neighborhood.

The personal tone of the documentary shows the failure of society to recognize them as anything but criminals. Their fierce reputation conflicts with how the director portrays them. Through the unrestricted access to their stories, we see that they’re just regular people forming ‘gangs’ for community and friendship. They seem warm and eager to talk and tell their story. We don’t see any fights or violence on screen, just many close up scars from the past. The only current proof of crime are the palais members currently in jail, but even this is up for debate as they argue they’ve been rounded up for past crimes.

Aicha Macky’s Zinder is an intimate tribute to the youth of her country. It offers a hopeful portrayal of those marked by the neighborhood they were born into.