Greetings from Fowler's in thunderstorm-beseiged downtown Durham, NC. It's day two of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and the cinetrix just met Walter Mosely. Nice guy. Cool specs. It seems to be the sort of thing that happens here. Start talking with someone, and another person wanders up, and sometimes that person just happens to be a renowned writer. Sure, why not? Just in case one needed a reminder that truth is stranger than fiction.
Mosely is on hand as one of the originators of the special curated program of films, "Why War?", which presents docs both new and old that examine the causes of war in the hopes of moving closer to peace.
War today is often unannounced, unofficial and indefinite. Stateless wars against a shifting backdrop of groups and countries have ushered in a new age of terror. The Internet hosts daily killings, Western journalists who are ostensibly afforded the rights of free speech are often asked to assume the role of cheerleader and cultural producers suffer threats to their economic and, at times, physical well-being. Often they simply succumb to self-censorship. It is a new face of war, deserving of new modes of consideration.
To that end, in addition to the films in the program, Mosely has funded two "Seeds of Change" awards for filmmakers "who lay bare the seeds and mechanisms that create war," and he and Ariel Dorfman will engage in a discussion following a screening of 1973's The Battle of Chile (Part 2): The Coup d'Etat on Sunday.
Driving here yesterday, I passed a billboard on I-85 that boasted that North Carolina was the most military-friendly state in the nation, which makes the slate of war docs hit harder, sting more, somehow. War is very much with us. One quick example: The first words you hear in Occupation: Dreamland, a doc that aspires to the Sam Fuller model of representing the reality of war [machine-gunning the audience], is a soldier saying "If you had told me I would end up in the army, I'd have said 'fuck you.' I was playing in a death metal band." Yeah, it's funny, but it's also heartbreaking.
Even blacker than death metal is the mordant humor of Marie Colvin, the cinetrix's new crush. Colvin, a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, is one of five female war reporters in doc-darling Barbara Kopple's newest film, the opening night selection [and world premiere] Bearing Witness. Holy shit, is Colvin badass. The woman lost an eye to grenade shrapnel and sports the hottest eyepatch ever [and a gorgeous pedicure visible from the second balacony during the post-film Q&A last night]. The film deserves my better-rested prose efforts: a full review TK, but the short version is see this film.
It's not all doom and gloom here in Realitywood. The cinetrix loved the sly 8-minute short Getting Through to the President, which screened earlier this afternoon. The premise couldn't be simpler: For three days last May, the filmmakers invited random pedestrians in Washington Square Park to use a payphone to call the distinctly not tollfree "comment line" at the White House. Folks, not surprisingly, had a lot on their minds and used their calls to comment on the war, gay marriage, choice, and even offer a compliment or two. The humor lies in the small moments: a chirping recording announces "Your call is very important to the president"; a man urges the president to stop doing things just to prove himself to his father; the operator breaks in to ask for another quarter.
Chatting with Getting Through producer Haskell King at the criminally early press/filmmakers breakfast this morning, I couldn't help but express surprise that they'd even been able to find a functioning set of three payphones in lower Manhattan, which certainly hasn't been my experience. Here's what you don't see: Phones broke during shooting, so the filmmakers had to call Verizon to get 'em serviced. Then they managed to fill the phones with quarters, which meant the phone company had to come back to empty them. All told, they went through about $350 in quarters. That's a lot of PAs standing in line at area bank branches.
Oh, yeah, and I asked. None of the "Smoke? Smoke?" guys in the park placed a call during filming. But you can, right now: 202 456 1111. Operators are standing by.
Longer reviews of Mondovino [wizened Mediterranean vinters are good; Mondavi is evil], Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque ["God help anyone who needs subtitles to follow Keaton."], and Bearing Witness, plus much much more, all TK.
