by Peter Wong on October 14, 2024
In Payal Kapadia’s radiant Cannes Grand Prix Award-winning “All We Imagine As Light,” three women navigate life in modern-day Mumbai. Lonely senior nurse Prabha has an absent husband working in Germany. Roommate and younger nurse Anu has a semi-secret romance with a Muslim boy. Cook Parvati faces the prospect of losing her home to a greedhead developer. Events cause these women to grow and change as people, including discovering traditions aren’t as helpful in life as expected.
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Was it living under apartheid, pigeonholing as the “racism photographer,” or something else that permanently shadowed the life and career of talented South African photographer Ernest Cole? Raoul Peck’s newest documentary “Ernest Cole: Lost And Found” attempts to answer these questions using Cole’s own words (voiced by Lakeith Stanfield) and Cole’s extraordinary photographs. Can these two sources explain why Cole lived a life of precarity or how 60,000 of Cole’s negatives were found in a Swedish bank safe?
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Peck’s newest film is showing as part of this year’s SFFILM’s Doc Stories film series. The director had appeared at a previous documentary film event with his seminal James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.”
Aside from Peck’s Baldwin documentary, over the years of its existence Doc Stories has shown such powerful films as Matthew Heineman’s “The First Wave,” Ben Proudfoot’s “Almost Famous: The Queen Of Basketball,” and Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ “The Mission.” This year, Doc Stories presents its 10th program from October 17-20, 2024 at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco.
One of the films shown at the very first Doc Stories series was Amy Berg’s “Janis: Little Girl Blue.” This electrifying biopic of rock legend Janis Joplin mixed together the late musician’s personal letters (read by Cat Power), stories from the likes of Pink and Melissa Etheridge, and footage from Joplin’s concerts and studio sessions. This screening is free, but tickets must be requested.
Opening Night honors goes to “One To One: John & Yoko” from directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards. The film follows post-Beatles breakup John Lennon and Yoko Ono as they undergo both a spiritual awakening and a political radicalization during the course of the early 1970s. Aside from personal phone recordings and home video, the film will mix in footage from the 1972 full-length charity concert Lennon and Ono put on for the children of Willowbrook Institution.
When Proudfoot’s Academy Award-winning short film was shown at Doc Stories, it was as part of the New York Times Op-Docs shorts block. This year’s package of shorts includes: Elahe Esmaili’s “A Move” (what results when the film’s Iranian director appears at a family gathering sans hijab), Lynne Sachs’ “Contractions” (a timely and poetic expression of grief and dismay made by reproductive rights activists during the overturning of Roe v. Wade), and Raquel Sancinetti’s animated “Madeleine” (the titular old woman’s refusal to leave her retirement home doesn’t stop her decades-younger companion Raquel from finding a creative way to take the older woman on the journey of a lifetime).
Doc Stories’ other short film block is called “The Persistence Of Dreams.” It includes such shorts as Mona Xia and Erin Ramirez’ “Kowloon!” (would you believe America’s largest Chinese restaurant is located in…Saugus, Massachusetts), Amelie Hardy’s “Hello Stranger” (while her clothes are drying at a local Nova Scotia laundromat, Cooper shares the story of her gender affirmation journey), and Kyle Thrash and Ben Proudfoot’s “The Turnaround” (the story of how Philadelphia Phillies superfan Jon McCann’s plan to turn things around for his beloved baseball team became the stuff of legend).
A different kind of institution saving is chronicled in Elizabeth Lo’s “Mistress Dispeller.” It follows Wang Zhenxi (aka Teacher Wang), a woman who’s part of a growing Chinese industry dedicated to repairing failing marriages. But if Wang’s tactics are anything to go by, her methods raise plenty of ethical red flags. The case followed here involves an errant husband and his mistress, and how Wang manipulates the extramarital lovers to end their affair.
Benjamin Ree’s film “The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin” begins with a different sort of ending: the death of online gamer Mats Steen from a rare muscular disease. But when Steen’s grieving parents Robert and Trude accessed their late son’s blog posts, they discovered that their son didn’t lead a lonely life playing the online game “World Of Warcraft.” Mats was the avatar known as Ibelin, and he wound up forging unexpected bonds with both fellow gamers within the game and beyond.
A different sort of teamwork with far different stakes gets chronicled in Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s “Union.” This documentary follows the efforts of aspiring rapper Chris Smalls to convince the workers at an Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island to join the Amazon Labor Union. Motivational speeches and offers of free marijuana may sound like dubious ways of getting workers to sign up. But the Amazon bosses are notoriously anti-union to the point of using anti-organizing tactics to stop the union. So all’s fair in love and worker relations.
A far more intractable conflict is depicted in the Berlin Film Festival award-winner “No Other Land.” Made by a Palestinian-Israeli filmmaker collective (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor), the film documents the struggle over several years by Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta to prevent the IDF from evicting them and seizing the land for a “training ground” (aka land to be given to Jewish settlers). This film promises to be a hot ticket partly thanks to current interest in Israeli-Palestinian friction. Also, no US distributor has as yet stepped forward to pick up the film for mass distribution.
Speaking of taboo subjects, talking about climate change has led to actual death threats against meteorologists reporting on the subject. In hopes of digging past the heated rhetoric and get back to “what happened and why,” “The White House Effect” from local filmmakers Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos, and Jon Shenk exhume the decades of failed U.S. policy that led in a way to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The filmmakers show why repeated policy failures on fighting climate change effects can’t be blamed solely on greedhead polluters. There was political maneuvering involved, as seen in what happened to Jimmy Carter’s environmental agenda and George H.W. Bush’s initial support for the EPA.
A country’s government may be a big fan of building grandiose architectural projects. But as Victor Kossakovsky’s new essay film “Architecton” shows, building grandiose physical structures has been a continual human obsession over the centuries of humanity’s existence. Will humanity ultimately pay a price for attempting to satisfy its unending urges to build bigger and allegedly better?
A person who paid a different sort of price is Sara Jane Moore, who was imprisoned for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Filmmaker Robinson Devor wanted to tell Moore’s story on film. However, the former assassin would agree to an interview only if she was the only person filmed. Devor agreed to Moore’s terms but turned these limitations into Doc Stories’ Closing Night Film “Suburban Fury.” The viewer understands from the start that Moore is an unreliable narrator. But figuring out what parts of Moore’s story are true and which fable is made harder by an inability to verify her story. Was Moore actually an FBI informant whose job was gaining the confidence of political radicals?
(“All We Imagine As Light” screened as part of Mill Valley Film Festival 47. It next screens at 3:00 PM on October 19, 2024 as part of the Third I Film Festival at the Roxie Theatre (3117-16th Street, SF). Following that screening, it will begin a theatrical run on November 22, 2024 at the Roxie Theatre.
(“Ernest Cole: Lost And Found” screens at 11:00 AM on October 19, 2024 as part of SFFILM’s “Doc Stories 10” at the Vogue Theater (3290 Sacramento Street, SF.))
