Camden International Film Festival, an Oscar Campaign Hotspot, Unveils 2022 Lineup (EXCLUSIVE)
Variety
By Addie Morfoot
August 22, 2022
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/camden-international-film-festival-2022-1235346757/

The 18th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival, kicking off Sept. 15, will feature a handful of award-contending documentaries fresh off showings at Telluride and the Toronto film festivals. The Maine-based festival will unfold in a hybrid format, with both in-person events over a three-day period concluding Sept. 18, and online screenings available from Sept. 15 to Sept. 25 to audiences across North America.

This year’s CIFF highlights include the U.S. premiere of Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen’s Netflix release “In Her Hands,” which follows one of Afghanistan’s first female mayors during the months leading up to the Taliban takeover the country in 2021; Chris Smith’s “Sr.,” centered on the life and career of Robert Downey Sr. and his relationship to his son, Robert Downey Jr.; and Steve James’ “A Compassionate Spy,” about Manhattan Project physicist, Soviet spy and University of Chicago alum Theodore Hall. Each of the three featured documentaries will have made its world premiere before CIFF, at festivals in Toronto, Telluride and Venice, respectively.

The fest will also offer a special sneak preview of Patricio Guzman’s “My Imaginary Country,” which chronicles the recent protests in Chile in which millions took to the street to demand democracy, dignity, and a new constitution.

It is also teasing “a special secret screening” which will be the opening night film, with little additional information besides the fact that it is a new film by an Academy Award-winning director that will be in attendance.

Located in a small, remote village on the coast of Maine that is two hours from a major airport, CIFF has become an Oscar campaign hotspot in recent years. Last year, Oscar contending docus including “The Rescue” (Nat. Geo), “Procession” (Netflix), “Ascension” (MTV Documentaries), and “Flee” (Neon) all screened at CIFF, where the who’s who of the doc community — including Oscar winner Alex Gibney, Cinetic Media founder and principal John Sloss and former Sundance Institute CEO Keri Putnam – come to celebrate the fest.

“Much of our slate this year will be brand new to audiences in the U.S. or North America, and one of the greatest things we can do as a festival is to build buzz and momentum for (films) here,” says Ben Fowlie, executive and artistic director of the Points North Institute and founder of CIFF. “This means getting filmmakers to Maine for their in-person screenings and connecting them with attending industry and press.”

All told, the 2022 fest will include 34 features and 40 short films from over 41 countries. Over 60% of the entire program is directed or co-directed by BIPOC filmmakers; this is the sixth consecutive edition that the festival has reached gender parity within the program.

“This year’s program celebrates the diversity of voices and forms in documentary and cinematic nonfiction,” says Fowlie. “This year’s program emphasizes the international that represents the ‘I’ in CIFF and reminds us time and again of the limitless creative potential and potency of the documentary form.”

Alex Pritz’s “The Territory,” Reid Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There,” and Margaret Brown’s “Descendant” are among the Sundance 2022 docus screening at CIFF. Jason Kohn’s “Nothing Lasts Forever,” which premiered at the Berlin Intl. Film Festival in February and Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s “Subject,” which debuted at Tribeca Festival in June, are also part of this year’s lineup.

“We were drawn to films that were aesthetically and politically urgent, that transformed us and that transported us somewhere new as viewers,” says Fowlie. “We are always looking for films and filmmakers that are taking creative risks and pushing the boundaries of traditional cinematic language with bold, singular visions. For all of the selected work, it is important for us to have an understanding of the film and filmmaker’s relationships with the communities, contributors, and collaborators involved.”

A program of Points North Institute, CIFF will also present two world premieres: Mike Day’s “Cowboy Poets,” about American national cowboy poetry gatherings and “Lily Frances Henderson’s “This Much We Know,” about the investigation of Las Vegas teenager Levi Presley’s suicide, which leads to the story of a city with the highest suicide rate in the country, and a nation scrambling to bury decades of nuclear excess in a nearby mountain.

The festival will present seven North American premieres, including “Foragers” by Jumana Manna, recent Locarno premieres “It Is Night in America” by Ana Vaz and Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s “Matter Out of Place,” as well as “Polaris” by Ainara Vera, which premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

In honor of Diane Weyermann, the industry veteran and former chief content officer at Participant who died in October 2021, CIFF will screen several of the last films she executive produced, including James’ “A Compassionate Spy,’ Geeta Gandbhir and Sam Pollard’s “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power” and Margaret Brown’s “Descendant.”

For the third consecutive year, CIFF will present its filmmaker solidarity fund. The fund will provide $300 honoraria to all feature and short filmmaking teams participating in the virtual festival. This year also marks the return of in-person panels and masterclasses through the festival’s Points North Forum program, which will feature conversations around the ethics of film financing, an exploration of experimental filmmaking about the climate, a masterclass led by veteran editor Maya Daisy Hawke and a special performance lecture on sensorial cinema led by award-winning Iranian artist Maryam Tafakory.

The forum program will conclude with a “town hall” gathering of the documentary community following the screening of “Subject,” which explores the life-altering experience of documenting one’s life on screen through the participants of five acclaimed docus.

The 2022 festival will run concurrently with Points North Artist Programs, a fellowship that supports early- and mid-career filmmakers. This year 21 projects will be supported through four fellowship programs.

A complete list of the program’s features and short can be found below.

Features Program

“5 Dreamers and the Horse”
“A Compassionate Spy”
“After Sherman”
“All Of Our Heartbeats Are Connected Through Exploding Stars”
“All That Breathes”
“Burial”
“Cowboy Poets”
“Crows Are White”
“Day After… “
“Descendant”
“Detours”
“Dos Estaciones”
“Foragers”
“Geographies of Solitude”
“Herbaria”
“I Didn’t See You There”
“In Her Hands”
“It Is Night in America”
“Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power”
“Matter Out of Place”
“My Imaginary Country”
“Nothing Lasts Forever”
“Polaris”
“Rewind & Play”
“SR.”
“Subject”
“Terranova”
“The Afterlight”
“The Territory”
“This Much We Know”
“What We Leave Behind”

Shorts Program

“Aralkum”
“The Ark”
“The Artists”
“Belongings”
“Bigger on the Inside”
“Brave”
“Call Me Jonathan”
“Congress of Idling Persons”
“Constant”
“Dapaan”
“Deerfoot of the Diamond”
“Echolocation”
“Everything Wrong and Nowhere to Go”
“Fire in the Sea”
“The Family Statement”
“The Flagmakers”
“Irani Bag”
“La Frontiere”
“Handbook”
“Life Without Dreams”
“Lungta”
“Masks”
“Moune O”
“Murmurs of the Jungle”
“My Courtyard”
“Nazarbazi”
“One Survives by Hiding”
“Pacman”
“Paradiso”
“Seasick”
“Solastalgia”
“Somebody’s Hero”
“The Sower of Stars”
“Subtotals”
“Swerve”
“Unsinkable Ship”
“Weckuwapok”
“Weckuwapasihit”
“When the LAPD Blows Up Your Neighborhood”

Continuous Movement in a Suddenly Still World: Lynne Sachs’ “Swerve”
Kinoscope
by Soham Gadre
August 8, 2022
https://read.kinoscope.org/2022/08/08/continuous-movement-in-a-suddenly-still-world-lynne-sachs-swerve/

I can’t say I’m all that well versed in interpreting the structural and tonal elements of poetry. But when they’re distilled through the formal elements of cinema, it becomes more understandable to me. Lynne Sachs’ “Swerve” (2022) is heavily informed and inspired by the poetry of Filipino immigrant and former Queens-resident Paolo Javier, particularly those in his book O.B.B. (Original Brown Boy). Mixing the free-flowing and expressionistic words of Javier with several characters hanging around food hall stalls, a park, and basketball courts, Sachs gives a strangely hypnotic look at a time during the pandemic when people were okay with going outside and being among others but still encased in a bubble with their own thoughts.

The seven-minute experimental film begins in the Hong Kong Food Court in Elmhurst, Queens. One character (played by Inney Prakash) converses with a kid about his favorite school activities. He then goes around looking at the offerings at the stalls and recites lines from Javier’s poems. Another character (played by Jeff Preiss) reads more lines while sitting on a bench in the Moore Homestead Playground, located across the street from the food court. Others (played by ray ferriera, Emmy Catedral, and Juliana Sass) converse in various places within this small enclave during the film. This patch of Queens is like a microcosm of the world. All the dialogue recited in the film, both in Tagalog and English, serves a basis for exploring the way that human connection changed because of the pandemic.

Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’ The Tsugua Diaries (2021), another wonderful experimental non-fiction made during the pandemic, examined the passage of time in isolation, with a cast and crew maintaining a secluded area that felt detached from the rest of the world. However, the characters in “Swerve”are surrounded by people, and while the culture of Queens remains a unique part of the film and Javier’s poetry, the necessary precautions of the pandemic are everywhere and instantly, globally recognizable. Sachs’ camera, in motion constantly, rolls around, tracks, and dollies to and from its characters. The liveliness of the park and the empty seats at a restaurant offer a glimpse of a transitory period in which the pandemic is ongoing, but the inherent need for other people, for some joy, was bringing life back to Elmhurst.

In “Swerve,” Sachs separates her depiction of the pandemic from other pandemic-related films by considering how our communication with one another shifted in isolation, presenting a new challenge when we went back to socializing. The poetry — recited both on camera and as voiceover — metaphorically stands in for the characters’ internal monologues. Thoughts within our own minds become the new formal ways of keeping a conversation going. When communication is severed for so long, when dialogue doesn’t happen as naturally or as organically anymore, words become puzzles, swerving in our heads until we can make sense of them again. In the film, characters are often observing other people without talking to them. In turn, when a character recites dialogue aloud, others observe them on the peripheries. We hear what these characters have to say, but behind the masks that define the times, we don’t actually see them talking to each other.

Likewise, the film focuses on the two things many of us found solace in to replace our lack of contact with others — art and food. Characters write, eat, hang out, and think through words in poems. To combine these universal elements of social living with the distinct rooted identity of Javier’s poetry is a fascinating experiment. To see the words of a Filipino artist recited by people of different backgrounds makes one consider what being part of the community in Queens means. The film’s formal choices combine two or more elements into one — Tagalog and English language, dialogue and voiceover, conventions of documentary and experimental filmmaking, super 8mm film and digital. At its seams, “Swerve”tries to flow as freely as the writing that inspires it. It is a hard film to grasp on just one watch and it means a lot for a film, in such a short amount of time, to find its way to make sense of jumbled words and new rules of the world we live in using our love for art, food, and identity as guiding stars.

“Swerve” premiered at the 2022 BAMcinemaFest.

QUEENS ON SCREEN: SWERVE / ENTRE NOS
This Week In New York
By Mark Rifkin
July 13, 2022
https://twi-ny.com/2022/07/13/queens-on-screen-swerve-entre-nos/

ENTRE NOS (Paola Mendoza & Gloria La Morte, 2009) / SWERVE (Lynne Sachs, 2022)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, July 15, 7:15, and Sunday, July 17, 1:30, $15
718-777-6800
movingimage.us

The Astoria-based Museum of the Moving Image’s monthly “Queens on Screen” series — which is not about royalty or LGBTQIA+ issues but comprises films set in one of the most diverse areas on the planet — continues July 15 and 17 with two works set in the borough. Up first is Lynne Sachs’s seven-minute Swerve, in which artist and curator Emmy Catedral, blaqlatinx multidisciplinary artist ray ferreira, director and cinematographer Jeff Preiss, film curator and programmer Inney Prakash, and actor Juliana Sass recite excerpts from Pilipinx poet Paolo Javier’s O.B.B. (Nightboat, November 2021, $19.95).

Illustrated by Alex Tarampi and Ernest Concepcion, the book, which stands for Original Brown Boy, consists of such sections as “Aren’t You a Mess,” “Goldfish Kisses,” “Restrained by Time,” and “Last Gasp.” New Yorkers Catedral, ferreira, Preiss, Prakash, and Sass share Javier’s words as they wander around Moore Homestead Playground and Elmhurst’s HK Food Court. “The words each operate on their own swerve, from music that would play in the background and from overheard conversation outside my window, on the subway, at the local Korean deli,” Javier says at the beginning, writing in a notebook.

The film was shot in one day in August 2021, during the Delta wave of Covid-19, so many people are wearing masks, and the food court is nearly empty; when Prakash orders, a plastic sheet separates him from the employee. The performers recite the poems as if engaging in free-flowing speech; words occasionally appear on the screen, including “free emptiness,” “unknown thoroughfare,” and “hum your savage cabbage leaf.”

Experimental documentarian Sachs (Film About a Father Who, Investigation of a Flame), who was the subject of a career retrospective at MoMI last year, captures the unique rhythm of both Javier’s language and the language of Queens; Javier and Sachs will be at the museum to discuss the film after the July 15 screening.

Swerve will be followed by Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte’s Entre Nos, a deeply personal semiautobiographical story in which Mendoza stars as a Colombian immigrant whose husband deserts her, leaving her to raise two children in Queens. The film is shot by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young (Arrival, Selma), who makes the borough its own character.

In a director’s note, Mendoza explains, “Throughout my childhood my mother worked countless double-shifts at the toilet bowl cleaners business and flipping burgers at local fast food restaurants near me. We never talked about the roaches in the house or the yearning to see our family back in the country and culture of Colombia. Instead we had to learn to smile through the grit, the trial of tears, and dealing with heartache. As the years passed, I came to a sublime new realization that our story was not unique. Thousands of immigrant mothers, for hundreds of years, have endured problems when trying to adapt to their new immigration in the USA. My mother, like those before her, have overcome all that remains for exactly the same reason, to build the foundation for a better life for their children.”