Day 7: A blissful something...

While waiting for Rose and Iraq in Fragments to begin, I realized, for the first time in the seven days that I have been attending the festival, that it's wonderful to realize that these storytellers are real human beings. Wonderful and terrifying. You sit in a theatre once or twice a week (if you're lucky) completely emotionally bound to whatever is happening on the screen, and yet you never have the opportunity to see the faces of the people responsible for drawing those emotions. The Gages, who made Our Land, Our Life, which screened yesterday, were sitting in front of me. I immediately recognized Hoku Uchiyama, the director of Rose, sitting several rows ahead of me in the space reserved for the directors and cinematographers.

I was particularly looking forward to watching Rose because of an incredible press packet New Times received about the film. It had several incredible photographs that seemed to spark everyone's interest. The film was as visually arresting as those still images. It expertly built tension, made me laugh a few times, and stretched convention in ways that really captured the audience's attention and curiosity. In fact, after the film was over Uchiyama discussed the fact that the various characters (seven or so) all seemed to come from different time periods. The main character, Travis, was dressed for the Dust Bowl migration, and Rose had a similar romantic, nostalgic, historical feel to her-both her clothing and her temperament. Travis' hickish brother had a decidedly '80's flair, and the characters reference television shows that cross decades as well. Yet, the audience somehow manages to notice all this without being distracted from the dramatic plotline. Rose was definitely a gust of fresh air-watching it actually felt like sitting outside in the woods as a gust of wind comes by-and so was writer/ director Uchiyama. He was affable, funny, and had a lot of interesting things to say about the film (as did the cinematographer). The theater-which happened to be full despite the fact that the film began at 4 on a Wednesday-chuckled and seemed to admire his comments a great deal.

The second film, Iraq in Fragments, was of a different nature. I really enjoy the title which alludes not just to the fact that the documentary is fragmented into three different narratives between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. But the documentary isn't half as fragmented as the country itself, where everyone is at war with one another over everything. The noisy sounds of chants, helicopters overhead, and spontaneous gunfire create a tumultuous portrait of a country that has broken into so many pieces, that nobody seems to know how to put it back together again. It was somewhat difficult for me to watch people, who I thought that I sympathized with, say and do things that revealed a value system completely foreign to my own. Watching this film, I realized that I don't know all that much about Iraq, but the more I know the more depressing and complicated the situation seems to be. Ignorance is bliss? Not so much. Maybe peace is bliss.

Tomorrow I'm off to see Ladylike, Marrying God, and Desert Dreamers at 2:30. Ladylike is about two neighbors with very different worldviews. Fatima is a devout Mulsim woman and Nikita is more of an exhibitionist. One can only assume that they'll learn a valuable life lesson about a shared sense of humanity. Marrying God is about one young girl's struggle to learn a prayer for her communion, and her later struggles to assister her older sister. Desert Dreamers is a fantastic documentary about artists and spiritualists that find themselves in the Mojave Desert making art and living their lives far outside the realms of what many people would consider normality. I had the opportunity to interview Director Frank Suffert (who will attend the screening for a Q&A session!) and he was incredible! He managed to capture what was different about these people without any sense of judgement or reserve. And he has a lot of insight about the challenges and rewards of independant filmmaking. Even though I have already seen this film, I don't want to miss the opportunity to talk to Frank in person. (For a copy of my interview with Frank pick up the March 1 issue of New Times)

Now I realize that 2:30 on a weekday is difficult to schedule around, but this festival comes around once a year and we SLObispans have a rare opportunity to pick the brains of people who love their work, make money from it (sometimes), and who are actually saying whatever they have to say about the world. It's not often you get to step out of a movie and engage in dialogue with the person who put it together. So, I'll see you at the movies...