One thing you can say for film theatres: when the lights go down, theyre one of the few places left where its considered uncool to text, tweet, call, fidget or fumble with gadgetsalthough habitual offenders still need reminding. A movie ticket comes with an unspoken agreement: you will sit quietly in the darkness for an unbroken period of 90 minutes or more, as quiet as a church mouse and as still as Han Solo dipped in carbonite.
Personally, I find it a good meditative practice to sit still and shut up while the silver screen works its magic or mundanity on me, as the case may be. I also appreciate the rare opportunity to penetrate real-world places I am unlikely ever to see on my own. Theres no better place and time for this form of budget travel than the annual Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»International Film Festival, with its selections of hundreds of films from dozens of countries. Based on media screenings, here are some recommendations for a few of the nonfiction films on view now to Oct. 12.
Bay of All Saints
This powerful film takes the viewer to Brazil and inside Bahias palafitas: ramshackle huts suspended on stilts over a toxic, trash-filled bay. Over a three-year period, bitterness and laughter play across the residents faces like shadow and light, as they try to cobble together better futures from impossible circumstances.
The Flat
After his 98-year-old grandmother passes away, Arnon Goldfinger finds troubling letters and clippings in her Tel Aviv apartment. The amazed filmmaker discovers his Jewish grandparents maintained a warm friendship with a high-level Nazi official in Berlin, both before and after the Holocaust. A standout film about the capacity of hearts and minds to erase, skew, or redact unwelcome information.
Were Not Broke
Theres actually money out there to finance social programs in the U.S.its just that trillions owed to taxpayers are held in offshore accounts by deadbeat corporations. This documentary follows Uncut, a community of U.S. activists attempting to raise public awareness of the high level shakedown of the underclass.
Bitter Seeds
What accounts for the tens of thousands of suicides by farmers in India over the past 10 years? Literally a grassroots film, Bitter Seeds traces a young journalists efforts to document answers from people in her area. She discovers that poverty-stricken cotton farmers are threatened every season by a perfect storm of unpredictable weather, loan sharking, fact-fudging GMO seed hawkers and costly agribiz products. Driven into despair and debt, many of the farmers mortgage the family property and escape the consequences by drinking Monsanto pesticide. A disturbing portrait emerges of the gene-splicing monopoly and its partner companies in India.
Bottled Life
Whenever I see joggers outfitted with their multiple bottles of water, a Robin Williams line comes to mind: Evian is just naïve spelled backwards. Swiss-based Nestle, owner of dozens of bottled water brands, is given the Michael Moore treatment by a film crew cut off from interviews and access to the CEO and his underlings.
Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth
Opening with words from the Mayan creation myth in the Popul Vuh, this beautifully shot film follows six indigenous people in Mexico and Guatemala as they confront a stark present while still healing from a traumatic past. One of them, a young Mayan studying to be a traditional healer, stands at the ruins of Palenque and muses how over 1,000 years ago the Mayan civilization collapsed at its height, with a wealthy elite living in magnificent palaces far removed from exploited peasants.
Leviathan and The Great Northwest
One thing Ive learned about overlong pans of ho-hum horizons in film; its often a sign the filmmaker has little to say and a whole lot of time to say it in. If youre about to build a film without much plot or characterization, everything comes down to cinematography, àla Ron Frickes Baraka or Terrence Malicks The Tree of Life.
Unfortunately, two well-intended misfiresone about Atlantic fishing, the other about a cross-state road trip recreated from a thrift shop scrapbookdont even have the dreamy virtues of REM sleep. If you can get past the cattle-on-the-highway scene in the latter film (I didnt) you truly deserve the filmgoers medal of patience.
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