{"id":16165,"date":"2021-03-22T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-22T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=16165"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:16:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:16:56","slug":"crooked-marquees-sxsw-documentary-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/crooked-marquees-sxsw-documentary-diary\/","title":{"rendered":"Crooked Marquee’s SXSW Documentary Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019d like to make a confession, if I may: the older I get, and the more time I spend at film festivals, the more I find myself gravitating towards documentaries. It\u2019s not that I\u2019m not open to the possibility of discovering a richly gifted narrative filmmaker in the festival setting \u2013 it\u2019s happened more times than I can count. But when your time and energy is precious, if it comes down to the choice between an unknown entity and a film about something you\u2019re already interested in, I go with the latter every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s proven especially true in the film festivals of the pandemic, which have all had a sense \u2013 deserved or not \u2013 of being programmed with the best of what they could get, rather than the best of what\u2019s out there. To it more plainly, if I were a filmmaker with a surefire indie hit on my hands, I might just wait a few more months to have the full film festival experience (travel, packed theatrical screening, big dumb party afterwards) than debut it in a \u201cfrom home\u201d capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of which is the fault of SXSW, the festival that has, I would argue, suffered the worst from covid-19 \u2013 this is the second consecutive year that they\u2019ve had to forgo an in-person get-together in Austin, Texas, and a huge part of the draw of that festival has always been its location (and the many charms therein). But when I looked over the slate, most of what was of interest to me was in the non-fiction sections, so I decided to focus on four of those film, each of which fill a particular niche in contemporary documentary filmmaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In terms of the traditions of the medium, we tend to think first of documentaries as custodians of history, but Dear Mr. Brody<\/em><\/strong> is not, by most definitions, a traditional documentary. Its director is Keith Maitland, who helmed the groundbreaking doc\/animation hybrid Tower<\/em>; here, he tells the story of Michael James Brody, the 21-year-old \u201chippie millionaire\u201d and heir to a margarine fortune who captured the American imagination for about a week in 1970 when he promised to give away all his money, \u201cbecause people need it more than I do.\u201d All you had to do, he said, was send him a letter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So people did. Boy, did they ever. They sent boxes and boxes of letters, most of which went unopened, and there\u2019s some cruelty there \u2013 because people poured out their hearts, told their darkest secrets, and were roundly ignored. The filmmakers seek out some of those letter-writers, and their surviving relatives, allowing their stories to be told at long last, which means the film is part history, part investigation, and part analysis. And the last element is what really makes it special \u2013 because it would be easy to paint Brody as a monster for raising this kind of hope and dashing it. But he had problems of his own, and Dear Mr. Brody <\/em>is, in many ways, a story of tragedy for everyone involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some documentaries are interested in more recent history, often at the service of a political agenda, which brings us to United States vs. Reality Winner<\/em><\/strong>, a detailed dive into the June 2017 arrest and subsequent incarceration of the intelligence contractor who leaked sensitive documents about Russian interference into the 2016 elections. The Trump years were such a flurry of news and \u201cfake news\u201d and scandals and bullshit that this story kind of appeared and disappeared; here, it\u2019s given the proper amount of breathing room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Director Sonia Kennebeck is undoubtedly on her subject\u2019s side, and that sympathy presumably helped her gain access to Winner\u2019s parents, who become the film\u2019s primary onscreen protagonists. But it\u2019s also hard not to be her side, particularly when the case is made so persuasively, with the help of other interviewed whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake. (The picture is also merciless in its portraiture of The Intercept, whose mishandling of the leaked documents lead directly to Winner\u2019s arrest.) We get plenty of details on her biography and into the events of her leaked intelligence, but Kennebeck\u2019s wisest choice is to keep circling back to the chilling audio of her lengthy interrogation by the FBI. We hear, quite clearly, a scared young woman who thought she was doing right by her country. There but for the grace of God, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Oxy Kingpins<\/em><\/strong> is of a different non-fiction ilk: the contemporary issues documentary, diving into a topic of current national interest with more depth than the typical nightly news report allows. Here, that topic is the opiod crisis, and director Brendan Fitzgerald adopts a multi-pronged approach, profiling a former dealer, a former user, the attorney at the head of a class action lawsuit, and his investigator, among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with contemporary issues documentaries is that, too often, you could get as much (or more) of the information in a well-researched and well-written magazine feature. Fitzgerald dodges that trap here by throwing in his lot with these particular people, colorful characters all \u2013 particularly (and surprisingly) the lawyer, who is a real mad-dog type. At 82 minutes, The Oxy Kingpins<\/em> still feels a little too slim; I keep seeing docu-series that should just be a movie, but here\u2019s a movie that should be a docu-series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWho am I, really?\u201d That\u2019s the question Paul Fronczak asks early in The Lost Sons<\/em><\/strong>, the latest example of the mystery documentary \u2013 films like Three Identical Strangers<\/em>, Tell Me Who I Am<\/em>, and the contemporary king of the sub-genre, Dear Zachary<\/em>, which immerse us in investigations and plot twists and long-held secrets. These films have their detractors, many of them vocal, who object to how they often use real-life tragedies \u2013 withholding information to provide shock turns in the narrative. I\u2019m fine with that, morally and aesthetically; your mileage may vary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story at its heart is every parents nightmare: the 1964 kidnapping of baby Paul from a Chicago hospital, not long after his birth. More than a year later, he was found half a country away \u2013 or was he? Director Ursula MacFarlane uses archival footage, tasteful reenactments, and contemporary interviews to bring his very cold case to vivid life, but she\u2019s ultimately less interested in the ins and outs of the DNA than the event\u2019s interpersonal toll. It\u2019s a quiet tragedy, scary and sad, brought to a fascinating and emotional conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what, then, did I learn from the documentaries of SXSW? Mostly, what I\u2019ve learned from all of these virtual festivals: I\u2019m ready to watch movies in a big room, on a big screen, with a bunch of strangers. Hopefully that\u2019s not too far away. Fingers crossed. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A look at four of the documentaries of #SXSW \u2013 and what they tell us about current trends in non-fiction film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":16168,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419],"class_list":["post-16165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22543,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16165\/revisions\/22543"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}