The Columbia, Mo.-based True/False documentary festival returned earlier this month as a live festival, but modified and primarily outdoors. For out-of-towners like me, they offered a virtual version of their offerings, albeit with a limited selection of features and shorts. On the plus side, they thoughtfully included a large to-go box for their "teleporters," filled with native goodies and film-theme treats. Here's the second batch of capsules from the experience.
"This Rain Will Never Stop": With its stirring black and white compositions, and subtly evocative use of sound -- both ambient and orchestral -- Alina Gorlova's film is beguiling to behold, and rich in atmospherics, even if its throughline, concerning a large Syrian family displaced by their country's ongoing civil war, and scattered between Ukraine, Germany, and a Kurdish section of Iraq, is more than a little hard to follow.
For the most part, we stick with a young man named Andriy living in Ukraine and working for the Red Cross, trying to help others who are suffering similar misfortunes from military geopolitics. Through the course of things, he gets to visit different factions of his family living in different parts of the world, eventually going to Iraq, near the Syrian border, where his father, a physical therapist, is staying with some other members of the family. Overwhelmed with emotion -- it must be said, the Suleymans are a powerfully loving group: One only has to watch the tight, tearful grip Andriy's mother and father have on their son, at last returned to them after seven years, to get a sense of just how emotionally difficult their diaspora has been -- Andriy's parents only get to enjoy their son's company for a short while before his other responsibilities with the Red Cross call him away.
It is shortly thereafter, in a part of the story that is made more confusing by the number of relatives who look similar to one another, that a death occurs, allowing Andriy, at last, to set foot on his home soil once again. Gorlova mixes in striking imagery -- the film opens with a drone shot of what appears to be the dusty, lifeless hills of a distant planet, before eventually revealing the series of refineries and smokestacks in the not-terribly-distant background, through the smoky haze of industry, and the director returns again and again to flashes of those hills as the film progresses -- some of which works on a metaphoric level that is both evocative and unclear, until, in a final visual flourish, the film offers a montage of gatherings, from a pride parade in Germany, and a military presentation in Ukraine, to an earlier scene with the family celebrating a wedding with a circle dance, cutting back and forth in increasing pace until, at last, everything becomes a whirled blur of motion and space, blending all these lives, and, I expect, all of ours, into a single, ungainly stream of indistinguishable visual noise.
Teleported Bonus: Two treats for this one: a bag of Derby Chips (Syrian potato chips, essentially); and a small box of Turkish Delight, a sugary, slightly soft square of a confection.
"Delphine's Prayers": The second film on the T/F Teleported docket from Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam is quite obviously connected to the first. In 2018's "Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman," the director returned home to the small village she grew up in after seven years to reunite with her mother and aunts who raised her. In this film Mbakam is again behind the lens, teasing out the story of a Cameroonian woman's life, but the subject of this gentle interrogation is her friend, Delphine, and the series of interviews all take place in a small, cozily cluttered bedroom in Belgium, the country they both emigrated to after leaving their native land.
At times, Delphine, at once a jumble of fierce, imploring, genial, and sardonic, tells the nightmarish story of her childhood, filled with abandonment, heartbreak, suffering, and forced prostitution, with a slightly detatched air, as if she were recounting someone else's horrors; other times, she's furious, or traumatized, or barely audible. Speaking in a pidgin of French and English, and switching back and forth sometimes within the same sentence, Delphine's story comes out in jagged rambles, which are often heartbreaking. Raped as a 13-year-old, and thrown out of the house by her father after the attack for being a "slut"; accused of killing her beloved niece by her sister, who left the young girl in her care, sick with malaria, and no money to take care of her properly; forced by circumstance into prostitution before her 15th birthday, and now living in Belgium in a loveless marriage, with several kids in tow. For all the drama and turmoil of Delphine's story, however, the tone of the film is never preachy or obvious. Near the end, as the poor woman breaks down in tears, imploring God to give her another chance at a life that actually makes her happy, Mbakam's camera slowly pans away from the sobbing woman and turns toward the opposite wall, where framed photos of Delphine's estranged family members hang on the wall. The fact that she's been through so much and is still here, still fighting, and hoping for something better is a testament to her, of course, but it's also a deft commentary on the brutal legacy of a culture whose treatment of women can be charitably referred to as deplorable.
Teleported Bonus: Along with "The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman," a bag of chin chin, a highly craveable West African snack.
"The Grocer's Son, the Mayor, the Village and the World": Despite the length of the title, this roughly two-hour doc from Claire Simon is actually much distilled from her 2017 nine-hour opus, "The Village," from which it came.
In both cases, the material is culled from an exhaustive supply of footage shot in the small French hamlet of Lussas in the southern growing region of the country. Amid the vineyards (including the one owned by the town's mayor), and the fruit trees, there is also the "Documentary Village," the vision of a cinematic hub tirelessly espoused by cinephile and Lussas native Jean-Marie Barbe. It involves not only the existing annual documentary festival, but also a new subscription streaming platform, Tenk, and an elaborate production facility, L'imaginaire, designed to be a post-production house for documentarians all over France.
It's the sort of project that requires an enormous amount of effort dealing with municipal politics, endless meetings with potential investors, and a huge amount of finessing of fragile egos -- artistic and financial. In short, a daunting possibility, but one that the indomitable Barbe, and his dedicated team, weather with grace, humor and willpower.
Simon's film works a bit like a Frederick Wiseman film, going from roundtable powerpoint meetings, and a pear orchid, to the construction zone where the new facility is being built. At this length, we get less of the personal stories of all but Barbe, the one member of the team actually born and raised in the village itself, whose family grocery was converted to team offices, but every scene drips with humanity (even the meetings are shot and edited so as to be clarifying, not stupefying), and the sense of the place, from its pretty winding main street, to its lush growing fields, pours out of the frame. Simon won the 2017 True Vision award for the original cut of the film, and it's pretty easy to see why the founders of True/False might have connected pretty directly with the film's message of perseverance and documentary love.
Teleported Bonus: A range of delectables, each inspired by the Ardeche region of France, including a small bottle of balsamic vinegar and a packet of heirloom tomato seeds.
"From the Wild Sea": Amid much fanfare, a group of swans is released from a rehab facility. The elegant birds saunter past an adoring crowd, protected by a barrier on each side of their walkway. As a group, they slip back into the water and head out. The next shot in Robin Petre's subtle-but-damning film shows the birds making their way out to open sea, in front of a backdrop of distant refineries, with a giant cargo liner moving in the opposite direction right past them. Anything but a polemic, the film never says a word, but shows the increasingly catastrophic effects of mankind's assault on the environment on the vulnerable creatures in the ocean.
Cut by propellers, covered in crude oil, slammed into by ocean cruisers, filled with plastic refuse, and, of course, with their habitat permanently altered by climate change, sea creatures fight to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. Sagely, Petre avoids a steady stream of such horror, and instead keeps the focus on the fragile-but-necessary support network of veterinarians, nurses, marine biologists and volunteers, who work along the coastline of the North Sea to save wounded seals, whales, seabirds and the like, heal them, and return them to the wild. They do yeoman work, but it feels, at times, like a drop in the proverbial bucket, with the amount of danger and suffering these creatures face seemingly overwhelming. Still, it's a good sight more hopeful than the alternative. Petre's creative camera work -- one extended shot near the end, of a group of swans from the elongated neck up, from inside the car as they are driven from the rescue facility to their release point, feels appropriately studied -- keeps the film from ever feeling static, visually (she's also quite playful with her shot selection, including a curious swan poking its head from behind a curtain), and the message, while certainly depressing, doesn't quite sink into complete misery.
Teleported Bonus: Fittingly enough, some seaweed snacks, to help keep you in an oceanic state of mind.