At home and abroad

I’ll probably never attend one of the big-name, high-prestige film festivals like Sundance or Cannes. But it’s hard for me to imagine I’d any enjoy any of them more than the event that Steve and I participated in last weekend: the Full Frame documentary film festival, held in Durham, North Carolina every spring. We learned about it from friends who love it so much they’ve gone 5 or 6 times, including this year. At one point, I commented to them that luring S and me to this festival was a little like introducing us to heroin. I’ve never used that, but I imagine the intensity of the pleasure and the rush are similar.

In the four days, the festival organizers screened almost 100 films (including about 15 shorts). We had no opportunity to see about a quarter of them, because we didn’t get in until late Thursday night. It’s only possible to see 5-8 per day (since there are almost always four films showing simultaneously.) But given those constraints, we amazed ourselves by what we were able to consume. I watched 17 films ranging in length from 6 minutes to almost 2 hours — an average of almost 7 hours of movies per day. My brain was exploding by the end of each day. But I woke up ready each morning for more.

As for the films, of the 17 I saw, there was not one I didn’t like. My only tepid response was to the 6-minute-long short on Lyndon Johnson — not much weightier than a youtube video. But I liked it. Five of the 17 were good to very good. And I thought 11 were superb. The ones most likely to be readily accessible for viewing are:

— Manhunt. This was the real-life version of Zero Dark Thirty — and far more interesting to me than the fictional one. It will be airing on HBO in early May.

— Twenty Feet from Stardom. An introduction to the world of back-up singers. I didn’t see this one, but Steve did (we split up for a couple of showings) He raved about it, and he’s not even that into music. It will be released in theaters in June.

— Muscle Shoals. I’m not sure if this one (or the next) will be released, but it’s hard to imagine they won’t be. Muscle Shoals is the legendary Alabama recording studio in a little town on the Gulf. A huge number of really famous musicians recorded there — from the Stones to Aretha Franklin to Bob Dylan to the Allman Brothers to so many more. The music was great, but even more fascinating to me was the insight into the art of capturing it.

— Downloaded. A riveting history of online music sharing, focusing most on the original: Napster.

All my 11 favorites were so good (and so varied) it’s hard to rank them in my affections. Still, I think the two that may have the most lasting impact on me were:

— Menstrual Man. This was the astounding story of a 9th-grade dropout in India who became obsessed with finding a way to get inexpensive sanitary napkins into the hands of Indian women (90% of whom do not use them, instead relying on cloths that they’re too embarrassed to hang out in the sun to sterilize, and thus are often germ-infested.) He came up with a small, simple, and easy to maintain manufacturing system, but he has no interest in getting rich from it. Instead he’s selling systems the NGOs that in turn are making them available to women in hundreds of villages all over India. They in turn are now supporting themselves and their families. Deeply inspirational, it was also funny and mesmerizing.

— After Tiller. This film tells the story of the four doctors who are the only ones in the United States left doing third-trimester abortions since the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita four years ago. Before seeing this film, I thought third-trimester abortions should be illegal. The movie taught me why there is a need for some. It showed me how that decision so often springs from the desire of anguished parents to protect their unborn babies from dreadful pain and early death (caused by various medical conditions afflicting them.) Viewers see the four physicians struggling with moral dilemmas and tortuous dramas daily; I don’t think I’ve even seen a movie so concerned with ethics. And I was awed by the manifold bravery of those four doctors.

I doubt either of those two films will be easily accessible, and that’s a big reason for going to a festival like this. It’s an opportunity to see so much one would otherwise miss. It was also a chance to visit places I’ll never get to (Tajikstan! The inside of a Moscow jail.) It was also a huge intellectual blast. Maybe I could eventually have found everything I saw online. But probably not, and I also wouldn’t have known what to look for, nor would I have had deep pleasure of watching these amazing movies in the company of hundreds of other people who also loved them.

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