Real-life drama comes to big screen at film festival

Strong Island is Yance Ford’s investigative documentary about the 1992 murder of his brother. The film played at last week’s True/False film festival in Columbia, Mo.
Strong Island is Yance Ford’s investigative documentary about the 1992 murder of his brother. The film played at last week’s True/False film festival in Columbia, Mo.

It doesn't always work this way, but sometimes when you go to film festivals you begin to see things in terms of overriding themes. It's a way to categorize the sheer volume of what you're taking in, I suppose, but, depending on the curation process, can also be a peek into the national zeitgeist, at least as far as the festival's programmers can ascertain.

True/False, the annual festival in Columbia, Mo., is built on the rewarding premise that real-life stories -- and, in some cases, their proximities -- can be every bit as compelling as carefully plotted dramas. True/False has its own particular vision, paying particular attention to those films whose lines are blurred between objective documentation and narrative flights of fancy. Naturally, those blurred lines can also be problematic when assessing a film: determining which part of what you're seeing is factual and which is crafted is a big part of figuring out its intentions.

At this year's festival, several films were specifically concerned with the dissolution and breakdown of family ties in the wake of tragedy. The most notable of these, Yance Ford's startling Strong Island, investigates the 1992 murder of the director's older brother. But this isn't an investigation to determine the killer or the motive -- he was immediately identified but claimed self-defense, which Ford hotly disputes. Rather, the film explores the reasons the killer was never brought to trial, and the palpable loss to the director's family, including his younger sister, his irascible mother (one of the stars of the interview sections), and his heartbroken father, who had a massive stroke soon after his son's death.

Ford, who was born female but now identifies as male, paints a vividly confrontational portrait of the grief behind the unspoken, even in a family as open and emotionally salient as his. The film moves from interviews with family members, friends, and some of the police and legal officials who handled the case, to haunting images of the concrete parking lot where his brother died, and the surrounding areas. Ford uses a kind of visual poetics to further push the point, but it is his own confessions -- shot in almost painfully tight close-up -- that become the film's most searing moments.

No less heartfelt is Travis Wilkerson's Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, a kind of live, multimedia presentation -- at least until the final narrative track is recorded permanently. Wilkerson, a documentarian known for his humanitarian causes, sits at a desk in front of us, his laptop open, speaking into a microphone to tell us the story of his great grandfather, S.E. Branch, who in 1946 killed a black man named Bill Spann in Branch's rural Alabama store. As Wilkerson, who had long since left his hometown, returns to try and unravel the mystery of why this happened and, more significantly, why the murder charge was dropped against his great-grandfather, he is forced to confront the evil that lurks within his family's collective soul.

Part of the project's effectiveness is witnessing the way Wilkerson twists and suffers with the material he's presenting, the agonies reflected in his quavering voice and hunched body language. It's white guilt made manifest, such that when he loudly joins in the chorus of the film's fierce song of remembrance as the last images play out on the screen, it's as if you are watching a man attempting to purge the demons from his bloodline.

Fortunately, this year's lineup also included films with a more positive familial outlook. Quest, a film shot over a decade in the heart of North Philadelphia, tenderly follows the varied tribulations in the lives of Christopher "Quest" and Christine'a "Ma Quest" Rainey. Years ago, the Raineys built a home studio in their basement, ostensibly to give Quest an opportunity to hone his producing skills, but also as a means for the neighborhood cats to lay down some tracks and focus on a musical career.

Initially, that's all director Jonathan Olshefski was intending to shoot, but over time, as the couple suffered through the life-threatening illness of their oldest son, and a severe shotgun wound to their younger daughter, P.J., Olshefski sagely just kept the cameras rolling. Kind, attentive, and preternaturally composed, Quest and Ma handle each of these horrific challenges with stunning grace. We watch the adorable P.J. go from happy, basketball playing imp, to severely wounded victim, to proud, fiercely intelligent young woman, as her parents continue to struggle through their difficult -- but beautifully complex -- lives. The film is sprawling and at various times suitably messy.

Far more focused is Steve James' excellent Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, a film I had seen in Toronto, but happily watched again. It concerns the Abacus Savings and Loan Bank in New York's Chinatown, a small family bank run by the extremely dignified Mr. Sung and his four extremely capable and sharp-witted daughters, which was almost laughably the only financial institution indicted in the wake of the home mortgage crises of 2008.

Instead of finding a passive lamb in the small bank, prosecutors came up against the Sungs, nearly all of whom are lawyers, who fought them tooth and nail -- with the state's star witness the very corrupt loan officer whose greed and malfeasance created the mess that got the bank in trouble. As the case stretches on for months, the family, even under this tremendous stress, still stays fiercely loyal to one another. It's a different sort of stress than what the Raineys endure, but it is met with no less determined poise.

Somewhat more deliberate in their assembly and composition, a trio of the festival's films each confronted their subjects with a more measured gaze. Jeff Unay's The Cage Fighter opens with a scene that could have come straight from the Sundance narrative division. A large man grunts with exertion as he flips a giant truck tire over and over in the darkened, deep blue light of an empty parking lot. The man is Joe Carman, a thick-shouldered family man who works as a pipe fitter by day, but much against his wife and four daughters' wishes, continues to fight in amateur Mixed Martial Arts combat at night. Kind and gregarious, Joe, who seems otherwise deeply devoted to his children from two marriages, has the fight game in his blood. He needs these savage bouts -- many of which leave him beaten, bloody and bewildered -- as he explains it, to find a version of himself of whom he can feel proud.

With a main character as rich and full-drawn as Joe, it appears that Unay is leading us to a Rocky-esque battle of redemption. Early on, the film identifies another, much younger and more chiseled fighter, Clayton Hoy, as the swaggering Apollo Creed to Joe's struggling Balboa. But just as things seem to be headed for an inevitable showdown, reality sets in to unravel the straightforward narrative kick of the beginning. Joe's family confronts him about his lying to them, and his wife leaves him. In the film's best and most unexpected scene, Joe meets with Hoy in a bar and the two hit it off like longtime best friends, comparing fighting notes, doing shots, and both lamenting the sad direction in which their crumbling marriages have led them. The film isn't about some sort of dramatic showdown for Joe's soul. Instead, we see an aging, battered man try to double-down on being the best father he can.

Meanwhile, Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini's Dina, also shot in Philly, follows the forthcoming nuptials for its middle-aged heroine and her fiance, Scott. Dina is autistic and Scott has Asperger's syndrome and they want nothing more than to be together, but circumstances make that difficult. Dina has endured the death of her first husband and a subsequent boyfriend whose manic episodes escalated into his stabbing her multiple times, and she is still dealing with the pain. Scott, by contrast, is friendly, warm and almost entirely innocent. Working as a greeter for a local Wal-Mart, he is forever doting on his fiancee and listening appreciatively to her various diatribes (among other things, she's a devoted fan of reality TV's Keeping Up With the Kardsashians), but the idea of romantic passion and, indeed, sexuality, are still scary propositions to him, even after they wed.

The curious thing is the mannered way in which the directors choose to shoot the film: It is composed entirely of locked-down camera shots, with the subjects entering and leaving the frame. It's not that the coverage is lacking, in fact, in numerous cases, it's clear they have multiple cameras covering Dina and Scott's lives, but it does greatly bring into question the legitimacy of its documentation. No film, even the most dispassionate of docs, is without its own subjectivity, but because Sickles and Santini shoot it as if it's a narrative feature, it adds a confusing element of intentionality to the story. Sweet as they are as a couple, you have to wonder what they did to amuse themselves during what must have been an arduous array of camera setups. Dina and Scott certainly stay with you, but you can't help but feel the saucy hint of exploitation.

A far simpler camera line is established in Claire Simon's intriguing Recreations (part of the French filmmaker's retrospective as part of receiving the festival's True Vision Award). Originally shot in 1998, Simon filmed from about waist high, following several classes of French elementary schoolchildren, ages roughly from 4 to 6, as they spend their precious recess time on their school's courtyard playground.

As can be expected, there's a wide range of dramas presented, including one in which a little girl collects a hefty roll of twigs together (oftentimes, the children treat them as a form of currency) only to fling them in front of her friends, so they can dance on them. In another, a round-faced boy tries to get everyone to play "barber" with him, only to have the game continually turned into a game of "prisoner" instead. At times, the kids are mean, and borderline cruel to one another -- a pair of boys square off about the ownership of twigs, but the larger one, by dint of a series of swift and punishing kicks, decides the matter for himself -- but also often sweet. The children are always quick to reassess and one gathers a sense of the unflappable elasticity of their relationships. Several minutes after the kicking boy has made his point, the two boys happily play together, calling each other "best friend."

Appropriately, the last segment is also the film's longest and most uplifting: A very young girl is distraught that her peers are able to jump from a concrete step over a park bench and onto the cushioned ground while she is too scared to make the leap. The girls' reactions range from rubbing it in ("I'm younger than you and I can do it, it's dead easy") to comforting the sobbing child and offering assistance to help her make the jump. It's to the film's credit that the conclusion of her ordeal -- she finally figures out she, too, can jump successfully -- feels as if a massive hurdle has been made in this child's life.

That was my last film of this year's festival, and a sweetly fitting note to close out on. As True/False so elegantly displays each year, the world is a strange, terrifying, and crushingly sad place, but there are also moments of grace and beauty, and triumph, and we can feel lucky dedicated filmmakers are there to document them.

MovieStyle on 03/10/2017

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