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“A Community Campfire”: The 2025 Camden International Film Festival
Shifting Baselines On the cusp of every autumn for the last 21 years, the Camden International Film Festival becomes the center of the nonfiction world, offering a kind of community campfire in the midst of the seasonal showcase sprawl (Telluride, Toronto, New York), its focus on a more intimate, artist-led level of engagement in the crisp air of coastal Maine, far from the madding crowds (and industry noise).
This year’s festival, situated in Camden and Rockland, felt securely grounded after several years shadowed by various uncertainties: COVID, a hurricane, and the departure of founder and former executive and artistic director Ben Fowlie – with former Kickstarter head of film Elise McCave coming onboard as the new executive director. There was one less venue (the hangar-like Rockland dock warehouse known as Journey’s End), but an added day of screenings – with a new Wednesday night kickoff designed specifically for local audiences.
The community vibe might best have been embodied by the U.S. premiere of Powwow People, a glorious immersion into the sound, color and movement called the powwow. Visionary filmmaker Sky Hopinka is known for his ecstatic abstract imagery and its deeply textured weave of cultural DNA that draws in and reflects forward themes at the heart of Indigenous life in the United States – in particular matters of land and language. The Wisconsin native, a member of the Ho-Chunk tribe, has made a number of shorts over the past decade, but Powwow People is only his second feature, after 2019’s Malni – Towards The Ocean, Towards The Shore. Unlike much of his work it’s in observational mode, bearing verite witness to a 2023 powwow at the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle. Notably Hopinka, who grew up as a dancer at similar gatherings, put the event together himself, compressing three days of performances into the single day of the film. Comparisons made to Frederick Wiseman’s candid and durational institutional studies aren’t unmerited, as Hopinka sets the stage and introduces several main characters – the Two Spirit dancer Jamie John, organizer Gina Bluebird-Stacona and Freddie Kozad, a drum circle stalwart who has since passed away – whose voices layer over the film, each speaking to the meaning, history and future of the powwow. The most prominent is Ruben Little Head, of the Northern Cheyenne, who acts as MC for the ceremonial competition, a seasoned raconteur with the enthusiasm of a carnival barker, the offhand wit of a late-night TV host and the knowing regard of your favorite uncle. He especially anchors the movie’s hypnotic closing section, a thrilling half hour of dance and ritual, bodies flashing across the screen in elaborate traditional dress whose hues evoke the bright wings of rare birds as drumbeats and ululating cries fill the night air.
Space is the place in Shifting Baselines, Montreal filmmaker Julien Elie’s strikingly monochrome meditation on the outer limits and our complicated contemporary relationship to the stars as Elon Musk fantasizes about colonizing Mars regardless of the ecological damage his SpaceX Starbase imposes on the beachy environs of Boca Chica, Texas, where the billionaire’s ambitions have chased off most of the former population. Yet, the site also is a tourist magnet, as eager rocketheads join the rattled shorebirds to witness the launches, setting up beer coolers and folding deck chairs in the sand and circling RVs into ad hoc compounds as they await the countdown. Cinematographers Glauco Bermudez and Francois Messier-Rheaul capture scenes of surreal, industrial emptiness that often feel like they could be lifted from a pulp science-fiction novel or an Antonioni picture emptied of a palette – a 50-story rocket looming ominous over it all. Meanwhile, various Muskovites, earthbound pilgrims drawn by their own dreams of the beyond, muse about What It All Means – their often fantastical discourse hitting a vibe somewhere between the stoner exuberance of Heavy Metal Parking Lot and the oddball philosophies of Vernon, Florida.
Elie introduces other personae throughout, including an astrophysicist who speaks to the threat imposed by the sheer volume of satellites blotting out the stars and the profound concerns around rocket debris. The film’s title is explicated by Daniel Pauly, a French marine biologist, who describes it as the way a succeeding generation experiences as normal the dwindling of resources available to the generation before it. As if the matter required an exclamation point, the camera joins the Starbase faithful as they witness a catastrophic launch in which the rocket explodes.
As homespun as its namesake, the filmmaker Amalie Atkins’ 90-year-old aunt, Agatha Bock, Agatha’s Almanac serves up a surplus of idiosyncratic charm along with its subject’s customary meals of radish sandwiches. Bock’s rural Manitoba garden is not only an abiding source of earthly delights but a world unto itself, where she presides over crops of watermelons, strawberries, tomatoes and all manner of flora – nurtured from the heirloom seeds she preserves – with a precise touch (her discourse on the art of tapping melons is something of a master class). Visiting Bock off and on over six years, Atkins and cinematographer Rhayne Vermette shoot in perfectly grainy 16mm, the stock picking up vivid primary colors: the reds of that juicy watermelon pulp, Bock’s sweater, socks and work table; the yellow flowers and the buckets she fills to water them; her blue clogs; and the full spectrum of candles on her birthday cake. The gaps between encounters are filled with phone conversations and answering machine messages, which overlay scenes with bits of autobiography and folk wisdom. There were suitors, back in the day, including one she summarily dismissed over his penny-pinching invitation to share a meal. “I never heard anyone say breakfast is cheaper than lunch,” she says, mockingly. “I’d never marry somebody like that.”
Bock’s solitary resolve living very nearly off the grid finds company in the example of Robert Frank and June Leaf, the fabled, groundbreaking photographer and filmmaker (The Americans, Pull My Daisy) and his wife, the painter and sculptor, who lived together in Mabou Mines, Nova Scotia, at the seeming edge of the world. Remote as it seems, the couple had a recurring visitor in Jem Cohen, a friend for more than three decades whose collection of short films about them, some works in progress, was presented last year at the Museum of Modern Art. Robert and June (and all the time in the world) belongs to that body of work. The film opens to discover Robert and June swaying in a hammock. Cohen asks each of them to describe themselves and the other as an animal. Frank picks a crow, but Leaf says he’s a bottomfeeder (like a catfish, perhaps): “They’re beautiful. They’re scavengers. They’re so quiet, and I think of Robert as the most quiet person I know, and he finds the most wonderful things at the bottom of the floor of the ocean.” Cohen, shooting in color and black-and-white in a variety of formats, likewise scavenges up imagery in an assemblage of moments. One of Leaf’s sculptures, a kind of skeleton made of twisted wire, dangling in a doorway of her studio; Leaf using her hand to draw the number “7” in the dust covering a door along the Bowery, then grinning widely; two shadows cast against the passing landscape from the back of Frank’s pickup truck; a grainy glimpse of the elevated track from the narrow back window of an F train subway car – which Cohen finds suggestive of the couple’s Mambou Mines home, sitting high above sea level. Street scenes. Landscape. The wrinkles on the photographer’s stubbled face. And finally two spare, abandoned buildings off the side of a road. “Still there. I hope,” reads an intertitle. “One for Robert, one for June.”
The heart of the festival is, as ever, the annual Points North Pitch, which reliably fills the Camden Opera House to the rafters as the year’s class of fellows present their works-in-progress to a panel of industry movers and shakers. The international lineup brought filmmakers from India, Mexico, Poland, Venezuela and elsewhere, with projects that often focused on intense personal and familial themes.
Director Jimmy Goldblum and producer Vero Kompalic’s Yosi is rooted in the former’s decade of friendship with poet Yosimar Reyes, a DACA recipient who is granted a one-year “advance parole” to leave the country, as he assists his undocumented 94-year-old grandmother in her return home to Mexico. When she suddenly dies and Donald Trump is once again elected, Yosi’s journey to bury her brings up his own existential questions about the meaning of “home,” of borders and dreams, amid a harsh shift in American immigration policy. Even though he comes from different circumstances, it’s a theme that resonated with Goldblum. “I was filming him through one of the most difficult years of my life,” says the filmmaker, who lost his Altadena home in January’s Eaton Fire. “One of the only things I saved was the hard drive [with the footage]. I’ve moved nine times this year, so searching for home is a deeply personal journey for me right now.”
The time in Camden, working with mentors Assia Boundaoui, Kristin Feeley and Andrea Meditch, proved helpful in dialing in troublesome aspects of the production. Subjects often mention that “for you to be an undocumented person you need to be the smartest person in every room that you walk into, because you need to understand how every system works in order to understand how you can exist in them without papers or without any kind of recognition, politically speaking,” she says. “Even though Yosi’s vast knowledge of the political system is so great, everything that has to do with that we sometimes get lost in. How do we explain that when we just have 15 minutes, or 10 minutes or seven minutes?”
The film shares themes with How To Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps, in which filmmaker Carolina Gonzalez Valencia frames the life of her mother, Beatriz, who left her and her sister behind in Colombia when she migrated to the U.S. 25 years earlier to support them as a domestic worker. Valencia eventually followed, but her mother, now retired, is returning to Colombia, as there is no social safety net for her in America and she could more easily care for Valencia’s stepfather. “It’s a commentary on the fact that she’s been taking care of Carolina, and these homes and all these people throughout the years, only for her to find herself not being able to be taken care of by this country,” producer Brenda Avila-Hanna says. “And she’s a caregiver again, somewhere else.”
In the film, Beatriz tells her story – or stories, as she takes on the guise of a famous (but fictional) Colombian author. “I wanted the film to be truly a collaboration, and to find ways for my mom to have the space to represent herself however she wanted to,” Valencia says. “We did a lot of experiments and rehearsals to figure out our dynamic and that’s where we found the writer. When she was playing the role … I was finding that she was more honest, and we were able to talk about harder things.”
Valencia opened her pitch with a surprise. She introduced her mother “the author,” who was seated in the audience. “And she now sees herself as a writer,” the filmmaker says. “She’s maybe not world-renowned, yet.”
