docfest 2000

Now in its third year, the New York International Documentary Festival – more spiffily referred to as docfest 2000 – recently hit New York City with a program of 17 films comprising all styles of documentary filmmaking. A festival dedicated exclusively to this theatrically endangered species is a rare thing indeed, so you have to credit Festival director and founder Gary Pollard for his good intentions in creating what he calls "a high-profile event to promote the documentary art form." And for Pollard, it’s the "art" that distinguishes documentary from journalism. "Documentaries should be subjective," he told me. "The voice of the filmmaker should be heard." Indeed, an eclectic array of voices veritably leapt out of the Festival program, discussing such subjects as polygamy, cannibalism, robots and political refugees.

Yet despite these potentially charged topics, the Festival and its filmmakers steered a safe course marked by reasoned discourse and political correctness rather than controversy or provocation. The most striking example of this was the Festival’s Jury Prize winner, Well-Founded Fear, an inside look at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) by Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson. Now, the INS’s less-than-stellar reputation presumably comes from somewhere, but those expecting a damning cinematic attack will be sorely disappointed by the film. As the camera follows a half-dozen INS officers in their daily interviews to determine whether political refugees merit political asylum, a group portrait emerges that is utterly sympathetic to the stresses and difficulties inherent in the officer’s decision-making process. I for one had hoped for a little more of an edge. Even so, it’s amazing that the filmmakers got access at all. Winner of the Festival’s Audience Award was Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker’s Scottsboro: An American Tragedy. Utterly traditional, but in the best sense of the word, the film mixes together interviews, archival footage and voiceovers to reconstruct the story of the nine black youths falsely accused of raping two white women in Depression-stricken Alabama. As it recounts the ensuing trials and retrials that sparked international protest, the film looks and sounds exactly like the kind of well-made doc you have seen numerous times on public television. But in this case, the story is more important than the storytelling, and in its interwoven critique of racism, anti-Semitism and American Communism, Scottsboro creates a complex and tragic historical tapestry that is, for better or worse, uniquely American.

On the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum was Michel Negroponte’s "sci-fi" doc W.I.S.O.R., about the design and construction of a robot that burrows through New York City’s underground steam pipes, repairing leaks as it goes. This superslick 75-minute job is stylish rather than substantive, and with its jazzy digital imagery and elaborate sound design, it proves surprisingly entertaining. Still, I would have liked a little more (dare I say it) nuts and bolts about how the robot works. Another triumph of style over substance was the Festival’s opening night offering, Saluzzi: Composition for Bandoneon and Three Brothers, Daniel Rosenfeld’s loving, impressionistic tribute to Dino Saluzzi, the Argentine master of the bandoneon (an accordion-like instrument used in Argentinian tango) is gorgeously shot, and the music is fantastic. But true insight into Saluzzi’s composing and performing process was harder to discern. Indeed, not digging deeply enough into potentially fascinating material was a problem that afflicted several Festival entries. In the case of both Pola Rapaport’s Family Secret (about the sudden emergence of a long-secret half-brother) as well as Elizabeth Barret’s Stranger with a Camera (about the 1967 murder of filmmaker Hugh O’Connor by a local Kentuckian as O’Connor tried to shoot a film about the area), the stories’s darker complexities were left insufficiently explored. Very frustrating, given the good intentions and intelligence of the filmmakers.

A quick survey of the Festival can’t leave out Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale. David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro create a mesmerizing portrait of Tobias Schneebaum, a sweetly disarming Jewish gay man and veteran of the 1950s New York art scene who traded painting for anthropology when he went off to Peru to live with Amazon cannibals. The Shapiros (a brother/sister team) follow our hero on a trip to Indonesian New Guinea and then manage to convince the guy – now 78 and still subject to nightmares about his Peru experience decades earlier – to return to the Amazon in search of his former cannibal friends. The film perfectly captures Schneebaum’s mix of winning candor and sheer bizarreness, and the effect is exhilarating. To watch Keep the River is to be treated to a privileged and extended peek into an ostensibly foreign planet, and that’s precisely what a documentary festival should be about. – Stan Schwartz

Cannes Film Festival by Noah Cowan
docfest 2000 by Stan Schwartz
The New York Latino International Film Festival by Arnold Salas
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen by Wellington Love
Seattle Film Festival by Brandon Judell
Florida Film Festival by Mary Glucksman