Three Days in the Thick of Bumbershoot

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 06 September 2013 12:30

Written by Matt Oakes

As an annual sendoff to summer, Bumbershoot 2013 is a monumental celebration of the free spirit (ironically set on Labor Day) - a keyed up free-for-all of art, music, comedy, film and theater. The droves of Bumbershoot attendees (henceforth known as Shooters) yearned for the wealth of artistic expression, surging and forming into longer and longer lines and eating the offerings up in almost greedy bites.

As a melting pot of bubbling tweens, suburban families, eager theater-types, and worn-down hippies, Bumbershoot tries to please everyone by offering the barns-width of variety of art forms. There are few other festivals where you can go from the intimacy of a brick-walled comedy venue to the booming dome of an indoor stadium, finishing the night off sitting in the grass of a cozy natural amphitheater. In this regard, Bumbershoot has it all.

But the zoo of staff and volunteers helping to run the large outdoor venue often gave it the feel of a circus - a chaotic swirl of slacking responsibility and "it ain't my problem" attitude. However, when bureaucratic issues weren't standing in the way (twice, I ran into issues of grunting and shoving from the staff at the Key Arena), the experience itself had a chance to shine. And shine it did.

While the first day of any festival always comes with its fair share of getting into the swing of things, day one at Bumbershoot was the calm before the storm - a day of relative peace before a tsunami of eager guests tore through the floodgates.

Starting out the festival with a collection of short sci-fi films seemed suiting so to the SIFF 1 Reel Film Fest I headed. Of the collection of short films, one stood out most - Incident on Highway 73. While the others had their own bits of flair and offerings of promise, they were mostly forgettable among a lineup of shorts. Highway 73 though managed to craft an immediate sense of tension that sustained itself through its near 30-minute run time. Props to director Brian Thompson for that.

Patton Oswalt - also an attendee for all three days and a seemingly lynch pin part of many other comedic acts - gave his comic two cents in a riotous but short live stand-up bit then handed the majority of his hour long performance off to his "guests." Thankfully, most of these featured comics were up to snuff with a raunchy, ritzy-girl persona from Natasha Leggero being the ultimate breadwinner when it came to the laugh bank.

But the first real standout came in the form of Jason Bonham's Led Zeppelin Experience - the surprise hit of the festival.  This four piece tribute band arched through a killer set of the much beloved 70s rock gods Led Zeppelin with abundantly rehearsed talent. Each note was so uncanny that if you closed your eyes you would swear you were listening to the salty croon of Robert Plant, the fiery licks of Jimmy Page and the sweet synchronization of drum legend John Bonham. But son Jason Bonham's gushing love of his now-deceased father was moving not only in his reverent reflection of his father's music. "I never told him this while he was alive," Bonham says, "but I do this for the love of my Dad."

The masses showed up on Sunday for what was easily the most packed day at Bumbershoot and the girth of humans could be felt in the ever-growing lines. The Mowgli's started the day off for me with their cult-alt-pop 8-man show. Belting songs about faith, togetherness and love, this LA-based ocho spewed infectiously catchy tunes to a crowd superficially embodying these benevolent ideals who, ironically enough, just couldn't seem to stop pushing and bumping into their fellow brethren. Thus is the eternal catch-22 of the modern festival.

Back in the SIFF Theater for more shorts was a true standout going by the name of Woody, which I will say now will be a strong contender, if not a shoe in, for Best Animated Short come Oscar season. The animation was breath taking and the story was simple, heartfelt, and unique - all the elements a short needs to sustain a breathless audience and garnish the buzz needed to get the nod.

Other noticeable spotlights of the day included a top notch Main Stage show from the Canadian duo Tegan and Sara, a comedy set led by a nest-haired, but certainly not feather-brained, Morgan Murphy, and a star-bedazzled lawn performance from bubbly synth-driven alt-pop band, Matt & Kim. The two-piece Grizzled Mighty played with sloppy mania and almost had the crowd possessed if not for the regular misplacing of time from drummer Whitney Petty. This chick could certainly bang her head but keeping a regular rhythm proved quite an insurmountable issue that ultimately left the band stranded in a sea of time, in desperate hopes of a metronome.

But the main event that rose to the top of my personal to-see list ended up packing an unexpected, and largely unwanted, surprise.

The Zombies, authors of one of the best and most-underrated albums of the 1960s "Odyssey and Oracle," came to stage in my eyes as Gods and left as mere pensioners. The culprit of this diametric perspective shift? A dangerously bipolar set. Much like watching The Rolling Stones this day and age, anything that wasn't a certified 60s classic just felt flat. Waffling between superbly performed classics such as "She's Not There," "I Love You," "A Rose for Emily," "Tell Her No" and "Time of the Season" and a string of new tunes that felt like little more than old men's 12 bar blues, The Zombies let old school fans and themselves down.

Even with the knowledge that these late great performers aim for a 11th hour redemption, it still feels too little, too late and a sidetrack from the show that I, for one, came to see. As a lover of all things 60s, it was a sad reality to realize that they would largely opt out of the songs that made them such a growing sleeper hit for the past fifty years and favor a bag of new tricks. The Zombies still do have a pulse, but it was weaker than I'd hoped for.

The last day, on glorious Labor Day itself, was characterized by the same mild Seattle sun and zombie-esque crowds shuffling between Russian dumplings and custom-made poster art but it was the final day which meant a requisite cramming in of all things grand.

Heading to the MainStage for two back-to-back performances from Alt-J and MGMT, I ran aground a hefty three-man security team that couldn't seem to wrap their head around the idea of a Press Pass and so I wound up stuck in the nosebleed section for two of the bands I most wanted to see. Luckily, both shows were so packed full of energy that it was hard to let the low levels of authority and illusions of grandeur sour things entirely.

Held in place by a hypnotic light show, Alt J took to the stage crooning out some killer harmonies and pounding melodies. While they sometimes drifted too far into the down tempo, when they picked things up there was a palpable sense of talent unhinged in their staccato vocals and pounding synth.

But for all the glory of Alt J, it was MGMT who stole the show and became the highlight of the festival. Shuffling between their older chart-topping hits like "Electric Feel," "The Youth" and "Kids", their more underground and subculture second album  "Congratulations" and a handful of excellent tunes off their upcoming self-titled album, MGMT was simply on fire. Between the visualizer showing seagulls flying in space and reflections of Mario Kart's revered rainbow road, this was a show all about the experience. It measured psychedelia and craftsmanship in equal doses and delivered to a jaw-agaped audience. This is a band that has improved their live performance significantly since their last show I saw back in 2010 was impressive but not nearly on the same level. They have truly become masters of arena rock. Transforming the old and the new into one singular beast may not be an easy task but MGMT has shown they can flex a muscle that few others can and that ought to be worth more than its weight in gold.

The only true piece of theater I had a chance to observe over the weekend came in the form of Audrey and Nelson, a puppet sex musical I attended on this final day. Even though the show sounds gimmicky (like an inbred cousin to the popular Broadway show Avenue Q) the script from Bret Fetzer and music by Peter Richards (of the band Dude York) married to the committed puppeteers controlling these felt-based characters resulted in a mix of steamy laughs and raunchy sing-a-longs. Complete with projector-lain images of penises, fully nude puppets, and singing vaginas, Audrey and Nelson is a worthwhile exploration of sex, love, and that weird grey area in between. While production is not currently planned to continue, the weekend long sold-out performance may shift a turn for this little stage production.

Finally, the sun set on Bumbershoot with a lengthy folk-bluegrass set by Trampled by Turtles. Closing out the festival was the five-man group playing a what's-what of folk string instruments. The guitar, acoustic bass, banjo, mandolin, and violin were each plucked with splinter-carving frenzy as the band beamed through a set marked by up-tempoed string-alongs and mellowed-out, somber cawing from lead singer Dave Simonett, leading up to a cathartic rendition of "Alone" that symbolically book-ended the three day festival. Like Cinderella's carriage melting into a pumpkin, as the clock struck midnight, the doors of Bumbershoot transformed back into the casual spread of Seattle Center...until next year.

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Death & Politics at Human Rights Watch Film Fest

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 23 July 2013 15:17

Written by Nora Lee Mandel

The powerful and poignant documentaries and docudramas of the 24th annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival were welcomed in New York at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and, for the first time, at the IFC Center, after turns in Toronto; London; and Chicago. Look for selections from this year’s thought-provoking Festival as they travel throughout the year across the United States and Europe.

The Festival is organized around themes that match the program activities of Human Rights Watch, as an international monitoring and advocacy organization—“Traditional Values and Human Rights: for Women, the Disabled, and Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT”); “Crises and Migration”; and, “Human Rights in Asia and the United States”. But the messages that come through from the brave, resolute, and determined people surmounting very difficult situations aren’t restrained by those categories.

When Politics Turns Deadly

Camp 14 – Total Control Zone is the most detailed of several recent eyewitness documentary accounts of the brutal labor-to-death camps that enforce the North Korea gulag state, following Kimjongilia and Yodok Stories. Director Marc Wiese, honored with the Festival’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking, illustrates horrific testimony from escaped prisoners and chagrined defector guards with animation that fits an extreme environment beyond any fiction. Plunging the audience into the rigidly totalitarian state where the slightest hint of nonconformist behavior is punished unto three generations, they wrenchingly convey how sadism can flourish as normal and a child born there can grow up with no awareness of a world outside the barbed wire with food and without constant death.

Further insight into the mentality of sadistic political victors in Asia is unforgettably provided in The Act Of Killing, where director Joshua Oppenheimer got Indonesian death squad leaders to bizarrely re-enact – to music – the genocide they carried out. This tribute to the power of Bollywood and Hollywood to get the most hardened thugs to preen their crimes against humanity for the camera has to be seen to be believe when it is released in theaters later this month by Drafthouse Films.

Two upsetting films directly link politics to tragic injustice, even though too many similar stories have been seen in fictional features. Director Al Reinert’s An Unreal Dream: The Michael Morton Story is eerily similar to the murder trial gone wrong covered in The Staircase docu-TV series about a husband wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife based on suspect forensic evidence (let alone like many very unrealistic TV shows). While just luckily this Texas prisoner didn’t get the death penalty, he, along with his determined pro bono attorney and The Innocence Project, earnestly recount the years (and years) it took to challenge the ambitious prosecution that used this mishandled case as a steppingstone to higher office.

Directly relevant to the current Congressional debate on immigration reform,The Undocumented trods much of the same arid ground and crowded morgues along the Arizona/Mexican border as the long-running National Geographic Border Wars TV series does in tracking failed border-crossers. But director Marco Williams usefully adds the points-of-view of the distressed family members who see them off hopefully south of the border, and the anxious relatives waiting to meet them north, many times, sorrowfully, to no avail.

Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, the festival’s opening night selection, answers the question “Whatever happened to Anita Hill?” since the controversial fall 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when she brought accusations of sexual harassment, and vociferous debates about it, into wide political consciousness. (Hill reported to the FBI a recent call from Thomas’s wife demanding an apology because she truly thought someone was imitating the conservative activist.) While director Freida Mock pretty much repeats inside-the-Beltway insights from journalists and Hill’s own memoir, with some helpful factual corrections to media misimpressions, it is as startling to see the 25 file cabinets full of hate mail (including death threats) she keeps stored at home near her Brandeis office as the many “We Still Believe Anita” events where she is still lauded.

Islam & Women's Rights at the Human Rights Watch Film Fest

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 22 July 2013 21:39

Written by Nora Lee Mandel

The powerful and poignant documentaries and docudramas of the24th annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival were welcomed in New York at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and, for the first time, at the IFC Center, after turns in Toronto; London; and Chicago. Look for selections from this year’s thought-provoking Festival as they travel throughout the year across the United States and Europe.

The Festival is organized around themes that match the program activities of Human Rights Watch, as an international monitoring and advocacy organization—“Traditional Values and Human Rights: for Women, the Disabled, and Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT”); “Crises and Migration”; and, “Human Rights in Asia and the United States”. But the messages that come through from the brave, resolute, and determined people surmounting very difficult situations aren’t restrained by those categories.

Is Islam Inimical to Women’s Rights? Or Just Muslim Men?

The Human Rights Watch Festival delicately terms one theme as illustrating “Traditional Values and Human Rights: Women’s Rights”, but in damning verité documentation and personal memories, a half-dozen moving films, implicitly or explicitly, point a veritable finger at Muslim male attitudes for keeping Muslim women from education and employment, and even contact with the world outside their home, even abusively so.

Salma is the most egregious example not only of oppression and redemption, but also in exposing how patriarchal attitudes become so ingrained in a society that women enforce them on each other, regardless of laws. Beyond even director Kim Longinotto’s previous profiles of iconoclastic women, from Africa (such as Sisters In Law) to South Asia (such as Pink Saris), this is an inspiring biography. The life story of Salma, born a Tamil Muslim in southern India in 1968, is frighteningly similar to that of the 19th century American slave Harriet Jacobs who escaped to pen an autobiography that spurred abolition, or a domestic version of Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. Salma’s crimes were first being born female, reaching puberty in a small village, then refusing an arranged marriage, and, worse, smuggling out richly explicit poetry about how she felt about being locked up in a small room for years in punishment for her stubborn refusal and being manipulated into caving in to a restrictive marriage. And that’s only the first half of her transformative life, that she revisits in her home village in revealing interviews with her extended family, who still have mixed feelings about her rebellion, her writings (her autobiographical novel The Hour Past Midnight is available in English, while her famous poems are currently being translated for publication), her scandalous escape to the city, and her political activities to help girls and women who still suffer today as she did. Even though the local and state Indian government party politics are a bit hard to follow, see this eye-opening documentary before any possible Hollywood bio-pic can simplify the complexities and nuances.

InTall As The Baobab Tree, the Festival closer, director Jeremy Teicher expands from the true stories in his earlier documentary This Is Us that grew out of the autobiographical videos his students made about the issues they face in rural Senegal. Filming in a village two hours south of Dakar typical of sub-Saharan Africa, non-professional actors portray characters whose personal lives closely parallel the (barely) fictional ones. Two sisters want to continue going to the new local school in the nearby town, even as accidents and expectations strain their father’s openness to this modern opportunity, and he resorts to the financial solution of arranging a marriage for the 11-year-old. Her devoted teenage sister undertakes a desperate effort to prevent this in every way she can, from appealing for intervention from elders to working any job she can get no matter how menial, even putting her own dreams on hold. Beyond the authenticity of a score that includes local musicians, including master kora player Salieu Suso, and dialogue in the local Pulaar language for the first time in an international feature film, the story is genuinely affecting as to what will happen to this family, if depressingly honest about limited options for girls.

In Morocco, Camera/Woman is an intimate take on how a Muslim woman can try to forge employment opportunities within the narrow acceptable strictures of helping other women with their weddings. Beyond similar-themed documentaries in the past decade (The Beauty Academy of Kabul and Desert Brides about a Bedouin wedding photographer in the Negev), director Karima Zoubir gets Casablanca divorcée Khadija Harrad to open up about her feelings over the increasing challenges she faces in pressures from her ex-husband and her parents to more respectably support her son, let alone from her landlord and the male wedding planners who hire her. Key to how she deals with her frustrations is the frank girl talk for emotional support she has with divorced friends, a heartening affirmation of the importance of female solidarity within a confined situation.

InGoing Up The Stairs, Iranian director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami opens up new horizons for a mature Muslim woman whose life has been circumscribed in the house where she arrived as child bride to a man 30 years older until her grandson asked her to draw for him. Now, like Grandma Moses in Tehran, the illiterate Akram covers every available surface with bright, gorgeous images from her dreams and now awakened imagination (Akram narrates lively explanations as she quickly paints), much to her grouchy, demanding husband’s consternation. Worse, he holds over her the restrictive requirement that she needs his permission to leave the country for an exhibition of her pieces in Paris arranged by the filmmaker, who also promises to be her chaperone to the wider world of art. Whether Akram’s prayers in the women’s section of the mosque will be answered is as suspenseful as enlightening.

Rafea: Solar Mama starts out as if directors Jehane Noujaim and Mona Eldaief are making a promotional piece for Barefoot College, founded in northwest India by Bunker Roy in 1972, which brings mature women, usually illiterate grandmothers, from impoverished villages around the world to their campus for a Ghandi-inspired empowerment program of training them as “solar engineers” who will set up sustainable solar electrification projects and teaching workshops for their communities, providing the first electricity and income stream they’ve had. The non-profit organization even pays for a family chaperone and support for the ones at home while they’re gone for six months, as well as the equipment. Who wouldn’t jump at this educational and entrepreneurial opportunity? Rafea, a Bedouin mother of young daughters, is initially reluctant, but she and her family give in to pressure from Jordanian government officials who want to promote their inaugural participation. Just when she blooms by achieving something, in concert with the other women students from conservative societies, her affronted, unemployed husband sends off a stream of complaints from Amman to India because his second wife is no longer around to wait on him hand and foot whenever he’s not with Wife #1. Such a dramatic example of the stubborn persistence of male prerogatives that’s it’s almost a soap opera, this documentary also continues to be shown on PBS stations.

What similarly comes across in the well-meaning effort My Afghanistan – Life In The Forbidden Zone, that gives mobile phones with HD video cameras to 30 civilians caught in the crossfire of the much fought-over Helmand province, is that Muslim women there are invisible to outsiders. While director/project coordinator Nagieb Khaja really tries to recruit shyly interested women participants over the three years, it looks like the men in their families quash their hopes. At least the farmers and teenage boys include glimpses of how they try to protect young children who are confused eyewitnesses to the noisy chaos (and worse) of living in a shifting war zone. In Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington director Sebastian Junger passionately captures how his friend and photojournalist (and humanitarian) colleague always made civilians a priority in his coverage of such hot spots around the world, particularly children.