→ March 2, 2018
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Faces Places.

Faces Places (original title Visages, Villages) is the last of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature I had to see – I’ve also caught two of the Documentary Short nominees – and I could see an argument that it’s the best. It’s certainly unique among the nominees in that it’s not really about anything at all; the other four all tell stories, often with an eye on exposing or explaining something, but Faces Places is a slice of life in the truest sense of the phrase. It seems like the sort of thing you could never sell until you’d made it and could show a distributor what the finished product is, because the magic here is in the way the two leads interact on screen throughout the movie. You can buy it on Amazon or iTunes.

Agnes Varda is an 89-year-old grande dame of French cinema, a major figure in the New Wave of the 1950s, a friend of Godard, married to Jacques Demy for over 30 years. She and a photographer-artist named JR are the stars of the film, driving around villages in France, visiting friends or acquaintances, taking photos and blowing them up to paste on the sides of buildings, water towers, and train cars. Their interactions with each other – it’s such an unlikely friendship, but the affection is so obviously genuine that it’s truly moving – and with the various locals are the heart of the film. Some of the best moments are the reactions of the people whose photographs JR and Varda take and blow up, how they respond to seeing themselves portrayed in these giant posters. One becomes a mini-celebrity and finds she doesn’t like how people recognize her now as the woman on the side of the building. The wives of three workers at a port end up with their portraits on giant stacks of shipping containers (Frank Sobotka declined comment) and then sit inside their own images in the film’s most memorable shot. One describes feeling large and powerful; another hates feeling enclosed and so far off the ground. It’s peculiar to see how making someone two-dimensional brings out something different in their humanity, but that seems to be the trick of Varda & JR’s technique.

Varda is really the star of the film, though, and that was evident to me even though I was totally unfamiliar with her work or reputation before seeing this. Part of the connection probably came from how she reminded me of my maternal grandmother, who, like Varda, was short (I doubt my grandmother ever saw five feet, and was probably closer to 4’8” when she died at 100), had a raspy voice (she smoked for 75+ years), and kept her hair very short. Seeing Varda lean into JR – who seems pretty tall, although standing next to her makes him look like a giant – reminded me so much of how my grandmother would do the same with me once I was an adult, especially comforting her during moments of melancholy near the end of her life, that I felt an immediate empathy with the director from the movie’s start. When she does have a real moment of deep sadness near the end, the one thing that really happens in the movie, it got to me even though her grief in that scene was intensely personal to her.

Varda became the oldest person to receive an Oscar nomination in any non-honorary category with this year’s nod, and between that and her importance in the industry, Faces Places might be the sentimental favorite, if not the overall favorite, to win for Best Documentary Feature. (The nomination also led to an amusing scene when Varda declined to fly from France to Los Angeles for the nominees’ luncheon, so JR brought a few cardboard cutouts of Varda in her stead, and 2D Varda was a big hit.) Last Men in Aleppo is probably the best of the five for the importance of its subject matter, although I was surprised at how distant I felt from the tragedies on screen in that film. Icarus was the most gripping to watch, because it’s so incredibly bizarre how that filmmaker stumbled on the biggest doping scandal in sports history while trying to make a documentary about something else. If I had a ballot, which I don’t because the Academy just won’t return my calls, I’d probably vote for Icarus, but inside I’d hope Faces Places won anyway … even if cardboard Agnes is the one accepting the award.

* Four of the five nominees for Best Documentary Short are available to stream right now, and I’ve seen two, with a third downloaded to watch today or tomorrow. Knife Skills tells the story of Edwin’s, a Cleveland restaurant that hires people who’ve just been released from prison, training them over a period of several months, while serving classical French cuisine and earning rave reviews. The documentary follows the restaurant’s inaugural class of 120, which ends up whittled by more than half before the restaurant has been open three months, focusing on a few individual student-employees, mostly imprisoned for drug-related offenses, who will surprise you with how quickly they seem to take to and enjoy this grueling work. It’s also on iTunes and amazon.

Traffic Stop is on HBO’s streaming apps, and holy shit, is this a bad look for the Austin Police Department. A white cop pulls a black woman out of her car for speeding, throws her to the ground, beats her, threatens to tase her, and then tells the next officer to arrive that she resisted arrest … but it was all caught on his dash cam. Not only was he not fired for the incident, his superiors didn’t hear about it for over a year, by which point it was too late for them to suspend or fire him; he was just terminated a month ago for standing on a suspect’s head during another arrest. The documentary intersperses all of the dash cam footage with shots of the victim, Breaion King, talking about what it did to her life, and just about herself – she’s a math teacher who has worked in the community and has no criminal history whatsoever, but was targeted because she was black. The big reveal, though, is when a different cop, one who seems to be sympathetic to her, says that the problem is that black people have “violent tendencies” that lead white cops to assume the worst. I see no evidence anywhere that that officer has been disciplined in any way, and can only assume that he’s still out there, representing Austin’s finest.

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→ February 23, 2018
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Strong Island.

Strong Island, available on Netflix, is another of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars and is one of the two that I think was somewhat widely known before the nominations came out, along with Last Men in Aleppo. Ostensibly the story of a murder that took place on Long Island in 1992 for which no one was ever charged, it’s much more the story of that murder’s effect on the victim’s family over the 23 years between when it happened and when the filmmaker, the victim’s brother*, began the project.

William Ford, Jr., was 24 in April of 1992, trying to pass the physical requirements for a job as a corrections officer, the oldest of three children of Barbara and William Sr. His girlfriend’s car had been hit by 19-year-old Mark Reilly, a white man working at a nearby garage (rumored to be a chop shop), who offered to fix the car for free if they didn’t call the cops to report the incident. Ford and his girlfriend, both African-American, agreed, but when Reilly took too long to repair the car and then swears at Ford’s mother, he returned to the garage to confront him, only to have Reilly shoot him with a .22, killing him. The grand jury returned a no true bill against Reilly, choosing to believe it was self-defense even though Ford was unarmed. Ford’s mother claims in the film that the grand jury was all white, and many members weren’t paying attention during witness testimony.

Yance (pronounced “YAN-see”), the middle child in the family, directed this documentary and appears in it frequently along with his* younger sister, his brother’s best friend (who was there when the murder occurred), his mother, and a good college friend of William Jr.’s. Not appearing, however, are anyone connected with the investigation; the ADA at the time declines to comment at all, even on the phone, while the investigating officer does comment in a recorded interview but does not appear. Neither Reilly nor the other white man at the garage that night appear, and Ford himself has been very clear that he does not want to give Reilly any “space” in the film. The murder is described, but it is an inflection point in the broader story, not a mystery to be solved. The reveal, such as it is, is minor to the viewers but major to Yance.

* Yance Ford identifies as queer in the film, but is referred to everywhere within the film as a daughter, a sister, etc. Apparently since filming ended, he has come out as trans, and most subsequent media coverage uses male pronouns (without, from what I can see, acknowledging the disparity). I’m just following their lead, but I may be wrong.

It is, therefore, a somewhat frustrating documentary, because the topic is so insular. A happy nuclear family was blown up by the murder of their son and oldest child, after which grief starts to tear apart the fabric holding them together. The father dies not long after the murder, long enough ago that he’s only in the film on video once, in archival footage. But their grief is quiet and private, and I didn’t get an emotional connection to the tragedy the way I think Yance might have intended. Their loss is huge, but William, Jr., is a figurative ghost in the film. And the racial aspects, while undeniable – if you don’t think a black man would have been indicted for the same crime with a white victim, I don’t know what to tell you – are also somewhat academic here. There’s nothing here to prove racial bias in the investigation or grand jury proceedings. Instead, Strong Island feels a bit like reading someone else’s diary – like I’m intruding on the grief of a family I don’t even know, and the cascading tragedies of the story are too distant to get the emotional response the writer would have had himself.

That said, it wouldn’t shock me in the least if this won the Oscar, given the racial politics of the film and high profile right now of Black Lives Matter and similar movements. It’s not the best documentary this year, but its subject matter might resonate more with voters than topics like Syria, doping, or the financial crisis.

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→ February 22, 2018
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Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, a documentary by Steve James (Hoop Dreams) that originally aired on PBS’s Frontline, earned one of the five nominations for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars. The film follows Abacus, the only bank to face criminal prosecution in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis, through the subsequent trial, largely from the perspective of the Sung family, who founded and still run the small neighborhood bank, based in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The resulting picture is one of politically-motivated prosecution of a non-white institution, of whom the overly ambitious Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., could make an example, while getting himself in front of the cameras. You can stream the film for free on PBS’s site, or via Amazon Prime.

Abacus Federal Savings Bank discovered in 2010-11 that one of its loan officers had submitted several loan applications with false information – such as forged employment info or inflated income claims – and had skimmed money from some clients, so they reported the violations to the Office of Thrift Supervision themselves, fired the offending loan officer, and began examining other loans he’d made. Despite the self-reporting, the Manhattan DA’s office chose in 2012 to indict the bank and its officers on over 200 counts related to mortgage fraud, including grand larceny, threatening the group with jail time, fines, and the potential closure of the bank. The Sung family, who founded the bank in 1984, chose to fight all charges; one of their daughters quit her job in the DA’s office and went to work on her family’s defense. Their defense included evidence that the offending loan officers had taken steps to hide their misdeeds from executives, that the loans in question still performed, and that their decision to report themselves showed they were not engaged in any systematic attempt to defraud Fannie Mae, which purchased many of the loans in question.

The Sungs are the stars of Abacus, of course, and their dismay and indignation power the film. It’s clear from the start that the family members involved in the bank saw no choice but to fight the charges, recognizing that even a generous plea agreement might ruin the company, and in the film they repeatedly emphasize what the bank means to the Chinese community in which it operates. Tom Sung, a co-founder of the bank and the family patriarch, recounts the difficulty Chinese entrepreneurs would have in obtaining loans from white-owned banks that were perfectly happy to take those same customers’ deposits. Along with community activist Don Lee (who has a politician’s coiffure) and several reporters who covered the case, the Sungs describe the different norms of the Chinese business world, and how American rules that might target mortgage fraud also made it harder for immigrants to obtain such loans, even if their income was legitimate and their default rates were extremely low. (Abacus claims a 0.5% default rate on mortgages it originates; the national rate for serious delinquency reached 4.9% in 2010 and dropped to a ten-year low of 1.1% last year.)

Vance and Polly Greenberg, who served as chief of the DA’s Major Economic Crimes division from 2012 to 2015, both appear in the film to their own detriment, as they come off in the final product as vindictive and unapologetic despite evidence that they put extremely unreliable witnesses on the stand, possibly suborning perjury in the process. (The film was made before revelations that Vance declined to prosecute Harvey Weinstein for sexual assault around the time that Weinstein contributed to Vance’s campaign.) Their star witness, in particular, lied repeatedly under oath and eventually had his plea deal revoked as a result of his false testimony. It’s entirely possible that James isn’t showing enough of the prosecution’s side of the case, although given his reputation and the ultimate outcome of the trial, I am inclined to give him and the film the benefit of the doubt. At the absolute least, Vance and Greenberg failed in their duty to do sufficient due diligence on their key witnesses, and that opens them up to charges of malicious, racially-motivated prosecution. Vance Jr. was unopposed in the November election, which is too bad, as Abacus would make a fine campaign film for anyone running against him.

I’ve seen three of the five nominees for this category now, with Netflix’s Strong Island downloaded for my next flight, and Faces Places due out on DVD at least on March 6th (after the awards … this is so stupid; if you’re nominated and can’t get into theaters, put it out to stream right away, I am trying to give you my money). Abacus is the best made of the three documentaries I’ve seen, but lacks the emotional punch of Last Men in Aleppo or the holy-crap aspects of the more timely Icarus. FiveThirtyEight’s Walt Hickey has pointed out that this year’s slate of nominees is extremely weird anyway.

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→ November 28, 2017
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Icarus.

Icarus, a documentary now available on Netflix, covers the Russian state-sponsored doping program for Olympic athletes from the most direct, personal angle possible: The director was working with the architect of the program on a completely different project when the story broke in a German documentary, The Doping Secret: How Russia Makes its Winners. So instead of merely following the chronology of the program’s execution, the leak to the press, and the subsequent drama around the WADA recommendations to ban all Russian athletes from the 2016 Olympics and the IOC’s decision to give WADA the finger, Icarus gives it to viewers in real time from the perspective of one of the whistleblowers who ends up fearing for his life.

Filmmaker Bryan Fogel decided, on what appears to be a whim, to race in a Haute Route cycling event, a seven-day endurance test across difficult terrain, this time in the Alps of southeastern France. (They also hold similar events in the Pyrénées and in the Rockies.) He finishes in the top 20, but his body just gives out near the end, so he does what any normal person would do in response – he decides to start doping to see how much a little artificial help will improve his performance. (He notes that the event bans performance-enhancing drugs but doesn’t bother testing for them.) He contacts the former head of the main U.S. testing lab, who agrees to help but eventually reneges and refers Fogel to Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the Russian Anti-Doping Centre, a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory that would test athletes for PED usage. Rodchenkov also knew quite a bit about the benefits of the various PEDs available to Fogel and helped him design a protocol, with the help of an “anti-aging” doctor here in the U.S., to improve his performance in a second shot at the Haute Route.

That second race doesn’t go as well as planned, but it becomes thoroughly secondary to the film’s real story: The German documentary exposes the Russians’ state-run doping program, claiming many of the country’s medals in recent Olympics, including Sochi, were achieved by athletes who should have failed PED tests but didn’t. Rodchenkov was actually running the doping program on the side, even while he was running the anti-doping facility, and during the filming of Icarus, he begins to fear that the government is watching him and possibly preparing to arrest him, so he flees to the U.S. and tells his everything to the New York Times for a piece that ran on May 12, 2016. That article blew the doors off the scandal and led to a longer WADA investigation, which the IOC chose to ignore because of reasons we can only imagine – as Rodchenko makes it clear that he believes Vladimir Putin, who approved the doping program, will stop at nothing to silence his enemies. We learn that one of Rodchenkov’s associates died, allegedly of a heart attack, in February 2016, shortly after the German film aired; another died the same month, with both men former directors of Russia’s anti-doping agency.

There is so much to unpack in Icarus, which is thoroughly gripping even though you invest the first 40 minutes or so in a story that doesn’t matter. (It’s never really clear why Fogel is willing to subject his body to the doping regimen, whether it’s a desire to win, a desire to show what doping can do, a Morgan Spurlock-style attitude to filmmaking, or something else). What was a weird but intriguing documentary that looked at the history of doping and the cat-and-mouse game between the athletes who use such drugs and the labs that try to catch them turns into a darker, real-life spy thriller. The film doesn’t bother with bothsidesism; Rodchenkov’s credibility isn’t questioned, nor are we given any reason to question it, and he provides Fogel with detailed notes on specific athletes’ regimens that seem to immediately convince a group of appalled members of WADA who walked into a conference room believing that this kind of program was physically impossible. (The KGB manages to tamper with WADA’s tamper-proof caps, among other tricks.) And a subsequent special investigation, led by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, found that over 1000 Russian athletes had doped in events over the time period covered.

Two angles in particular stand out from this. One, relevant to those of us here with an interest in baseball, is that a sufficiently determined and organized group can defeat even a sophisticated testing program. This isn’t about masking agents, or super-secret new drugs that haven’t hit testing protocols yet, but about physical exchange of dirty samples for clean ones that won’t test positive. It shows how difficult such a scheme would be to pull off … but also that it was pulled off, successfully, for years, and therefore is at least feasible.

But I don’t know how you can watch Icarus now without drawing the obvious parallel: Vladimir Putin approved a program to interfere with a competition that went beyond his own borders to try to engineer the results he desired – and even when given irrefutable proof of what he did, he just dismisses it as, in essense, fake news. He even gets away with it, despite those meddling kids, because I’ve seen jellyfish with stronger spines than the IOC, which just gave carte blanche to any major power to dope the hell out of its athletes. There’s even a scene where we see a Russian TV show airing emails between Fogel and Rodchenkov – emails obtained via hacking. We’re fighting someone who appears willing to do anything, perhaps even kill, to achieve his goals, and who thus far has proved immune to any penalty or retribution. It’s a grim projection for the future of international sport … and our elections, too.

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→ November 28, 2017
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Last Men in Aleppo.

The Syrian Civil Defense, better known now as the White Helmets after a documentary short by that name won the Oscar in that category this past February, is a volunteer organization that has operated in Syria since 2014, providing rescue and medical services in the wake of airstrikes in the failed state, including in the major city of Aleppo before and during the siege of the town in 2016. Last Men in Aleppo follows the group, focusing on two of the volunteers, Khaled and Mahmoud, as they race around the city, trying to rescue victims buried under rubble, while also trying to live their lives, like Khaled worrying about medicine for his daughter, or Mahmoud trying to coax his brother to flee. The film is available via iTunes or to rent/buy directly from the distributor.

Filmed in cinéma vérité style, Last Men in Aleppo has no narration or overarching structure, and simply follows the two men and some of their colleagues from airstrike to airstrike, mixing in scenes of almost mundane daily life, including an outing with their families to a playground – which, of course, is cut short by the sighting of government warplanes. (All of the airstrikes shown or discussed in the film are either from Syrian government jets or Russian jets.) The rescue scenes are gripping and horrifying, since they find more dead bodies than survivors, and are often pulling children from the wrecks. The survivors are often shown wracked by grief as they realize most of their family members are dead – and there’s no editing here to soften the impact on the viewer. The camera observes, nothing more.

That editorial decision makes the movie somewhat hard to follow, as there’s no story to track, and the pacing is as uneven as the pacing of real life. We see the men in their regular lives, or the facsimile thereof in a city under siege, interrupted by a bombing and a phone call, and they race to the scene with their comrades and the construction equipment they use to excavate the wreckage of bombed-out buildings. There’s a ton of disturbing footage in here, including corpses of babies, body parts, head injuries, and even a badly wounded cat. It is utterly draining, and simultaneously honors the bravery and altruism of these men while reminding the viewer of the enormous suffering of the people of Aleppo and Syria in general, suffering that the United States has done very little to stop.

That last bit was the biggest takeaway from Last Men in Aleppo for me – the lives of ordinary people have been discarded by a dictator’s brutal efforts to retain power over his country, even if there are very few people left in it, supported by another dictator whose warplanes are helping bomb innocent civilians, sometimes appearing to even target the White Helmets while they work. The west at least intervened to stop a government-led massacre in Libya during that country’s version of the Arab Spring, although the end result has been a failed state there as well. In fact, it’s unclear that western intervention can do much of anything except to avoid the direct killings of airstrikes and ground invasions, as the one true success story of the Arab Spring, Tunisia, succeeded without any involvement from the west. Libya is close to a failed state, as is Syria. Yemen is suffering from famine and a cholera outbreak with nearly a million victims. Egypt overthrew its dictator only to end up with a military autocracy. So maybe we couldn’t have done anything to help any of these countries transition to democracy or peace. It’s just hard to watch Last Men in Aleppo without thinking that anything we do would have been better than the nothing we’ve done.

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