BRATTLEBORO — It's still true today, the age-old complaint that most Hollywood movies are made by men for teenage boys who like to see things blown up, with an occasional romantic comedy that always surprises the film establishment with its popularity (i.e. director Nancy Meyers, the acting Dianes - Keaton and Lane, and the hilarious Kristin Wiig.)
The image of women in Hollywood certainly takes a beating, figuratively and sometimes literally - unless, of course, the women are in a James Bond film, when they experience passion followed by violent death.
But just under the radar, there is a wealth of fascinating films made by men and women about men and women. Independent films offer us worlds where people might be demented, enlightened, brave, interesting, vulnerable, charming, gifted, and sometimes even joyously happy.
For those of us who love films, it's a question of separating out the good movies from the dross and then finding ways to see them.
Living in the Brattleboro area helps, because we enjoy one of the richest film cultures in the country. Over the years, we have enjoyed Indian film festivals, Jewish film festivals, and LGBTQ film festivals.
Plus, of course, for over 20 years, we've had the Women's Film Festival, whose selection committee was so well regarded in the industry that last year they garnered an astonishing 60-plus unsolicited submissions.
That's before things went to hell.
The battle started over a 2009 documentary about Marilyn Monroe, My Marilyn, which was made by men, starred men (and images of Marilyn, of course), and was screened at the 2011 festival. My Marilyn's inclusion in the festival was intended to incite discussion.
A year later, the Women's Freedom Center, for whom the festival serves as a fundraiser and image-enhancer, announced that from then on it would not allow films made by men to be shown at the festival. They pointed out that men controlling the images of women is often a catalyst for violence.
It could be argued that Monroe endlessly created and controlled her own images. It was her life's work, perhaps for men, but only about her love for the camera.
It could also be argued that even women sometimes make films that offer horrible images of women. And that there are enlightened men in the world and it enriches all of us to know about them.
To make a long story short, as a result of the Center's decision, the most experienced festival volunteers left to start their own festival.
So now we have two!
Brattleboro can rejoice that it will still be getting rare, amazing, revelatory films, but this time some of them will be enlivened with the addition of penises.
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“What's really nice for us is that now we can consider all kinds of films that we couldn't before,” said Merry Elder, who for 22 years was the heart and soul of the WFF selection committee and is now the board president and chief film selectrix of the BFF.
“It's very refreshing to us. We were feeling more and more boxed in [by relevance to womens' issues]. Now it's very freeing and exciting.”
The first annual Brattleboro Film Festival begins at the Latchis Theater during the weekend of Nov. 2-4. The Women's Film Festival still plans a run in March.
The BFF has found stories about men as well as women, made by men as well as women. We meet the incredibly brave and creative Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. We meet a group of outcast teenage boys who turned high-flying skateboarding into poetry and became millionaires along the way. We enjoy a ravishingly beautiful Cuban love story told with graphics and jazz.
We meet two old women who have loved each other for 31 years. We meet a stunning 21-year-old female hustler who creates a deep relationship with an 85-year-old woman - who is also something of a hustler. We rise to the heights of joy with a school chorus from Staten Island.
The members of the selection committee - Elder, David Levine, Diane Laverdi, Meg Lyons, and Suzanne d'Corsey - have chosen 12 films of the highest quality for their first festival. They are deeply moving, finely balanced, unique, intelligent, quirky, and riveting. Since this is a first-time event, most films will be shown only once.
Putting together a brand new film festival is not easy.
“We had to restart everything,” said BFF Vice President Lissa Weinmann. “We don't have a track record. Distributors associate the Women's Film Festival with Brattleboro, but we had to explain that we're a new festival. We can't pay as much, and we can't promise to deliver as large an audience. It takes time to build up credibility.”
What kinds of films did the selection committee seek out?
“We love Brattleboro and are part of Brattleboro and have in our minds what kinds of films Brattleboro people would appreciate seeing,” Elder said.
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The committee began by looking for independent films that had already won awards on the festival circuit.
“That way we don't have to weed through a lot of films that aren't vetted,” Elder said. “Not that there aren't gems out there that haven't won awards, and we hear about films through words of mouth, but we really want to have quality films.”
“For example, we looked at a skateboarding documentary about Afghanistan. It was a remarkable story - they built this huge skateboarding stadium and included girls. We thought it was remarkable and inspirational.
“We wanted so much for that film to be good. But unfortunately, it needed to be edited down - and badly.
“We argued and argued about that film and were really frustrated. The idea was so good, but the first half of the film would put you to sleep, and we really wanted to pull in children and teenagers.
“And then we found Bones Brigade.”
Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, by Stacy Peralta, looks back at the filmmaker's 1980s all-boy teenage skateboard team, the Bones Brigade, and how this group of teenage outcasts took over skateboarding; after the sport waned in popularity, these guys invented it all over again.
“These were 15- and 16-year-old world-class athletes,” Peralta says. “Many of the tricks they were doing belong to them. They invented them.”
What makes the film remarkable is that we meet the skateboarders as adults - legends like Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, Steve Caballero, and others. They talk about their skateboarding childhood in the same terms that artists use when they talk about creating art.
“I'm going to do what I want even if I have to be miserable doing it,” Lance Mountain tells the camera.
Rodney Mullen says, “Skateboarding is the art of self-expression. It's the inspiration that comes so deep it's almost like total desperation. It's like Beethoven going deaf. He had this fire in him. Deafness brought him to self-isolation, and that's where he became himself.”
Hawk and Mullen, who both quit for a time, were especially aware of the damage that constant competition could bring.
“It was like you built this house but you can't live in it because you're too busy guarding it,” Mullen explains. “Contests defined me, but they came to represent 'don't fail.' I felt like I was dominating something that doesn't matter.”
The film offers plenty of 1980s action, but it's the introspective nature of the athletes - some of them talking through tears - that drew me into loving this film.
The film selection committee members obviously had Brattleboro's own current skateboard park controversy in mind when they chose this film.
But the film won't help either side. It will show how important skateboarding can be in helping young people define themselves, but it will also show how loud and crowded a sport it can be.
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“We try not to impose a theme,” Elder said. “It's better to just look for good films, and then the themes just happen. Like with Chico and Rita.”
The luscious Chico and Rita is a music-drenched, Spanish, animated, feature-length film directed by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal.
It tells the story of a Cuban jazz pianist who falls in love with a beautiful singer in pre-Castro Cuba and how the couple's lives are changed by struggle, success, jealousy, revolution, money, heartbreak, separation and, ultimately, love - life, in other words. It's heartwarming, sexy, and clever. Check out the Gene Kelly “Gotta Dance!” parody in the middle.
Made in 2010 and released to rapturous reviews, there wasn't a chance that this passionate, jazz-filled (Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Cuban bolero) film would find a wide release. The BFF is doing Brattleboro a huge favor by bringing it here, even if it's for one showing only. As they say, “If you can only see one....”
But then you might want to see Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. This visually dull but tension-filled and gripping story is made up of footage - maybe too much footage - of internationally famous Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei as he makes conceptual art and challenges the Chinese government over the right to free speech.
You can decide whether Ai's incessant publicity-seeking is an ego-driven character flaw or a way of protecting himself from imprisonment - a tactic that doesn't work in the end. He is a force of nature, a huge, bearded lion of a man whose welfare becomes ours in this fascinating documentary.
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For sheer fun, check out Cloudburst, Thom Fitzgerald's 2011 Canadian-American film starring the glamourous Olympia Dukakis as a foul-mouthed butch dyke who rescues her love of 31 years, played by the brilliant (and cuddly) Irish actress Brenda Fricker, and takes her on a road trip to be married.
The plot line is conventional, but the language and the love are extraordinary. An Edmonton, Canada paper called this movie, “The best menopausal lesbian road trip movie ever made.”
The festival also answers my burning question from the 2011 Academy Awards: “Who are those Black and Latino kids whose joyous singing closed the show?”
Once in a Lullaby, a documentary by Jonathan Kalafer, traces the journey of the P.S. 22 fifth-grade chorus and their upbeat and compassionate teacher, Gregg Breinberg, from Staten Island to YouTube fame to the glitz, glamor, and excitement of red-carpet Hollywood. This film had me in tears. Bring tissues and a full heart to this one.
The last film I'm going to discuss might have exploded heads at the Woman's Freedom Center if it had ever come up for discussion there. It's an NC-17 drama called Starlet. It hasn't opened yet, so Brattleboro is getting a sneak preview.
Starlet, by the way, is not a person but an adorable male Chihuahua. The film stars the enchanting 21-year-old Dree Hemingway (daughter of Mariel, grand-daughter of Ernest, if you must know) in her first role as a young, disaffected porn actress - and, yes, you watch her make a sex film - who forms an unusual friendship with an 85-year-old woman played by Besedka Johnson, also in her first role.
This film, by Sean Baker, gives us insight into the demented, drug-addled brains of young Hollywood starlets - the always-stoned, detached-from-reality roommate, played by Stella Maeve, almost steals the show as well as the money. (You really just want to reach into the film and slap her.) And what can you say about her boyfriend, who thinks the height of living room decoration is a stripper pole?
As shot by Radium Cheung in the light of southern California, a landscape full of telephone lines off into the horizon, the decaying cages of a closed zoo, the beauty of an old, brown-spotted hand holding a pale young one - this film has gorgeous images.
Other films treat the dangers of nuclear radiation, global warming and gay families. China's entry into the 2012 Academy Awards, A Simple Life, by Ann Hui closes the festival and runs for a week at the Latchis.
Film lovers in our area are well served by having the Brattleboro Film Festival as well as the Women's Film Festival.
“The BFF film selection committee has an ethos and proclivity that reflects the town at large,” Weinmann said. “We love Brattleboro. It's a wonderful place to live. So we put together some transgendered stuff, some racy stuff, some interesting kids' stuff.”
“We don't get enough of those films in the Latchis, which does a good job. But now that we've lost the Kipling Theater, our [year-round film] choices have been greatly reduced. It's nice to have a chance each year to widen our reach as a community.
“If we can deliver some of that great cinema at home and help the Latchis do its job, it's a win-win for everyone.”