BRATTLEBORO — How many among us have not somehow, somewhere been touched by a film?
For me, film is a second-generation addiction. My mother, who was born in 1917, was an early adapter of talking pictures. Mesmerized by the stars' elegance and glamour, she passed on her love of movies to me.
I grew up thinking I would marry Bill Powell as the Thin Man, have a waistline as thin as Myrna Loy's, and wear gowns to sophisticated parties where I would drink lots of cocktails.
It didn't work out that way, of course, but I did learn at an early age to love the dark anticipation of the theater, the abandonment of my everyday consciousness, and the plunging into new - and sometimes dangerous - worlds. I still love nothing more than seeing my preconceived notions smashed into pieces and learning something new and startling.
Films that take us into foreign worlds, that entertain us as they break our hearts, that teach us about our own humanity: these are the kinds of films usually called “independent.”
Which leads me to the fourth annual Brattleboro Film Festival, running from Friday, Oct. 30 through Sunday, Nov. 8. This year, it is presenting 31 independent, award-winning films chosen from more than 150 entries.
“We start in February and work very hard,” said festival Board President Merry Elder, who also chairs the Film Selection Committee. “We have hard discussions about many good films that we end up letting go of in favor of other films. We consider the balance of subjects and the films' availability. We don't go after any old film - with only a few exceptions, we go after award-winning films. The selection committee is made up of folks with diverse viewpoints that make intelligent arguments for or against a film.”
Elder is a second-generation film lover also.
“My parents brought me to the movies frequently as a baby because I was a quiet baby,” she said. “Then, when I was about nine years old, I was flipping through the TV channels and I caught a powerful image - on a PBS-type channel - of the baby carriage going down the Odessa steps in [S.M.] Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. I was transfixed and awakened to what film can communicate.”
Elder and many of her colleagues have been sharing their love of film with Brattleboro for decades - first with the Women's Film Festival, and now with this newer iteration.
The BFF is also connected with the Vermont International Film Foundation, which puts on a fall film festival in Burlington.
“We share some film discoveries,” Elder said. “So the combined effort results in lowered prices for both of us - it is easier to negotiate down when there are more showings. We are different festivals on each end of the state with different audiences, but we help each other out as we can. Since it is a rural state with a relatively low population and economic resources, this connection made a lot of sense.”
The eight films the festival share are Very Semi-Serious, The Second Mother, The Babushkas of Chernobyl, The Dinner, Radical Grace, Taxi, On the Edge of the World, and Before the Last Curtain Falls.
For the past few weeks I have had the enchanting task of previewing the films. I managed to see about 20 of them; this is my report.
* * *
One of the most beautiful and bravest films is Before the Last Curtain Falls, a Belgian documentary by Thomas Wallner structured around the last stage performance of a nine-person cabaret show called Gardenia. The show, originally improvised, was so popular that it did about 200 performances in 25 countries. The nine performers are all elderly men who are transgender, transvestite, gay, or a combination of the above.
When Gardenia played in the U.S., it did not get high praise from The New York Times, which accused it of indulging in cliché: “The show's directors seem content to present their performers as exotic objects, never offering an especially nuanced take on any one individual.”
This is not true for the film. Here we are taken deep into the lives of most of the performers. We see their apartments, look at photos of them when they were young, hear their life stories, share their sadness, and feel their loneliness.
Two of the performers, in their youth, were prostitutes. One has found a fulfilling career as a nurse for premature babies. One is currently running - as a woman - for mayor of her town.
In and out of costume, the performers show off their flamboyant makeup as well as their bare, sagging breasts (“Then they came out with hormones and we all got breasts,” one of them says cheerfully.)
To open yourself up like this - to be almost naked on stage when artifice almost alone defines your stage persona - is the height of bravery.
* * *
Another of my favorites this year is Margarita With a Straw, a narrative Indian film by Shonali Bose and Nilesh Maniyar. It tells the story of a young girl with cerebral palsy and an unbreakable spirit.
Kalki Koechlin plays the girl, Laila, who is growing up in India with severe disabilities but in a loving home. At school she writes lyrics for a rock band and has a major crush on the cute lead singer. Yet when her band wins a national talent contest because the lyrics were written by “someone with disabilities,” Laila gives the announcer the finger and the band rejects the trophy and leaves the stage. Her body and her speech might be difficult to manage, but her intelligence is unfettered and wants to be recognized for its own bright shining self.
When Laila receives a scholarship to New York University, she and her mother find themselves in snowy, slushy New York. Watching her navigate the winter streets in a wheelchair made me hold my breath.
Laila eventually finds sex and love with a stunning Asian woman and then a hot young male writing student.
By the time she returns home, Laila has turned - still in a wheelchair, still unable to articulate words, still unable to control her body - into a stunning young woman. Disabled people's sex: a refreshing new way to look at things, and why not?
* * *
A documentary I'm still thinking about is the 2015 The Babushkas of Chernobyl, by Holly Morris and Anne Bogart. The story begins on April 26, 1986, when Reactor #4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant melted down, making a 2,600-square-kilometer area - “the evacuation zone” - declared permanently uninhabitable.
Yet for many of the people forced off their ancestral land, Chernobyl is home, the place where they were born and raised, where their dead were buried, where they want to live out the rest of their days. So about 100 of them - mostly women, called “babushkas” for the head coverings they wear - sneaked back in.
At the time, they were allowed in because they were already old, and scientists decided that age would get them before the radiation did. But even amid doctors' visits and the clicking of geiger counters, 29 years later the women continue to live there. They fish in the rivers; they tend to lush gardens full of flowers, fruits, and vegetables; they raise pets, chickens, and ducks; and they are living longer than their evacuated neighbors.
“People die from anguish,” says one of the babushkas. “I'm still so happy I'm in my own house. I'm not dependent on anyone. I don't regret anything.”
This film left me bewildered. Is radiation less dangerous than we're told it is? Are these women crazy? Are those beautiful vegetables deadly?
The message is mixed here, but the story is fascinating. Who knew?
* * *
Speaking of who knew, here's a documentary about our own state featuring people many of us know and telling us a story that many of us lived through. The State of Marriage, the deliberate-double-entendre title of a 2015 film by Jeff Kaufman, tells the deeply researched story of how Vermont became the first state in the union to offer gay people civil unions.
As any reporter who went through that cataclysmic time in Vermont will tell you, the film misses a lot of the good stuff. It captures the anger of the Take-Back-Vermonters, but it doesn't examine attitudes now, 15 years later, when gay marriage couldn't even get a raised eyebrow here. It also only touches on the politicians who sacrificed their careers to do the right thing.
But mainly, Kaufman's camera wasn't trawling the Statehouse corridors during the House of Representatives debate, capturing the real change that was happening there - one lesbian or gay couple's baby cuddled in the arms of one Take-Back-Vermonter at a time.
We all got to be human with one another. We all saw that our opposites didn't have horns and tails. I think many fears were worn away by simple proximity as we milled about, waiting to be called to testify.
* * *
A documentary that left me cheering was Radical Grace, an intimate look at the lives of the American nuns who rebelled against the Vatican and were condemned for their “feminist spirit” and “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” (As if the first were a bad thing and the second actually possible.)
The nuns were fighting for social justice. They openly supported health-care reform and the Affordable Care Act. They banded together and organized. They barnstormed like rock stars across the country in a bus!
One of their supporters carried a sign: “What would Jesus Do? Ask a nun, not a politician!”
The nuns did not promote “conservative doctrine” and “conformity.” In fact, they laughed out loud at those ideas and almost cried real tears for the patriarchal church's “denial of the divine” in all of us. They outlasted two popes and finally won when a third, Pope Francis, took over the Vatican.
Beautiful film, beautiful women, beautiful nuns.
* * *
There's a Cuban theme to this year's fest, built around the remarkable 2014 narrative Conducta (Behavior) shot in modern-day Havana by Ernesto Daranas.
It centers on an 11-year-old wild child, Chala, played by a remarkable new young actor named Armando Valdés Friere. Saddled with a useless pill-stunned mother, he raises pigeons on a rooftop and hustles money from dog fighting, which - be warned - is a brutal but necessary part of the film.
The respected elderly teacher who sees his potential and works to save him is brilliantly acted by Alina Rodriguez, who makes us feel the very real love she has for her students, especially the difficult ones, as well as the pain of an old body almost worn out from giving so much love.
The film shows us a realistic view of modern-day Cuba and the poverty there, far away from the image of sexy music and hot antique cars. This is a brilliantly visual world of train tracks and crumbling buildings and power lines - wonderful horizontals! - and of people scrambling to make it from one day to the next.
* * *
Three shorter narrative films are well worth watching.
The American film Birthday is about a wounded vet and his wife coming to terms with his badly damaged body. It will make you cry with pride.
Two other short narratives read like cartoons. One, In the Clouds, set in Buenos Aires, tells a charming story of modern romance and how it can go off and on the rails. The other is Till Then, a lovely, lovely German story about how two elderly neighbors wordlessly - and cleverly - connect.
The Brazilian narrative The Second Mother tells the story of how an obsequious maid is freed by her alienated daughter. The mother's point of view: “I have to work for the money to support you, and this is how I have to act to get the money.” The daughter's: “You are not their slave.”
Both are right, and there's a happy ending to prove it. All the acting in this one is so fine that you could easily take it for a documentary.
* * *
This leads me to Taxi, which, if you just sit down to watch it without knowing the backstory, will leave you feeling meh. But when you know the backstory....
The documentary Iranian film was made by a world-famous Iranian filmmaker, Jefar Panahi, who has been forbidden by a repressive, conservative, dictatorial regime to make films. So what does he do? He sets up mini-cameras in a taxi and drives around the city filming the people he meets.
The frequently amused Panahi makes a marvelous host for this trip around Tehran. And while he cannot make films openly, his 11-year-old niece, who rides along with him, can. Everyone seems to have a camera in this one, and you get to tag along for the mesmerizing ride.
* * *
There's also a revealing inside look at how The New Yorker chooses its cartoonists: Very Semi-Serious. (For those of us in love with cartoonist Roz Chast, she's in it.) The Way We Talk takes on stuttering and lets us know that the latest thinking indicates that it's genetic.
Radiator is a British narrative film about a middle-aged man coping with recalcitrant elderly parents. All the Time in the World is the story of a family (a filmmaker mom, a dad, three charming kids, a dog, and two cats) that goes off the grid - imagine, no computers! - for nine months (including the winter) in the backwoods of the Yukon and lives to tell the tale.
Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective is one of several ecological films. This one is positive, offering some answers to the burning question of how humans might be able to survive, and even live gracefully, on this planet after we've used it all up.
* * *
And that's just a taste of what's in store. All in all, I'd say that film selection committee has done Brattleboro proud.
“A little more than three years ago, a small group of us, all volunteers, launched the festival with a shared dream, blind faith, and a credit card,” Elder said.
“Today, the festival is steadily growing thanks to the generous businesses and individuals who are supporting us financially along with all the film lovers who anxiously await the reveal of our slate.
“It's a major year-round undertaking to put on a 10-day festival and we'll always be working out those 11th-hour kinks, but we are proud to be an essential and welcomed event that adds to the vibrancy of Brattleboro as a unique and dynamic cultural center.”