Visions du Réel 2020: Quick Notes (Patreon)

I have been doing what I can to dip into this year's online edition of the Swiss documentary festival, and I may end up doing a longer write-up. At least I am hopeful that I will be able to. But for now, I wanted to share some thoughts about the first batch of films I've seen, before they completely evaporate from memory.

Nardjes A. (Karim Aïnouz, 2020)

In recent years the protest documentary has become a bit of a staple, as filmmakers strive to make a record of political unrest around the world. The tendency is usually to focus on the crowd as collective subject, as you might expect. With Nardjes A., Aïnouz takes a slightly different approach, examining the March 8, 2019 protest against Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika through the eyes of one young woman. We come to understand her specific investments in the movement, her strategies, and her unique emotional life. Moreover, Aïnouz shows us the complicated affect, the highs and lows, that come with devoting a large portion of one's life to real-world, in-the-streets struggle. This film shows us something rare in that it emphasizes activism not just as duty but as love.

Il mio corpo (Michele Pennetta, 2020)

Given the recent international success of the documentaries of Gianfranco Rosi, I suppose it stands to reason that we would start to see his style being imitated. In both subject matter and form, Il mio corpo strongly resembles both Fire At See and Sacro GRA, but it lacks the insights or the structural facility of those films. Pennetta follows two unrelated groups: an Italian man and his sons who are scraping by as junk scrappers, and a Nigerian immigrant and his friend, trying to navigate the naturalization system. The degree to which Pennetta completely effaces his own presence, appearing to capture tense human moments like the proverbial fly on the wall, doesn't instill trust. And then, when the film reveals the connection between these two spheres of humanity, we see that Il mio corpo has been meticulously reverse-engineered, for no real reason aside from the need for an Aha! Moment.

Purple Sea (Amel Alzakout / Khaled Abdulwahed, 2020)

At just over an hour, Purple Sea may be one of this year's most interesting films. I certainly think it will be one of the most ethically troubling. I am still struggling to decide exactly how I feel about it. It mostly consists of a real-time documentation of the aftermath of the sinking of a refugee craft on October 28, 2015, on which Syrian co-director Alzakout was a passenger. The camera bobs in and out of the water, frequently depicting flashes of life vests, tangles of kicking legs, and the occasional upended horizon line. It is next to impossible to watch Purple Sea without immediately thinking of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan. Except, of course, that film was shot under highly controlled circumstances, whereas Purple Sea is, ultimately, a retroactive aesthetic rendering of an event that cost many innocent people their lives. It is only the fact that the filmmaker was among those in jeopardy that prevents this project from being entirely ghoulish. Of course, there is significant value in the fact that Alzakout and Abdulwahed are raising these issues, since they go to the heart of what it means for the media, writ large, to depict the Syrian refugee crisis in the first place. But I could never escape the feeling that I was watching something that demanded a kind of spectatorship for which I am simply not equipped. If I think, "oh, this part looks like Bruce Baillie," or "this part is a bit visually redundant," I instantly feel like a bad person. But I don't know what it would be like to watch Purple Sea like a "good person."

Correspondence (Carla Simón / Dominga Sotomayor, 2020)

I am not sure if this 20 minute film is officially part of the "Correspondence" series that, over the years, has produced collaborative films between (e.g.) Lisandro Alonso and Albert Serra; Fernando Eimbcke and So Yong Kim; Jamie Rosales and Wang Bing; Naomi Kawase and Isaki Lacuesta; and Jonas Mekas and Jose Luis Guerin. Based on the boxed set that emerged from that project, it seemed rather "closed." But this film, if not an official contribution to that project, is certainly in the same spirit.

Spanish director Carla Simón produces a "letter" to Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor, detailing the packing up of her late grandmother's house, musing on the place of the women in her family, wisdom and care passed down between the women in her family, maternal expectations, and her ambivalence about delaying or abjuring motherhood in order to make films. Sotomayor, meanwhile, "writes" back with a film that reworks and partly reshoots older footage from just before the "No" referendum, showing her own grandparents' struggle against Pinochet and ruefully comparing their joy with the violence in Chile today, as a new form of fascism has emerged. The film is a remarkable example of how feminism can serve as a bridge concept to display the material links between two political conflicts, despite their circumstantial differences.

Sanfield (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2020)

Like many of Everson's best films -- Ears, Nose and Throat comes to mind -- this one slowly amasses details that do not immediately make sense in isolation. Through their patient accumulation, they form a coherent social picture. The dominant recurring image in Sanfield is a portrait of a young African-American man whose head is revolving in the frame at a moderate pace, as if either he or the camera is on a turntable. Over time, we figure out that he is undergoing an Air Force stress test, making sure he's physically up to flying at (presumably) mach speeds. As his voice and that of the examiner remain on the soundtrack, Everson shows us clips of other black people working in various capacities at the Columbus AFB as part of the 14th Flying Training Wing. We see men on the ground signalling to aircraft; women doing tech on parachutes; and officers in uniform waiting to board the jets. 

It's interesting to read some of the responses to Sanfield, some of which describe the film as highly political, depicting the men and women in the film as somehow bristling against a white authority structure within the military. This is certainly not wrong, but I did not see this myself. The U.S. military is, of course, an arm of a racist government. But many have claimed, not without reason, that there is less racism in the armed forces than in other institutions of equal stature, sociologically speaking . All of this to say, I think the value of Everson's film is that it is relatively impressionistic and direct, allowing us to meet its subjects (as much as possible) on neutral ground.