Reel Journeys: Sketches from the 2017 Camden International Film Festival

Downtown Camden, Maine embodies a dream—derived from collective cultural osmosis—that one might have of northern towns as hubs of autumnal Americana. An atmospherically foggy view of the coast was my backyard for four days. Each morning after several good cups of coffee I made my way from the rear porch of the Hawthorne Inn down a slope dotted with chairs and a fire pit, crossing through a wooded area over to the neighboring amphitheater, where portions of Todd Field’s In the Bedroom were shot. From there, I passed the library (featuring a tribute to Mark Robson’s Peyton Place, which was also shot in Camden) over to the main strip of town, which is rich in 19th-century buildings housing a palm reader, an ice cream parlor, numerous gift shops, and a deli that serves a terrific lobster roll.

There are at least four bookstores within a quarter mile of the Hawthorne Inn. By contrast, the Virginia town where I live doesn’t have any, and I spent most of my scant spare time in Camden at the Owl & Turtle Bookshop Café, which suggests a Hobbit’s nook, as the stairs in the center of the shop wrap around the room, uniting the upper and lower floors in a cavernous pattern that turns the smallness of the place into a cozy, cuddled-up-with-hot-chocolate-on-a-Sunday-morning asset. Craig White, who co-owns the Owl & Turtle with his wife, Maggie, told me that the author Richard Russo lives close by and pops over to sign his books for fans. I felt like Dale Cooper in the first several episodes of the original Twin Peaks: exclamatory and ready to go native.

Of course, a tourist’s vision of a town is a fantasy uncluttered by the day-to-day practicalities of life. Dale’s paradise, after all, was shattered, and his efforts to rebuild it in Twin Peaks: The Return came to a terrifying and ambiguous end. As beautiful as Camden is, many of its residents reminded me that winter was a different story in this part of the country. And it’s obvious—even to a tourist—that this part of the town is geared mainly toward the wealthy, and the number of people of color who I saw in Camden render small-town Virginia diverse by contrast. Camden is a reminder of a truth that haunted the 2016 presidential election: The thriving “small community” of many stifled white Americans’ dreams is an inherently rarefied concept.

These reverberations aren’t incidental to the Camden International Film Festival (CIFF), which specializes in a vast selection of progressive and formally adventurous documentaries, both short and feature-length. Sabaah Folayan’s Whose Streets?, a searing, kaleidoscopic vision of the unrest that followed in Ferguson, Missouri after the unpunished murder of Michael Brown, received a hero’s welcome at the festival. Jonathan Olshefski’s Quest, an extraordinary study of an African-American family in Philadelphia throughout the Obama years, won an award. The legendary documentarian Steve James, in attendance with Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, was regarded by filmmakers and filmgoers alike as a rock star, and was also nice about my accidentally butting in front of him and his wife in a screening line. Playing at CIFF were films about global warming, European colonialism, African immigrants and refugees, animal slaughter, alternate forms of energy, and the modern debtors’ imprisonment that empowers the American judicial system.

If you live as a liberal aesthete in Trump Country with people indifferent to art, you often feel like a cultural secret agent. Which is to say that the act of watching impassioned liberal documentaries in a new setting with like-minded people is liable to inspire a newfound sense of gratitude and perhaps a disconcerting new propensity for touchy-feely platitudinous-ness. These good vibrations intensify a sensitivity to the uncomfortable contrast that exists between the lives of the festival-goers and those shown in the films screening in Camden and neighboring Rockport, lacing your intoxication with guilt. This disconnect is an occupational hazard of festivals and art at large, and there’s the lingering question of what’s accomplished when people unite to consider issues about which they largely already agree. Watching Daniel McCabe’s This Is Congo, an operatic character study set against the M23 rebellion, I wondered what an American isolationist might make of the images of children casually watching tank warfare as one might a tennis match.

White guilt was a recurring subject of cocktail conversation during my stay at Camden, as it’s difficult to reconcile the oysters with the strife that’s seen in, say, Dustin Nakao Haider’s Shot in the Dark, which charts the lives of high school basketball players in Chicago, in a manner that somewhat suggests a blend of Quest and Steve James’s Hoop Dreams. Structured as a feel-good sports movie, Shot in the Dark was criticized by certain audience members for failing to question an American society that forces a black teen to stake his hopes for success on sports. This concern isn’t unfounded, but Haider displays a haunting feel for interfamilial texture that underlines the toil such a system has on the impoverished and nearly disenfranchised. The film preaches by not preaching, and has the potential to reach audiences (read: Caucasian sports fanatics) who might not otherwise be receptive to politics.

I rarely consider a film’s accessibility, as I find the internality of cinema to be its greatest quality, and am not especially fascinated by the communal nature of theater-going. But festival socializing temporarily reorients one’s priorities. Participating in a press preview of several virtual-reality exhibits, I wondered if VR might be more effective as a political tool if more than just a privileged few had access to it. During a preview of Greenland Melting, which offers one the illusion of standing on Greenland’s receding icecaps, I imagined the legislative change that might be initiated if this experience could be purchased in malls. The exhibit merges ecological awareness with disaster-film showmanship, cutting through political euphemism to directly show us the ice caps as they recede, signaling a landscape’s death rattle. This impotency is exacerbated by sudden shifts in the frame: Participants stand on ice in one sequence only to find themselves in simulated midair the next, surveying destruction from a vast and chilling distance.

More surprising and poetic in its simplicity was Tree, which allows you to consider life as lived by a tree in the rainforest. In addition to goggles and earphones, variations of which are necessary to every VR exhibit, you wear a heavy backpack and hold a circular remote control in each hand. The backpack almost literally grounds you, giving you a feeling of hearth and rootedness while providing mild heat at the climax. But most of the experience involves you looking down at a forest from the top, waving your arms as if they were branches, regarding birds and other trees until a twist ending brings the exhibit’s political message to the foreground, with a visceral sense of tragedy that can’t be communicated by bullet points and statistics. To borrow a phrase from Roger Ebert, Tree is an empathy machine.

Conceptions of empathy resounded through CIFF as rallying aspirations. One of the festival’s hallmarks is the Points North Pitch, in which documentarians pitch projects to industry honchos from studios and venues such as Sundance and PBS. Assuming this would be a cynical business seminar, I was inclined to skip this presentation for a series of short films, but serendipitous shuttle rides with said honchos changed my mind. I’m glad I came around, as Points North Pitch wrestled with one of the classic ongoing questions of nonfiction filmmaking: What right do filmmakers and audiences have to the people and material to which documentaries offer us free and easy access? Predominantly and unassumingly composed of women, the jury asked such questions of the filmmakers, and the pitches, which are still mostly confidential, suggest thrilling fusions of protest art and personal inquiry.

But one does continue to wonder what right we have to these people’s lives in the context of entertainment. For me, an uncomfortable moment of the festival concerned the Q&A after Shot in the Dark, when the film’s central subject, Tyquone Greer, was brought on stage with the filmmakers. Greer was one of very few people of color in the auditorium, and so there was a whiff of racial spectacle to the event. As if the Caucasian audience, myself included, were satiating its guilt and curiosity by engaging in a demonstrative gesture of empathy for a black man who grew up rough in a racist society but who had the talent and charisma to capture our attention.

Related to appropriation and ironically self-absorbed empathy is a broader potentiality of nonfiction films for exploitation and muddying of the “truth.” Watching documentaries about the poor, one might understandably wonder why filmmakers can’t be bothered to put their cameras down for a moment and get their subjects something to eat. Capturing misery on film has been proven to make a social difference, as in Hoop Dreams and Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line. To be a good journalist is to be an observer, perhaps valuing macro awareness at the expense of immediate micro need. In a panel with Jeff Unay, the director of The Cage Fighter, James spoke about these familiar torments of documentary filmmaking, describing a tortured balance of reporting a story while helping his subjects find resources.

Throughout CIFF, audiences were occupied with such distinctions of fiction and reality, often asking filmmakers which scenes were coached and which were captured spontaneously. After a screening of Martin Dicicco’s relentlessly arty All That Passes by Through a Window That Doesn’t Open, which allows one to feel the full brunt of the tedium of life as a train conductor in Azerbaijan, Dicicco was asked if he had to tell his subject to look at the TV for the film’s striking opening shot. A little ruffled, he said that he shot hours of footage of television-watching, and this was the one they used. Of course, such filmmaking still informs the “reality” that’s being rendered.

I’ve only been to a few film festivals in the flesh, but CIFF feels unusually earnest and soul-searching. Every subtext that I’ve referenced so far—problematic and otherwise—has been considered by the programmers, and the filmmakers were open and approachable. I talked Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson with someone from Sundance, and began my trip on a shuttle discussing the films of Werner Herzog with documentarian and cinematographer Drew Xanthopoulos, who was at CIFF with his moving The Sensitives. I also had a recurring adventure with a Caucasian festival-goer who gave me a couple of rides from Rockport to Camden. We discussed Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro and the work of James Baldwin, and the man told me of his life, which has been fraught with indecision and disappointment.

I thought of this man’s frustration while watching The Work, which is due in theaters next month and is almost destined to provoke polarizing reactions. Directors Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous follow several inmates in Folsom Prison over four days as they engage in violent group therapy with outsiders new to the program. The central concept of the therapy is simple yet astonishingly effective: These prisoners, who epitomize bad-ass masculinity, give the newcomers permission to own feelings that are implicitly coded by our society as shamefully effeminate. Racially and culturally mixed, the inmates want these outsiders to cry and tap into their feelings of inferiority so as to quell interior violence before it’s actualized as exterior chaos.

The Work mines a deep well of curdled masculinity that’s often un-accessed by pop culture. And American men, unsure of who they’re supposed to be in a 21st-century that simultaneously tells them to be tougher and more sensitive, may find this unapologetic tear-jerker to be a godsend. In this film, one enjoys the convicts’ toughness as well as their newfound empathy somehow without conflict, and this tonal smoothness is insidiously appealing. The violent crimes that landed these men in prison are acknowledged but not grappled with, and so you’re allowed to forget that one of these men, say, sawed a victim in half with a knife. And there’s an irony that isn’t explored at all: The prisoners are bullying in their very openness, insisting that their new recruits get with the program and unfurl themselves on schedule. But this lack of distance and clarity renders The Work a powerfully neurotic experience. The film is all catharsis, following one emotional peak after another, reveling in a sea of facial close-ups that physicalize male id.

Another study of male ego, Guido Hendrikx’s Stranger in Paradise, was one of the bleakest and cheekiest of CIFF’s offerings. The film follows a white instructor (played by Valentijn Dhaenens) who teaches African migrants the realities of seeking refuge in Europe. The unnamed man initially espouses isolationism, telling the Africans that they should form their own welfare system like Europe in the wake of WWII, insisting that they can’t be helped here. Later lectures contextualize this entitlement as satire, as the instructor fesses up to Europe’s history of colonialist atrocity.

Stranger in Paradise offers the visceral pleasure of a white man acknowledging European sin, and his straight talk—smug, condescending, white-mansplaining—nevertheless thrums with an electrical excitement that’s understood to concern the alleviation of white guilt. The film’s bracingly austere and didactic—a classroom lecture as art that’s clearly staged and was advertised as a fusion of fiction and documentary aesthetics. Yet it packs an ambiguous emotional charge that stems from pushing the literal so hard to the forefront that it slips into the figurative. The teacher’s anger is shown to contain compassion that isn’t strong enough to inspire him to turn on the system that provides him with the power and comfort which he has the privilege of decrying. His classes are theater. The film’s ending—in which the festival circuit is shown to be inevitable for Stranger in Paradise itself, with the teacher describing the riches that the audience has been enjoying—is infused with curt and futile rage. Hendrikx bites the hand that feeds him but not really. His film encapsulates all the riddles and frustrations of making democratic art that’s only accessible to a few people. CIFF knowingly deconstructs itself in front of your eyes, suggesting a fleeting utopia.

The Camden International Film Festival ran from September 14—17.