Other artists docs of note: Patti Smith: Dream of Life, directed by Steven Sebring, is a beautifully photographed but suffocatingly indulgent first-person look at Smith’s life over the past decade or so; Eric Metzgar’s follow-up to The Chances of the World Changing, the well-received Life. Support. Music., tracks an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who’s suddenly hospitalized after a brain hemorrhage leaves him vegetative; and Jeremiah Zagar’s IN A DREAM — a festival hit at South by Southwest this year — follows a prolific mural-maker at work in Philadelphia.
Documentaries
Comprised of two decades of intimate footage, Ellen Kuras’s The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), brings to light the unintended consequences of the US’s secret operations in Laos during the Vietnam War. Beginning in Laos, Kuras chronicles a large family’s transplant to a crack house in Brooklyn. The film is an awfully long 96 minutes, but the decades of footage at Kuras’s disposal ultimately make the family’s slow breakdown harrowing.
UNDER OUR SKIN: THE UNTOLD STORY OF LYME DISEASE, directed by Andy Abrahams Wilson, is a widely praised cinematic documentary that implicates the American health care system in the fast spread of the title disease. Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson’s A MAN NAMED PEARL, the festival’s closing night selection, is said to be an uplifting look at a black man named Pearl Fryar who taught himself to garden and has maintained a massive topiary garden for decades, after hearing someone quip that “Black people don’t keep up their yards.” A number of environmental documentaries are also on the slate, including Christina Hemauer's and Roman Keller’s A Road Not Taken, about the journey of the solar panels installed on the White House during Jimmy Carter’s presidency to Maine’s own Unity College.
Feature films
The most prominent fiction film at this year’s festival is Towelhead, the provocative directorial debut of Alan Ball, writer of American Beauty and creator of HBO’s Six Feet Under. The film finds a nearly pubescent girl in a Texas suburb being influenced by her immigrant father, racist neighbors, and the onset of the war in Iraq.
Azazel Jacobs’s much more humble and humane indie MOMMA’S MAN is set nearly entirely inside the most cluttered and fascinating New York City apartment you’re likely to see (it turns out to be the home of the director’s parents, who play the parents in the film). With each unique camera angle filled with eye-catching bric-a-brac, Jacobs’s film is about a thirty-something business man who stays with his parents during a work trip, leaving his wife and newborn baby in Los Angeles, and can’t bring himself to leave. At first glance, the film feels elliptical and Sundancey to a fault — a man with vague problems finds himself, vaguely — but it becomes a deep and unusually tender film, one well worth a second visit.
In another corner is Let the Right One In, a Swedish children’s vampire film for adults, directed by Tomas Alfredson. Save a terrible instance of CGI (as cats attack a bitten woman with Snakes On a Plane-level realism), the movie is a solemn and serious love story between a pale, bullied young student and his mysterious new neighbor who only appears at night.
