Portland Dispatch. 2.

Hands down, the best film I saw at last weekend's Longbaugh Festival was El Inmigrante, a grippingly told non-fiction account of tensions along the US-Mexico border. Co-directed by John Sheedy, David Eckenrode and John Eckenrode, the movie would make an intriguing double bill with Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. A realistic counterpart to the Jones-Guillermo Arriaga fantasy of life and death in the parched Southwest, El Inmigrante retraces the events leading up to the killing of Eusebio de Haro, a migrant who came north to Texas, unable to earn a living as part of his family's firecracker-making business in San Felipe, Mexico.

The directors interview at length Eusebio's soft-spoken parents and his highly animated brother Diego, a young man who has both the charm and ease in front of a camera to be a movie star. The filmmakers also take pains to establish an indelible sense of place. Near the beginning, we're shown the primitive white crosses that honor the hundreds who died in immigrating to Arizona, California and Texas. We're introduced to US Border patrolmen who defy the stereotype of law enforcement present in Three Burials; several of these men are themselves Hispanic, and they have an understated empathy with the "illegals," as they're referred to, many of whom the patrolmen come to know after repeated failed crossing attempts. Quite courageously, the Eckenrodes and Sheedy give screen time to a few participants in "Civil Homeland Security," a group of jingoistic self-appointees who, motivated in equal measures of paranoia and racism, patrol the border in their spare time. One middle-aged blond woman, a gun-toting Bush fan, makes clear her conviction that the migrants (desperately poor) could be transporting Weapons of Mass Destruction across the Texas-Mexico line.

In an extended sequence of bravura editing and pacing, the filmmakers interweave a videotaped court deposition given by a survivor/witness of Eusebio's murder with recollections by Diego and his parents and, from the other side of the border, with statements from the small-town, white sheriff, LK "Buddy" Burgess, who investigated the killing. Underneath these four contrasting portraits of the same story, a percussive score rustles and pings subtly through the brush of the narrative - a masterful reconstruction of a horrific event. The credits list no fewer than five composers, including Matthew Valverde, for the original score. No matter who wrote what, the music abets the story to perfection, never overwhelming it.

Later this month, El Inmigrante (still seeking a distributor) surfaces at festivals in Atlanta, Boston and Tucson; in early May, it has its European premiere in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. If you are anywhere nearby, see it. Although Sheedy and the Eckenrodes didn't have the maverick cinematographer Chris Menges at their disposal, their movie surpasses Jones's in every other respect.

In my all too infrequent visits to New York, one of the consistent surprises of the city has been the music I've heard by buskers in the tube. Therefore, I was jazzed by the prospect that a pair of sibling filmmakers, Robin and Rory Muir, had directed a documentary on this very topic. But the result, the disappointing Downtown Locals, is a narrowly conceived work with lighting so dark, even in the aboveground sequences, that it obliterates color. This video should have been shot in black and white, a distinguished way to solve or at least neutralize the lighting and color problems. Among the six buskers whom the Muirs profile, only Helen, the lone woman performer, has something of consequence to say. An accordionist no longer in her youth, Helen plays a sweepingly nostalgic "La Vie en Rose" on her squeezebox. A former English major at Vassar, she speaks of having romanticized poverty in her 20s, but taking quite a different view of it in her 40s, as she's reduced to stealing napkins from Starbucks: a succinct statement on the misery of an artist's life. There's too much footage of the five men complaining about their respective lots. One of them, a gray-haired, snaggle-toothed guitar strummer who once preached on the evils of drug use, before himself choosing to shoot heroin at the age of 36, could be an emblem for why the film degenerates into a pity party for monumental bores.

Alas, Alex Karpovsky's The Hole Story proved too nerdy (and too meta) to melt the ice of my elitist sensibility. But I warmed up to Julie Gustafson's Desire, a pre-Katrina study of the class divide in New Orleans. Gustafson gave video cameras to five teenage girls, and they spent half a decade filming their lives. The young women are fascinating and at times heartbreaking, as when Cassandra, who lives in the housing projects, sees her ambitions of studying to be an engineer dissipated by an unexpected pregnancy. Her mother, whose hopes rode on Cassandra, finds the news devastating: "Even when the sun was shinin', I thought it was rainin'." As entrancing as the dreams, thoughts and visions of these women are, one of the best scenes is a turnaround in which Kimeca, a high school dropout who keeps having babies, positions the camera on Gustafson, and gets the older auteur to talk about why she chose abortions over teenage motherhood.

For the first time in its four-year history, the Longbaugh Festival was able to award filmmakers in three categories. I missed the best documentary recipient, Don Downey's Time in the Barrel: Death & Life in Vietnam, but it would have to be a superior work to its compadres in the winners' circle. The prize for best feature inexplicably went to September 12th, a movie as bad as its title. The winner for best short, Chris Brandt's indifferently made Closing Time, about sophomoric hi-jinks at a fast-food joint, was also a dud.

If I had been voting for best short, my choice would have been Between You and Me, a four-minute dazzler from Patryk Rebisz. This stop-motion vignette of how images inside a digital camera solve a mystery absolutely towered artistically over the vast majority of what I saw at the fest. Rebisz loves color, and he uses it exquisitely, a feast for the eyes, especially coming so soon after the Downtown Locals screening. Like the Muirs, Rebisz shot in New York, but what a difference when you have a director as visually attuned and technically sophisticated as this young artist, a Polish émigré who graduated from Cooper Union. Of course, it doesn't hurt that his silent leads, Alexandra Lerman and Rasko Ristic, are cute as buttons.

Posted by dwhudson at April 12, 2006 2:59 AM