SF Docfest Dispatch.

Considering its size, San Francisco is blessed when it comes to documentary screenings; the major festivals in the area all have healthy line-ups (check out the doc slate at the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival), the Documentary Film Institute has a very sporadic but well-curated annual programming schedule, and then there's autumn.

This month sees two dedicated documentary festivals shine on San Francisco with the October sun (residents and Mark Twain both know that October is San Francisco's only summer month). SF Docfest and the United Nations Association Film Festival are both worth venturing to, with UNAFF offering good, parental, eat your vegetables programming, and SF Docfest acting the smoking-out-the-back-of-the-skating-rink rebel.

Updated.

While the excellent UNAFF pops into San Francisco for only two days, preferring Stanford's hallowed grounds, SF Docfest, produced by SF Indie, runs for two weeks and showcases 32 new documentaries, all at the Roxie Theater in the heart of the vibrant Mission District. The number one rule of this festival is - run, don't drive! The Mission is no place for a car. Excellent food abounds, the train station is a block away and the closing night party, keeping with IndieFest tradition, is within long-jumping distance of the theater.

Falling where it does in the yearly festival calendar, several strong films are screening at SF Docfest that premiered at SXSW, whose documentary line-up smoothly compliments the aesthetics of SF Indie. One of those films is Manufacturing Dissent [site], the quiet examination of documentary filmmaking that caused an uproar when it headlined a packed theater at SXSW earlier this year. Canadians and self-confessed bleeding heart liberals Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine offer up a great dissection of Michael Moore as a filmmaker and personality, asking the key question: is it okay to manipulate the truth if the grand purpose is to reveal a greater truth? Are white lies okay in documentary filmmaking? Some vehement members of the audience clearly thought Melnyk and Caine had a dirty secret of their own - that they were out to smear Moore - but these were clearly timid, genuine documentarians on stage, with no sensationalistic motives. Their basic quandary is actually kind of a geeky one. Although a nasty personal portrait is drawn of Moore, mostly through interviews with friends, former friends and collaborators, the larger questions here, larger even than Moore, are the important ones. The reality may be that not only are many Americans unable to digest the truth, they'll also not even step up to the plate without a promise of a little entertaining and confrontational fiction mixed in.

Speaking of entertainment, and of mixing things up, Jim Brown and Gary Burns' Radiant City [site] is an intelligent, hilarious, deadpan dissection of a dangerous form of suburbia that is spreading in the developed world. Ever wondered - driving, jaw-agape, past vast stretches of identical new "single family homes" wedged in the middle of nowhere, somewhere on the freeway between two gargantuan malls, ruining some perfectly nice rolling hills or an empty landscape and called without a hint of irony "Evergreen" or "Tuscany" - who actually lives in these places? Meet the Moss family - father Evan is interviewed in the endless shuffle of commuter traffic, mother Anne is all pent up in her turtleneck and brand new home, and the kids don't know anyone and can't walk anywhere so they invent sinister entertainment in the construction mud.

Early on in Radiant City, which combines statements from urban designers and architects with vignettes from the Moss manse, author James Howard Kunstler shows up to tell us that "80 percent of everything ever built in North America has been built in the last 50 years and most of it is brutal, depressing, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading." Indeed. Radiant City, a critique, should also hold plenty of wry appeal for suburbanites, even while it rails against them. Several of the subjects muse self-consciously about the pros and cons of their decisions. A larger problem looms for these sheepish home owners though, beyond urban hipster contempt. There is a major reason why cities have traditionally built houses with shared walls - energy conservation. Some of the most disturbing statistics to come out of Radiant City are the numbers of square footage we seem to feel we need for living now. When fossil fuels are used up or sanctioned, and overpopulation becomes a burden, these car and heat dependent houses will become more than just soul killers - they will be seen as lethal excesses. Joyfully throwing convention away and replacing it with unique and genre-bending acumen, Jim Brown and Gary Burns have made the one perfect film to see about this creeping threat.

One of Fahrenheit 9/11's most convincing arguments is that the US government keeps the working class uneducated and poor because they make better fodder for Army recruiters when kept that way. A great supporting film for this argument is Michelle Mason's Breaking Ranks [site], which portrays the attempts by four AWOL US soldiers to emigrate to Canada in resistance to the war in Iraq. When faced with the reality of battle, and particularly of killing and sanctioning torture in a losing and unjust war, these soldiers understandably balked at what their superiors were commanding them to do. While it's a great general concept for a film, Mason is stuck with some difficult protagonists, whose own valid, but tragically inarticulate arguments don't help their case either as individuals, or more problematically, as subjects. These guys are victims, there is no doubt about it, but just by living with them for an hour it becomes clear that the US education system is largely to blame. More contextualization might have helped, but the film itself seems to be mostly a worthwhile bid for public support in the face of the soldiers' appeal to the Canadian government.

Other notable films screening in the coming week include the sports track: Hell on Wheels, El Mechanico Loco and Wiener Takes All: A Dogumentary; award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, from Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room); and a crowd-pleaser at SXSW, What Would Jesus Buy?

Update: Kevin Langson at Pixel Vision: "Breaking Ranks' looming question? Whether or not the Canadian government will have the gall to make a move that is not obsequious to the US government and grant these men refuge."

Posted by dwhudson at October 4, 2007 6:39 AM