Wrapping HRWIFF and Silverdocs.

Balzac once said that behind every fortune lies a crime. In this country, Norman Rockwell took a different approach in his 1959 painting, Family Tree, which traced a proper American family back to pirates and prostitutes, and through to a relationship between a drunken pioneer and an Indian squaw, then to what look like a gunslinger and a bar girl, and then eventually to the kind of "respectable" people who populated Rockwell's warmhearted scenes of American life. Don't look too closely, Rockwell seems to be telling us slyly, or you might see that your family's success might have come from people who made money the old-fashioned way - by stealing it, or sleeping with it.

As the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival closes, I wanted to take note of one film which examines a family fortune and is bound to make some viewers uncomfortable. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North [site; Thomas Norman DeWolf's Inheriting the Trade], looks at the DeWolf Family, heirs of Rhode Island entrepreneurs whose fortune came from the slave trade. The film is the debut feature of Katrina Browne and it premiered at Sundance, although I missed it there.

Information about the family business was not hard to find, the troubled descendants learned. Back in the 18th century, the DeWolfs packed goods on ships that went to Ghana and traded those goods for slaves, who were then sold in Cuba, where the ships carried other goods and some human cargo to Charleston, South Carolina, and then north to Rhode Island. Slaves were all over the North, the family is told, although not in such great numbers on the land of an individual family, as they were in the South. And when the slave trade was illegal, the DeWolfs found ways to get around that ban. With their earnings, they built the church in Bristol, Rhode Island that they attended. Katrina Browne reads to her chagrin that Mr De Wolf gave his wife two African children as a gift, and the family immortalized the child slaves with a nursery rhyme. This could be right out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would have appreciated the delicate darkness of the DeWolf's family secret.

It was bad enough for the educated and prosperous DeWolf heirs to learn that their proper ancestors were slavers, and that the unpaid labor of slaves subsidized factories and other enterprises in New England in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the DeWolfs are Episcopalians, and their guilt is painful. Not satisfied to wring their hands, the DeWolfs research their history in Rhode Island and find to their chagrin that the economy there depended on slavery. They then journey to Ghana, where the locals don't all welcome the well-meaning travelers, and then travel to Cuba, where much of the slave trade moved once it was outlawed in the US. Then they take on the Episcopal Church, which of course has voted to condemn slavery and recognize its pernicious legacy. It's a little late.

Traces of the Trade edges into the debate over whether the descendants of slaves should receive reparations from the descendants of those who enjoyed the benefits of an economy based on slavery, but mostly it dwells on the piercing guilt felt by the DeWolf family. With most of the water under the bridge, and none of the family members responsible for the sufferings of those whom the family traded as property, they can confess their guilt as they dig up more and more troubling facts, and the film ends up bogged down as a series of meetings at which the DeWolfs tell each other how troubled they are, and then tell the same thing to their Episcopal brethren and sisters. Just doing the digging, however, is more than most white Americans are willing to do.

Katrina Browne can't seem to figure out how to end her movie, nor could lots of other people, if we are to judge by the number of funders and friends who are thanked in the credits. Perhaps that's getting it right. One family member looks at the camera and wonders what crimes we take for granted today, as slavery was back then by the church-going and church-building DeWolfs. What crimes will be deplored a few decades from now? Humans are no longer part of the triangulated trade that brought slaves to the New World, but illegal immigration that sustains the US economy, to the extent that anything sustains it these days, could be another place to look. Only a fraction of immigrants are actually bought and sold, but the DeWolfs, who wring their hands like troubled Protestants over yesterday's crimes that they can do nothing about, might do better to consider the peculiar institution of immigration.

Now over to Silverdocs. In Four Seasons Lodge [site], directed by Andrew Jacobs, another family is the subject. This "family" is a colony of Holocaust survivors who sought out each others' company in a group of bungalows in the Catskills. We meet several dozen of them, all veterans of concentrations camps, as we visit the colony in what is to be its last summer. We hear stories of childhood before the war and explanations of why they lived when the vast majority did not - and plenty of humor in Yiddish-ized English. A lot of marriages among survivors did not work out, one woman says, because people married whomever was left alive right after the war. "Hitler was the matchmaker," she says ominously. The survivors seek each other out, most of them say, because they can never satisfactorily explain what they went through, and only those who lived through what they endured could really know them. Their shared experience creates a community, but the community is based on the experience of seeing mass murder firsthand.

Jacobs's documentary is tender as it roams through the modest colony. We hear that there used to be more of these summer communities, but the survivors are dying out. It's surprising that we don't hear much that is specific about their experiences in the concentration camps. Indeed, they may not need to talk to each other about those horrors, but this documentary is not just made for Holocaust survivors who don't need to be told about Auschwitz. Oddly, in this film about people who were able to come to America and create new lives, we meet only one of their children. It's as if they went from concentration camp to holiday camp, and you know that couldn't have been the case.

Four Seasons Lodge builds its tension on what seems to be the end of the colony, which I won't give away. It's heartwarming to see women (and a few men) in their 80s who can still dance and curse and laugh among themselves. It's a shame that Andrew Jacobs could not get them to tell us more.

-David D'Arcy

Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door on Letter to Anna (site; David D'Arcy): "Though dry and straightforward, even clunky in spots (especially when narrated in the English language version by Susan Sarandon, standing in for the filmmakers), the doc is a low-key, respectful summation of a life that resembled a tabloid-ready espionage thriller." More on from Rob Humanick at Slant.

Acquarello:

• "The specter of the Partition of Bengal in 1947 continues to haunt the modern day consciousness of a divided Kashmir in Senain Kheshgi and Geeta Patel's provocative and acutely observed Project Kashmir." Site.

• "Continuing in the vein of Justice, Maria Ramos's examination of the Brazilian justice system, Behave is an equally potent and sobering social inquiry into the state's juvenile re-socialization program."

• "Thoughtful and impassioned, Youth Producing Change is a diverse and intimate reflection into some of the issues and ideas that inspire young people worldwide into taking action."

Update: Online scrolling tip. AJ Schnack's Silverdocs Photo Booth.

Update, 6/28: For Acquarello, China's Stolen Children is a "thoughtful and remarkably comprehensive examination of modern day human trafficking." Also: Sari Soldiers.

Posted by dwhudson at June 26, 2008 9:36 AM