MIFF 2004 FILM FESTIVAL NOTEBOOK

By Joel Johnson

DAY 10

It is day 10 and the last day of the festival is here. This is a day of mixed emotions. After twenty-eight movies in ten days, it will soon be time for a less intense diet of motion pictures. To be absolutely blunt about it, I’m worn down by the pace of movie watching and just plain tired. Like nearly all great vacations, one senses the need to rest up from the vacation. Showing up at work only to rest probably is not what my work colleagues and superiors expect from me tomorrow morning. Then again, it is unlikely that I will find anything in my work tomorrow as entertaining and powerful as an almost-good movie—let alone a terrifically good one. The community of cinephiles that has stood in line together and bonded will soon be breaking up. Some will be traveling back to their homes in distant locales. Everyone will return to their usual lives and a more casual pattern of film viewing. The opportunity to share opinions with so many others while conducting impromptu dissections of individual films will be coming to an end until next year. In celebration of all that we have shared over the previous nine days and—for some of us—several previous festivals, we begin the final day with a brunch gathering of some of the most hardcore festivalgoers.

Today we will see The Letter, the story of how Lewiston coped with the racial and cultural tensions arising from a rapid influx of Somali immigrants. We will go see Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. This film is a surprise addition to the festival program for just one screening. Then we will see Home of the Brave, a documentary covering the story of the only white woman killed during the civil rights struggle in the South during the 1960s. The final film for us and for the festival will be Takeshi Kitano’s The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi.

THE LETTER
USA, 2004; 76 minutes; video; in English



Ziad H. Hamzeh filmed Shadow Glories (2001), a kickboxing movie, in Lewiston, Maine. This was a modest film with a cast of unknowns and a shoestring budget. The result was a thoroughly watchable, if flawed drama. However, the real product of the Shadow Glories shoot in Lewiston was The Letter. Hamzeh had been able to establish a personal relationship with key individuals in the community during his time filming Shadow Glories. When black African immigrants from Somalia who practice Islam and didn’t speak English particularly well decided to try to find a good place to raise their families, they came to a nearly all-white Lewiston, Maine. The Somali immigrants were different from their neighbors in race, creed, and language. The largest ethnic group in this city of about forty thousand was the Québécois who had moved to this mill town in droves during the early decades of the twentieth century. Like nearly all established and nearly-assimilated immigrant groups, they focused less on the hardship experiences of being newly arrived that they have in common with the new immigrants than on how the new arrivals would change the local community and threaten their future. As the number of Somali immigrants increased to over a thousand and the perception developed that they were beneficiaries of special treatment that was not available to the white local populace, resentment began to emerge. Lewiston’s Mayor Raymond wrote an open letter to Somali immigrants to tell other Somalis not to move to Lewiston because the city services to address their needs had been exhausted. This letter, for which the film is named, seemed to galvanize those uncomfortable with the “Somali invasion.” The community and its racial tension became highlighted in the national media. Soon people were coming to Lewiston to use the city’s problem to advance their own cause of white supremacy. Many others felt compelled to make their own statements about what was happening. Hamzeh seems to have been the perfect man to gain the confidence of all these diverse groups and document their perspective. He had the language skills and cultural background (born in Damascus, Syria) that made it easier for him to relate to the Somali immigrants. His skin was fair enough that he was able to attend the meetings of white supremacy groups without any suspicions being aroused. The film that has emerged from this work is powerful and thought-provoking. Racism has been a longtime blight on our national ideals. Our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” yet racism in the form of slavery mocked these lofty sentiments. Racism has continued to afflict our nation (today’s third film, Home of the Brave, shows vividly the toll racism has taken on one family during the 1960s). Historically, most Americans probably have been either indifferent or have a mild antipathy toward Islam. Certainly one outcome of 9/11 was greater suspicion and antipathy toward Muslims. The action-thriller filmmaker in Hamzeh comes through with a gradual and steady crescendo as the action heads for a showdown and the potential for it to explode into a violent conflict. Some of the footage—particularly of the white supremacists—gets used multiple times. The film’s talking heads are, for the most part, articulate in describing the events, passionate in their perspective, and provide key insights. The mayor’s interpretation of the burden facing the city of Lewiston from the Somali immigrants is challenged by several speakers. The mayor does not come off very well. However, this does not seem to be a product of being ambushed by the filmmaker, but rather because the mayor was unwilling or unable to provide much leadership for the community after starting the fire. The mayor doesn’t have much to say and even went on vacation during the time leading up to the climax of the events that he had set in motion. As a Maine resident, it is particularly meaningful to get an in-depth perspective on this recent chapter in Maine history. On the other hand, as a Maine resident, I know the basics about the outcome. Still, the film clearly shows the hair-trigger emotions that people on both sides had and the prudence of the police in taking extraordinary precautions to minimize the potential for a tragedy. The film ends on a hopeful note as one of the film’s recurring speakers relates his own family’s story of emigrating from Greece to the United States and weaves that experience and all immigrant experiences into the fabric of the United States.

SEARCHING FOR THE WRONG-EYED JESUS
UK/USA, 2003; 86 minutes; video; in English

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Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is a “to be announced (TBA)” screening and comes to MIFF after having tied for the Documentary Award at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival. The festival programmers heavily promoted it, as it was not included in the festival program catalog. It is billed as being a road trip through the “real South” and featuring a “fantastic soundtrack.” The “real South,” to which musician Jim White takes us in a vintage 1970 car rental adorned with the titular wrong-eyed Jesus statue hanging out of the trunk, shows the inextricable link of sin and salvation. Sin and salvation in the South are like the oriental yin and yang that complete each other. The journey takes us to roadside diners, bars, honky-tonks, correctional facilities, scrap yards, mines, swamps, and Pentecostal churches. These can not be on anyone’s idea of the scenic route through the South, but they do allow us to meet a number of colorful, real people. That doesn’t mean we would have wanted to meet them or that we will have found the experiencing enlightening. Mr. White does have a laconic delivery that occasionally hits the humor mark for a full-fledged belly laugh. I found the ratio meager in comparison to the strange humanity that is trotted in front of the camera. I thought having reached middle age that I had experienced a fair amount of the world, but I must confess that I found my mouth agape and myself aghast at what I was witnessing. There’s an intellectual part of me that knows these people and I share more about life than what we don’t share, but what was shown in the movie makes it seem like my reality was from a completely different planet than the people in the film. For me, there were two sections that seemed particularly salient. One was the juxtaposition of the lustful sin of a Saturday night honky-tonk and the salvation sought in the charismatic worship of a Pentecostal church on Sunday morning. There seemed to be an infusion of life in the intensity of these different, though indelibly related experiences. The other section that seemed to register with me was a tired-looking middle-aged woman making a strong case for not getting tattoos—at least not tattoos celebrating lovers—as she explained how several of her tattoos were cover-ups for earlier tattoos that touted failed relationships. The soundtrack features a mélange of folk, country, and blues in the music of Johnny Dowd, The Handsome Family, 16 Horsepower, and Lee Sexton as well as Jim White himself. Much of the music seemed similar to the music celebrated in Bluegrass Journey except that the energy of bluegrass had been left out. One of the performers had a singing voice that makes Bob Dylan’s vocals seem like they came from Dean Martin. I don’t think I’ll be looking for the soundtrack CD. Interestingly enough, one of the theater venues for the festival boasts a graffiti quote in the men’s room attributed to the President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis: “I am an American by birth and a Southerner by the grace of God.” Based on this film, I am completely happy that God destined me for the North—of course, that’s easier to say in the summertime. I suspect that few Southerners will use this film to explain why they are proud to live south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

HOME OF THE BRAVE
USA; 76 minutes; video; in English



The film Home of the Brave probably won’t do a lot for Southern pride, either. Nor will it do very much for American pride. The film tells a convoluted story about the murder of white civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in Alabama in 1965 and her family’s struggle in the aftermath of this terrible trauma. The film takes us from Viola’s upbringing through three marriages and six children to Alabama, where she volunteered in the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery and, ultimately, to the fateful night when she was killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Her family’s journey takes us through multiple court cases, a smear campaign orchestrated by longtime FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, allegations that their father provided muscle for Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, the discovery that an FBI informer rode along with the Klan killers and may have fired the fatal shot, the family’s dissolution, and finally a trip back to Alabama to visit a memorial to their mother at the site of her murder. The film is pieced together from file footage from a variety of different sources—mostly from television—and some specifically shot video footage of interview subjects and the current family activities. Paola di Florio (producer, director, and writer), Joan Churchill (cinematographer), and Nancy Dickenson (producer), who collaborated on this film, have created a very powerful film about one of the more shameful parts of American history. The story it tells keeps evolving so that one is never quite sure exactly what kind of story is being told. This is a double-edged sword that never allows the audience to complacently assume where the story will end up, and yet constantly revealing that the “real story” the film is telling is different from what has already been told can frustrate an audience. Home of the Brave is a very disquieting film because despite all the trials, all the investigations, and, most of all, all the pain, one senses that the truth of what happened to Viola will never be completely known by either her children or the public. One has grave doubts that the extreme isolation chosen by one brother and the shadowy underground life of another brother as a member of a private militia defying weapons provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act are healthy choices, but in a perverse way, they make perfect sense considering how the justice system has failed the Liuzzo children.

THE BLIND SWORDSMAN: ZATOICHI
Japan, 2003; 116 minutes; 35mm; in Japanese with English subtitles

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Takeshi Kitano has gained a worldwide following, producing several Japanese gangster films. His actor-persona Beat Takeshi, taking advantage of a facial paralysis, has appeared in these films as a tight-lipped Yakuza gunslinger. Here Kitano takes on another Japanese genre of the mythic hero in The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi. The distributor Miramax has decided the best way to market the period-piece martial arts extravaganza to the American public is to have the title be a combination of the character name and a description of who he is. I would have to agree that the combination title is probably more meaningful than the two parts would be separately. The result is a joyous splat-fest with a parade of baddies fighting each other and eventually the heroic blind swordsman Zatoichi, who is played by a platinum-haired Beat Takeshi. There’s a convoluted story of gangs fighting each other and extorting exorbitant protection money from the law-abiding citizens. There’s a troubled ronin-for-hire who just wants to be able to take care of his wife, and his martial arts skills are his most marketable aptitude. There’s also a story of revenge engineered by two geisha siblings and the comical reappearances of a would-be samurai. Okay, I’m kind of worn down after twenty-seven movies, so keeping the story straight in number twenty-eight about which set of gangsters belong to which gang is not going so well. It doesn’t really seem to matter. The story is not the most essential part of the film, and that is an unusual thing for me to say, as I tend to focus on the story. Here the focus is on action and character. Kitano keeps the swords flying and the blood flowing, and then he mixes in slower-paced scenes to allow the audience a little time to catch their breath. The outcome for the characters seems consistent with how they have behaved. The film ends with a monster production number that seems to be a Japanese homage to Bollywood, Irish step-dancing, and the theatrical troupe STOMP. It’s a pretty wild ride, but my diminished capacity made me less than the most alert film viewer. I will have to give it one of my “conditional” ratings.

 

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