Filmmakers at the Forum

Filed under Events by Mario Contreras on June 30, 2009 at 11:58 pm {no comments}

Join us for a discussion with directors and producers from the Kartemquin series, The New Americans. To celebrate the rebroadcasting of the groundbreaking series, They’ve agreed to share some of their knowledge with us on the Viva Documentary Forums.

Visit the forum thread and leave questions here.

The series will air as part of Global Voices on Sundays beginning July 5th and is also available for download on iTunes for $1.99 as part of iTunes’ Independence Day promotion. Other select documentaries from “Global Voices” series will be available on iTunes this summer on the PBS Indies Channel.

The New Americans and Me

Filed under Features by Mario Contreras on June 30, 2009 at 11:28 pm {no comments}

Jose from The New Americans
Looking back, I can find all types of moments that may have foreshadowed my love for documentary but if there was a time that truly made me commit to non-fiction, it was my last year at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. The design of the film program at that time was that you make a choice at the thesis level; make a narrative film in 16mm snyc-sound or a documentary in digital video with the Canon XL1. The year that followed stretched me and challenged me in so many ways that I realized that documentary filmmaking makes you eat, sleep and breathe film in the way that my Production 1 teacher, Mike Covell, talked about in my first real film class. At that age all I wanted to do was change the world and documentary gave me to tools to do so.

My thesis film followed a bus full of immigration rights activists for 8 days as they lobbied and rallied in Washington D.C. with thousands of others from around the country. The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride marked the beginning of a new civil rights movement that combined the issues of all immigrants instead of just one population. I knew little about all this when I stepped on the bus and I probably never would have if I hadn’t taken a leap into something completely foreign to me but I was college so I took the chance.

In a tiny way, getting on that bus was like the immigrant experience. I left home with a few bags and a camera and I lived among a group of people that I knew very little about. Feelings of displacement, helplessness, pride and acceptance were some that I was able to sample during those 8 days and 9 nights. I was different when I returned but I still didn’t have the language to articulate my new outlook on life. I was a kid with 30 hours of footage and about 10 hours of experience in non-linear, digital editing. Lily Buroskowski helped me manage the footage and look for the story but it was a grueling 4 months of bad edits and do overs.

It was in this venerable state that I first encountered The New Americans. Steve James, a Southern Illinois alum and Academy Award nominated director of Hoop Dreams, was screening his series, The New Americans during The Big Muddy Film Festival. The film was spread out over 3 days which meant that we were able to watch it the way that Kartemquin preferred. The series still hadn’t aired on television and we had the privilege of listening to Steve James, who was there for a Q & A after part 1. I spoke to him briefly about my thesis project and he was very encouraging. The details of the conversation are blurred by my star-struck memory but I’m sure I sounded like a nervous little fanboy so I still appreciate how kind he was.

nullThe juxtaposition between Riccardo, an unmistakable talent, and Jose, a poor boy who can play, gives us a wide range of information about why families pin in their hopes to something as fickle as a professional baseball career. There are echoes of this relationship when Jose and Riccardo negotiate contracts with management and are happy to have check for $5,000 for a season while their U.S. born counterparts won’t consider playing for under a million dollars.

The Nigerian story of Ogoni Refugees, Israel and Ngozi shows a completely different approach to the story because we are introduced to Israel and Ngozi Nwidor after they’ve lived for a refugee camp for 2 years and are about to make the transition of starting a new life in America. This storyline requires a backstory to explain the circumstances that brought the Nwidor family, and many other Ogonis, to this point.

Isreal’s optimism serves as a reminder of what makes people risk their futures to come to the U.S. A scene where Ngozi and Isreal send a portion of their earnings shows some of the pressure that most immigrant families are under to maintain the image of the American Dream in the eyes of family back at home. Even though they are suffering through hardships, they still have to send money back home and tell everyone that they are doing well.

Watching the Nwidor family experience America for the first time is an amazing thing. When the refugees are first given McDonald’s hamburgers it’s as if they’ve finally arrived in the land of opportunity. It’s a food that I do everything in my power to avoid but watching Isreal eat one makes me appreciate what it would mean to appreciate it without even knowing what’s inside. His excitement to learn what goes on the outside and what is in the middle shows that, like anyone on the brink of change, he doesn’t know what he’s in for.

The last story that’s introduced in the first part of the series is of Naima Saadeh, a Palestinian bride that is determined to leave her small town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank where she has lived her whole life. We get to know Naima as she goes through a typical commute to school. She needs to take three taxi-vans and cross an Israeli checkpoint to get to school. We get some of the back story of the situation in the West Back through letters that her brother, Jihad, wrote to her while imprisoned for his role in the youth movement during the Intifada. I love the scene for it’s emotional power, the amount of information communicated and because they allow Naima to break the fourth wall by telling Jihad that “They” asked to see the letters.

The relationship between of Naima and her fiance, first-generation Palestinian American Hatem Abudayyeh, is fascinating because of the differences between the way they view Naima’s life. Hatem is offended to see Naima and all of his people have to travel through checkpoints. There’s also a scene where Hatem sheds a tear for the story of one of his father’s tenants. Naima, on the other hand, doesn’t find her story as tragic and seems uncomfortable that her husband is so moved and she isn’t.

The tapestry that’s woven with these 3 stories creates a depth that couldn’t be achieved by focusing on an individual family. However, Kartemquin’s approach doesn’t cheat any of the characters out of their own complexity. That’s why I’ve found it so easy to find parallels between The New Americans and my own life last time I watch it as well as this time. The issues that are bought out of the lives of these families translate to the lives of anyone that is in transition.

The feelings of displacement that I felt when I was on a bus full of strangers is the same as those that Jose and Ricardo felt when they were brought up by the Dodgers. The helplessness that Isreal and Ngozi felt in trying to advance at their jobs is similar to my having a mountain of footage and no knowledge of how to edit it and the feeling that I had as I neared graduation echoed Naima’s experience as she passed her exam and prepared for her new life in America. As the series is rebroadcast, I find myself in a similar transition as I assimilate into the culture of documentary filmmakers and begin a new chapter in my own life. I can’t wait to see what this series holds for me this time around.

The filmmakers behind The New Americans will be visiting the Viva Doc online forum soon. To read more about that, click here.

The Fruits of our Labor: Food Inc. Review

Filed under Reviews by Matthew Wendeln on June 30, 2009 at 12:42 pm {no comments}

Food, Inc. Trailer from TakePart on Vimeo.

Directed by: Robert Kenner
Length: 1 hour 34 minutes
Development to Distribution: 6 years
Shot on: Panasonic HDX900 & HDX200

The most prevalent metaphor employed throughout the film is that of a veil: one fashioned by the food industry giants to be drawn between the consumer and the source of their food. But as Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) points out, at least once a month a news story emerges that allows a peek behind the veil. Food Inc. is an attempt to tear the veil down altogether, through a collection of poignant stories and factual insights into the dangers of our modern efficiency-driven food production machine. This is not to imply that the film simply contains a redundant collection of such news stories. Kenner and Co. have done their own investigating and applied a fresh analysis to both well-known and obscure phenomenon. In fact, he includes such a wide array of information damaging to the food mega-corporations that he must have had a whole squad of First Amendment attorneys peeking over his editor’s shoulder. The film’s second food conscience Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) bluntly notes that these companies have “legions” of lawyers and aren’t afraid to sue even when they know they can’t win, just to make an example out of you.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock the past 40 years: cows, chickens, pigs, and other animals are already genetically mangled creatures at birth before they are subjected to various intensities of torture throughout their brief lives, only to be unceremoniously killed for the grocery and fast food joint alike. But the real value of Food Inc. lies in its more subtle points. Given the methods of standardization in breeding and processing cattle, the burger you eat can paradoxically contain the flesh of thousands of cows and yet still lack any meaningful diversity. In a wide high-angle shot of a supermarket, the same points is made about an astounding array of products. Do the tens of thousands of items contained in a single supermarket represent variety if so many rely on chemically re-constituted corn starches as a key ingredient? So while advertising depicts rolling fields and idle farm animals, the reality is increasingly a matter of new ideas envisioned in a lab then realized in filthy, crowded, mechanically controlled conditions. It’s too bad the film is almost bereft of representatives of the corporations driving food production in this direction, since one can sense Kenner doing his damndest to be as fair as possible. Then again, their intentional silence is the best evidence for his thesis of the “veil”.

The closest the film gets to representing the positives of corporate farming is summarized by one character: we can make a ton of food very cheaply and on very little land-what’s so bad about that? In addition to the gross abuse of animals, the agonizing stories of a mother who lost her only son to E-coli in his fast food burger helps answer the question. In another scene, a taped court deposition in a frivolous lawsuit shows a man beaten and broken by the invasive abuses of a corporate powerhouse. As he answers the plaintiff lawyer’s questions, the look of defeat on his face foreshadows his fate: he folds and ends up being put out of business. All of these human moments in the film feel very authentic and compete tightly for sympathy with the depicted animal suffering.

This gets at the richest insight of the film: business and economics drives everything. Capitalism is not going away, at least not quickly enough to affect the kind of change that desperately needs to happen now. The idea proffered by Food Inc. that every purchase is a vote for a candidate product is a powerful one, and will probably be the key to changing how food is produced in America. In one section a family is shown making a big order off the dollar menu at Burger King, then later shown at a supermarket lamenting their inability to afford any of the produce. I find this scene frustrating, because it’s true but not the whole truth. Sure, in a food to dollars ratio, cheap burgers may beat apples and oranges every time. But that doesn’t mean that fast food is your best option for eating cheap, even if you’re simply looking to maximize your calories. The implication of the scene leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

A doc that tries to tackle the problems with our food industry has arguably bitten off more than it can chew. Thankfully, Food Inc. chooses to gloss over or ignore many still important issues (“food deserts”, NAFTA, imported produce, etc.) so it can pay enough attention to those topics it decides to stick with. I wish the film was longer to offer more analysis, but still I think Kenner made the right decisions on what to focus on with one exception: the exact use of the term “organic” and its manipulation for marketing and advertising purposes. Although the film is awash with plenty of examples of the opposite of “organic”, it never tries to directly define what “organic” means. All the subtleties of the term’s meaning are left vague and obscure, and never is it mentioned that not all organics are created equal. Nor is it revealed that industrial machinery, some fertilizers, and even a few pesticides (albeit a very limited few) are still allowed on organically labeled foods. Finally, nothing is mentioned of how similar terms or logos that hint at organics (“free range”, “sustainably harvested”, the big “O” found on some Safeway brands, etc.) are not submitted to the same regulations and can easily be used to confuse and trick consumers. Considering the explicit attention given to individual consumers voting with their dollar, uncovering the specifics of the now ever-present term seems pretty crucial. Ultimately this essential gap in coverage is not enough to seriously compromise the message of the film though.

I’ve avoided discussing the craftsmanship of the film up to now because it seems so translucent. It’s simplicity is such that you are easily sucked in and soon forget that you’re staring at a screen. Aside from some inventive visuals at the beginning, most of the footage is straight verité. The modest use of motion graphics may not be too creative, but they do effectively express ideas and facts in visual terms. Although the film is explicitly broken up into topically labeled chapters, it still feels like it organically unfolds as one whole. It never struck me as awkward that certain characters are in every chapter while some are briefly in one. And despite the ubiquity of such key characters, the ideas about new ways of growing, consuming, and living are the stars here. And yet the film is rarely judgmental and never preachy, a rare trait for a film that attempts such a topic.

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