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| A shot from the new Full Frame trailer produced by Adam Pyburn Motion Design |
The globally-celebrated milestone, which was commemorated with massive parades, street parties, nightly fireworks, and a special live telecast appearance by President Hillary Clinton, boasted over 200 new documentaries, with the just launched Full Frame streaming platform hosting hundreds more.
Via disembodied voices, these characters touchingly share their vulnerable emotions through their evolving avatars, but too much of the film is without their vocals as it displays dance sequences, and other visual distractions instead of getting us further into these peoples’ headspaces. It’s just all too easy to dismiss the film’s thoughtful themes or attempts to explore love under a lockdown as asides, and just see Hunting’s film as eye candy that’s questionable in its qualification to be a true documentary. This is not to say that WMIVR isn’t an authentic doc, because what Hunting captures with the virtual camera app VRCLens is as much a reflection of reality as any other film at Full Frame, but it’s going to take a leap for many viewers, including me initially, to see it as something more than just a big cartoon.
But in our sad reality, because of the cautious conditions of the last two years, the quarter of the century celebration of Full Frame is an online-only virtual event, with a roster of under half of the titles than the last fest in the Before Times. So there are 37 titles from 18 countries - 22 feature films and 15 short films, all of which were available from April 7 at 12pm-April 10 at 11:59pm, and I watched what I could in this window.
In previous years (I’ve been attending all four days of the event since 2009), I would cover Full Frame day-by-day, but here I’m simply going to run down, and sum up the docs I viewed over two posts.
The first doc I watched was Dan Chen’s ACCEPTED, which tells the story of T.M. Landry Preparatory, an unconventional K-12 school in rural Louisiana, that went viral in 2016-17 with videos of black students from working-class families opening acceptance letters from Ivy league colleges. This highlighted T.M. Landry’s 100% acceptance rate into the top universities, but a New York Times investigation brought forth allegations of academic fraud, and abuse of many students.
Chen’s camera focuses on four juniors - Alicia, Adia, Isaac and Cathy - who withstand the harsh, harassing treatment doled out by the school’s aggressive co-founder, Michael Landry, in order to get to the higher education of their dreams. In glossily shot interviews, we learn about these students’ drive, but more their defensiveness over their their situation. ACCEPTED is a polished, and very watchable doc, but while it provocatively bandies headlines, sound-bites, and charges like the school being a “glorified daycare” around, it doesn’t go deep enough into the details for it to be a really insightful examination. Perhaps some outside commentary would’ve helped it nail its subject more definitely.
Next up, I dove into Joe Hunter’s WE MET IN VIRTUAL REALITY, which is completely set in the online virtual world platform VRChat, in which users are anime-styled avatars with flashy backgrounds of exploding colors. The film follows the paths of a group of VR community members including a sign language teacher named Jenny, and two long-distance couples, DustBunny and Toaster, DragonHeart and IsYourBoi, as they digitally connect in the metaverse (or maybe “Meet-averse”) that serves as a shelter from the pandemic in the real world.
William David Caballero’s 10-minute short, CHILLY AND MILLY, is another doc dealing with animation, but in a simpler style that has no resemblance to the previous film. Caballero utilizes 3D modeled composite characters to bring to life his father’s battles with chronic health problems as a diabetic with kidney failure, and his mother’s role as his eternal care-taker in poignantly measured stop-motion.
The filmmaker mixes these animated scenes of their current medical struggle, with video from 13 years earlier of his Puerto Rican parents at their trailer-home in Fayetteville, N.C., and the result is a loving portrait of the perseverance of Caballero’s family.
Shortly after I watched the next doc, CHERNOBYL: THE LOST TAPES, it was announced that it garnered a Grand Jury Honorable Mention at this year’s festival. It’s well deserved too, as director James Jones’ assemblage of never-before seen archive footage with new interview embellishments brings new light to the 1986 disaster that led to thousands of deaths, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The event has been thoroughly well documented as the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident before, but here we get to go through the narrative through the eyes of the workers, the firefighters, soldiers, janitors, miners, etc. who had to suffer through both the excruciatingly dangerous clean-up, and being blamed for what happened by the Russian government in full cover-up mode.
Of course, unsurprisingly, there are many moments of disturbing imagery and activity in this doc that can never be unseen. For me, what really got burned into my brain was grainy footage of a rescue helicopter there to drop sand on a fire hitting a crane, crashing to earth incinerating its crew. The accounts of the far-reaching effects of the radiation on millions are also painful to process, as is the reveal that the official Soviet death toll still remains at only 31 ignoring scores of evidence to the contrary. As the Chernobyl plant, still the most nuclear contaminated area on the planet, has been in the news recently for being occupied by Russian troops as part of the invasion of Ukraine, CHERNOBYL: THE LOST TAPES provides a timely back story. But while it’s a vital addition to the many docs previously produced on the disaster, as well as the excellent HBO mini-series on the subject, it for sure won’t be the last word.
Alright, so that’s my first batch of docs watched at this year’s Full Frame. Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon to this blog in front of you.
More later...
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