So Many Docs, So Little Time - Full Frame 2022: Part 2

THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT (Dirs. Anne Alvergue, and Debra McClutchy)

So many documentaries, so little time. I crammed as many doc viewings as I could in the four day window of the online offerings of the 25th Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival around working shifts at two different jobs, and, of course, sleep. I was able to see some good ones (check out Part 1), but I was sorry I missed the winner of the Full Frame Grand Jury Award, Reid Davenport’s I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE, and the other award winners, Alejandro Alonso’s ABYSSAL, and Jannis Lenz’s SOLDAT AHMET, which won The Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award, and the The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Award respectively.

A prize-winning doc that I did catch was Timothée Corteggiani, and Nathalie Giraud’s THE SILENT SHORE (French title: LE SILENCIEUX RIVAGE) which scored The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short. Running a swift 36-minutes, the film concerns famous fantasy author, Pierre Dubois, and his wife Aline’s quiet life living an idyllic yet haunted home and garden existence in Cartignies, a village in northern France. The couple recount the suicide of their daughter as they go about their days in their lush, often foggy settings, and the aura, and warmth of their resigned sentiment will likely remain in the minds of this film’s audience long after the last credits have faded. 

There always has to be at least one retro political doc in the roster at Full Frame, and this time it comes in the form of Anne Alvergue, and Debra McClutchy’s 40-minute short, THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT. Mitchell was the loud-mouthed socialite wife of President Nixon’s Attorney General, who became an unlikely whistle-blower in the aftermath of the Watergate break-in in the early ‘70s. One of the burglars, James McCord, had been one of Mitchell’s bodyguards, which tipped her off that it had been an inside-job, so the cabinet wife blabbed about it over-time to the press leading to her being sequestered in a hotel room, injected with a tranquilizer, and held for four days to quiet her (one headline was “Who’s Needling Martha Mitchell?”).  

While the White House and the Republican Party did what they could to discredit her, there was a leftwing “Free Martha Mitchell” movement making itself known at the Democratic National Convention in 1972. Mitchell, known as “The Mouth of the South,” channeled her cause célèbre into a stint co-hosting The Mike Douglas Show, and stealing nearly every doc on Nixon and Watergate in the following decades with her outspoken soundbites. Alvergue and McClutchy wonderfully weave the archival footage into a supremely entertaining narrative, which organically mimes the material for key laugh lines.

 

Mitchell was memorably portrayed by Madeline Kahn in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic NIXON, and later this month, Julia Roberts will step into her shoes for the Starz series, Gaslit, so this doc could serve as a primer if its production company, Netflix, would give it a premiere date in time. Whenever TMME becomes available, folks should seek it out as its illustration of how someone who’s widely painted as being delusional, but later turns out to have been telling a crucial truth, makes Mitchell’s story so much more than just a funny footnote. 

Next up, Kevin Shaw’s LET THE LITTLE LIGHT SHINE shines a light on the fight to keep a high-performing predominately Black public elementary school, Chicago’s National Teachers Academy, from being replaced by a new gentrified high school in 2017. We get close up to the heated concerns of the students, and educators as they protest against the Chicago Public School system, and we watch as Isaac Castelaz gets in way over his head as the stressed-out NTA principal in the middle of it all (Castelaz gets frowned on by the board for wearing a “Black Students Matter” T-shirt at one point).

This professionally polished, and compelling film, the second doc I saw this fest about African American educational predicaments, has a lot of emotional drive in its conventionally stream-lined structure, and doesn’t waste any of its 86-minute screen-time in getting us to care about this community, and pull for these passionate people’s plight. The appearance of Chance the Rapper, an advocate for Chicago Schools through his foundation Social Works, certainly helps to power up the protests. Director Shaw has obviously learned well from documentarian great Steve James (HOOP DREAMS), with whom he worked with on America to Me (another Starz series), in making this inspirational crowd-pleaser. This is one that would’ve been great seeing with a packed Full Frame audience on the big screen. 

 

So that’s a few more docs from Full Frame 2022. I’ll wrap up the remaining films I saw at Full Frame 2022 in Part 3 so stay tuned.

 

More later…