The Final Fest Report: Full Frame 2022: Part 3

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and pictures of his poisoners in Daniel Roher’s NAVALNY

My coverage of the 25th Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival now concludes with my musings on the last three docs I watched while exercise-biking, and wearing pajama pants - the only pluses to having to watch the festival’s offerings at home instead of at the Carolina Theatre, and the surrounding venues in downtown Durham, N.C. Here’s hoping we can all get back to that in 2023. I’ve made this joke before, but when Full Frame does return in full effect from all the pandemic-set conditions, the program will be nothing but documentaries about the pandemic. Yeah, it’s not really that much of a joke.

Anyway, onto Daniel Roher’s NAVALNY, which has been likened by many critics to a thriller for its detailing of the investigation into the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The 44-year old anti-authoritarian was infected with a nerve agent, later to be revealed as Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “signature poison,” on a flight home to Moscow from Siberia in 2020. After recuperating from a coma in exile, Navalny goes undercover in Germany to find the men behind the assassination attempt, and further expose the wide-ranging corruption of Putin’s regime with the help of journalist/hacker Christo Grozev.

 

The media-savvy Navalny is a charismatic, jovial dude who makes a great protagonist/narrator for the film, as he takes us through the paces of his procedural, which involves an elaborate evidence board (also known as a “crazy wall,” or “murder map”) - you know, a wall covered in pictures of people, newspaper clippings, charts, etc. connected with strings - and, funnily enough, tik tok videos. One of the film’s most crucial moments comes when Navalny, posing as a fellow conspirator in the poisoning plot, gets a Federal Security Service (FSB) scientist to confirm in great detail how the state-sanctioned murder endeavor went down.

 

NAVALNY is indeed a thrilling portrait of a driven man, and his mission, and is the best film I experienced at Full Frame 2020. Look for it on the festival circuit now, and, with hope, in theatrical release later, before it finds its eventual home on HBO and CNN, the outlets responsible for its production.

 

Next up, Jon Ayon’s doc short NO SOY ÓSCAR, which insightfully displays s a lot in its 15-minute running time as it follows the journey of the filmmaker through the treacherous border regions between the U.S. and Mexico in search of the area where Salvadoran migrants Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his young daughter, Angie Valeria, drowned. 

While it contemplates harrowing, heady issues, the film is more meditation on the meaning of the definitely divisive, and deadly dangerous border wall which Ayon describes as a “Trump inspired, ridiculous monstrosity of concrete and steel.” NO SOY ÓSCAR won the President’s Award for Best Short at this year’s fest, but no word yet as to its availability either theatrically or streaming in the coming months. I’ll keep you posted. 

Finally, a very fascinating doc that ended my Full Frame 2022 experience nicely, Yaara Bou Melhem’s UNSEEN SKIES, which explores the work of landscape artist, photographer, geographer, and author Trevor Paglen, who specializes in studying mass surveillance. We witness his processes via his time-exposure photographs showing the streaks of light left by classified satellites taken in the Nevada desert, as his prepares to launch a 100-foot-long mylar sculpture into space, a $1.5 million project dubbed Orbital Reflector.

The project runs into red tape as it apparently didn’t fit into Trump’s concept for Space Force, but the bureaucratic hassle doesn’t deter Paglen from his life’s passion of watching the skies. The film has a glossy look, but it well contains Tom Bannigan’s cinematography, which captures the rocky terrain, and the milky way above it so stunningly that it certainly makes this the doc with the most eye-popping scenery at the fest this year. Bou Melhem’s film equally honors technology, and art, but like many of the best docs at Full Frame (or docs in general) it most celebrates perseverance in the face of odds no matter what size. 

So that’s my coverage of Full Frame 2022. While there were a good number of worthwhile docs, the festival as an online-only event is wearing thin. There were times throughout the four-day event that when I took a break from the films and would do other stuff, that I would almost forget the fest was happening, and that is unacceptable in my world. This can’t be how it goes down next year, new strains of coronavirus be damned. Come April 2023, this thing better be back on in full. You hear this lowly blogger? You Full Framers get on it!

 

More later…