Full Frame 2025: Day Four

Full Frame 2025 wraps up at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina, last Sunday night.

This is my third and final post about the 27th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival which took place last weekend. I only have a few more films to babble about, from day four, and these are quicker takes than before as I’m pretty exhausted, and overstuffed with  all the non-fiction infotainment I devoured, as well as the multiple trips to downtown Durham.

My Sunday morning began with Alix Blair’s HELEN AND THE BEAR, which concerns the marriage between Helen Hooper (nicknamed “Helen”) and Pete McCloskey (nicknamed “The Bear”). McCloskey, who passed away last year at age 96, was a Republican politician that ran for President against Richard Nixon in 1972; Hooper, who is 26 years younger, was a free-spirited hippy during that era (and still is today), but their shared love of nature, the environment, and conservation brought them together. 

Hooper’s diary entries, old photos, and home movies give us fleeting bits of back story, but Blair’s doc largely focuses on the 70-year old dealing with her partner’s imminent death after suffering a stroke. Helen’s reflections on the couple’s ups and downs, including her affair with a woman, whose face is blurred in pictures from decades ago, are touchingly free from sentiment, and emphasize how full of contradictions, and complicated this lady is. A lovely, and lovingly shot portrait of love that’s gone through the wringer.

Next up, I took in a doc short: Alison McAlpine’s PERFECTLY A STRANGENESS, which was presented with the Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short at the Awards Barbeque at the Durham Armory around noon today. 

The 15-minute film features wide shot cinematography that beautifully captures three donkeys walking around an abandoned astronomical observatory (Chile’s La Silla). A visually poetic experience in which nothing much happens, but it's immersive nonetheless.

The last film that I saw at Full Frame was Jennifer Tiexiera, and Guy Mossman’s SPEAK., which received the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights earlier that day. The film, which was screened on Saturday and given a Sunday evening encore after its win, follows five teenagers (Esther, Mfaz, Sam, Noah, and Noor) as they prepare to compete for the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA).

It’s fun to watch these kids try to perfect their public speaking skills on such subjects as the stigma of being handicapped, LGBTQ rights, and suicide, with Esther, a child of Nigerian immigrants and the two-time national champion, stealing the doc at every turn. Though it doesn’t go very deep, it was nice to end the fest with such an uplifting, funny, and overall good feeling doc about determination.

So that’s Full Frame 2025! There are many other docs from the fest I didn’t get to like THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT, SEEDS. THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR, COEXISTENCE, MY ASS, COME SEE ME IN THE GOOD LIGHT, and many others that I look forward to seeing in the days to come.

More later...