Full Frame 2017: Day Two

Day two of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival held at the Carolina Theatre and the Marriot Convention Center in Durham, N.C., was a lot livelier than the first day as the weekend crowds starting pouring in. This was also due to the capper of the second day of the fest - the North Carolina premiere of Amir Bar-Lev’s epic four hour Grateful Dead band biodoc, LONG STRANGE TRIP. But first let me get to some other worthy docs I saw on Friday.

THE ORIGINAL RICHARD MCMAHAN
(Dir. Olympia Stone, 2016)

This fascinating 20 minute film, part of the New Docs Program, concerns outsider artist Richard McMahan, who makes miniature versions of some of the world’s great paintings. Hailing from Jacksonville, Florida, McMahan is the creator and curator of the Mini-Museum, a traveling and online exhibit of thousands of his hand made replicas including intricate recreations of Egyptian tombs, 20 years in the making. McMahan’s work is incredibly impressive, and he's a likable, if extremely eccentric character (he wears period costumes at his installations) so the doc is a short but sweet treat.

Next up, I saw another film in the New Docs Program, Garret Atlakson’s MOMMY’S LAND, which was making its World Premiere at this year’s Full Frame.

The film tackles the protest that was formed by a group of women who were dislocated when the corrupt government of Cambodia forcibly evicted them from their homes in 2006 and 2007 to make way for new developments funded by World Bank.

The former residents, mostly young mothers, of the Boeung Kak Lake (BKL) area in Phnom, Penh, whose houses were flooded and destroyed by property developers filling the lake with sand, rally behind a fellow resident, an elderly grandmother they call “Mommy,” in often violent demonstrations. Watching this unfold in brutal confrontations with Military Police, while uncaring ruling party members stand uncaringly on the sidelines, is heart breaking. Mommy’s perserverance is inspiring, and filmmaker Atlakson’s eye never shies away from the excruciatingly uncomfortable imagery of bloody assaults that were made on these women fighting for the land titles owed to them. It can be a bit grueling, but the timeliness of Mommy and her people’s struggle makes for a powerfully emotional 68 minute viewing. 

ALL SKATE, EVERYBODY SKATE
(Dir. Nicole Triche, 2016)

Miss Doris, a woman in her late 70s who runs a 50-year-old roller skating rink above a post office in Topsail Island, N.C., is the subject of this charming 20-minute short. Miss Doris takes us through her operation, her family’s history, and displays her own skating skills for us as well. Another inspirational tale of an old unstoppable lady, albeit under severely different circumstances than MOMMY'S LAND, Triche’s film celebrates Miss Doris and her beloved community venue, which looks like, with no plans for retirement, she will keep rolling as long as she can.

BALLOONFEST (Dir. Nathan Truesdell, 2017) This is a six minute curiousity, mostly made up of archival TV news reports, about the United Way of Cleveland, Ohio, attempt in 1986 to break a world record by releasing over a million balloons in the air. However, a high pressure system approached, causing many of the balloons to end up in Lake Erie making a search for two missing fishermen difficult. Despite the event not being recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records, the initial release of the balloons, with swirling clouds of color engulfing the skyline is quite a site to be seen. 

LONG STRANGE TRIP (Dir. Amir Bar-Lev, 2017) I’ve had my ups and downs with the Grateful Dead. I loved them in the late ‘80s to mid ‘90s, seeing them close to a dozen times, but came to loathe them later in that decade. I’ve come back around these days, but still wouldn’t consider myself a Deadhead. I’ve loved the work of Amir Bar-Lev (MY KID COULD PAINT THAT, THE TILLMAN STORY), so I was pysched to see his take on the iconic San Francisco band’s legacy (Martin Scorsese being one of the film's executive producers added to that as well).

This new four hour, career-spanning documentary (thankfully containing an intermission), features a wealth of archival footage, both vintage and current interviews from band members, and a intoxicating exploration into the Dead’s philosophy and vision. That philosophy can simply be stilled down into “having fun” as the late lead guitarist/singer Jerry Garcia puts it, and that vision can be seen as to just keep on truckin,' but there's a lot of ins and outs and what haves you involved, as the Dude would say.

From the 1965 Acid Tests, to a hilarious late ‘60s appearance on the Playboy After Dark TV show where they dosed the coffee pot, to their famous 1972 European tour to their performance in Egypt in 1978 to their surprise success in the ‘80s with their first top 40 single (“Touch of Grey”) and beyond, Bar-Lev’s pacing never falters, and the music never stops. Bar-Lev, in attendence at the fest, boasted before the screening that he and his crew utilized the original individual instrumental tracks of many of the band's studio recordings to provide a musical bed for the film, and it sounded great through the Carolina Theatre’s Cinema One speaker system.

A must see for Deadheads and those curious about the band, but maybe not recommended for haters as such a lengthy breakdown of the ethos of Garcia and company is doubtful to win them over. For the folks in the audience I saw it with on Friday night, some of whom shouted their appreciation for individual gigs being mentioned, it was a delight from beginning to end.

Coming soon: Coverage of Days Three & Four. And be sure to check out coverage of Day One, if you haven’t already.

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DVD Review: THE OTHER DREAM TEAM

Releasing today on DVD:

THE OTHER DREAM TEAM

(Dir. Marius A. Markevičius, 2012) *

In Marius A. Markevičius’ debut documentary, THE OTHER DREAM TEAM, mostly set during the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall leading up to the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, the Baltic state of Lithuania breaks free from Soviet rule with the help of basketball and the Grateful Dead. 

You read that right - following several decades of devastating oppression in which Lithuanian athletes were forced to compete for the USSR, the countries’ top basketball players were able to compete under their own flag in the ‘92 summer games, aided by some financial assistance from that aforementioned famous psychedelic San Francisco band.

As the film’s title suggests, the Lithuanian basketball team was the underdog antithesis of the all star 1992 American Olympic team that included Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and Magic Johnson. The Lithuanians didn’t win against the Americans, but they did defeat the Russian Unified team for the Bronze Medal.

Valdas Adankus, President of Lithuania from ’98-’09 puts it like this: “This was not only a pride, it was an open war. We are not going to accept, no way, no time, ever, the occupation of Lithuania. We are fighting the enemy, not in the field with bombs, machine guns, or planes, but fighting them on a basketball court.”

Through vivid testimony (most subtitled) from star Lithuanian players Valdemaras Chomičius, Arvydas Sabonis, Šarūnas Marčiulionis and Rimas Kurtinaitis, alongside sports commentators such as Jim Lampley, David Remnick Chris Mullin, and Bill Walton, we learn how the stage was set for the team and the, now independent, countries’ victory.

The story of recent NBA draftee Jonas Valanciunas, who was born in ’92, is interwoven through the film, to show us how far they’ve come from the days where Lithuanian players could only travel to the U.S. with KGB escort, and players would fear that they if they accepted a draft from an American team, they would be put away into a Soviet prison camp, something the extremely talented player Sabonis worried about in ’86 when selected by the Portland Trail Blazers.

In 1991, haven finally been granted freedom from Communism after nearly half a century, Lithuania is bankrupt, unable to afford to send their beloved basketball team to the Olympics.

That’s where the Grateful Dead comes in. Members of the longtime hippy rock band (Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and Phil Lesh), who were all big basketball fans, read an article about the Lithuanians’ plight written by San Francisco Chronicle beat writer George Shirk, and decided to kick in funding, through their charitable non-profit organization, the Rex Foundation, and provided the team with a supply of tie-dye uniforms with their distinctive skeleton logo.

You don’t have to be a basketball fan or a Deadhead to appreciate seeing the Lithuanian team walking out onto the court at Barcelona ’92 dressed in tie-dye t-shirts and shorts, some with dreads, to pay tribute to the band that helped get them there. They became known as “Team Tie-Dye,” and the slogan “Better Dead Than Red,” accompanied them everywhere.

Drummer Mickey Hart, the only member of the Dead interviewed for the documentary, notes “They could’ve been laughed at, you know, if they weren’t as good as they were, they would’ve looked like fools wearing tie-dye, but we had a championship gold team flying their colors.”

Despite some unnecessary pop culture cutaways in the buildup to make its Cold War case, writer/director Markevičius’ first feature-length film briskly assembles an extensive blend of arresting anecdotes, archival footage, and photos, sprinkled with new location shots of Kaunas, Lithuania to entertainingly tell its uplifting story.

Special Features: Commentary by filmmaker Marius Markevicius and producer/co-writer Jon Weinbach, and a featurette of a Q&A with Markevicius and Weinbach.

* This review originally appeared in the Nov. 9th, 2012 edition of the Raleigh News & Observer.

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