Octoberfests: Mill Valley and UNAFF

OctoberFests: Mill Valley and UNAFF By Frako Loden December 30, 2019 From Rosemary Rawcliffe's 'The Great 14th: Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama in His Own Words,' which won the Audience Favorite Award in the Valley of the Docs category at Mill Valley Film Festival. The Mill Valley Film Festival, which screens every October in affluent Marin County, north of San Francisco, is known for its music, film and environmental documentaries, many of them produced in the Bay Area. A moderate few in each category stood out this year. Things went smoothly despite the widespread PG&E pre-emptive fire-prevention power shutoffs, causing no cancellations and only a handful of films to change venues. The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash, directed by Thom Zimny, is a lyrical, almost dreamy account of the Arkansas country boy's life and career, undistracted by the sight of talking heads. Instead we hear the voices of Emmylou Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Rick Rubin, Sam Phillips, Rodney Crowell, and offspring Rosanne Cash and John Carter Cash—people who actually knew Cash and not modern artists merely wowed by him—as they try to explain in words the mysterious force of Cash's voice and songwriting. The artist's own voice recordings 1 from the 1990s evoke bus and train journeys through the backroads of America. We hear the usual themes of childhood trauma—Cash's father inexplicably blamed him for the table-saw death of Cash's older brother Jack at 14—and redemption for the sin of neglecting his first wife and four daughters in favor of touring, political causes and amphetamine addiction. The film brightens when Cash performs with, then marries, his soulmate June Carter, and Cash's 1968 Folsom Prison appearance is featured repeatedly as the pivotal performance of his life and career. This film unfairly suffers in comparison with the longer, more detailed treatment of Cash in the Ken Burns Country Music series, which aired on PBS the month before. Brett Harvey's wildly entertaining Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo traces a template similar to the Johnny Cash doc: an emotionally remote father and childhood tragedy lead to misdeeds and drug addiction—the gangster uncle he idolized gave him his first taste of heroin at 12— followed by a lifetime of fame, redemption and giving back to his community. In Mexican- American character actor Trejo's case, the Pacoima native spent a decade in San Quentin and several other penal institutions up and down California until 1969, when he joined Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. Years later he launched his film career with the 1985 Runaway Train. On the set of the 2010 Machete, his first starring role, he discovered that director Robert Rodriguez was his second cousin. Reminiscences by Trejo's two sons and daughter (curiously, no wife), neighborhood homies and actor friends like Cheech Marin and Michelle Rodriguez, as well as Trejo's own monologues, reveal a warm, generous individual who gets pleasure from helping others. His prolific filmography gives up a hilarious montage of clips that may even send you to see Death Wish 4: The Crackdown. Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet's Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters is a gem, a portrait of the longtime partnership between a brilliant, taciturn artist and his more gregarious, business-minded wife, producer and studio head Jules Roman. If it weren't for Roman, Phil Tippett (and Berkeley-based Tippett Studios) would probably not be the legendary creator of the stop-motion creature effects in Star Wars, RoboCop, Starship Troopers, the Twilight saga and many other films. She is what kept his career going, since he would be otherwise content to shut himself away from people, sitting in a room developing his miniatures. This doc details the history of Tippett's evolution in his own (and his colleagues') words, starting with his childhood astonishment on seeing the stop-motion animation in the original King Kong and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad—"I was never the same afterwards," he says. It's a treat to see his earliest experiments in creature movement, his influences and mentors, his innovations within stop- motion, his fierce independent spirit and his complete indifference to fame. Varda by Agnès, the late French filmmaker's final work, is a personal summation of her career more suited to newcomers than to hardcore fans or scholars. Joel Zito Araújo's My Friend Fela takes a contextualizing approach to the life and times of Nigerian musician-political activist Fela Kuti, framing the legendary man's life by means of his friendship with Cuban biographer Carlos Moore, who wrote This Bitch of a Life about Fela. The film describes Fela's radicalization when his mother was killed by the military, but sadly it has little to say about the topic most on non- Nigerians' minds: the sexual politics of Fela's 27 wives. 2 Lauren Greenfield's specialty in portraits of tasteless extravagance and endless striving for wealth (The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth) seems suited to The Kingmaker, her profile of Imelda Marcos, former first lady and widow of longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. For Americans who know Imelda only as a punchline to a shoe joke, this is an epic of her prominent role in Filipinx and global politics. Taking advantage of her beauty and charisma, Ferdinand frequently sent her on diplomatic missions that had her meeting with Mao, Castro, Khadafy and Nixon. Now in her 90s and granting Greenfield an astonishing and revealing level of access (as, the director says, only a narcissist can), Imelda shows little sign of slowing down in her relentless pursuit of power and wealth despite holding the Guinness World Record for "Greatest Robbery of Government" (estimated in the tens of billions, still unrecovered). During a screening Q&A, Greenfield namechecked Ramona S. Diaz's 2003 documentary Imelda, which Greenfield updates by cross-cutting the saga of Imelda with the 2016 campaign of her son Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. for vice president, a separately elected office in the Philippines. Despite her unsteadiness and protestations of only giving to the poor Filipino people, Imelda herself succeeds Bongbong as house representative of her district of Ilocos Norte and forges an alliance with the notorious president/dictator Rodrigo Duterte, who has praised the Marcos dictatorship and helped fund recent Marcos campaigns. By the looks of this film, Imelda and her progeny are well on their way to regaining the influence they lost in the 1980s. Her life and career are a manual for the acquisition of power through the Big Lie (for her, greed equals "giving," persecution equals "mothering"), violence and fake news. Mill Valley is a hub for environmental documentaries, so Matt Wechsler and Annie Speicher's Right to Harm is right at home here. Unlike some, this one is not interested in taking names or demonizing the perpetrators of factory farming, or CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). You won't see egg-laying chickens or hogs being slaughtered or smothered in their own filth. Instead you will see local activists in Arizona, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Iowa who have been personally affected by the stench, sometimes even the spraying, of liquid manure produced by these animals too close to their own homes and farms. Public health scientists confirm that livestock litter can irritate eyes, noses and throats and aggravate asthma, heart disease, bronchitis and even lung cancer. Yet CAFOs are not covered by the Clean Air Act and can easily avoid regulation. The activists' dogged determination and formation of over 200 community groups fighting CAFOs embody the highest ideals of democracy, as citizen politics battle corporate farming in the heartland. Deia Schlosberg's The Story of Plastic is the textbook environmental documentary: It shows us a dire environmental threat, explains its origins in clear words and imagery, traces the history of its proliferation and those responsible for it, and introduces us to the people we should follow in reducing that threat. The story of plastics is the tragedy of ordinary Americans' capacity for believing the propaganda of heedless profit. Before seeing this, I didn't know how phenomena such as the Keep America Beautiful campaign of my childhood, the Tupperware that filled my mother's kitchen cupboards, and my high school-era eagerness to stomp on aluminum cans would somehow be all connected. Then in my middle age, there was Berkeley's sudden willingness to accept plastics for recycling; innovation in fracking and the shale gas boom; and municipal and global Zero Waste policies. This film connects all these seemingly disparate 3 things and points the way to correcting the overflow of plastics and the toxicity of every phase of their production. The Story of Plastic won the Audience Favorite in Mill Valley's Active Cinema category. From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock: A Reporter's Journey, directed by Kevin McKiernan (the reporter of the title), was the biggest unanticipated pleasure for me at Mill Valley. McKiernan was a rookie NPR reporter, a Caucasian, whose first assignment was the 1973 armed occupation of the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. With the help of Willard Carlson, a Native Yurok fisherman who was there at the occupation and then returned to his tribe in northern California to fight for salmon fishing rights, McKiernan puts a human and heroic face on the activists in some extraordinary contemporary footage. The biggest local documentary story at Mill Valley this year was one very close to my own heart: Rosemary Rawcliffe's The Great 14th: Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama in His Own Words, which won Audience Favorite in the Valley of the Docs category.

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