Last week, I was happy to travel back to Texas for the second time in two months to serve on the Target Documentary Feature Competition Jury for the 5th annual Dallas International Film Festival. Rare for most festivals, it was a two-person jury, with Rhino Films head Stephen Nemeth (producer of DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS, FLOW, FUEL, CLIMATE REFUGEES) as my co-juror. Luckily, our opinions largely lined up, making jury deliberation a painless affair, and resulting in a special jury prize for Joseph Mantegna’s NORMAN MAILER: THE AMERICAN and the grand jury prize for Anne Buford’s ELEVATE (pictured).
As I’ve done recently for other festivals I’ve attended, what follows are my brief thoughts about the seven films in the competition. I should note that these are my personal views and are not meant to represent my fellow juror’s opinions.
ELEVATE
Buford follows four high school boys in Africa and, eventually, in the US, supported in their athletic and academic aspirations by the Seeds Academy, a boarding school in Senegal established by the Dallas Maverick’s director of scouting, Amadou Gallo Fall. Through its deft balance of characters and tone, the well-shot film, which premiered at SXSW and will also screen at BAMcinemaFEST this summer, succeeds in engaging both audiences pre-disposed to docs about sports and those who couldn’t care less about basketball. While I wonder if it was necessary to focus on so many subjects rather than concentrate on only one or two boys’ stories more fully, ELEVATE nevertheless works on an emotional and dramatic level. Impressively, Buford pledged to donate the $25,000 jury prize to the Seeds Academy.
NORMAN MAILER: THE AMERICAN
Mantegna’s biographical film about the controversial writer and thinker has had a solid festival run so far, including screenings at Denver, Cleveland, Edinburgh, and Ft Lauderdale (where it won the best doc jury award), as well as the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Independents Night. Mantegna delves into the various facets of Mailer’s personal and professional life – from his contentious appearances on talk shows to interviews with a selection of his six wives and nine kids, including the infamous story about stabbing his wife. With many such projects end up being little more than hagiographic, it’s refreshing that this film takes a more balanced approach, and, impressively, is able to pack in a fairly comprehensive 80+ years of an accomplished and complex life into little more than an hour and half.
ZERO PERCENT
One of the documentaries that was also awarded, outside the confines of my jury, was Tim Skousen’s look at the Hudson Link college degree granting program of the infamous Sing Sing prison. The film took home the Embrey Family Foundation’s inaugural Silver Heart Award, with a cash prize of $10,000. I’m happy that the film received the recognition – while I ultimately had some concerns with its length and structure, the film’s message about the power of education to rehabilitate and stem the tide of recidivism is an important one, and should get out to more audiences.
WILD HORSE, WILD RIDE
Alex Dawson & Greg Gricus’ film also received an award – their doc, on the training and competition of Ft Worth’s annual Extreme Mustang Makeover Challenge, took home the Documentary Feature Audience Award. Professional and amateur trainers work with wild horses to compete at the horse show, which culminates in an auction to find homes for the mustangs. Personally, I was much more interested in the relationships developing between the horses and some of the trainers (though there were a few too many subjects featured) than in the competition itself, which dominates the latter part of the film, but audiences clearly have been responding well to docs about horses and horse trainers this year, between this film and Cindy Meehl’s BUCK.
BEING ELMO
Also appearing in Dallas’ competition was Constance Marks’ uplifting portrait of the man behind SESAME STREET’s popular Muppet. I profiled the film prior to its Sundance debut here.
THE GREATER GOOD
Chris Pilaro and Kendall Nelson’s doc looks at debates over vaccines and their safety, as revealed through the personal stories of a number of children and teenagers who have suffered ill effects. The topic is certainly worth exploring, and the portraits are sometimes affecting, but the approach tends towards the utilitarian rather than the artful, and is not particularly memorable as a result.
PROSECUTOR
Barry Stevens’ profile of the International Criminal Court’s controversial Luis Moreno-Ocampo premiered at IDFA and also screened at Thessaloniki’s Documentary festival last year. This Canadian production provides a wide-ranging look at the activities of the Court’s prosecutor, and the criticisms the Court and he have received for their supposed targeting of African concerns and lack of an effective method to enforce their arrest warrants. Pamela Yates’ THE RECKONING covers some similar territory and feels more focused than Stevens’ doc, which also often oddly notes Canadian involvement in the Court, such as an ill-fitting and disparate sequence in which a former Court employee engages in a direct action rescue of former child soldiers. The film also features excessive and sometimes snarkily-pointed narration – a personal pet peeve that does it no favors.
what (not) to doc 