FILMFORT: CARBON (2016)—The Evening Class Interview With Christian Lybrook

Poster design: Mankit Lam.

We are stardust (we're made of million-year-old carbon).
We are golden (we just got caught up in some devil's bargain).—Joni Mitchell

When I first moved to Boise, Idaho, I was delighted to discover an ambitious film production scene. Idaho had already introduced me years earlier to the importance of regional filmmaking when I was invited in 2007 to the then-existent Idaho International Film Festival by programmer Bruce Fletcher, a colleague of mine from the San Francisco Bay Area. My "beat", so to speak, had long been international cinema with a focus on the Global South, so it was challenging, and intriguing, to embrace American independent filmmaking at the regional level, specifically Southern Idaho. I committed myself to balancing my international coverage with regional coverage.

It's not always been an easy alliance. Absent true opportunity, and an alarming lack of awareness regarding the importance of film education and film exhibition to temper the unbridled inflation of film production, I likewise recognized that the hazard of regional filmmaking is its complacency with local rewards and an inability to imagine past state lines to national and international platforms. Regional filmmaking that achieves a national or international audience is precisely what I consider an ideal, but I quickly learned that it was not every Idaho filmmaker's ideal.

Like attracts like, however, and in the years that I've been observing Idaho film culture, it's been my great fortune to befriend Idaho filmmakers who envision themselves interacting on the world stage. One such filmmaker has been Christian Lybrook, who I met during the inaugural edition of the Sun Valley Film Festival (SVFF) when the then-existent Idaho Film Office invited me to serve as media liaison to the fledgling festival. His short film Crawlspace (2011) was premiering in SVFF's local showcase and I was quite taken with it. I interviewed his talent and later discussed the film with him for an interview with Fandor timed to the release of his next short film The Seed (2013).

At the 2015 edition of SVFF, Lybrook won the inaugural One Potato Screenwriting Competition which awarded financial and creative assistance to a script in development. His film Carbon (2016) premiered a year later at SVFF and will now be seeing its Boise premiere as part of the Filmfort program "Idaho Elements", free to the public at 6:00PM on Wednesday, March 23, 2016, at the Owyhee.

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Michael Guillén: I understand that Carbon came from an experience you had of finding a photograph that reminded you of a girlfriend?

Christian Lybrook: In a former life, I wrote prose. I wrote fiction. I was working on a novel that was set during the Great Depression. I would often look for photographs of the era to help with context. That was easier than trying to read about it, right? I could just see it. I was flipping through this book of standard Depression-era photos and came upon a black-and-white photo from around 1935-1937. In this photo there was a family from the Dust Bowl gathered together in front of their old truck and in the foreground was a young woman who was looking directly into the camera.

I was completely caught off guard. "Oh my God, that's Aurora!" I thought. It was a moment where I didn't feel that it looked like Aurora; it was Aurora! I thought, "How is this possible? It doesn't make any sense." In my head I knew it couldn't be Aurora; but, everything about it convinced me it was her. That moment of my looking at that photo—my mixed reaction of disbelief and being confounded—stuck with me. But I didn't know what to do with it. I put it away in my head and it sat there. Every now and again, I would pick at it, figuring there was something there even if I didn't know what to do with it.

Every once in a while I would go looking for the photo again, but I couldn't find it. I had borrowed the book from a library, returned it, and then I couldn't find the book again. I asked the research and reference librarians and we searched but we couldn't find it. It was as if the photo had disappeared. I hunted for it over the space of a good 10 years.

In the meantime, I outlined what I thought the story of this photo might mean, but never to my satisfaction. I knew that I didn't want to tell the story of my relationship with Aurora, which felt more circumstantial and not part of the "real" story; but, I didn't know how to couch it in a way that made sense to me.

SVFF's Laura Melhaff had reached out and said, "Hey, we have this One Potato screenwriting competition, do you have a script?" By then, the story around this photograph had settled on the idea of what you would do if you found out you were not unique and not one of a kind? How far would you go to protect your sense of self? The One Potato competition allowed me to consider setting the story in Idaho, which gave it a focus that it hadn't had. I asked myself, "What are you interested in and drawn to about Idaho?" I thought about the Basque culture, their tradition of sheep ranching, and stunning locations, and it all came together into the story of Carbon.

Guillén: So it went directly from an idea that had been germinating in your mind into a script you could submit to this competition? It had not been a short story first?

Lybrook: It had not.

Guillén: And then you won the inaugural One Potato screenwriting contest?

Lybrook: I did! But what's ironic is that I had submitted two scripts. I submitted one called Calving Season that was about cattle rustlers. That script felt much tighter and more focused. By contrast, Carbon—which at the time I submitted to the contest was called Bruneau (after the Bruneau Sand Dunes, which served a larger metaphor in the original script)—was messy and complicated; I knew it would be hard to do. When SVFF announced that Carbon had won, I turned to my creative collaborator Gregory Bayne and said, "I think they read the wrong one!" Literally, I thought they had read the wrong one. People came up to me and offered congratulations and asked what Carbon was about? I was not prepared to talk about it at all.

Guillén: Were you given a hint why they preferred Carbon to Calving Season?

Lybrook: Laura might tell you something different, but I think she wanted to do something that was a little bit ambitious for the first year out of the gate; but, also doable. One of the reasons Calving Season made her a bit nervous was because there was a scene with a bull that had to be put down and she wasn't sure how we would pull something like that off. There were probably other reasons as well why Calving Season wasn't selected. I think she felt Carbon was ambitious, but doable, and she also liked that it had a touch of sci-fi, because she's a great fan of sci-fi. Carbon was a story that was Idaho-centric, with a Basque background, that used great scenic locations like the Bruneau Sand Dunes, but also familiar locations like a sheep ranch.

One element that figured prominently in the initial script that, unfortunately, got slowly edged out of the script as time went on was a traditional Basque walking stick called a makila. It has one small appearance in Carbon, though it figured much more prominently in earlier versions. The makila is a symbol of stability, but also it's a weapon. I worked with Meggan Laxalt Mackey, a local Basque scholar, who put together a team to help us create a replica of a makila. I wanted these details to be authentic and to ring true. It was fun to work with her and—though, again, these were details that didn't make it into the final script—they were Basque-centric. Another bit of Basque history in the film is the newspaper article at the end, which speaks of the bombing of Guernica. So although that Basque back story never really comes out in the final film, in my head the woman in the photo is someone who was there at the bombing of Guernica and who migrates to the U.S. afterwards, and ends up in Idaho with her husband running a Basque sheep ranch.

This Basque fantasy was what motivated me to write the story of Carbon. I was interested in telling an Idaho story that wasn't set on a ski mountain. I had to ask myself: "How do you make Idaho matter to the story?" The Basque back story was always important and had always interested me. The main character's name is Quinn Bolibar, which is a Basque name. Unfortunately, much of that was whittled out while shaping the script for an audience. The story was so complicated and elusive. We all knew that going into it, but once we were in the edit, one of the hardest things I had to do was to leave in the things that matter to give the audience enough information to keep them engaged and to have the story be meaningful. When I look back at Crawlspace and The Seed, it's a theme throughout, right? How much do you withhold and how much do you reveal?

Guillén: Which leads me to ask: I've noticed in watching your short films over the years that there is this common theme of something otherworldly, supernatural if you will, informing your narratives. You infer an invisible world and I'm intrigued by that thematic continuity. In Zero Point (2015) and Carbon, especially, I sense an added commitment to genre. Can you speak to that? Was your intent always to move towards genre?

Lybrook: Not at all. The prose I wrote was rooted in the real. I wrote a novel about a guy in Africa doing development work and getting caught up in all sorts of crazy stuff that leads to the death of a close family member for things that he did. There was nothing supernatural or fantastical about that story. The other novel set in the Depression era was about boys growing up in Indiana who idolize the boxer Joe Louis, so again nothing supernatural there. What film allowed me to do was to visually represent a world that maybe I couldn't do in prose, at least through my prose.

I was well into the edit on Carbon when I considered that—when I looked back at Crawlspace, The Seed, and to a certain extent Zero Point, but especially Carbon—those three pieces are a kind of triptych with characters who are isolated and lost, essentially in worlds of their own creation. Those surrealist, magical—whatever you want to call them—elements are things of their own making, metaphors for the bigger challenges these characters have to go through. Zero Point is rooted in near-future science fiction. My mantra all along has been: "If there are no original stories, how do you create original moments? How do you take something that's familiar and turn it 180º to make it something interesting, if not unique?"

Guillén: I'd say that's the industrial elasticity of genre and its accepted forms. It's the signature you imprint on genre, or the way you mash or meld genres together, that sculpt interesting forms and combinations. Genre is the emotional language of film in many ways. Certain emotions, certain ranges of emotion, are encapsulated in genre forms so—when you start mixing those up—that's when some really creative things start happening and the audience starts feeling the unexpected. A western is a western but add a little noir and it's a dark, existential western, or add aliens from outer space and you have a weird western. That's when—as you're saying—you can create original moments.

Lybrook: One of the filmmakers I love is Guillermo del Toro, especially his early work. The Devil's Backbone (2001) is incredible! Pan's Labyrinth (2006) is beautiful, but The Devil's Backbone is my favorite of his films, because it is an amalgam of forms. One of the elements that is most fascinating about Pan's Labyrinth is that it's historical; it's a period piece. Yet it's also a fantasy and magical realism and all these things wrapped together. Not to overstate things, but the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez is fascinating to me and I know I could never do that. I realized early, "Don't try to be Márquez. Be your own version of how you get at these characters and their worlds."

For Carbon, I was interested in the existential crisis a person would go through. We put so much value on even our lowest of lows; at least it's our own. We own it. It's unique and singular to us. Nobody's going through the same thing in the same way. It occurred to me watching shows like Orphan Black (where there's a clone) that—if you really encountered yourself—there would be some serious shit that would go down. I don't think it would be, "We're all friends and let's try to work this out." Suddenly you're at that line, just like Quinn says in Carbon: "If you are you then who am I?" That's the only thing we have at the end of the day: our own perception of our own identity.

The film has to stand on its own; but, people are always interested in the back story of it, so I usually tell the story about finding the photo. When I started the Kickstarter campaign, I knew I had to talk about the photo; but, it was gone! I couldn't find it. I was working with Travis Swartz and he said, "You need to find that photo." I said, "I know." We shot the Kickstarter video and talked about the photo, but still needed to find it. I spent days searching everywhere I'd already searched and then, finally, with the right combination of key words on Google Image Search, I saw it among a sea of images! There was a piece of me that was always afraid to find it again because, I thought, what if I find it and it's not her? The whole concept would be blown for me. I saw the image, clicked on it, it enlarged and the same feeling rippled through me: "This is her in 1935. How is that possible?"

Then there was a new problem, which was that I knew I was going to then show the photo and talk about this story and I needed to basically have Aurora's blessing. She lives in Boise, is married now but we're still friends, and I knew I couldn't do it without her blessing. I sent her a text on the Monday before the Wednesday launch of the Kickstarter: "Hey! Do you have time to get together tonight? There's something I want to show you."

We got together that afternoon. I didn't tell her anything about the photo. In fact, when I first found it I showed it to a mutual friend of ours. I didn't prep him and he turned the page and saw the photo and said, "What is this? Why is Aurora in this photo?" Which confirmed that I was not alone in thinking that. He asked, "Are you going to tell her?" I said, "NO! What would you do if someone handed you a photo of yourself from 80 years ago? You'd freak out, right?" So I had never told her. Fast forward to a couple of days before the launch of the Kickstarter where this story, her story, was going to come out, so I sat her down at Bar Gernika and I put my laptop in front of her. I had the image all queued up. She said, "What's going on?" I said, "Well, there's something I want you to see and I didn't want to spoil it. Go ahead and take a look at the image." In the meantime, I was filming the whole thing, which was kind of diabolical of me, but I also knew that this moment was important for me in terms of what her reaction would be.



When I saw how Aurora reacted, I knew that this idea I was exploring was a real one.

Guillén: What is it about identity that makes it such a fragile construct? Why aren't people more like Shirley McClaine? Welcoming previous lives, if not other concurrent lives?

Lybrook: What I wanted to explore wasn't so much about previous lives; but, what if you exist in multiple times or the same time? Would we each feel unique about each one of our selves? We each create our own sense of value, place and reason that no one else can take away no matter what we go through in life. Even my pain is my pain. There's the core question of why we are here? What are we doing? Why do we strive for anything? We're all just going to die anyway, right? But yet there's this thing that drives us forward because we can each make an individual unique contribution, even if it's small and minute.

Guillén: Etymologically, "unique" comes from the 16th century Middle French, which in turn stems from Latin unicus, which means "only, single, sole, alone of its kind," from unus "one". In essence, it means "forming the only one of its kind" and only later in the mid-19th century was extended to give a sense, however erroneously, of "remarkable, uncommon." It appears to be hardwired in the human animal to subjectively own the unique experience in order to feel distinct and, as you say, to have any purpose or motivation whatsoever.

Lybrook: Which goes back to Descartes proposing, "I think, therefore I am", with an emphasis on the I.

Guillén: One thing I much admired in Carbon is its concision. When I first watched it, I was presuming it was going to time more like your previous shorts and was surprised by its brevity, and yet impressed with how it relayed complex concepts so powerfully. My question would be: in editing, how do you create that sense of timing? How do you time the beats to serve such a swift communication of a difficult idea?

Lybrook: The place I start is that there's the story I write, the story I shoot, and the story I edit. And it always changes. But the goal was always to get it under 15 minutes. Crawlspace and The Seed were both over 20 minutes. I had always wanted to get them under 15 minutes, but I just wasn't able to do it. That was my fault as a storyteller and editor on those particular films. With Carbon, the first cut came in at 22 minutes. Gregory Bayne actually did the first five edits and then I finally got to a point where I said, "Greg, I could tell you, 'Please move this here, put that there', or I can just get in, tear it apart, and put it back together."

Guillén: Was the goal to get it under 15 minutes a requirement of the One Potato competition?

Lybrook: The competition required the script to be under 15 pages with the idea that the finished film would be under 15 minutes. There was nothing that said it had to be that other than my own preference to tell a concise story.

Guillén: It's my understanding a written page equals a filmed minute?

Lybrook: Yeah. The edit was incredibly difficult. I was super insecure about it because the story was so complicated and elusive, yet I wanted to tell it within a certain amount of time. There was a lot that we stripped out. It's funny how the process is so circular. It took me a long time to circle back to my original question of what happens when you discover that you're not one of a kind and how do you protect your sense of self? Somewhere in the middle, I got lost in wanting to also explore stories about Basque sheepherding and delving into the character Jake's back story, where he came from and his goals and ambitions. How did Guernica tie into this? I felt like I had to explain it all. I held onto all of that for a long time. Usually my process is we start with a rough cut, which I know is going to be too long, then I cut it way back to something I know has enough information and then I slowly layer details back in.

There were a lot of people I asked to watch it along the way to make sure the story made sense. If there's not enough information for the audience, then I've lost. It goes back to how much do you withhold and how much do you reveal? I went back to some of the material in the original script that I had taken out and shot it after the principal photography was already done. A lot of that were the clues: the map, the list of others, the photos, all those things that helped pull the story together. Editing is a puzzle. It's a process of how to get the right pieces into the right places to make it all fit together so that it does create a cohesive whole. Aristotle's advice was to start your story as close to the end as possible. You learn these things and then you try to implement them in whatever story or film you're working on.

Guillén: You did a great job.

Lybrook: Thank you.

Guillén: I likewise appreciated that Carbon was rooted in naturalism. I favor supernatural stories that are grounded in naturalism. That's what makes a supernatural or uncanny concept seem real. Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby was one of the first stories where I really noticed the effectiveness of that. Levin made that apartment in New York seem so real and from there he could incite terror and instill dread.

Lybrook: It's totally helpful to have somebody you trust like Gregory Bayne, who truly is a fantastic editor; but, he couldn't get into my head. In a way, there was no way I could explain what I wanted. The editing was something I had to experience firsthand. But, after I was done, he took it and smoothed things out. Another thing I wanted to do with this project was to create a different sense of collaboration. Any film is a collaborative endeavor. In the past, I've worked with my friends Tom Hamilton and Chris Brock. We would work together on the writing, but I was the one who would really do the editing. They would come in and say, "What about this or this?" and, in that way, we would collaborate on the editing. But with Carbon, I wanted to do something different from the get-go.

Once I had the script to a certain place, Matt Wade—one of the camera operators on Carbon, and a filmmaker, artist, illustrator, animator in his own right—agreed to do concept artwork. The same with Patrick Benolkin, who did the score and was willing to do concept music just off the script. As I was rewriting the script, I was looking at Matt's artwork and listening to Pat's concept score and both started to infuse the story, the shot list, and how we would visually tell it. These collaborations opened up things that I just wouldn't have seen otherwise. The other thing was that we shot Carbon in 2:35. We had a filter that made it look anamorphic. I wanted to replicate the old westerns.

Guillén: Your locations had a lot to do with effecting that. Can you speak to why the Bruneau Sand Dunes were so important to telling this story?

 Lybrook: In what we shot, Quinn talks about the sand dunes and the million grains of sand and how individually they're nothing but collectively they create something that stands against time. She says that to the "Vermont Quinn"—the one who shows up with a gun—as a way of saying, "If we join together...." There is the question, however, of how reliable she is in terms of telling the story.

Guillén: I love unreliable narrators. They're intriguing!

Lybrook: I asked myself, "Why are you going to shoot this at Bruneau? It can't be just because Bruneau looks cool." It goes back to the title of the film. There's always the idea of "carbon copy" but what was more interesting to me was carbon as the building blocks of life.

Guillén: Your "we are carbon" t-shirts was a brilliant marketing move.

Lybrook: Even on the t-shirt, it was important that it was a collective idea. We are carbon. I wanted people to feel empowered. From that aspect, Bruneau became a very important metaphor.

Guillén: Can you speak to the experience of your successful Sun Valley Film Festival premiere? I understand you couldn't hear a pin drop during the screening, the audience was so transfixed.

Lybrook: Absolutely. As you know, Crawlspace played at the first Sun Valley Film Festival. Up until that point in time, I felt I was only making videos in my effort to learn. I made a lot of mistakes and some pretty shitty videos. But I always knew that I had a good sense for story and character. Crawlspace was the first time that technology caught up with what I had in my head. It's wholly imperfect but I have a huge soft spot in my heart for Crawlspace. At the time it felt like it was going to be the last one. Everybody was busy with our own lives. Tom had just gotten married. Chris was in a serious relationship. We just wanted to go all out on Crawlspace and see where it would take us.

I remember meeting with Dana Plasse. I had sent her a DVD of Crawlspace. We had submitted to festivals but I didn't really know what I was doing. She said, "I'm going to be in Boise. Let's get together for coffee." We chatted about how we had built all the crawlspace scenes in Tom's garage. He and his wife had just bought a brand-new car literally the week before we started shooting Crawlspace. Tom's wife, who is a lovely person, said, "But you're just going to be in the garage for the weekend, right?" We were in there for three weeks. We brought in dirt for the crawlspace floor and totally took over the garage. We upped everything, the production value, everything. When it played at Sun Valley, I remember being in the filmmaker lounge where people would ask me, "What are you doing here? What's your role at the festival?" Sheepishly—because I felt like a total fraud—I'd say, "I have a short film that's playing." I remember someone saying, "Oh, you're a filmmaker?!" And I was, like, hesistantly, "Yes..... Sure. Let's say that." It took me a long time to feel that was a true statement. It probably wasn't until Zero Point got some legs under it with the Independent Filmmaking Project (IFP) in New York and going there and meeting lots of other people and realizing that everybody's making it up.

Guillén: Which runs parallel to the theme of Carbon. At 62, I can assert from life experience that we can be many different people at once. We can be a filmmaker, an archaeologist, a cook, a lover, a thief, whatever, all at the same time. It's a fallacy of identity to presume that when you use a noun—which are problematic anyways—that you're locked into an identity. Identity is more in the action, in the fact that you are a filmmaker because you are making film, at the same time that you're working for health services and at the same time that you're drinking beer with buddies. I do understand your initial hesitation to identify as a filmmaker, however, because—as you know—I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of filmmakers and it is a hazardous noun fraught with peril, especially when people become over-identified and inflated with the noun, which invariably leads to their demise. Others are committed to the practice and the craft, they keep doing the work, and they're the ones who I see survive, because the focus is on the act of making film, and often not even on the finished film itself.

Lybrook: You nailed it. It is the difference between the noun and the verb. It comes back to that standard question, "What do you do?" What do I do? Well, here are all the things that I do. But what that question really means is, "How do you make a living? How do you pay your bills?" Which, in most cases, is the least interesting thing about a person.

Guillén: Truthfully, because we live in a culture where we're not allowed to earn a living doing what we really love.

 
Carbon | Trailer from Christian Lybrook on Vimeo.

FICCI56—OSCURO ANIMAL (2016)

Committedly absent of dialogue, Felipe Guerrero's feature debut Oscuro Animal (2016) [IMDb] is nonetheless tremendously articulate at expressing the profound trauma of war on its victims, specifically Colombia's longstanding armed conflict and its horrific effect upon three women. Rocío (Marleyda Soto) returns home from washing clothes by the river only to discover her entire village has been disappeared by paramilitary forces. In one cruel abrupt moment, her life has been ruptured as she joins the ranks of the desplazados, the displaced ones uprooted from homes where they once belonged. The second La Mona (Jocelyn Meneses), little more than a young woman this side of girlhood braiding the tangled hair of her Barbies, is brutalized and held captive by a paramilitary commander. To escape, she is forced to extreme action. The third Nelsa (Luisa Vides Galiano), herself a soldier, is complicit with unimaginable atrocities. Forced to bury the dismembered bodies of executed farmers, Nelsa sets her sights on a measure of redemption. How they each maneuver away from life-threatening circumstances through a perilous jungle towards tentative freedom in Bogotá provides the narrative thrust of the film, which is harrowing and devastating.

In his director's note at the film's official website, Guerrero explains that the film's title is a metaphor of a violence that relentlessly hounds these women wherever they go. "It is this sense of terror, coiled and ready to strike," he states, "that is felt as a bone-deep reverberation that accompanies the characters throughout their flight." Felipe Guerrero, already an accomplished editor on such films as Oscar Ruiz Navia's El Vuelco del Cangrejo (Crab Trap, 2009) and Jaime Osorio Marquez's El Páramo (The Squad, 2011), made his directing debut with the short documentary Paraíso (2006), which was awarded at FID Marseille. Oscuro Animal is his feature film debut.

Of the three actresses (all competent in their muted portrayals; Meneses and Galiano in their first roles), I must single out the performance of Marleyda Soto as Rocío. Similar to how I perceive Magaly Solier to be the face of indigenous resistance, Soto claims the traumatized countenance of Colombia's desplazados. In César Augusto Acevedo's lauded debut feature La Tierra y la Sombra (Land and Shade, 2015) winner of the Caméra d'Or at Cannes, Soto plays the wife of a man dying from respiratory failure induced by sugar cane exploitation. Her performances are raw and strong and I look forward to seeing more of her talent in films to come. I regret that I was slow on the uptake and didn't seize the opportunity to talk to her at FICCI56.

Having saved a little girl from near death when the bus they are riding is attacked by a paramilitary squad, Rocío's natural impulse is to shelter the young girl, whose mother is killed in the attack. She bundles the little girl in her arms as they hitch a ride in the back of a truck and, while the girl sleeps, Rocío tugs at a weathered photograph that shows her happy with her husband and her two children. My heart leapt to my throat. Her loss was palpable and the grief cut like a knife. All relayed without a single word.

Again, Guerrero justifies the absence of dialogue as a purposeful cinematic device "to heighten this sense of being cornered, hemmed in by violence" and "a sense of angst that cuts off any communication the characters might have among themselves or with the rest of the world", in effect a "textual denial" that brings Fernando Lockett's cinematography and the central performances front and center as pure visual communication. "The absence of dialogue," Giovanna Hernández writes in her program capsule, "sharpens our attentiveness to ambient sound: the birds in the rainforest, the music on the radio and the fall of the raindrops that caress Nelsa's face once her life has grown more peaceful again."

My understanding is that long-awaited peace accords to end the regime of paramilitary activity in Colombia's frontier regions were on the table even as FICCI was in the midst of its 56th edition. The mothers and daughters of Colombia, and their ravaged bodies, deserve nothing less than peace.

As reported by John Hopewell at Variety, Oscuro Animal followed its Ibero-American premiere at FICCI with an appearance at the 31st edition of the recently-held Guadalajara Film Festival where it won awards for Best Ibero-American Fiction Feature, director, cinematography and actress (in an ensemble tribute to all three female leads).

 

FICCI56—LOS NADIE (THE NOBODIES, 2016)

The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing.—Eduardo Galeano.

Traditionally, each edition of the Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI) begins with a Colombian entry for opening night. For their 56th edition—which recently occurred on March 2-7, 2016 in Cartagena, Colombia, South America—FICCI56 premiered Los Nadie (The Nobodies, 2016), the debut feature of Juan Sebastián Mesa. An invitation-only capacity audience excitedly walked the red carpet at the Centro de Convenciones Julio César Turbay Ayala, and the festival officially began with opening remarks by General Director Lina Rodríguez, Artistic Director Diana Bustamente, and the President of the Republic Juan Manuel Santos.

Juan Sebastián Mesa holds a degree in Audiovisual and Multimedia Communication from the University of Antioquia (Medellin). His short film Kalashnikov (2013) served as his graduation project. He is a part of Monociclo Cine, who produced Los Nadie.

The film's title Los Nadie comes from Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's poem of the same name, published in his volume The Book of Embraces (1989:73), translated by Galeano's longtime translator, Cedric Belfrage.

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them—will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.

With the extradition of military chiefs in 2010, Medellin became an increasingly violent city and no one, including Mesa, wanted to stay. He and a couple of friends suspended college to leave the country to travel around South America. En route to Machu Piccu, they met a nomadic group of young Colombian jugglers. Mesa was impressed with how they were able to get along without depending too much on the system. They were never out of it, of course, because that would have been impossible; but, they maintained a certain degree of autonomy, which he admired. They didn't really belong anywhere, and didn't have any specific date they needed to return to Colombia.

Mesa befriended one of the jugglers who encouraged him to write a script for a short film about someone who wants to leave the city, but where the issue is not the city and what happens in it, but the shared aspirations of those who inhabit it. In 2014, this script was selected for a grant by Colombia's Film Development Fund and Mesa elected to expand Los Nadie into a full feature.

What Mesa has created is an ambling black and white portrait of a disaffected group of punk youngsters in Medellin; a city with a huge punk subculture listening to Punk Medallo. Camilo, Mechas, Manu, Ana and Pipa represent a generation attracted to but excluded from the city. As promising as the city appears, it is equally hostile and rejects them. Their non-conforming roustabout ways serve as a creative defense against circumstances they can do nothing about; yet, their punkish lifestyle is at the same time a protest and, in effect, a renewed discourse addressing and resisting the cultural limitations of their time. Through music, street art and friendship they define themselves, inspire each other, and seek out a way to become themselves even under curfew, and even as startling gunshots in the distance momentarily unnerve them.

In its best sequences Los Nadie reminded me of Altmanesque dialogues with everyone talking at once, as in real life, with a charming sense of what individual personalities bring and contribute to the group as a whole. Its story is attractive for being simple, raw, and absorbing. I anticipate its ensemble of young actors will begin appearing in films coming out of the revitalized Colombian film industry. It serves as well as an emboldened example to other young filmmakers that billions of pesos are not necessary to make a film. "It is better to have friends than silver," Mesa asserts.

As Giovanna Hernández contextualizes in her program capsule: "The Nobodies is deeply rooted in the tradition of Colombian cinema about youth, from Pepos to Rodrigo D: No Future [1990], or from Apocalipsur [2005] to Los Hongos [2014], but behind this continuity lies a new gesture, firm and assured, and an obstinate vision of the future."

My thanks to Manuela Saldarriaga H. whose article for El Espectador provided the background information for this review.

LA CALLE DE LA AMARGURA / BLEAK STREET (2015)

I imagine Diane Arbus and Luis Buñuel sharing stale popcorn sitting third row center watching Arturo Ripstein's latest melodrama La Calle de la Amargura (Bleak Street, 2015). Billed variously as a "Mexican noir" and a "true crime film", Bleak Street was inspired by a nota roja read by long-time Ripstein collaborator (and lifetime companion) Paz Alicia Garciadiego. She transformed the sordid tabloid events of an accidental 2009 homicide of two dwarf luchadores in a Cuauhtémoc love hotel by two middle-aged prostitutes into a quintessential Ripsteinian netherpiece, which succeeds as a welcome return to form from Ripstein whose recent films have not quite captured the imagination of the public as avidly as his earlier works.

Bleak Street had its World Premiere at the 2015 Venice Film Festival, then Toronto, Morelia and Gijón (where it scored the Best Director Award for Ripstein and Best Production Design for Marisa Pecanins). David Hudson rounded up the first reviews from Venice and Toronto for Fandor's Keyframe Daily, with Critics Round-up following suit.

Garciadiego's script ingeniously emulates the grotesque reflections of funhouse mirrors through an intricate replication of the twinning and doubling of characters, starting straightaway with the masked dwarves Little Death (Juan Francisco Longoria) and Little K-9 (Guillermo López), the shadow mascots and diminished reflections of luchadores Death and K-9. The dwarf twins are managed by alcoholic parents who exploit them mercilessly. Their mother Doa Epi (Silvia Pasquel) is especially manipulative, using a fierce, unyielding mother love and the threatening blessings of Christian prayer to twist their minds into obedience, when all they really ask for is that their costumes be made of respectable material and that they be given a little allowance for a night of hanky-panky. Once again, Ripstein reveals how familial obligations are, perhaps, the most confining prison of all, moreso than the immovable barriers of class and economic circumstance.

So it is, as well, for the film's parallel protagonists, the used-up prostitutes Adela (Patricia Reyes Spíndola) and Dora (Nora Velázquez). Adela accepts being saddled with a crippled mother as meager compensation for her agonizing loneliness, and she puts the old bat to good use, having learned that strangers offer loose change to absolve themselves of the guilt they feel confronted by an old woman begging. Senior abuse has rarely been depicted so mordantly. Her friend Dora, on the other hand, is under the resentful thumb of her sluttish daughter and her cross-dressing husband Max (Alejandro Suárez), which upsets her only because Max is ruining her work clothes by stretching them out when he uses them to flirt with young men. Other than for that, she's willing to put up with his homosexuality just to maintain an illusion that she leads as normal a life as her condescending neighbors. But Max is fed up with having sex forced upon him in Dora's bid for normalcy and runs away under the cover of wide-eyed darkness with Dora's meager savings (and her best lingerie).

It is only in their friendship that Adela and Dora find any relief, even as they labor to find one shaft of sunlight where they can sit and remember the fun they had as young prostitutes drugging men and stealing their money. Although Alejandro Cantú's atmospheric and sullied palette is 180º away from that used in Sean Baker's oversaturated Tangerine, the honesty of the love and friendship between Tangerine's transgendered duo resonates with the shared street experiences of Adela and Dora, emphasizing a kind of love that is, perhaps, unknowable if unthinkable to those with a touch more light and a little less street in their lives. The tenderness of Dora rubbing a little rouge on Adela's high cheekbones emphasizes her heartfelt flattery that Adela looks just like Dolores del Rio. "Do you really think so?" Adela questions demurely, for one fleeting moment young again. Cinematographer Cantú, in no small measure, is wholly responsible for the film's oppressive yet engaging ambiance. Combined with Marisa Pecanins' production design, Bleak Street's grimy world is shadowy with faint overhead light, dirty puddled streets, and the everyday decasia of crumbling walls and mildewed plaster. His camera eavesdrops furtively. It holds back at a distance in wary long shots, then advances floatingly as if to overhear the gossip more clearly and to more fully witness the sordid events taking place.

Eschewing sentimentality, Bleak Street does not, however, suffer from a lack of compassion or begrudged respect. As miserable as the lives of its criminal cast of characters might appear, as wanton their desires or forlorn their hopes, their fatefully flawed humanity lifts its weary chin momentarily recalling a near-forgotten sovereignty, even if limned with dark, smudged charcoal in waning light. There's too much love in Ripstein's portrait to accuse him of mere miserabilism. Life is far too messy and complicated for that. The flamboyant codes inscribed in his melodramas reveal these denizens of the dark as heroes defiantly resisting the overwhelming odds of a world set against them, even if it is all—as Adela seeks to comfort Dora at film's end—meant to pass away. As if to prove a point, Luis Mariano's "Mexico" sung in French over the film's closing credits offers a contrapuntal jubilance.

Bleak Street is currently screening at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley.

 

CAAMFEST 2016—RACIAL FACIAL (2016)

Although it no longer works out with my festival calendar to attend San Francisco's CAAMFest (formerly known as the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival), it remains a community-based film festival close to my heart for being the first to grant me press credentials when I began covering film 10 years ago and the first to offer me the opportunity to write program capsules for subsequent editions. It was during their 2006 edition that I met Jeff Adachi, San Francisco's Public Defender, who was flexing his strengths as an activist filmmaker with his debut feature documentary The Slanted Screen: Asian Men In Film and Television (2006). This world premiere offered my first opportunity to review and interview Adachi for The Evening Class, with subsequent dispatches on the fascinating panel discussion coordinated for the festival, and my own personal reminisces of the ethnic masquerades foisted upon me early in my theatrical career.

Adachi followed up The Slanted Screen three years later with You Don't Know Jack: The Jack Soo Story (2009), which afforded our second opportunity to converse.

Since then, Adachi has had his hands full negotiating justice in race-related crimes in San Francisco, either directly or indirectly attentive (as with the highly-publicized murders of Alex Nieto and Mario Woods). His Facebook postings remain one of my main resources for information on the controversial issues of ethnic minorities and their ongoing resistance against institutionalized racism in police departments across the country, and within the criminal justice system.

Tackling these contemporary concerns square on, Adachi contextualizes them within an eight-minute short Racial Facial (2016) , which premiered March 12, 2016 at CAAMFest. Commencing with a flashing warning—"The images in this film may make you think differently"—Jeff Adachi's Racial Facial proceeds to visually document the history of racism in the United States and ongoing efforts to end it, frequently utilizing a powerful stroboscopic effect, as if the thought of such rampant institutionalized racism is reluctant to register in the brain, stuttering, yet struggling towards articulation. One must invest hope in articulation, trusting clarity and accuracy to redress ignorance and hatred.

With commanding concision, Racial Facial abbreviates a tortured history to its key visual signifiers, provocatively conflating the raised fist salute of Black Olympic champions with the Statue of Liberty's raised torch-bearing arm and historical illustrations of slaves being transported on boats with photos of incarcerated prisoners in their bunks. Drawing from media resources such as news clippings, early cartoons, and the TV miniseries Roots, Adachi connects the economic underpinnings of how 450,000 Africans were forced into U.S. slavery with the even more distressing demographic of how over 1,000,000 Black Americans are currently incarcerated in the U.S. via a prisons-for-profit incentive; slavery in different guises for the same profit.

Phrasing solidarity, Adachi likewise features conditions for Chinese Americans (slaves to the building of America's railroads), Japanese Americans (interned during World War II, alarmingly aligned with Donald Trump's campaign promises to oust Muslim Americans), Native Americans (slaughtered by the millions, robbed of ancestral lands, and shamelessly acculturated), and Mexican Americans (whose territories were appropriated and whose labor has been the backbone of America's produce belt, only to be hatefully maligned by Trump's campaign speeches).

The failures of the criminal justice system prevail, evident in a demoralizing continuity of overlooked mob lynchings to the recent verdict by a predominantly white suburban jury that absolved San Franciscan police officers of wrongdoing in the murder of Alex Nieto. As a visual assessment, Racial Facial is a commanding work of assemble editing, driven forward by an original score by DJ Smash. As synopsized by Adachi at the film's Indiegogo campaign: "The film aims not to place blame, but to identify the causes of ignorance and individual and institutional racism, and then provide a degree of self-realization in the viewer that sparks new solutions."

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (2015)—MVFF38 Q&A With Brionne Davis

Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent (2015) screened at the 38th edition of the Mill Valley Film Festival with Brionne Davis—the actor who portrayed Evan (the film's characterization of American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes)—in attendance to field questions from the film's festival audience.

Explaining that he knew what he was experiencing in the Amazon was amazing, Davis was nonetheless blown away by seeing the finished film for the first time at Cannes. "It literally took my soul out," he enthused. Nine languages are represented in the film, including English.

Asked how he became involved in the production, Davis answered that he had shot a film called Avenged (2013) in the Mojave Desert. Jason Gurvitz, a producer on Avenged, was contacted by David Corredor, the production manager of Embrace of the Serpent, who asked him to name some actors he'd worked with who he enjoyed working with and who he felt could handle the experience of shooting Embrace of the Serpent in the Amazon. Davis was among his recommendations and he had the good fortune as well of looking like Schultes. All the magical pieces fit together for him to get the role.

He was in Colombia for two months shooting the film, which was shot in seven weeks; a testament to the passion and commitment of the crew, Ciro Guerra's phenomenal directing talent, and the willingness of the Amazon to have them shooting there. "We had to be blessed," Davis explained. "We had a shaman who blessed and accepted us. He prayed and chanted for 24 hours and, fortunately, the Amazon said okay; but, on one stipulation: we had to let Mother Nature be the boss. So we did."

Davis joined the shoot two weeks in, overlapping with his co-star Jan Bijvoet (who played Theo, the film's characterization of German ethnologist and explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg). He spent the first two weeks learning the Huitoto language. All his previous research on Shultes had been admittedly intellectual. Mainly he'd read One River, a phenomenal book by anthropologist Wade Davis, and a couple of others, trying to imagine what it would be like to explore the Amazon and what had driven Schultes to be so passionate about—not only the people—but their languages. Brionne Davis couldn't wrap his head around that passion and knew he wouldn't understand it until he was in the Amazon himself. Once he arrived, he became an observer. For 10 hours a day he worked at vocalizing and memorizing the language, because the written Huitoto in the script made no sense to him.

The adaptation of the diaries of both explorers was fairly close, given that they were the seed planted to tell the story. Theodor Koch-Grünberg's diaries were written in the late 1800s-early 1900s. Little of this actually made it back to the world and the little that did was what Schultes followed. Richard Evans Schultes' diaries were written in the early 1940s. Schultes, in fact, remained in the Amazon for 19 years, during which time he discovered more than 30,000 plants. He is the individual almost solely responsible for bringing this information back to the States and alerting the world to the ecological threat to the Amazonian region. The film embellished on their diaries, of course. The mythic plant yakruna, for example, was a metaphor for all the plants of the Amazon. There were a lot of elaborations, but they were all based on truth. All the madness of the Catholic indoctrination of the indigenous people happened, and worse, and was in effect another Holocaust.

All the actors were indigenous. The extras for the smaller roles were found in the villages. Antonio Bolivar (the elder Karamakate, Evan's traveling companion) and Nilbio Torres (the younger Karamakate) were both indigenous. Antonio, in fact, is one of the last surviving members of his tribe and their language is spoken by very few. Nilbio is a farmer. He was discovered because when they went into the villages and relayed the story of the film. He said adamantly, "I want to play this role." Looking at him and noting his passion, they realized it made perfect sense.

Scenes on the rapids in the Amazon appeared treacherous and Davis admitted some trick photography was used. They were in the rapids, yes, but they looked more dangerous than they actually were, and the crew canoeing were experts at it; they do it all the time.

My question engaged one of the film's most fantastic scenes: the vision of the jaguar killing the snake. Once he'd seen the film at Cannes, what did that scene mean for him? When you use archetypes in storytelling, Davis answered, it helps ground it in something deeper and reminds us what animals can tell us. He saw that scene as a warning that we all need to heed. It was written that the jaguar was running through the jungle and attacked the snake. It was violent. He's still sitting with that particular scene and still processing many of the sensations he experienced there.

In his first week in the Amazon a huge moth flew around him and landed on his shoulder. It then flew down and clung to his foot as he was walking along the river. He knew shamans felt that the presence of a moth or a butterfly signifies transformation and change. He realized his fears: that he would be kidnapped, that he would fall in the river, or that he would never make it back home. Yet alongside those fears was his awareness that he was open to and going to have one of the most amazing experiences of his life. It ended up being the latter. He realized he was about to go on a journey that—if he were open to it—would change his life and his perspective, much like his character Evan was going through something similar.

The only CGI in the film Davis is aware of is when Karakamate is sitting on the rock with all the butterflies fluttering around him. When they were shooting the B-rolls at their last location, they got to it just as it was about to rain. A group of butterflies were on the shore feeding on minerals. Ciro cleared the set and directed him to walk to the butterflies and let them fly around him. When they did so, Davis said it felt like there were thousands of them. That was not intended to be the last scene of the film—another scene had been written—so when he watched it at Cannes, he wasn't expecting it to be the final scene. It moved him incredibly and he lost it at the screening. He realized he and his character had gone through the same metamorphosis and that you cannot be in the Amazon without being connected to it in personal, meaningful ways. As a young boy in the Boy Scouts, he taught canoeing and rolling boats in the Ozark Mountains. In retrospect, he could see that everything he'd ever done in his life had led him to his transforming experience in the Amazon.

And then he had a singularly gifted experience. After two weeks, he was still trying to discover the character of Evan and working with Guerra to combine qualities in his own personality with those of Evan's. They hoped to ground his performance in similarities. On his second night of shooting, he returned to their lodge and was lying down on his bed. He felt grateful and appreciative for being there. He fell asleep and woke to the sound of a murmured chanting. When he opened his eyes, above him he saw an amber-toned figure moving over him. The figure chanted until he realized Davis was awake, who then backed up against the wall. The figure faced and looked at him then slowly moved to the foot of the bed, glancing back at him with something of a smile. He moved out of the room into the darkness. Davis followed, but he was gone. He turned on the light, looked under the bed, and freaked out just a bit. He had never seen a ghost before and had never really believed in them. He crawled back into his bed a little bit afraid because he didn't know what that encounter meant. A feeling of blessedness washed over him. A feeling that he had been welcomed.

The next morning when he relayed his experience, Guerra simply shook his head and said, "I have so much to say about that but I can't say anything until we finish shooting." When he told Antonio, he said, "Yeah, well, welcome to the jungle." "I was blessed," Davis confirmed. "I was meant to be there for every reason imaginable. This film is my philosophy on life and how in the world did I have this philosophy for 15 years of my life before walking into the jungle and being able to be a part of this story? If we listen and we serve our own purpose, if we listen to the Earth, then we'll get to do what we're supposed to do."

FICCI56: EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT—The Cineaste Interview With Ciro Guerra

Photo courtesy of Cineaste.

Ciro Guerra may not have won the Foreign Language Academy Award® for Embrace of the Serpent (2015); but, the film's nomination remains a stirring first in Colombian cinematic history and continues to be celebrated internationally as one of the year's most significant films. It has certainly inspired considerable enthusiasm among Colombia's filmmaking community and is being seen as an invitation for Colombian filmmakers to aspire towards an international stage.

At the 56th edition of the Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI56) Embrace of the Serpent has been programmed into FICCI56's popular sidebar "Cinema Under the Stars", a non-competitive section of the festival during which the streets of Cartagena's Historic Center are transformed into a giant outdoor movie theater. Thanks to the sponsorship of EPM, RCN Radio Televisión, Bigvideo TV and the IPCC, the public will have opportunity to celebrate Embrace of the Serpent against a star-studded backdrop. FICCI56 has also arranged for the hearing and visually impaired to catch a special screening of the film at Multiplex Cine Colombia Plaza Bocagrande. Further, Guerra will be teaching a master class to filmmakers attending FICCI56.

It's with genuine pleasure that I join Colombia's celebration of Embrace of the Serpent with my recently-published conversation with Ciro Guerra, conducted over breakfast at the Palm Springs International, and published as a web exclusive at Cineaste.

 

LAST DAY OF FREEDOM (2015)—The Evening Class Interview With Dee Hibbert-Jones & Nomi Talisman

"Why are we trying to kill all the broken people?"—Brian Stevenson, Just Mercy (2014).

Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman's Oscar®-nominated documentary short Last Day of Freedom (2015) is, in essence, the little film that could. Framed within a heartfelt testimonial that lasts only 32 minutes, Last Day of Freedom concisely relays a painfully personal story that at the same time addresses a cluster of contemporary social concerns—the failure of our country to honor and help veterans suffering from PTSD who are incapable of returning to civilian life; the criminalization of the mentally ill and the homeless; a prisons-for-profit system that benefits from the death industry of capital punishment; and the secondary trauma experienced by marginalized communities and innocent families with relatives on death row—huge dimensions for such a small film! Few films, let alone an animated documentary short, have emotionally devastated me as powerfully, in precise sharp strokes, as Last Day of Freedom. There are a lot of reasons not to be interested in this year's Academy Awards® broadcast, already hobbled by controversy over its institutionalized racism, but Last Day of Freedom is not one of them. I have my fingers crossed that something as important and accomplished as this film will rise above Hollywood's pageantry of mediocrity to secure the honor it deserves.

In a hellish "third tour of duty" within his own mind, Manny Babbitt suffers a dissociative break and kills an innocent woman. Hoping to do the right thing, his brother Bill turns him in to the police, but is failed by the criminal justice system. Instead of his brother receiving the mental care he requires, he is expeditiously sentenced to death. In 32 breath-halting minutes, Last Day of Freedom searingly indicts institutional and infrastructural failures that capsize on each other like cascading dominoes. No help. No justice. No mercy. No closure.

Photo: Andrea Chase.

When they first started working on the film, Hibbert-Jones and Talisman couldn't secure major funding because no one wanted to put money into a film about the death penalty, considered too controversial an issue. They struggled for meager support. Yet, since first starting production, these issues have become increasingly prominent in the cultural zeitgeist, which they now believe might help to propel the film forward. We met for coffee to discuss the film no less than a few days after the tragic execution of Mario Woods at the hands of the San Francisco Police Department, which has inspired a groundswell of protest in the Bay Area, joining a nationwide uproar decrying police misconduct against the mentally ill, the homeless, and communities of color. Why, indeed, is there so much concerted effort to kill all the broken people?

Last Day of Freedom has been winning several awards on its festival run, most recently the Best Short Film at the International Documentary Association, which secured the film's nomination for the 88th Academy Awards®. It's an absolutely remarkable and assured effort from Mission residents and first-time filmmakers Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman. It is the first in an intended series of films for a proposed multi-platform project exploring secondary trauma by way of testimonials of family members who have relatives on death row. As part of her job with a non-profit offering media services to these families, Nomi Talisman and her partner Dee Hibbert-Jones—with whom she's been collaborating since 2004, exploring stories about "little people hurt by big systems"—recognized early on the potential of telling these stories to a general public. After securing permission from Nomi's employer, the two began interviewing several family members from three different families with relatives on death row.

"These people were amazing storytellers," Hibbert-Jones emphasized, "and their stories were so egregious." The challenge was to craft a linear narrative. Their research had given them a series of stories but Bill's story stood out in the unique way it was being told, and became the lead story by which they could address ideological issues of infrastructural and institutional failures for communities deemed disposable, and specifically the secondary PTSD trauma associated with the death penalty impacted on innocent family members.

As an experimental short-form documentary Last Day of Freedom achieves its linearity through a gradually-constructed process of unfolding information rendered through rotoscoped animation. The animation intrigues in how it simulates film, even metatextually incorporating leaders as chapter headings. The force of Bill's narration was so strong, textured and detailed that they knew they didn't need to literally illustrate it. Instead, the animation serves to visually enhance the emotional resonance of Bill's narration and his incremental style of revealing his story; a style that bears an authentic masculine reserve that resists being overcome with emotion.

As an animation choice, rotoscoping—though, at this juncture, no longer particularly radical or cutting edge—was important in relation to the content and allowed a fluid transparency between the visuals and the narrative. More plastic animation techniques would have caused a disassociation from the materiality of the image, which wouldn't have served the story. Above all, they were always aware of the responsibility of taking such a personal story and translating it to animation and it has been heartening for them that Bill has confirmed their creative decisions.

They wanted a layered narrative that wouldn't confuse the storyline. Once they had recorded Bill Babbitt, and edited that recording, they figured out when they needed to hear him, see him, and follow elements related to him. The rest they broke into sections to work out specific resonances and create what was happening either for Bill or for the external viewer. Sometimes they knew they wanted an interior close-up, whereas at other points they visualized him further away as he had larger perceptions. At the beginning, they wanted it to be a nostalgic, even romantic, glance at the past, before breaking into different emotional states.

The issue of the animated line quality became important. They tried out different approaches. How did they want to draw his face? How did they want to show that Bill was barely holding it together? When was it appropriate to move in close to his face to simulate an intimacy usually reserved for a family member? Their main concern was not to chase and illustrate the narrative but to layer it with emotional resonances. They figured out that, in Bill's mind as he tells the story, he's always on the drive to San Quentin to visit Manny in prison. What could they take out of the visual landscape that defined Bill's sad repeated drive over the years?

Having filmed and recorded Bill, I was curious why they felt the need to animate the footage? Why did they feel animation would give the original footage more force or artistry? Nomi offered a multi-layered response. Clearly, the film incorporates many more pieces of art and drawings than the usual documentary film (over 30,000 drawings). They knew how to draw, it was their strength, but they weren't as confident about how to make a documentary film. Rather than obsessing over documentary form, they proceeded with skills with which they were comfortable. One of the families they had interviewed before interviewing Bill required anonymity, which further promoted their decision to use animation.

By the time they decided to lead with Bill's story, they felt comfortable enough to develop a piece to secure further funding. They chose the final sequence of their dramatic narrative. Dee had the opportunity to present this sequence to a university class, which was only partially animated and still included raw footage, and discovered that the audience simply could not bear to watch a 70-year-old man weep on screen. Animation provided a comforting distantiation that made his suffering palliative. "Somehow that little bit of removal allowed people to step in." Animation universalizes so you don't become overinvested in details, she explained. Of course you can identify racial features, but a little distance provides for a universalized experience and a possibility for increased intimacy and identification. Animation allows an extremely graphic and violent story such as Bill's to be shown in a manner that doesn't sensationalize it or turn it into a piece of pornographic violence.

The filmmaking duo consider the families they've interviewed as being superheroes because their stories are so extraordinary. How does one tolerate or manage an experience where you're trying to save the life of a brother? Bill tried to do the best thing and then, all of a sudden, it went miserably wrong. Once they decided on how to animate his face, they sensed the potential to elicit audience identification, allowing viewers to feel they were Manny (such as when the windshield wipers segue into and signal Manny's chaotic subjectivity). When Bill specifically identifies Manny's illness as paranoid schizophrenia the animation becomes sludgy with slightly washed-out colors. Then they could depict moments that were clearly within Bill's experience. They could incorporate metaphors of stumbling and falling; moments where the past was seemingly romanticized. That's when they decided that everything having to do with Manny's veteran experience should exhibit a grainy, 16mm quality. Animation allowed the freedom to think about these experiences in complex ways that leant themselves to their strengths. They were looking at art history, looking at film, driving by billboards and thinking about images to support a really great storyline.

The interstitial imagery of street scenes—particularly the image of Manny walking down the street (where it's made clear that he is mentally ill)—they created on their own while some scenes, like the war sequences, were taken from actual footage of the Battle of Khe-Sanh, in which Manny fought (among several hazardous tours of duty). Nomi indicated she wouldn't be surprised if some of the Khe-Sanh footage that they used actually included Manny. But a lot of the interstitial imagery they shot themselves, composed, then sent to be rotoscoped.

They also looked at home movies. Often working with found footage, Nomi has amassed a collection of 8mm and 16mm home movies. She had already scanned several leaders from these home movies for an experimental piece she had done and—when Dee suggested they look to them as a potential resource—they discovered that, with a little color correction, they could be effectively incorporated. The first time these leaders appear is in company with the first sounds of war, which served as something of a chapter heading that finished the first chapter of Manny's deployment to the Vietnam War. The crackling radio conversation on top of the footage melds into the sound of the film running through a projector before fading away. They felt this sequence simulated old movies where you had to wait for reels to be changed that sometimes didn't happen rightaway. Manny's life was made up of all these chapters leading to the same tragic fate.

Of course, they had no idea that the film would traffic as far as it has and enjoy such a winning season. My eyes will be glued to my television set come Sunday to see if the little film that could achieves every filmmaker's dream.

Of further interest is Pam Grady's write-up for the San Francisco Chronicle and Patricia Williams' stirring essay for The Nation.