FULL FRAME 2006
—Mocha Jean Herrup

I find it charmingly ironic that the best promotional materials for a festival that I’ve seen this year were at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the preeminent showcase for non-fiction film in the U.S held every year in Durham, North Carolina. Their posters say “we are now entering ‘realitywood.’ No cops one day away from retirement being suddenly thrust into the adventure of a lifetime.” Brilliant. They really know how to sell the idea of non-commercial!

Full Frame is to documentary film what Cooperstown is to baseball. It’s a really big deal. This year’s famous guests included Al Franken, Danny DeVito, Branford Marsalis, Ellis Marsalis and legendary documentary filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Albert Maysles, Ross McElwee, Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and Ken Burns.

Festival Director Nancy Buirski and crew put together a timely and diverse slate of programs including special sidebars about class in America and post-Katrina New Orleans. A common thread from people that I spoke with at the event, filmmakers and moviegoers alike, was their excitement about being at a festival where the documentaries took center stage. People were excited to talk about the films and their subjects. These are engaged people. Picture a whole audience full of people with “I voted” stickers stuck on their chests eager to talk about film and current events. That’s Full Frame.

THE REVIEWS

51 BIRCH STREET (Doug Block)
I’m in love with this movie. It’s completely not what you expect. It begins like one of those overly indulgent personal docs with the really bad narration bad narration the filmmaker insisted on doing himself but then a placed close-up of a martini glass and a beautiful moving shot of Autumn tinted tree lined streets hints at something more.

When filmmaker / wedding videographer Doug Block’s mother contracts pneumonia and unexpectedly dies three weeks later, Block starts to interview his father on camera hoping to facilitate greater connection between the two as they work through their grief. To his amazement his father seems fine. More than fine. A few months after his mom’s passing, dad moves in with his secretary from 40 years ago and puts the family home on the market. When Block and his two sisters sort through the decades worth of stuff that has collected in the house they discover volumes of his mother’s diaries. Block struggles with whether to investigate. “How much do we really want to know our parents?” the film asks. He goes there and what we get is a lucid and elegant exploration of the relationships among feminism, suburbia, and lives of “quiet desperation.”

Mina Block was born in Brooklyn, married in ’47, had three kids and moved to New York state. She had a lifelong love of writing. Mike Block was also born in Brooklyn, served in WWII and spent most of his life working as a mechanical engineer. On the surface, these two made a happy, 57-year marriage together. When Mike tells his son that the union “wasn’t a loving association, just a functioning one,” his son feels the heavy tug of the proverbial rug.

Behind the A-Frame walls and the precious family photos, Mom smokes pot and falls madly in love with her therapist. Judiciously selected fragments from her typed diaries appear onscreen and we get a glimpse of her hidden realities as the words fly by... Misery, Agony, Settle, Felatio...

Block’s dad spent years struggling to feel his emotions and joined a men’s group to help him through it. Like most men of his day, especially the veterans, he couldn’t show or even acknowledge his feelings. Anger, he believed, could destroy him.

As Block learns more and more about his parents, talks with his sisters about their shared histories, revisits all the old videos and photographs and considers the actualities of his own complicated relationship with wife, 51 BIRCH STREET segues into a rare examination, perhaps indictment, of traditional marriage. By no means an unequivocal dismissal of the institution as a whole, the film does remarkably call attention to the many lies that get told in the name of Marriage and The Family. This, I find riveting.

BEYOND BEATS AND RHYMES: A HIP-HOP HEAD WEIGHS IN ON MANHOOD IN HIP-HOP CULTURE (Byron Hurt)
Former college football quarterback Byron Hurt directs this compelling, eloquent film about Hip-Hop’s ugly truths. In an opening direct address, Hurt explains that he is someone who loves hip hop and for years never thought anything of it. It was an integral part of his life and cultural expression as a man, an African American, and an athlete. Things changed when he took a job after college leading anti-sexism workshops. He began to learn more about himself and the pressures to be the hard, emotionless, violent man depicted in the mass media and all over hip hop. He starts to connect the dots between violence against women and violent representation and the ability for men to lead full lives. BEYOND BEATS comes from the filmmaker’s deep desire to get “us men to take a hard look at ourselves.”

Hurt is the right person to make this film. He’s an insider. An African American, attractive, all star athlete, he has the street cred to get through to the vast majority of people who won’t be taking a Women’s Studies class anytime soon, let alone one of Hurt’s workshops. The film is informative but not didactic, alternating between personal narrative, interviews with cultural critics such as Michael Eric Dyson and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, hip hop stars Mos Def, Busta Rhymes and Chuck D, and on-the-street clips with aspiring rappers. BEYOND BEATS also includes many moments of intervention including an impromptu interview with hip hop mogul Russel Simmons and revealing footage of BET’s spring break in Florida.

In one charismatic sequence, Hurt approaches a group of young African American women enjoying their vacation in the Sunshine State. The tell him they don’t mind hip hop lyrics because, they say, the songs aren’t talking about them. We then see footage of these same young women being endlessly groped and harassed on the streets. In his on-camera narration Hurt exclaims “They are talking about you! If George Bush gave a speech and said ‘nigger’ would you say ‘he ain’t talkin about me?!’”

BEYOND BEATS strikes a powerful chord when it makes the point that not only can hip hop be misogynistic and homophobic, it can also be downright racist. Nelly’s notorious music video for “Tip Drill” plays in which he slides a credit card down a woman’s ass crack and one critic chillingly points out how the attitudes about women conveyed in the video do not at all differ from a 19th century slaveholder’s view of women. The film takes a hard look at the preponderance of guns and black-on-black violence in hip hop lyrics and videos and concludes that such self defeating depictions might as well be created by the KKK. Both bring great harm to the black community.

Adding to the impact of this documentary was the context in which it was viewed, screening in Durham just a few days after members of the Duke men’s Lacrosse team faced allegations of rape and assault. Careful not to draw conclusions either way during the Q&A, Hurt discussed difficulties of changing men’s culture. He wondered allowed that if things happened as they were alleged if there were some men involved in the incident who were uncomfortable with what was happening and wanted to make it stop but, facing enormous pressures to conform, couldn’t find the courage.

It’s hard to speak up from the inside out. Thank you Byron Hurt for doing just that.

AL FRANKEN: GOD SPOKE (Chris Hegedus, Nick Doob)
Hegedus’s and Doob’s documentary about Al Franken’s move from comedian and satirist to left wing talk show host and candidate for the U.S. Senate comes at a time when, increasingly, “fake news” like The Daily Show continuously out-truths the “real news” like correspondent reports on Fox TV. Fans of Al Franken will enjoy the film for its the fun behind-the-scenes stuff as Franken does his radio show, makes various media appearances, and gets along with his wonderfully outspoken wife, Franni. Ultimately though, the film does not have the kind of substance one craves from Franken and famed documentarians Hegedus and Doob. The film does no more to illuminate Franken and his career than the entertaining on-camera slings between Franken and his conservative counterparts Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter do to elevate the debate about critical issues like the war in Iraq or the erosion of civil liberties. Both settle for the simple and the familiar.

THE REFUGEE ALL STARS (Zach Niles, Banker White)
Niles and White’s debut documentary about refugees from Sierra Leone who form an Afro-pop band continues to rack up the awards. The film received an audience award at the Miami Festival right before snagging the Filmmaker Award at Frame Line. While I commend the first time filmmakers great effort in making and completing this film and find the story itself about people who from great loss find great hope to be important and worthy, the filmmaking itself left me wanting more. Great emphasis was placed on the soundtrack and the retelling of hugely tragic events and not enough on character and story development. I remember how one man lost his arm and was forced to kill his own child but I don’t remember his name, his hopes or his dreams.

NO UMBRELLA: ELECTION DAY IN THE CITY (Laura Paglin)
A gem of a short film, NO UMBRELLA is a microscopic look at what went wrong on election day, 2004. Shot from morning to night in one predominantly African-American precinct in Cleveland, Ohio, NO UMBRELLA is exhibit A in the case to prove election irregularity. Paglin follows the indomitable community elder and city council member Fannie Lewis’s efforts to get enough voting machines up and running at the egregiously neglected polling site. Literally fighting city hall, Lewis is persistent, resourceful and brassy. She’s your loving grandma who doesn’t take no sh*t. Paglin’s crafty verite shows us that it isn’t until white mayor Jane L. Campbell shows up, late in the afternoon, that things get rolling for the throngs of increasingly disenfranchised voters, some of whom have been standing in line in the rain for hours. NO UMBRELLA is right-time, right-place documentary at its best.