By David Sterritt
NEWPORT, R.I.--The Newport International Film Festival regards itself as a regional event, but International is its middle name, and the 2007 edition—celebrating the festival’s tenth birthday—had enough movies with an intercontinental flavor to seem quite cosmopolitan in tone. I was there as a member of the documentary jury, and the overall achievement level of the nonfiction slate was impressively high. Ditto for most of the narrative features I saw, with only one near-stinker to assure me I wasn’t in some manic state that had me liking *everything* on view.
Not surprisingly, the documentary that pleased me most was the movie awarded first prize by my admirable fellow jurors—producer Sarie Horowitz and producer-director Kristi Jacobson, both doc specialists—and me. *Taxi to the Dark Side* is a riveting look at a cluster of practices very much in vogue with the George W. Bush administration: arbitrary detention, “extraordinary rendition,” and plain old-fashioned torture. The movie takes its title and its through-line from the incarceration, persecution, and murder of a hapless Afghan cab driver named Dilawar, whose ordeal in Afghanistan’s notorious Bagram detention center was reported by the New York Times in May 2005.
While the film’s moral center of gravity is the series of horrific atrocities at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, director Alex Gibney provides equally appalling information about Bagram and, inevitably, the notorious Guantánamo camp with its hordes of “combatants” held without benefit of official charges, legal rights, or even the rudiments of due process under law. Gibney touches every one of the necessary and appropriate bases, up to and including Alberto Gonzalez’s idiotic rationalizations, Dick Cheney’s deplorable comment about waterboarding as a “no-brainer” for right-thinking interrogators, and any number of outrages perpetrated by the scandal-ridden president whose contempt for traditional American values of ethics, equity, and legality surely outruns the Constitutional sins of Ulysses S. Grant and Richard M. Nixon combined. It took lots of time and wrangling for Gibney to raise enough money for the film’s completion, editor Sloane Klevin told me at the festival, but after its Tribeca Film Festival premiere *Taxi to the Dark Side* was picked up for distribution by ThinkFilm, so it should be widely available for viewing before long. It deserves the widest possible audience.
Our other award, the jury prize, went to a film that couldn’t be more different. *The King of Kong* takes a witty, savvy look at a competition you probably haven’t heard much about: the struggle to be recognized as the world’s finest Donkey Kong player, a title vied for by a small number of geeks—ubergeeks, really--who pride themselves on mastering video games of the retro variety, which they regard as more challenging to hand-eye coordination than their more up-to-date counterparts. Doesn’t sound like a scintillating subject, you say? Common sense is on your side, but director Seth Gordon beats the odds, developing a remarkable real-person cast of heroes, villains, and fellow travelers. I wish equal time were given to Frogger, to which I once became temporarily addicted, but hey, a 97-minute movie can’t include everything. By the time *The King of Kong* reaches its bittersweet conclusion you feel you’ve visited a world you’ve never seen before, and (with luck) won’t ever see again. Not to be missed.
*The Devil Came on Horseback* was another standout, offering a cogent and compelling overview of the genocidal horrors in Darfur, where untold miseries are still unfolding with little interference from the “civilized” world. Directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, the movie views its subject through the eyes of Brian Steidle, a former Marine captain who left the military to become an observer for the African Union, traveling through Sudan and surrounding regions with cameras instead of guns.
The things Steidle saw—shown by the movie in graphic detail—are so horrifying that he became convinced the world’s developed nations would leap into action once he presented his incontrovertible evidence of unconscionable atrocities. Regrettably, he was dead wrong, so he now devotes his time to spreading the word so widely and forcefully that the situation can’t continue to be ignored. Or can it? Despite its acknowledgment that Darfur’s ongoing torments are indeed genocidal, the Bush administration can’t seem to get beyond all-but-meaningless talk about sanctions and other indecisive measures. *The Devil Came on Horseback* weakens in its last half hour, which focuses more on Steidle and less on the evils to which he bears witness. But its first hour is invaluable.
Lucy Walker’s exotic *Blindsight* is noteworthy for taking on the most offbeat topic I’ve encountered in quite a while: the attempt by six Tibetan teenagers to climb a 23,000-foot peak on Mount Everest’s north slope. The kicker is that all six of them are blind.
They had plenty of support, including a mountain-climbing physician and an individual guide for each blind member of the party. One of the film’s most interesting angles is the difference it observes in Western and Eastern attitudes toward mountains; while Westerners take a macho stance, determined to reach the summit at almost any cost, Easterners are less goal-oriented, regarding the climb as worthy even if it doesn’t press on all the way to the top. At the festival Walker wittily compared her *Blindsight* filmmaking feats to the famous quip about Ginger Rogers, who matched everything Fred Astaire accomplished but did it backwards and in high heels. I won’t give away the film’s ending, but Walker told me she was mighty pleased get back onto level ground after the long high-altitude shoot.
I’ll comment on a few more documentaries before moving to narrative features. *War/Dance* interweaves first-person stories of aggression and repression in Uganda, all told by the young children who experienced them, with preparations by those children for a national music-and-dance competition, which they hope to win on behalf of the displaced-persons camp where they now live. By contrast, *Ghosts of Cité Soleil* makes a spotty impression with its murky account of progovernment gangs in a district of Haiti identified by the United Nations as the most dangerous place on the planet. *In the Shadow of the Moon* opened the festival with a vivid account of the American moon-landing program, oscillating between eye-dazzling space footage and close-up interviews with most of the astronauts involved. It was directed by David Sington, a British filmmaker with extensive science-documentary experience. *Protagonist* interweaves vivacious interviews with four (now reformed) men with a weakness for highly dubious ventures--martial arts, bank robbing, terrorism, Christian evangelizing--that test, and thereby affirm, their masculinity. The film was directed by Jessica Yu, whose earlier works include *In the Realms of the Unreal* about Henry Darger, the great outsider artist; she punctuates the episodes of *Protagonist* with ancient Greek dramatic texts enacted by puppets, which were designed by Janie Geiser, a brilliant artist and filmmaker in her own right. *Autism: The Musical* probes the nature of autistic children by showing several of them preparing to put on a stage show under the guidance of a dedicated director with an autistic son of her own. The kids are hugely appealing, behavioral problems and all, and the parents are almost as fascinating. *Kurt Cobain About a Son* tells the rock star’s story via excerpts from an epic-length taped interview and vaguely related images that work in counterpoint to Cobain’s words; think *Koyaanisqatsi* with a Seattle-style beat. *Crazy Love* also graced the festival with its stranger-than-fiction story of a sociopathic romance.
One more documentary deserves special notice. The aptly titled *Deep Water* recounts the adventures of a weekend sailor who attempted in the late 1960s to win a contest by circumnavigating the globe, alone and at record speed. He should have known from the beginning that he wasn’t up to this task—his trip to the starting point, three days for an average boater, took him two weeks—and sure enough, he soon floundered. But instead of heading for home, he decided to fake the full journey by drifting inconspicuously off the Brazilian coast, then slipping in with the other contestants as they raced for the finish line. This scam was almost plausible in the ‘60s, when communication and navigation devices were relatively unsophisticated. What our hero didn’t count on were the psychological demons unloosed in his mind by months of solitude and fear. His mental disintegration is evident in logbooks and tape recordings that survived the voyage, and directors Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell make good use of these in a *Grizzly Man* sort of way. Like that Werner Herzog documentary, *Deep Water* tells a sad and spellbinding story.
In the fiction-film sweepstakes, *Evening* was the festival’s closing-night attraction, with two of its innumerable stars—Claire Danes and Mamie Gummer—in attendance. It’s based on Susan Minot’s novel as adapted by Minot and Michael Cunningham, and it resembles Cunningham’s ingenious work *The Hours* in its effortless shifting among different time frames.
*Evening* belongs to what I think of as the bunch-of-women genre, and this may be the most intelligent specimen of its breed, which isn’t lavish praise, since the insufferable likes of *Steel Magnolias* constitute the competition. Gummer looks uncannily like her mother, Meryl Streep, and they’re well paired as the same woman in very different stages of life. Danes and Vanessa Redgrave are the other then-and-now team, which doesn’t work as well, but at least Redgrave refrains from chewing the scenery. In all, it’s a pleasantly dull picture.
Patrice Leconte’s comedy *My Best Friend* tells the amusing tale of a middle-aged man who discovers he has no friends, only colleagues and associates he *thought* were friends until they set him straight during a most unpleasant dinner party. So he sets about acquiring one, helped by a taxi driver he meets by chance. The last half hour is very contrived, but the fluff is generally enjoyable.
I topped off the festival with two horror movies. *Black Sheep* is a pitch-dark comedy about (among other things) genetically engineered sheep with a taste for human flesh. I found it mostly pointless and entirely unfunny. The much darker *Them* was better by a mile, focusing on a couple menaced by unseen evildoers in a rambling old house. Based on real events and titled *Ils* in France, where its directors hail from, it builds a boldly claustrophobic mood, reminiscent of *The Blair Witch Project* with its jiggly camerawork but far more inventive in other respects. Best of all, it has the smarts to clock in at a tight 77 minutes, just as the excitement is starting to seem a tad repetitious. Shot in Romania by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, it could become a midnight-movie staple in years to come.
No festival is without disappointments, but Newport’s tenth-anniversary event was mighty impressive by any standard. My hat is off to programmer David Nugent, his associate Cullen Gallagher, and the rest of the Newport team. They’ve done Rhode Island proud.
