This year's Tribeca Film Festival is bigger than ever before, something which is especially noticeable in the documentary category. I don' t have hard numbers, but in 2005 there were fifty-odd documentary offerings; this year that number has almost doubled. Whether that's because everyone's a filmmaker these days or because there are more pressing issues vying for documentary attention is anyone's guess. But the presence of political documentaries--that is to say, overtly political documentaries--this year is notable. Every documentary is political on some level, as anyone who has edited Aunt Leslie out of the Thanksgiving video for forgetting the ambrosia knows.
I'm thinking specifically of my friend and fellow Canadian, Jeremy Gans. Jeremy spent the last four years of his life working on a documentary called No Past to Speak Of. It explores the high incidence of infant rape in South Africa through the case of one young girl who survived a rape at just 5 months old. Now, I have trouble just typing that, how would one go about making an entire film? Jeremy's attempt to make these agonizing crimes even remotely fathomable relied heavily on delving into South Africa's political and socio-economic infrastructures, pulling back to give a broad picture of the environment in which something like this becomes even vaguely possible. Jeremy's film did not make it into Tribeca, but it will premiere at Hot Docs, Toronto's excellent documentary festival--the largest in North America--which also begins this week.
So one of the things I'm looking forward to at Tribeca is sifting through the various documentaries for political gold. Somehow I don't think Air Guitar Nation will cause riots in the streets or cries of "agitprop!", but part of the fun (for me at least, and if this is nerding you out, wait until I get to Guy Maddin) is thinking through the choices the filmmaker made, because making a documentary is like creating a tiny society, with the director as president. How has she served her subject(s)?
I hope to speak with Ahmed Jamal and Ramesh Sharma, the directors of The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl, about taking on such a contentious story. Sharma is based in India and has previously made films about Islam and the Taliban. I am in a race against time to finish Bernard-Henri Levy's byzantine investigation into the Pearl affair Who Killed Daniel Pearl? before screening the film and am especially curious about what the directors make of Levy's assertion that Omar Sheikh--the man sentenced to death for Pearl's murder--was a member of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency. Levy also concludes (at least as of page 295) that the Pakistani goverment was involved in sheltering members of al-Qaida, specifically the perpetrators of this crime. In a fascinating, heartbreaking passage of the book, Levy analyzes the gruesome three-and-a-half minute video of Pearl's murder; he derives meaning from every edit, examines the riddle posed by every choice, articulates the political motivations behind what's left in and what's left out. Pearl's story keeps demanding to be told properly, in a way that makes more sense than those horrific three-and-a-half minutes; I am anxious to see a new treatment. There are several Pearl movies in the works, including a Brad Pitt adaptation of Mariane Pearl's memoir and Ed Zwick's version of Levy's book, but this is the only one to emerge from the region that Daniel Pearl spent the better part of his career exploring.
And I haven't mentioned Al Franken: God Spoke. Luckily there's plenty of time. If you're in New York or Toronto, I highly suggest you check out a film at the Tribeca festival, or Hot Docs, because supporting new filmmakers and the festivals spotlighting them takes twelve bucks, and what's a few hard numbers between friends?