4 Little Girls

All the discussion about whether I have an obligation to be nice made me question my choice of films. It's easy to fill the blog with posts about so-so Hot Docs screenings and films chosen almost at random from the firehose barrage of docs on TV. But the point of this blog is to learn. And while it's true that as much can be learned from a film's failures as from its successes, it's only true up to a point. Truffaut learned his craft by watching Hitchcock, not Ed Wood.

So I decided it was time to raise the bar and watch some better docs. I turned to the precariously balanced pile of DVDs by the TV, and picked 4 Little Girls, Spike Lee's 1997 film about a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Added bonus: the film was shot by Ellen Kuras, whose directorial debut, The Betrayal, was my hands-down favourite at Hot Docs.

4 Little Girls has an arresting opening sequence: Kuras's beautifully impressionistic shots of the cemetery where the girls are buried, cut with archival footage of protests and photographs of the funeral, and set to "Birmingham Sunday," Joan Baez's haunting song about the bombing. The mood is established, and we have all the background we need. We then meet Maxine and Chris McNair, parents of Denise, one of the four victims. They are the heart of the film, telling deeply personal stories about their own lives as well as their late daughter's, who feels very much alive to them still. Lee uses the extreme close-up to great effect: the faces sometimes fill almost the whole screen, so that we are literally face-to-face with the participants. The handheld close-up is a powerful tool, often as powerful as Errol Morris's Interrotron gaze. (Though I imagine this probably works better on television than on the big screen.)

Lee interweaves the stories of the four girls and their families with the story of Birmingham, one of the most racist, violent cities in the segregated South. He takes us inside the families - parents trying to explain segragation to their young children, slowly getting involved in the civil-rights movement, often prodded by their own teenagers - and the community as a whole, which was in the process of mobilizing for a hard-fought and dangerous challenge to the racists who ran the town. By focusing as much on the social setting as on the families, Lee creates a much richer picture of the community that was targeted than we normally see in this type of countdown-to-the-event historical doc.

This made me think of course of another film I saw recently, Sturla Gunnarsson's Air India 182, which is airing this weekend on CBC. Lee and Gunnarsson make some very different choices: Lee focuses on the families' daily lives and relationships, and on the community; Gunnarsson, on the victims' last few hours, the suspects and the investigation. Lee uses impressionistic imagery - family photographs shot handheld, creating a home-movie effect, archival footage tinted blue; Gunnarsson shoots detailed, literal re-enactments. Both use graphic images of the victims, Lee flash cutting to photos of the girls on the autopsy slab, Gunnarsson showing news footage of bodies being pulled out of the ocean. Both are powerful films, but I think 4 Little Girls is a more complete emotional experience: rather than dwelling on the search for justice, the investigation, the trial -- the Mississippi Burning approach -- Lee chooses to tell the story of the girls and their community, an unembellished, personal and direct approach. Air India 182 is a very competent summary of the story that's appeared in the papers over the last 20 years, with few new revelations. 4 Little Girls is a work of cultural history.

There is one misstep in 4 Little Girls that shows just how powerful a pure look into the past can be. About two thirds of the way through the film, Lee brings up a series of church burnings that happened in the South in the mid-1990s, when the film was being made, and includes comments from three people who had absolutely nothing to do with Birmingham in the 1960s: Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby and (improbably) the late Reggie White, an NFL football player turned preacher. It's a jarring turn, and in his attempt to bring the story into the present day Lee wrenches us out of the world he's so painstakingly created. There's no need to make these explicit connections. When you tell the story well enough, the audience can make its own emotional and thematic connections to the present.

Overall, though, 4 Little Girls is a very satisfying film - cinematic both visually and as an emotional experience.

Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)

Once in a while a film comes along that leaves me feeling deeply humbled, as a filmmaker and as a human. The Betrayal is one such film. I knew I had to see it because of its amazing history - it was made over the course of 23 (!!!) years by the acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras, in close collaboration with its main subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, who ended up as her co-writer and editor. But what I saw on screen was way beyond my expectations. I can think of few films that bring together this degree of creative vision, thoughtful application of craft, and commitment. And it moves me enormously that the relationship between documentarian and subject, which is always potentially problematic(*), turned gradually into one of close collaborators.

It's clear from the opening minutes that we're being taken on a journey. The film opens with shots of boys fishing on the Mekong River, and a myth - a Laotian prediction about the end of the world. We meet Thavi, speaking in the present, and his mother, interviewed in her kitchen, and we are soon immersed in the story of their family. The father, a soldier who worked with the Americans against Vietnamese and Lao Communist forces, is arrested shortly after U.S. forces leave and the Communist Pathet Lao regime takes over. Twelve-year-old Thavi swims across the Mekong River into Thailand, and waits for two years for his family to escape. Eventually, most of the family joins him and they make their way to the United States, where their hardships hardly diminish.

Cinema vérité would have been the easy, default approach to this film. It's certainly worked well in everything from Grey Gardens to Hoop Dreams. But Kuras goes in a totally different direction. Her approach is to focus on the subjects' internal journey, and on the way their memories inform and intersect with present-day reality. The past is represented partly with beautifully composed impressionistic shots filmed by Kuras herself, and partly with shots culled from Vietnamese propaganda films, which she and Phrasavath found in a Laotian archive, projected on a wall, and shot on 16mm film. (This is how documentary filmmaking often goes: a combination of careful planning and absolutely unexpected serendipity.) All this is combined with Thavi's poetic narration, which often has an epic quality, and revealing interviews with him and his mom.

After the film's screening at Hot Docs, Kuras talked about her desire to use dramatic elements but avoid having them look like docudrama (a very different approach from Air India 182, which is all about docudrama). One of her challenges, she said, was to shoot from her subject's point of view and then find a way to bring that person into the scene in an organic way, without having it look like docudrama. Whatever she did, it worked beautifully. I left feeling that I could learn more about filmmaking from The Betrayal than from any other film I'm likely to see at Hot Docs this year. This is a film I want to watch over and over.


(*) As explored in Jennifer Baichwal's The True Meaning of Pictures, which I also saw yesterday and hope to write about soon.