On the day before this year’s Woodstock Film Festival screenings are due to begin, festival director Meira Blaustein sits in her office, enjoying a moment of calm before the storm. As it’s grown in stature and reputation, this “fiercely independent” festival in the well-known Catskills town has been finding itself increasingly spoiled for choice. This year, Blaustein says, the quality of submissions was higher than it’s ever been. “You wish you could support more filmmakers,” she sighs. “In the final stages, I kept saying we should extend the festival or have another one – but then you’d have to scrape me off the floor!”
Asked to pinpoint themes she saw among this year’s crop of films, Blaustein points to two trends she observed, one in documentaries and one in narrative features. On the documentary side, she says, filmmakers are learning to use more drama and storytelling to get their message across. A case in point is Dan Stone and Patrick Gambuti’s At the Edge of the World, which Blaustein describes as “an environmental documentary that becomes almost like an action film.” The film tells the story of a group that travels to the Antarctic on a mission to save whales from Japanese hunting ships. “People are learning how to tell these stories, which are so important to us, in a more dramatic fashion,” Blaustein says, adding, “I like that development.”
On the narrative side, Blaustein says, this year’s slate includes a lot of films about broken families, such as Tom Quinn’s The New Year Parade and Gerard Hurley’s The Pride. She sees this as a reflection of larger trends in society. “More and more families are going through this, so it’s not surprising we’re seeing it emerge as a theme in young filmmakers’ movies,” she says.
In addition to its provocative documentaries and narrative features, the Woodstock Film Festival is proud of its connection to the town’s musical past: concerts and music films are a vital part of its programming. The first film I see, Throw Down Your Heart, is a gentle documentary in which Nashville banjo player Bela Fleck travels to Africa to discover the roots of the banjo and play with local musicians. The film bears a passing resemblance to Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club: like that movie, it’s a celebration of musical exuberance and local color. It becomes a little more poignant, though, when guides describe to Fleck how slaves kept their spirits up on voyages by playing music and singing. (The title comes from a belief that slaves could “throw down their heart” on shore before boarding a ship to the unknown.) Fleck, who’s a quiet and unassuming presence, acts as a sounding board for some outrageously talented musicians, and the film’s positive presentation of Africa is refreshing. (“When Westerners think of Africa, they think of poverty, war and HIV/AIDS,” says one of the musicians, “but that’s only a small part of what Africa is.”) Woodstock’s musician community seems to have come out in force to see this film, and everyone is enraptured, showering Fleck with questions about nylon string action and fingernail slides after the screening. It’s a feel-good moment for this modest, charming documentary that probably won’t get the wide distribution it deserves.
Of course, Woodstock is also famed for its history of counterculture resistance and political activism, and the festival’s slate of documentaries strives to honor that tradition. The next two films I see, Larry Charles and Bill Maher’s Religulous and Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s Bulletproof Salesman, are both witheringly critical of the current political culture, but in different ways. Religulous unites Borat director Charles with the irrepressible Maher, who’s got a bee in his bonnet about the way religion has hijacked common sense in America. Going on a Borat-style cross-country tour, visiting places from a trucker’s chapel in North Carolina to a Florida theme park called “The Holy Land Experience,” Maher introduces us to a wide spectrum of believers, then proceeds to destroy them with his smart-bomb logic. (“If you believe heaven is so much better, why not kill yourself now?” he asks a former Jew for Jesus who runs a tacky Christian souvenir store.)
Like Throw Down Your Heart, Religulous plays well in Woodstock: the audience seems to love not only its message, but also the Michael Moore-style sledgehammer editing, in which clips from Spartacus and porn movies are spliced in with footage of people making idiotic claims about their faith. Satisfying as it is to see some of this country’s faith-based boobs confronted with their own absurdities, though, I wish the movie could have been a bit more subtle. It’s easy enough to get the brawny actor who plays Jesus in the Florida theme park to admit that “God had a plan for the Holocaust,” or to trap a gold-bedecked preacher into defending himself by claiming, “Jesus dressed well.” Maher’s intellectual sharpness is wasted on such soft targets, and the film’s obsessive jump-cutting seems like a calculated play for younger viewers. It would have been nice, and given more heft to the enterprise, if Maher found more genuine theologians to debate.
By contrast, Tucker and Epperlein’s Bulletproof Salesman is nothing if not objective. It follows Fidelis Cloer, a German who sells armored cars to wealthy stakeholders in Iraq. Tucker and Epperlein, whose previous, well-received documentary Gunner Palace told the stories of young soldiers in Iraq, are clearly at home with this subject matter, and they largely stand aside and let Cloer speak for himself. A portrait emerges of a man with no clear moral center, who admits that, “I want war, not peace,” and says that the Iraq war presented him with a perfect business opportunity. Ultimately, without being heavy-handed, the movie becomes a critique of war profiteering in general, with the charmingly amoral Cloer standing in for Halliburton, Shell et al. Shooting in Baghdad during the beginning of the 2003 insurgency was “difficult, because you only get one take,” said Tucker in the Q & A session after the movie. Asked by an audience member if he, like Cloer, might be addicted to war, Tucker had an unambiguous answer. “I might have felt that in the beginning, but it’s gone on so long,” he said. “It would surprise me if anyone felt a fascination for war after all of this.”
Playing to type, the Woodstock audience murmured its approval.