The first full day of the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival included meaningful documentary shorts and the always stellar Mojave to Mammoth shorts line up. We saw two innovative features and their accompanying shorts with plenty more to come the next three days!
Starring Jerry as Himself
You know all along there’s a twist – the opening graphics say it’s almost completely true – but what that may be gets superseded by the very real horror of retired Chinese American engineer Jerry being scammed out of his life savings.
He believes he’s under investigation for money laundering at first and must prove innocence; then that he’s being recruited to help catch criminals – as an undercover agent helping police in Shanghai.
Law Chen’s film is billed as a documentary, but it is primarily a reenactment of a true and horrible occurrence starring the real and titular protagonist.
Living in Orlando, elderly, and parsimonious to a fault, despite three adult sons and his friendly but ex-wife being all a part of his life, he doesn’t confide his situation until too late.
And then another situation reveals itself – one I won’t reveal here, which is partially the twist, but ultimately Jerry has chosen to make this true story film both to warn other seniors about the dangers of being scammed and fulfill a lifelong dream of being an actor instead of the engineer he became. The story is a moving one, tensely and entertainingly told.
The film was accompanied by an experimental short called A Throwing Forth, evoking haunting family memories via a single window, colors, and image.
Unicorn Boy
Animated feature six years in the making chronicles a break-up and a coming into acceptance by a struggling non-binary artist vaulted into saving themselves and a unicorn kingdom. All this unfolds while protagonist Matty survives a break-up, explores how to love and examines the reasons why the world can be a dark place. Lush animation using varied techniques and a vibrant palette of color is well-matched by a sweeping emotional musical score. Varied cameo voice actors includes turns by Maria Bamford and Patton Oswalt as the unicorn kingdom’s king and queen in this tour de force by lead, writer, and director Matt Kiehl. The message: let your freak flag fly through rainbow animation that visually dazzles.
The animated short that accompanied this film, Eclipsed, is the short story of a world in which eclipses are the norm and the sun coming out is entirely unique. It well conveys anticipation and anxiety in its spaghetti-o’s-consuming and witch-like main figure.. Director Jamie Wolfe creates a bold experimental narrative.
Genie Davis; photos: Jack Burke and film stills courtesy of MLFF
The setting is galvanizing from the moment the film begins. Queendom, set in the heart of Russia, is a compelling documentary from Agniia Galdanova. The film profiles transgender artist Gena, as she navigates her life – in which she becomes a living art form and activist, wrapped in fabric, repurposed trash, and painted tape.
The artist moves in a snowy small-town landscape, navigating troughs of predjudice, and the confining love of her grandparents, who cannot accept her art or her rebellious nature, much less her gender transformation. There are conversations with friends, the abandonment of a school of cosmetic study in Moscow due to Gena’s acts of protest, and most of all the growing awareness – as she moves from the village of Magadan to Moscow, and by film’s end, Paris, that she can shine her artistic light on the brutality and cruelty of the Russian regime and its war with Ukraine, exposing both.
The imagery of the film – Gena’s amazingly created costuming, the icy and bleak backdrop of her home village, the harsh lines of Moscow, and the almost palpable sense of relief the viewer and the subject feel as she moves through the more gracious architecture of Paris, is deeply engaging.
If Gena begins the film as a misunderstood misfit in the unyielding winter of Communist Russian culture and politics, viewers watch as her work grows to embrace the power of artists. Artists, after all, are something of the canary in the coal mine, pointing out danger and distress. Artists like Gena can effectively call attention to brutality, inequity, and violent injustice.
The film starts with her building an Instagram following, creating set pieces with her fabulous, sculptural costuming for views, and follows along quietly and decisively as she turns her art into a potent weapon for political activism, at great risk to her own well-being – by birth gender, she might very well be drafted to fight in the war.
Over the course of the film, she moves from a somewhat self-serving personal view to one of force, bravery, and action; discovering that to use her art and truly be herself, she can become the focal point of an important movement that radiates beyond her personal desires.
Visually stunning and yet intimate and quiet in approach, the film makes an excellent opening night salvo in what is sure to be another exciting year at Mammoth Lakes Film Festival.
Mammoth Lakes Film Festival presented its winners on Sunday of the two day festival, as the 2020 virtual iteration of the always exciting fest concluded with an awards ceremony.
The conclusion was as happy an occasion as it is in person, where it is always a joy to talk to the filmmakers one last time and see first-hand the enormous satisfaction of being chosen as a winning contender.
But prior to the fest’s conclusion there were plenty of other stellar viewing experiences to be had, each of which translated just as powerfully on my lap top, phone, and TV as they did at the festival, because utterly unique cinematic experiences are enormously involving no matter how they are viewed. For opening night, Thursday, and Friday coverage of the five day festival, visit our earlier article, here. Now, welcome to the weekend.
Saturday began with a perfect panel, an hilarious conversation with and tribute to the creators of Airplane! The seminal comedy celebrated its 40th birthday this year, and MLFF director Shira Dubrovner moderated an informative talk with directors Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, followed by a Q & A with attendees. Abrahams and Zucker were joined by a surprise guest, actor Robert Hays.
Asked if they could make the film today, Zucker shook his head “Only without the jokes. People who do this type of movie and do puns, it wouldn’t be funny today.” Discussing the way the film came together, Abrahams said “There was something special about having dramatic actors like Lloyd Bridges doing comedy…it was unique.”
Why was there no Airplane! 2? Zucker says the reason was simple “I couldn’t think of any jokes to do on a plane. I went to Paramount with the idea of [characters] Bob and Julie going to meet his family, and they’re like characters in The Godfather. Paramount loved the idea, but Coppola wanted to do Godfather 3 at the time, and so he said no.”
After the rollicking conversation, it was on to the films. Both Shorts Block 4 and 5 had some terrific works; they were followed by a screening of the moving doc Acasa, the very surreal Revolution Laundrette, and a lively Zoom Disco Dance party (below) which gave attendees not only a sense of the fun at the festival’s usual-in-person dance party, but a glimpse of participants’ pandemic homes.
Shorts Block 4 gave viewers Nero, an intimate and darkly comic portrait of a man creating a product made literally from the sweat of his labor.
Le Coup des Larmes offered a somewhat terrifying, always fascinating, look at an actress immersing herself in a role, and a confrontation with a former lover.
The Fourfold (above) Lushly and glowingly animated, the film unfolded a somewhat cryptic tale of gods and myths set against the backdrop of environmental crisis.
A grubby dairy farm and the relationship between worker and boss – and the woman who lights the match that burns them – fill the bleak but mesmerizing Sinful Pleasures.
And the Israeli film Touch provides an amusing look at the burgeoning relationship between an internet troller and her would be beau – who almost meet IRL.
In Shorts Block 5:
Marriage Counseling for Friends Episodes 1&2 gives viewers an amusing look at two platonic friends who look for a way to enrich their relationship with a marriage counselor’s help.
A Living Sculpture looks at the relationship with a muse – as artists connect and disconnect in a wry short from the U.K.
The Star Sisters (above) are nothing if not playful and chatty – but their past is dark, and this involving short was both sad and sweet. This is a story of overcoming – or perhaps simply attempting to – an epically bad backstory with heart and eccentric verve.
In the Still Night – in a film both surreal and haunting, an art curator enters a mysterious new realm in an empty museum.
Now 2 also dove into the surreal, but in a different way entirely, with an animated look at the macabre underbelly of suburban life.
Between examined the lives of middle schoolers with grace, while Love at 48 presented a wistful and rich look at a couple on a date that went nowhere through a path in the woods.
As to the features: Acasa took viewers into the life of a displaced gypsy family in Romania, a story that was as suspenseful as it was mournful. Depicting the passing of a way of life, the film chronicled the lives of the Enache family—nine kids and their parents— who spent 20 years living in a shack in an abandoned water reservoir eventually reclaimed by the authorities as parkland. Uprooted, they are resettled in an apartment, and it was not a happy transition.
Revolution Laundrette was a fever dream of images and events, taking protagonist Tomo into various unusual subcultures and a final uncovering of the purely and existentially bizarre. Definitely not a conventional film, its visualization and involving surrealism was a cinematic experience it would be difficult to find anywhere but MLFF.
On Sunday, the documentary Democracy on the Road to Savah was followed by Shorts Block 6, the dry comedy of Tapeworm, and the bold vision of the documentary Pier Kids.
Democracy on the Road to Savah offered biting humor it its portrayal of political campaigning in Tehran, proving that politics are, well, politics – no matter where they’re taking place. Dark and funny, the documentary film offered an interesting look at life in Iran.
The narrative film Tapeworm was a restrained, ironic comedy set in Winnipeg, taking us among the lonely loser lives presented in a series of emotionally linked vignettes as amusingly bleak as the setting.
Documentary Pier Kids (above) was a stand out for its riveting, heartbreaking look at transgender youth on the streets, ushering audiences into a world of both friendship and loss.
In Shorts Block 6, viewers were also treated to a vibrant series of films. Take It and End It was a poignant look at the life of a Greek butcher asked to slaughter his pet lamb for veal. His moral conundrum was thoroughly involving in a film with visuals reminiscent of the work of Old Masters in lighting and palette.
Kikokids of Paris was also moving: a look at homeless girls having a “holiday” together on the streets in the City of Light.
And I Need A Haircut offered a brief but comically harrowing look at stressed women in a short well-suited to these pandemic times.
Rio was another favorite of mine. The initially elliptical film was lonely and mysterious as it took a look at two young women working at a Russian border hotel; the arrival of a stranger changed everything, creating an emotionally intense experience with a burst of sudden action.
Wild Game was equally harrowing; a bleak Czech film about a woman caught in a nightmare when three uninvited men show up at her door.
Not to be forgotten were shorts that played exclusively before feature-length films during the festival. These included: Lover, an Iranian film depicting a necessary killing of a wolf; Wash, a deeply dark Swedish film about the terror of childhood and horror of abuse; the comedic Ava’s Dating a Senior which depicted the controversy of a younger girl dating an older boy who may not be her true love after all; and the fraught but superficial relationship between frenemies in Ding Dong.
The award winning Huntsville Station (above) gave viewers an insightful and absorbing look at incarcerated men as they are released from prison; Mason presented a heartbreaking look at a small child experiencing the toughest of love from his grandparents. And finally, debauchery doesn’t bring true pleasure in Buck; while the French film Hors Champs lets viewers participate vicariously in a strange daily ritual involving tourists, the police, and migrants.
And that brings us to awards night, Sunday evening, the conclusion to the eager devouring of 56 feature and short films by film fans.
The Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature, went to Residue ,directed by Merawi Gerima; and the Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature, to Feather & Pine directed by Star Rosencrans and Michael James Beck. Narrative dramatic film honorable mention went to my personal fest favorite this year, Marlene, directed by Andreas Resch. The Jury Honorable Mention for Documentary Feature was given to Democracy on the Road of Saveh, from Turaj Kalantari.
Marjorie Conrad’s Desire Path (above) won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature; the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature, went to The Wind, directed by Michał Bielawski. Both are powerful films.
This year the Special Jury Award for Bravery, a prize awarded for a documentary film that goes above and beyond in taking risks, was won by Pier Kids (dir. Elegance Bratton).
Jury Award for Best Narrative Short was taken by Elinor Nechemya’s Follow Me; honorable mention: They Won’t Last from Portlynn Tagavi.
Jury Award for Best Documentary Short, Huntsville Station (dir. Chris Fillippone and Jamie Meltzer).
Jury Award for Best Animation Short, went to Fourfold (dir. Alisi Telengut). Honorable mention was claimed by Bryan Lee’s Cage Match.
New this year was the festival’s first annual screenplay competition. Screenwriter Matthew Dixon was selected for his screenplay, Fish Story. It’s already time to submit for 2021.
Image above created by Beau Bardos
Whether submitting or attending, or both – don’t miss Mammoth Lakes Film Festival in 2021 whether it stays virtual one more year or goes back to real life. Either way, it’s a film lover’s dream.
Mammoth Lakes Film Festival Virtually VibrantMLFF founder Shira Dubrovner on Zoom Paul Sbrizzi, MLFF Program Director
Mammoth Lakes Film Festival was back in force for 2020, taking on the “mammoth” job of transferring the entire festival – full length features and docs, shorts, cocktail power hours, a party, awards ceremony, and Q and A’s with filmmakers – from real life to virtual life.
It’s unsurprising in a way that MLFF took on this transition with style; the festival has always been uniquely cutting edge, perhaps more so than any other film festival I’ve had the pleasure of covering.
Films are dynamic, exciting, maybe even “out there” and always innovative. If any festival deserved the reputation for being “different,” for being inclusive, global, unafraid, it would be Mammoth Lakes.
Entering its 6th year in these pandemic times was not easy, and yet the festival covered a vast amount of ground, adding a showing for films, allowing online pass holders to access films for a five-day period past the premiere, and above all else, not hesitating to show films that are entirely unique and push the envelope. The times may be difficult, but that doesn’t mean films have to be facile and easy.
Under the sure-handed guidance of Festival director Shira Dubrovner, who also serves as the artistic director of the Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theatre, and innovative programming director, LA-based filmmaker and film programmer Paul Sbrizzi, Dubrovner started the film festival in 2015. While she has faced challenges before, they were surely nothing like those experienced this year in getting the festival up and running and interactive – online.
According to Dubrovner, “Thanks to the virtues of technology that can host a communal film going experience, we were excited to bring these works into people’s homes and promote the exchange of ideas and storytelling these films evoke.”
Sbrizzi described the line up as “wonderfully eclectic and thought-provoking films,” and that was an accurate assessment.
While I watched the programming live in most cases, viewing only a few after the fact and missing only two offerings, we were unable to offer our usual day by day coverage, due to, well, an uneven pandemic work-load colliding with festival timing. In “normal” years the festival runs over Memorial Weekend; this year scheduling was in September, in the initial hope it could safely run live.
In any event, life happened, and although the films and programming were thoroughly viewed and appreciated, daily coverage of each day’s programming did not take place. So in lieu of that, we are offering the same type of coverage, consolidated into two separate articles and an upcoming filmmaker interview for the new year.
Let’s dive into the excitement of the first three days of the five-day festival.
Opening night, the selection shown this year was Residue, in its West Coast Premiere. Directed by Merawi Gerima, the film was recently acquired by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY and will be released on Netflix. But you could’ve seen it first here. It’s a complex story inside a deceptively simple package: Jay, a young African American filmmaker, returns home to Washington D.C. with his girlfriend Blue after years away to write a script about his childhood. But he discovers his neighborhood is in the process of a transforming gentrification, his childhood friends mostly scattered and gone. But the true core of the film is its confrontation of violence: the violence perpetuated on the soul by unaccepted change, unacknowledged loss. A relentless invasion is still that, even if it is couched in the guise of “betterment” for a community. When all that remains is the residue of a life, life itself can turn in an instant into moments of rage and confusion, violence and fear. Change, in short, isn’t always a wonderful thing or an exemplification of progress.
Welcome Happy Hour; Flula Borg – second from the end, top row
Prior to the film, a filmmaker welcome happy hour ran on Zoom, hosted by the always funny and engaging Flula Borg. Filmmakers introduced themselves, attendees, while primarily remaining muted, nonetheless got to say hello and hear the intent and passion of the filmmakers along with Borg’s wit.
Thursday, as always, marked the first full day of festival programming, with Shorts Block 1, the locally oriented Mojave to Mammoth block of programming, and perhaps my favorite film of the entire festival, this year, Marlene. I missed seeing one film, documentary The Reason I Jump.
Starting backwards, Marlene, from German director Andrea Resch, is a devastating, fascinating, and richly compelling study in suspense, psychological drama, and eventually, horror. The slow build is wonderful in this story of a restoration specialist who moves to Berlin to begin a new life with new friends due to personal issues. With everything so new, she finds it difficult to set boundaries with an upstairs neighbor, Flo, who is pushy at best, and deeply threatening at worst. To call the film masterful is to underestimate it: it’s one of the best “scary movies” and the smartest that I’ve seen in any year. Resch discussed the film in an outstanding – despite a time difference in Germany that made it the wee-hours for the director and his star – q & a after the screening. In the lead, Cordula Zielonka had a tough emotional and physical role, and on her fell the burden of making us care as much as the film made us scared of Flo, played by the also terrific Thomas Clemmens.
The Mojave to Mammoth block provided two fascinating shorts and one “featurette.” Nature’s serenity and man’s poetic attempts to preserve it through art were the subject of the beautiful loose documentary of Passing Through, in which a printmaking-artist discuses living an intentional life filled with the wonders of nature. Ravage, a briefer short, was a fictional tale of revenge, with a squirm-worthy confession in a church and the ultimate trap it leads to in a well-directed, high-concept piece.
The longest segment was the hour-plus documentary of Accidental Climber, a true story of survival and a revelation about what a life-changing experience can really mean. It charts the course of Jim Geiger, a retired forest ranger and amateur mountaineer from Sacramento, who at 68 years old, attempts to become the oldest American and first great grandfather to summit Mt. Everest. And he may have made it, too, were it not for an avalanche that changed his life and his view of living it. The story was as exciting as a scripted narrative, and the outcome unexpected.
And circling back to the start of the day, Shorts Block 1 proved packed with innovative and surprising films. 5 films encompassed an array of styles and stories, and were followed by a Q and A. It began with a laugh in Cabin Stories 1, part of a series of short-shorts involving friends at a weekend cabin. In this “episode” friends expressed amusing over-the-top reactions to the simple pleasures of their temporary abode.
At a 25-minute runtime, Kiko’s Saints was a truly intense and involving story, and one tailor-made to stretch to feature length. Possibly my favorite short of the festival, the Japanese/French film, directed by the entirely assured, quite wonderful Maniel Marmier was a redemption story rich with metaphor.
Kiko, a Japanese illustrator on assignment in France, finds wild inspiration from spying on a gay couple on the beach next to the chapel where she’s working. Drawing them secretly leads her to an encounter with the duo, one that changes her life. It’s magical and transformative for Kiko and the viewer. A breath of pure oxygen.
A Woman offered the fascinating story of a young wife and mother in changing Ajerbijan, giving us a country and a relatable protagonist struggling to address and fully embrace both past and future.
Follow Me was a wonderfully enigmatic portrayal of an alluring woman and a young man with life or death responsibilities. The Israeli film from director Elinor Nechemya follows youth hotline volunteer Omer to a party in search of his seeming “last chance” with the girl he desires. The essential and trivial of life both hang in the balance in a suspenseful and evocative night.
Equally riveting was the story of Tryphon and Pharailde from French director and screenwriting pair Casimir and Edgar VERSTRAETE. Haunting and enigmatic.
On Friday, MLFF served up even more variety, with the brilliant documentary, The Wind, two fascinating shorts block, a riveting documentary, Feather and Pine, and a surreal and poetic thriller in Desire Path. Plus Q &As of course. There was also a wine tasting, but I had to content myself with an iced coffee.
Feather and Pine took on the enigmatic subject of the logging industry – enigmatic because the recession and the industry’s passing left residents in a small town at loose ends. Heartbreaking in an unusual sense, it evokes a quintessential longing for what might best be described as “an American Way of Life.”
Equally evocative, the Polish doc, The Wind is thriller and an immersion into place; the annual Halny Wind can be vicious; man against nature is vividly depicted in an achingly memorable film.
The narrative feature Desire Path is a vampire story about possession and desire, with little dialog and resonant images, it is more a canvas for feelings and fears than it is conventional storytelling, although it works in that way as well. According to director Marjorie Conrad, her inspiration for the film was “Slow Cinema.” It was her second feature, her first having screened at Slamdance, Chemical Cut. Casting via Instagram, the biggest challenges to creating the film she cites as “money, ice, and time.” She created her vision in 13 days; asked what’s ahead for the artistic filmmaker, she relates “Piracy. It’s the future and it’s future-proof. See Piracy Is the Future of Culture: Speculating about Media Preservation after Collapse by Abigail De Kosnik.” Okay, then.
Shorts Blocks Two and Three each had many gems.
In shorts blocks two, there was another amusing episode of Cabin Stories; a fight following a wedding over an engagement between another couple grew extreme in the comedic They Won’t Last; and an elevator ride became a Cage Match in a hand-drawn animated work. Roseline, Like in the Movies was a graceful, black and white French language film about the lines crossed between art and life; while “On Task” explored the dedication of a young teacher.
The longest film of the set was my favorite, All That You Love Will be Carried Away was based on a Steven King story and set in a frigid Nebraska. A lovely and evocative character study, it was also a thriller as an obsession with graffiti led to chance encounters and a life saved. Director and screenwriter Thad Lee created a haunting piece.
Things skewed darker in Shorts Block Three. In the deft and lightly humorous Melancholy Hunters, a man and his ten-year-old cousin look to hunt down and literally vanquish melancholy. The brief and brilliantly animated Urges took on just that; David Henry Nobody Jr. drew viewers into the world of a zany and opinionated artist; the Spanish-language Asalto Chido took on the dramatic lengths to which a pair of friends would go to raise money for a film. Last Day was a moving and somewhat enigmatic film about a Chinese sex worker receiving news that she absorbed rather than letting it devastate her. In Cool for Five Seconds, making amends as part of a 12-step recovery program is not as easy as it looks for one woman around the holidays. And, in a burst of comic relief, two Lesbian moms worry about their daughter dating in the Rain Poncho.
Saturday and Sunday slates coming soon. Stating the obvious: Mammoth Lakes Film Festival took it to the limit – and not for the last time.
Genie Davis; photos provided by MLFF, Zoom shots Genie Davis
