2013 Sundance Diary, Day 1: Documentaries Continue to Thrive

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PARK CITY, Utah – Here I am in Park City, Utah. Well, sort of. The truth is that I’ve been allowed to see a number of 2013 Sundance Film Festival films early, either screening in Chicago or streaming online. Some will merely be scattered through my coverage, as I won’t mention them till they premiere, but a vast majority premiere on the first full day of the fest, January 18, 2013. And so I’m writing this before I head to Sundance but know that for the next few days, HollywoodChicago.com will be your source for actual on-the-ground coverage of the most important film festival in the United States. Most films will be covered the day after their premiere (since, well, I need to see ‘em) but I was lucky enough to get out in front of these select few.

The films I’ve seen that premiere today, January 18, are mostly documentaries and one of the two narrative films is a recreation of real events. The docs range from a film about Google to a piece on AIDS in Africa to a documentary about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to a striking look at one of the past century’s most controversial leaders, Dick Cheney.

Circles
Photo credit: Sundance

Let’s start with the non-docs. Srdan Golubovic’s “Circles,” the Serbian director’s third film, is a tale of cyclical repercussions of violence through generations and the multiple families impacted by it. Marko is a Serbian soldier on leave who returns to his Bosnian hometown. He spots three soldiers harassing a Muslim shopkeeper named Haris and intervenes. He is killed by the soldiers. Twelve years later, three stories intertwine the ripple effect of that day’s tragedy as the son of one of the soldiers ends up working with Marko’s father, one of the murderers ends up on the operating table of Marko’s best friend, and Haris learns he’ll have to pay his karmic debt. Golubovic’s film has some striking visuals and solid performances but it’s ultimately too inert to have any dramatic impact. It meanders instead of simmers and the threads drawing these characters feel more a product of screenwriting than reality.

No Photo credit: Sundance

Much stronger is Pablo Larrain’s “No,” already an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and opening soon in Chicago. Starring Gael Garcia Bernal, “No” tells the story of the 1988 Plebiscite vote in Chile, as dictator Augusto Pinochet put it to his people as to whether or not he should stay in power. Each side — the “Yes” vote & the “No” vote — were given fifteen minutes of advertising time every night on national TV even if most people considered it a rigged proposition. The “Yes” vote would win through sheer intimidation. Or would it? Larrain’s drama carefully balances the human story of Bernal’s heroic battle for what he thought was right and keenly understands how hearts and minds can be moved through a jingle. Shooting most of the film on the same stock as would have been available to the advertisers in 1988, “No” sometimes looks a bit too hideous for its own good but the aesthetic choice adds to the genuine quality of the filmmaking. A powerful drama.

The five documentaries I had a chance to see pre-fest were “Fallen City,” “Fire in the Blood,” “The Gatekeepers,” “Google and the World Brain,” and “The World According to Dick Cheney” and the overall quality of them all certainly indicates that the Documentary Premieres portion of this year’s fest is going to be a very strong one. Only “Fallen City” feels a bit unshapen in its structure, telling a powerful true story but without much filmmaking composition to make it truly connect. Zhan Qi’s film documents a select few people from the mountain city of Beichuan, one of several destroyed in the 2008 earthquake that took thousands of lives. These people are like ghosts in a graveyard — children without parents, parents without children. Their story has an undeniable emotional gut punch but Qi’s film doesn’t dive deep enough into how they’re healing and moving on (or if they are at all). Maybe the wounds are still too fresh.

Fire in the Blood Photo credit: Sundance

Just as many may not know about the Sichuan earthquake, the subject matter of “Fire in the Blood” promises to illuminate and enrage. It would be an interesting companion piece to David France’s stellar and Oscar-nominated “How to Survive a Plague,” as that film chronicled the fight for drug treatments for AIDS in the ’80s. It turns out that the fight is far from over in most of the world. Whereas two-thirds of the world’s AIDS cases are in Africa, the country has almost none of the world’s drugs. Pharmaceutical companies continue to hold patents that either make the drugs unaffordable for Third World countries or impossible to make there altogether. Africa accounts for 1% of AIDS drug sales. This is a strong diatribe against the corruption that is at the core of the pharmaceutical industry around the world and it’s engaging. It will get your blood boiling.

Another sure-to-be-controversial political doc comes to Sundance in the form of “The World According to Dick Cheney,” which will play on Showtime in March and is an incredibly fascinating look at one of the most important political figures of the new century. Whatever you may think of him, Cheney has been on the front line of so many major decisions of the new millennium, ostensibly taking over the Presidency after 9/11. Don’t expect any “Fog of War”-esque self-reflection in R.J. Cutler & Greg Finton’s stellar film, one that hits most of the major beats of Cheney’s career and sheds new light on the decision-making process that led to them. With great interviews with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bob Woodward, and many more, “The World According to Dick Cheney” neither places the man on a pedestal nor feels like a hatchet job. It perfectly walks the line in the middle and allows you to make up your mind as to whether or not we want to live in Dick Cheney’s world.

Google and the World Brain Photo credit: Sundance

Actually, it’s really Google’s world, isn’t it? That’s the case made by the very-interesting “Google and the World Brain,” a film that documents the “Google Books” project, one that saw the company scanning thousands of books around the world before little things like copyrights and profiting off other’s work infringed on the company’s plans for world domination. The film has a “conspiracy busting” approach that may first seem unwarranted until you really ask why Google has been so quiet about this operation. Why so secret? Why a code name? And what purpose would there be to putting all of written history on the internet? Where do business and philanthropy intersect? What if they’re making money on it? And then there are the issues like the fact that a search for Goethe produces 19 out of 20 search results in English. A scary and eye-opening examination of a company that may think they’re contributing to the advancement of world knowledge but that we should never forget is first and foremost a corporation.

Finally, there’s the brilliant “The Gatekeepers,” nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary and opening in Chicago soon. Dror Moreh’s film is a stunner, the best work I saw pre-fest at Sundance this year. It features interviews with the last several heads of Shin Bet, the organization that fights terrorism in Israel. Imagine a conversation about the major CIA decisions in the war on terror of the last four decades and then consider the stories these men have to tell about the constant flow of violence between Israel and Palestine. It’s a stunningly insightful film on the cyclical nature of a part of the world defined by violence. It’s a great film which we’ll be writing about more here on HC, including an interview with its director. Stay tuned and come back tomorrow for reporting live from Park City.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com