Month: November 2022

Descendant 

The United States outlawed international slave trade in 1808, but more than a half century later a ship called the Cotilda smuggled a group of enslaved Africans into Mobile, Alabama. The expedition was illegally chartered by a plantation owner named Timothy Meaher, who ordered the Cotilda be burned and sunk to hide all evidence of his crime. 

Now, most of the descendants of the Cotilda have settled in Africatown, a small community just north of Mobile. Margaret Brown’s documentary, Descendant, follows residents of Africatown as they come together to search for the Clotilda, reclaim their ancestors’ narrative, and demand accountability. A discussion with subject Kern Jackson and moderator Robert Daniels follows the screening. November 5, Violet Crown Cinema

Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting

Despite the ongoing movement to remove the use of harmful and exploitative stereotypes of Native Americans from the sporting world, appropriation of Native American culture still runs rampant. While teams like the Washington Commanders and the Cleveland Guardians made tardy name changes, others, like the Chicago Blackhawks and the Atlanta Braves, cling to their reductive imagery. 

In Imagining the Indian, directors Ben West and Aviva Kempner chronicle the movement to end the use of Native American logos, mascots, slurs, and names. A discussion with Kempner, documentary subject Rhonda LeValdo, and moderator Adriana Greci Green accompanies the screening. November 6, Violet Crown Cinema

Dani’s Twins

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dani Izzie became one of the first quadriplegics to give birth to twins. Dani’s Twins follows the Madison County resident as she navigates her unique pregnancy, grapples with biases faced by women with disabilities, gives birth to her children at UVA Medical Center, and begins the journey of parenthood. 

A discussion with producer Angie Gentile, subjects Dani and Rudy Izzie, and Dr. Robert Fuller is moderated by Eric Swensen, and accompanies the screening. The documentary will be presented with open captions, and on-stage presentations will include ASL interpretation. November 3, Culbreth Theatre

Hazing

Filmmaker Byron Hurt explores the history and culture of hazing with sensitivity and care in his new documentary. “As a filmmaker who is a fraternity member (I am a proud member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Incorporated) and someone who has been hazed and has hazed young men, I feel uniquely qualified to make this film,” says Hurt.

Hurt examines the sometimes-deadly practice from all sides, conducting heartfelt interviews with survivors and families who’ve lost loved ones, while also delving into issues of systemic racism, toxic masculinity, and groupthink culture. Hurt will discuss the film with subject James Vivenzio and moderator Angie Miles. November 4, Vinegar Hill Theatre

Eternal Spring

Whimsical, exhilarating, and ominous, Eternal Spring is not your average doc. Told through alternating present-day footage, first-person recounts, and 3D animation, the official Oscar-selected flick follows comic book illustrator Daxiong, a member of outlawed spiritual group Falun Gong. In an attempt to counter the government’s narrative about its spiritual practice, Falun Gong hijacks a state TV station, forcing Daxiong to flee the country. Now, 20 years later, Daxiong sets out to retrace the events of the hijacking through his artwork, but finds his views challenged by another surviving hijacker. November 5, Violet Crown Cinema 

Justin Black grew up on the James River and didn’t realize some people thought it was “disgusting,” including two friends he met at the University of Virginia. Years later, the three paddled 250 miles down the James—and made a documentary.

Black, Will Gemma, and Dietrich Teschner had never made a film before. What they had done was paddle parts of the James with two other friends. The five decided to embark in three camera-laden canoes from the headwaters in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the Cowpasture and Jackson rivers converge.

In the course of the 13-day journey to Richmond, they were threatened with a gun, lost a boat, and endured soaking rain. And they saw the best—and the worst—of the James River. 

The result is Headwaters Down with three co-directors. Black, a musician, did the soundtrack, Gemma, who studied poetry at UVA, narrates, and Teschner, an actor, is the film’s editor.

“We had no budget,” says Black. “We had our own cameras. We had boats. Everybody paid their own way.”

Local documentarian Paul Wagner will moderate the November 6 Headwaters screening panel. “What struck me and I found so pleasurable is when you get to the credits and you realize the guys who are in it filmed it, edited it, did the sound,” he says. “I just love this idea of adventuring down the river and into documentary filmmaking.”

“We didn’t know it was going to be a feature film,” says Black. “We did a ton of research, but we didn’t know things were going to happen.”

In hindsight, the encounter with the possibly drug-crazed gun-toting guy who didn’t want to share camping space on an island was a gift, says Black. “We had a climax in Act 1.”

The James River was once considered one of the most polluted waterways in America. Its health has improved, but it still faces peril, from Dominion Energy power plants, excessive damming that makes 25 miles of the river unnavigable, and both industrial and agricultural runoff. As recently as July 2022, the Virginia Department of Health issued a recreational water advisory to refrain from swimming, wading, tubing, and whitewater kayaking after a ruptured pipe allowed 300,000 gallons of raw, undiluted sewage to reach parts of the James.

The crew started in the crystal-clear water of the Cowpasture River—until it converged with the Jackson River and turned black. A paper mill on the Jackson is allowed to discharge certain dyes, says Black. “But it’s really jarring to see the change and 12 miles of blackish-brown water.”

Tires have been tossed into the James apparently for as long as the rubber has hit the road. The James River Association has removed thousands, says Black, but they still litter a section of the upper river.

Yet there’s also the great blue heron, the catch-of-a-lifetime musky, the historic Kanawha Canal and the beauty of floating down a river. “What comes through thematically is their joy in navigating the river and how important it is to preserve it,” says Wagner.

The screening at Culbreth Theatre is a “full circle moment” for the three friends to return to UVA 11 years after their graduation, he says. “We’re guest lecturing on the power of storytelling and the environment.”

And they’re planning a sequel and traveled from Richmond to the Chesapeake Bay in June to complete the entire 348 miles of the James. 

“A big part of this is to encourage people to take their own adventures in their own backyards,” says Black.

You don’t forget Eugenio Caballero’s production designs. There’s the otherworldly Pan’s Labyrinth, for which he won an Academy Award. There’s the black-and-white Mexico City in Roma, for which he was nominated for another Oscar. And his most recent efforts in director Alejandro Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths will be screened at this year’s Virginia Film Festival.

Caballero will also be presented with the film fest’s first Craft Award, which recognizes a distinguished and outstanding practitioner of behind-the-scenes craft.

A production designer is “the artist hired to create everything you see in the environment that the actors inhabit on screen,” explains film critic Carlos Aguilar, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wrap, and who is the festival’s first critic-in-residence.

“I think [Caballero] is an incredible artist with a talent for creating worlds that either existed in the past or that are sort of fantastical,” says Aguilar.

Caballero has worked with Mexico’s three most renowned directors: Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Iñárritu.

Aguilar’s review of Bardo for The Wrap describes Caballero as “a magician dexterous at turning places long frozen in the directors’ unreliable memory tangible once more for the screen.”

Says Aguilar, “In Roma, he basically brought to life the Mexico City of the ’70s and Alfonso Cuarón’s childhood home.” In Pan’s Labyrinth, “he built the magical world Guillermo had envisioned that is really striking.”

Pan’s Labyrinth had “very strict rules with colors and shapes,” says Caballero in a podcast called Decorating Pages. The filmmaker chose a cold palette for the reality of Franco’s Spain, and a warm palette for the fantasy “that’s supposed to be scary, but at the end it’s a refuge or shelter for this girl,” he says. The furniture was built to be a little bigger. “We really wanted to change the scale.”

Aguilar notes Caballero’s “incredible attention to detail in painstakingly bringing to life these worlds. In Roma, making it seem organic and natural, not artificial, is part of the magic he does.”

Writer/director/producer Dustin Lance Black’s films and television work—including his Academy Award-winning Milk script—are frequently outspoken about LGBTQ+ issues. The Mormon Church also resurfaces throughout his work, as in the hit FX series “Under the Banner of Heaven.” The two topics merge in director Laurent Bouzereau’s new documentary Mama’s Boy, which focuses on Black and his late mother, Anne. And they’re more deeply personal than ever.

Black, 48, half-jokingly calls the film “This Is Your Life and Mostly the Painful Bits.” Working from Black’s memoir Mama’s Boy: A Story from Our Americas, Bouzereau follows him as they retrace his experiences growing up gay among strict Mormons in Texas. There, homosexuality was considered venal, and he was terrified to reveal his true self. Meanwhile, Black’s resilient mother bravely lived with polio. Mama’s Boy explores how his coming out to her revealed her extraordinary gift for compassion.

An Instagram DM from Bouzereau concerning Black’s book led to their collaboration. Black was already aware of Bouzereau from his film-related documentaries, and was “very interested” in working with him. As they became acquainted, Black discovered that “to know Laurent is to love Laurent. … It’s easy to trust him. And I do feel that that trust was well placed.”

Black wrote his memoir “from the safety of my home now as a grown man,” he points out. But facing his tough childhood memories on camera—particularly where they occurred—was another matter. “I would imagine many a therapist would say it’s incredibly bad therapy,” he says.

Black stresses that he deliberately didn’t write, produce, or direct Mama’s Boy: “I hate it when I watch documentaries and then at the end it says ‘directed by’ or ‘produced by’ the person who was just featured because then you don’t necessarily trust it.”

“This is my mom’s story more than mine,” he says, “and I feel like the lessons that I learned from her are vital now—are even more necessary now than when she shared these lessons with me when she was still around.”

Despite her background, Black’s mother not only accepted her son’s sexual orientation, but his friends’, as well. He was moved, he says, “to see how a conservative military Mormon woman showed the courage back in the ’90s to share space with a bunch of my queer friends … who she had been taught her whole life were immoral and illegal and hellbound. … And [show] the curiosity to listen. And we found common ground.”

Eventually, he recalls, she “challenged me to do the same in the other direction. And it’s not easy. … But what you find is you can build a bridge because you still do, for the most part, have more in common than what the 24-hour news channels and the newspapers would claim.”

Black hopes the film will encourage greater civility and humaneness, especially in the current climate of intense political polarization. “Perhaps we can just learn to live and let live a little bit more,” he says. “That’s the way we’ve kept the country together for nearly a quarter of a millennium. Are we going to make it any further? Not if we keep on like this.”

Looking back, Black says, “Everything I do in my activism is for that next generation so they don’t have to grow up having their adolescence spoiled by homophobia. … Frankly, we’ve already lived our youth. We’ve already survived those years, thank God.

“It’s really not for us, is it? It’s all for that next generation. That’s why we do it.”