Short your investment: Release dates and streaming access make it a challenge to see every movie nominated for a best picture Academy Award this year. But serious Oscar pool competitors know the short film category is a more easily achievable viewing list. Enter Violet Crown’s Oscar Shorts series, part of the theater’s RSVP Cinema program. The shorts will show on the big screen in three categories: animated, live action, and documentary. The films in each group are offered back-to-back, so viewers can gain an edge while enjoying the authentic movie experience we’ve all been missing.
Through 4/15, Prices and times vary. Violet Crown Cinema, 200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. charlottesville. violetcrown.com.
TVisually beautiful and socially complicated, Some Kind of Heaven is a cinematic essay that begs for contemplation and digestion.
Whether they are willing to admit it or not, all documentaries make an argument. Michael Moore is never shy about voicing his opinions, while at the other end of the spectrum, Ken Burns frames his work as recording history. Some Kind of Heaven, the debut work from Lance Oppenheim, never shouts its thoughts from rooftops, but thanks to juxtaposition and keen editing, the message comes through.
The film premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it takes a look into the lives of four residents of The Villages in Florida. The Villages is the largest retirement community in the country, home to over 75,000 people, all looking for their own version of a twilight chapter. Some Kind of Heaven opens with idyllic shots of palm trees and golf carts, but as it allows us to get closer to a small handful of the residents, we see that even the gates of this gated community cannot keep reality from leaking in.
Anne and Reggie have been married for 47 years and are proud of it. She likes pickleball and keeping active, and he prefers more metaphysical pursuits. When we first meet them, she’s the uptight wife and he’s the quirky husband. But through closer inspection we see a much deeper portrait of their post-retirement life.
Barbara is younger than many of The Villages’ residents, and still needs to work full-time. She moved to Florida from Boston, reluctantly bringing both her husband and her strong accent, but was soon widowed and left trying to find her way in this strange place. She tries her best to get out and meet people, but the most gregarious we see her is when she is getting her hair done and chatting with a stylist.
And finally there’s Dennis. He lives in his van, which is often parked somewhere in The Villages, and relies on swimming pools for showers and hunting for mates. Dennis is very open about wanting to find a woman to support him financially, though as the film proceeds it becomes clear that he may not truly know what he wants.
The pivots in each character’s story never feel like a bait-and-switch, but rather a peek behind the curtains. For every person who claims The Villages is a utopia built in stucco, there’s another person hiding a struggle or lying to themselves. Especially when watching what Anne and Reggie are going through, it is difficult not to see every couple dancing across the screen (sometimes literally) as complicated—and not people who have it all figured out.
Cinematographer David Bolen brings a contemplative gaze to this curious world. The activities of the community, like a golf cart drill team and synchronized swimming, are filmed in vivid color with frequent symmetry, resembling the feel of idealized 1950s advertisements. These manufactured images are what sell people on The Villages, and they are what many of the residents want to believe their lives look like.
Oppenheim never goes so far as to shift Some Kind of Heaven into a rumination on loneliness or class disparity, but there are hints throughout that he’s building an argument to look beyond the surface. Dennis appears to be the same as his tanned, parrothead neighbors, however his intentions and personal history set him apart from many of the people he tries to connect with. And while it might seem that Barbara is doing her best to put herself out there, we see her literally out of sync at tambourine practice and staring, vacantly, off in the distance during her workday.
It is through these revelations that the documentary is constructed with intention. Oppenheim could have dug deeper to only show us the gritty underbelly of this Floridian dystopia. Instead, he creates a dialogue between perfection and defects, pleasure and discomfort, love and loneliness, movement and tranquility. The Villages is not one or the other, and Some Kind of Heaven looks at all of these angles.
This is not a documentary that aims to educate, proselytize, or sell, though in its own way it does all of that. It chooses which facets of this niche world to show you through remarkable access to the residents, and with a guiding hand that asks you to draw your own conclusions.
Larry Sabato’s Center for Politics produced the documentary "Charlottesville," a real-life horror story that took place in August 2017. The movie screens at the Virginia Film Fest on Saturday, November 3, at the Paramount Theater.
Courtesy UVA
The most frightening movie on this year’s Virginia Film Festival schedule doesn’t feature supernatural ghouls, but it had Larry Sabato shaken. Charlottesville is the real-life horror story that took place on UVA’s Grounds and in city streets when white supremacists and neo-Nazis came to town in August 2017.
“We have people and film footage no one else has,” says Sabato, whose Center for Politics produced the documentary. While racism is obviously a theme, “We also focus on the deep-seated anti-Semitism in the white nationalist movement.”
Sabato notes that he didn’t hear any anti-African American chants as the Unite the Righters marched through Grounds.
“It was all about Jews,” he says. The marchers are “obsessed with Nazis. And who would ever believe that in 2018, they would seize on Adolf Hitler as a hero?”
Most shocking for Sabato were the chants: “Jews will not replace us.” “Blood and soil.” And even, “Into the ovens.”
“People were stunned,” says Sabato.
He warns that some of the footage is shocking. And some of it came from Sabato’s cellphone, which he used to film the tiki-torch march through the Lawn, where he lives.
Sabato says he had about 20 minutes notice that the march was not going up University Avenue as Unite the Right organizers had said. August 11 was move-in day on the Lawn. “I was very fearful for the students,” he says—particularly the Jewish and African American students.
He quickly rounded up whomever he could find and hid them in the basement of his Lawn pavilion.
Later that night, he wrote then-president Teresa Sullivan and her husband. “Of my 47 years here,” he recounts, “it was the worst night ever on the Lawn.”
People will find the film disturbing, predicts Sabato. “We didn’t want to put a happy face on it.”
He adds, “You don’t make it go away by ignoring it.”
Charlottesville screens on Saturday, November 3, at 4pm at the Paramount. It was made with the Community Idea Stations and will air on PBS affiliates across the country in early 2019.
As Charlottesville development races ahead, the documentary West Main Street gives us a reason to pause and evaluate how we define progress. Friday’s screening will be followed by a brief Q&A with filmmakers Reid Oechslin and Chris Farina (pictured during the making of the film in the ’90s). Courtesy subject
From 1988 to 1992, two recent UVA graduates, Chris Farina and Reid Oechslin, set out with a camera, 16mm film, little money and no lighting equipment, to interview residents of Charlottesville’s West Main Street. They wanted to learn more about their newly adopted hometown by inquiring into the lives and histories of the people tethered to this stretch of land.
Under the production company name Roadside Films they had already made one film together, Route 40, about the residents of Pulaski Highway in Baltimore, near Farina’s childhood home. Back then, UVA didn’t have filmmaking classes, so Farina and Oechslin took film criticism and fell in love with the medium. Farina says, “We were basically self-taught and [Oechslin] was the one who had the capacity to learn how to use the camera and editing table.”
In West Main Street, “The people, themselves, they tell the story,” says Farina. The film—which premiered in 1995 at Vinegar Hill Theatre, where Oechslin was the manager—features Jefferson School teacher Rebecca McGinness, funeral director and civil rights activist George Ferguson, teacher Sonny Sampson, Greek immigrant and entrepreneur Pete Stratos, Barrett Early Learning Center Director Cindy Stratton and barber Milton Via, among others.
West Main Street Vinegar Hill Theatre April 27, 7pm
At the time, “A bunch were older residents, so in a way it was capturing the 20th century through their perspectives,” says Farina. McGinness was born in 1892 and was about 98 when they interviewed her. Ferguson was born in 1911 and grew up on Main Street. And Stratos, the owner of the Chili Shoppe restaurant, “was almost the classic immigrant story,” Farina says.
Barber Milton Via is one of the fixtures of West Main Street featured in the film. Courtesy photo
While their intent was to represent the everyday lives of their subjects, it was impossible to tell the story of West Main Street without talking about the destruction of the historically black neighborhood Vinegar Hill. “The beauty of it was, it wasn’t our agenda going in,” says Farina. “Our agenda was to listen to these people who had lived here for a long time who really contributed to the community.”
As a result, the film documents both the shared humanity of the black and white residents and the prejudices that directly affected black residents. Ferguson, the funeral director, was the head of the local chapter of the NAACP when the public schools were desegregated, and his daughter was a member of the first integrated class. In the film, he speaks not only of his identity as a black man, but as a funeral director, too. “We talked to him about his perspective on death and he spoke from his real sense of faith,” Farina says.
Similarly, McGinness—who taught at the Jefferson School from 1915 to 1960—“one of the matriarchs of the black community,” Farina says, “talks about why she got into teaching…expressing the importance of a teacher to a community.” Teacher Sampson recounts the devastation of Vinegar Hill, where his uncle owned a business, and also reminisces about growing up in Fifeville, where he picked and sold peaches for his grandmother.
Farina doesn’t want the film to be politicized for its documentation of some painful aspects of Charlottesville’s past. “In many ways I feel like our films were kind of anthropological,” he says. “Here’s a community that people drive by and walk by. Stop and think about it.”
More than two decades later, Farina has digitized the film and will screen it again at Vinegar Hill Theatre on Friday. The original impetus for his desire to share it with a new audience was the commercial and residential development that has drastically changed the cityscape. “I just feel we’re racing ahead and not looking back,” he says, adding that we’re more concerned with who’s coming than with who lives here. “Mrs. McGinness remembers when the streets were dirt and you had to close the windows ’cause of the dust,” says Farina. “So you can say that change has always been part of things. I just don’t feel like the people who live here get as much respect as the money that’s being made.”
The events of August 11 and 12 gave him even more reason to digitize and share the film. He remembers the integrated audience at the premiere in 1995. Now, he says, Charlottesville is segregated. “That’s one of our problems in this town.” But the film doesn’t preach, he says. “I genuinely have a real affection for the subjects in the film,” says Farina. “If the affection I feel is shared with the audience, then it’s going to be successful and that’s kind of the real purpose.”
Two young lovers and two heinous murders: A documentary of the Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering story heads to the U.S. as Soering seeks an absolute pardon.
Courtesy Filmperspektive
With the success of the podcast “Serial” and Netflix’s “Making a Murderer,” wrongful convictions are a hot topic. Joining the debate is a documentary about one of central Virginia’s most notorious double homicides—and the convicted murderer who has insisted he’s innocent for 30 years.
UVA Echols scholars Soering and Haysom were convicted for the March 30, 1985, stabbings and near-decapitations of Haysom’s parents, Derek and Nancy Haysom, in their Bedford County home.
Soering, a German diplomat’s son who wrongly believed he had diplomatic immunity, initially said he committed the crime. Although he recanted before he went to trial in 1990, a jury convicted him and sentenced him to two life sentences. In 1987, Haysom pleaded guilty to first-degree murder as an accessory before the fact and was sentenced to 90 years in prison.
“It is a big love story,” says Steinberger. “A crazy, incredible love story. He said, ‘I confessed for her so she wouldn’t be killed in the electric chair.’”
Soering’s case has intense interest in Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel raised the issue with President Barack Obama in 2014, and the case drew international headlines in 2010 when outgoing-governor Tim Kaine agreed to send Soering back to Germany, only to have that decision immediately rescinded by his successor, Bob McDonnell.
“The harshness of the American system is hard for people in Germany to understand,” says Steinberger, who notes that America incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country. Germany does not have life sentences without the possibility of parole, and it’s very rare to have someone sit in prison as long as Soering has, she says.
“Here, the system allows you a second chance, particularly if you’re young,” Steinberger says. “It doesn’t help to have a lot of people in prison. They’re part of society. We want them to be back in society.”
The filmmakers asked questions about what they observed, including why the judge, William Sweeney, a friend of the Nancy Haysom’s brother, was allowed to preside. “In Germany this is not thinkable,” says Steinberger.
She also wonders why nude pictures of Elizabeth Haysom taken by her mother were not entered as evidence. Haysom has claimed she was abused by her mother. “This is a huge motive,” says Steinberger. “The judge sealed off the photos. He very clearly didn’t want them discussed in court. But if you want to find out the truth, you have to talk about everything.”
Many people with information about the case were not questioned in court, and an FBI profile of the Haysoms’ killer disappeared, according to Steinberger. She says noted FBI profiler Ed Sulzbach appeared on camera and said he came to the conclusion the killer “was very close to the family and female.”
Steinberger first interviewed Soering in 2006 and got him on film before Virginia prisons banned videoing. Now, she can’t even speak to him on the phone because such calls require a U.S. phone number.
After The Promise premieres June 24 in Munich, co-producer BBC will air the documentary and it will head to U.S. movie theaters and television.
