Hot Docs: Best of Enemies; The Nightmare; The Dictator's Hotel

*This column was originally posted at The Film Experience as part of the coverage of Hot Docs 2015.

It is hard to imagine today that there was once an America where political debates in the media were sensational, not just sensationalized. Harder yet is to envision a time when conservative political commentators weren’t complete buffoons, but rather eloquent, smart thinkers. That is exactly the time that Best of Enemies transports us to, Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s film about the televised debates leading up to the 1968 Republican and Democratic national conventions. ABC, then trailing as America’s third network and in search of a ratings boost, decided to pit two of the country’s most famous commentators against one another: the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. The two were known to dislike each other and their pairing on live TV was sure to cause a stir.
Their prediction proved to be correct when on the 8th night of a series of incendiary discussions, Buckley reacted to Vidal’s name-calling and being labeled a “crypto-Nazi” with a momentary burst of anger...

Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Buckley regretted this lapse of judgment for the rest of his life and was haunted by memories of that night. Vidal, the more outrageous of the two characters, carried the memory with a triumphant smirk. Best of Enemies creates an energetically paced, consistently entertaining narrative out of these debates. It is formally trapped in the familiar structure of similar documentaries, with several talking head interviews that contextualize the significance of the debates and the ramifications of it for American TV and the two. Not all of these inserts seem necessary, though most of them – such as conversations with Buckley’s brother and TV executives who knew both commentators – are exciting. Still, the best parts of the films are excerpts from the original debates. The vicious and hilarious cat-fighting leaves one pining for that golden age of TV.

A more unconventional structure is at play in The Nightmare, Rodney Ascher’s follow-up to the acclaimed Room 237. Based on the lives of eight people who suffer from sleep paralysis, the condition that was the inspiration behind Nightmare on Elm Street, the film explores the world of this strange and, literally, unbelievable disease. Those who suffer see all kinds of monsters and ghosts in their sleep, and they fall into paralysis at once, unable to move or talk at all as these demons infiltrate their bodies. Employing animated sequences and visual effects to show the nightmares of these eight people, Ascher’s film is the rare documentary that doubles as a horror film. As the subjects delve deeper into their nightly terrors, the film also raises the stakes, faithfully recreating the claustrophobic sense of indefensibility against these creatures.

The most intriguing aspect of these horrific experiences is how much their share in common, not just in their nature, but in the specifics of the violent imagery. The Nightmare traces the origins of these visions and arrives not just at recent pop culture icons, but even classical art in which shared elements of sleep paralysis – demons with red eyes, black cats sitting on a dormant person’s chest – appear across works that were produced in different countries in different era. Whether it is the familiar imagery that feeds the nightmares of the subjects or whether it is artists who have brought to life visions that terrified them is the most interesting question the film raises. But beyond the curiosity of this rare condition, Ascher doesn’t know how to deal with the material. The film touches on a superficial level the medical, religious and personal reasons behind each subject’s condition, but never fully engages with them on a deeper level. While the oddity of the topic and the horror scenes are intermittently interesting, they are not enough to keep the film from falling into a repetitive cycle of tedium from which it can never escape.

The Dictator’s Hotel proves a much more rewarding experience, despite its concise, 15-minute running time. Directed by Florian Hoffman, this one visits a newly built but completely abandoned hotel in the Central African Republic, owned by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi before his death. Still supervised by its diligent staff, the hotel’s equipment and furniture have never been touched, but it remains ready to serve at a moment’s notice. The building’s ostentatious structure and vast landscape is splendid and at utter odds with the poverty that surrounds it, though rather cleverly, we are only exposed to the surroundings through the iron gates of the hotel and the few words spoken by one of the employees. This brief visit of the building, during which a North African hotel manager acts as tour guide, is haunting, serving as a reminder of the atrocities committed by political leaders in the region and the sense of entitlement that at once secludes and protectes them from the abject destitution of people in their countries. That the film does this with so few references, and no visual depictions, of political or economic turmoil, and remains entirely within the confines of a single building, is truly extraordinary. The Dictator’s Hotel might not travel outside of specialized festival circuits, but it’s a sharp, humorous and unique film that deserves a much bigger audience.

Amir Sat on a Branch Reflecting on TIFF

*This column was originally published at The Film Experience.

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence

You may have noticed that after a few years of covering the festival to various degrees for The Film Experience, I was completely absent from this space for the past ten days, mostly because of a personal decision to enjoy the films without sweating over writing. TIFF is a big festival, maybe the most frantic and hectic in the world, with more choices than one can physically experience over ten days. Nathaniel and I shared so few films from the program’s sprawling lineup, we could have each written about every single thing we saw and you’d never know we attended the same festival. It’s this overwhelming scale that made me want to take a break from reporting, and yet, I feel unsure about how that affected my festival experience.

Writing about films for me is a passion born out of the necessity to articulate my thoughts on the things I watch. Maybe that process of writing makes the films more memorable? Isn’t it so that writing, even about bad films, makes us appreciate good cinema all the more? Without recording my memories, details about this year’s films have fled my mind quicker than ever. My feelings about some of them have been diluted a bit, too. There is something missing, even though I had the best festival experience of my life, meeting more people than ever and watching some terrific films. Maybe this pessimism is just a withdrawal symptom. Let’s stay positive!

As has become something of an unplanned tradition for me – with precedents including Oslo, August 31st and Closed Curtain – my favorite film of the festival came my way on the last day. The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to The Act of Killing is a remarkable achievement, one that I dare say, with festival hyperbole now fully behind me, is one of the best documentary films ever made. Where the original film shocked its audience with both the viciousness of the story and the inventiveness of its approach, this sequel of sorts is rather more formally straightforward. Turning his camera 180º to focus on the victims of the Indonesian massacre of the 1960s, Oppenheimer examines unhealed wounds and social and familial fractures that are still silenced decades on. The Look of Silence is no less brutal than its predecessor, yet, its emotional punch comes not by shock, but from the force of personal traumas visible in the victims’ silent looks.

A Respectable Family

Grade: B

[Editor's Note: One of the greatest perks of living in a cinematic hub like Toronto is the large number of festivals and retrospectives that run all year long. TIFF, of course, is the parent festival and the organization's year-around activities are the prime destination for any cinephile living in this city, but the smaller festivals offer their own share of pleasures. This year saw the inaugural edition of Scarborough Film Festival, founded by Sergei Petrov, whom I've had the pleasure of knowing from a few years back when we crossed paths somewhere along the TIFF hierarchy. The festival, located at the beautiful Fox theatre along the seaside, southeastern edge of Toronto, was a success by all measures and will surely grow into a landmark summer event as years go by, since Scarborough's culturally diverse demographic and the dreamy locale that hosts the festival provide the perfect platform for a rising festival slightly removed from the frenzy of downtown.]

Scarborough Film Festival's closing piece was a film from Iran, which felt like a real blessing, given the relative lack of imports from Iranian cinema today. It's a film called A Respectable Family, by director Masoud Bakhshi. Bakhshi's first film, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates! has found something of a cult following among Iranian cinephiles so I was quite happy to catch up with his work here. All the more so when the jury announced prior to the screening that the Bakhshi was the runner-up for the festival's best director prize.

A Respectable Family tells the story of Arash (Babak Hamidian), a young Iranian university professor who has spent the last 22 years of his life serving the academia in Europe. Upon receiving an invitation from the University of Shiraz in his native city, Arash heads back home to spend a year as a guest professor; but Iran's many political upheavals have created an entirely different atmosphere from the one he'd left behind. Yet, it isn't his unfamiliarity with the academic system or the city of Shiraz at large that discomforts him the most; it's his dysfunctional family, ravaged by decades of betrayal and war.

Arash's father, an ostensibly pious man who provided people with food during the Iran-Iraq conflict, had actually committed one of the greatest crimes during that war: hoarding. The minimal amount of resources he provided to the people in need paled in comparison with what he hid in his storage to sell for magnified prices. His personal life was no less tainted than his social one - he had been married prior to his communion with Arash's mother (played by two of my favorite Iranian actresses, a young Behnaz Jafari and an older Ahu Kheradmand), though the marriages had been kept secret from both wives. Arash, as a result, had two brothers: a half brother called Jafar (Mehran Ahmadi) from his father's previous marriage and a blood brother who has been killed in the war after his father had persuaded him to join the forces. Arash's mother, blaming her husband not just for cheating, but for losing their son to war, had shunned the man and chosen to live the rest of her life alone and on a very minimal income.

Expedition to the End of the World

*This review was originally posted at The Film Experience during the Hot Docs International Film Festival.

I'll have the watch till 11 o'clock. Then I'll go down to the saloon and write the meaning of life.”

As a general rule, I try to avoid all films that deal with the ocean. I'm not averse to action adventures but I suffer from intense thalassophobia and cinema is an experience I'd like to enjoy, not endure. Exceptions have to be made every now and then, of course, and a few experiences have been rewarding enough to justify all the shaking and sneaking through fingers. I made one such exception for Expedition to the End of the World, based on strong word of mouth, and I’m happy to say I came away thoroughly satisfied.

This Danish film follows a group of explorers – crudely referred to only by their respective professions: the archaeologist, the geochemist, the artist, the other artist, etc. - who sail to the North East of Greenland to a previously untapped fjord in the ocean where access had been denied prior to the partial melting of the North Pole. It’s a small benefit of global warming, as one of the scientists puts it, that these men are able to explore this particular region, but here’s the catch: the inlet is only open for a short while as a result of this melting. In a few weeks, it will trap the group in between the mountains.

As one might expect from the premise, Expedition is shot beautifully, with picture-perfect photography that haunted me as much as it forced me to bow to Mother Nature’s grace. There are breathtaking shots composed of the misty mountains, the dormant ocean and the odd polar bear rummaging through the land, but what Expedition does is drawing the most curiously beautiful images of the sight of man against nature, where these intelligent scientists are reduced to specks of dust in relation to the magnitude of their surroundings. It’s a theory that one of the film’s protagonists poses: that humankind’s irrelevance in the grand scheme of things cannot be overstated. There is a fascinating scientific comparison between mankind and the microorganisms that possess similar functioning structures, but it’s the visual compositions that really blew my mind in illustrating this point, quite often framing the central characters against a backdrop of mountains that shows just how insignificant they can be.

Echoing that impression is the fact that the directors scale their project down, at times grounding it in conversations that appear inconsequential on the surface, but drop the audience into the heavy waters of studying human history and identity. By the film’s end the audience yearns to spends more time with this team of sailors. Like a group of hyper-intellectual college kids on their last trip together, their conversations vary from scientific arguments about dormant bacteria to making fun of each other’s fields of work. Expedition to the End of the World is effectively an incisive, anthropological discussion by way of a playful road comedy - characterized by bridges between Mozart and thrash metal music.

In every conversation I've had about the film – which has happened quite often since Expedition has become one of the festival’s favorites – Werner Herzog’s name has come up, for the type of dry humor that’s injected into the film’s chilly atmosphere is reminiscent of the German auteur’s Encounters at the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams; but I dare say this is an even richer experience than either of those two films. There are deep truths to be sought in the simple questions that these men nonchalantly throw at each other and the beauty of it is that the answers don’t come easily. As the geochemist puts it, “the joy is in not finding the answers,” in striving for a deeper understanding of ourselves and everything around us, and in savoring the splendor of our planet in the process.