The Santa Barbara International Film Festival is the highlight of my year. I go to four to six films a day for the ten days of the festival. Every year I want to diary the best films, but I am so busy, and so exhausted at the end of the day, that I never have. This year I have decided to be willing to throw a diary together, just to get one out there, when I see important films. This is tonight's report.
Seeing these independent films and documentaries makes mainstream Hollywood films look even more shallow, if you can believe that. It is a shame more of these films don't reach a wider audience. It took me a while to discover that documentaries with daunting topics--such as, torture or environmental catastrophe--are more often inspiring than depressing. Now I try to see as many docs as I can.
[Other documentaries proving a person or small group of people can make a difference: The Whistleblower, Yes Madam, Sir, The Road to Fallujah, Someplace With a Mountain, and Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz).]
One reason we love these stories is that they tell us again and again that individual lives do matter. I doubt it will hit as close to home for most people, but I was badly needing a box of kleenex throughout When I Rise, the story of mezzo-soprano Barbara Smith Conrad viewed primarily through the lens of racial tensions. The University of Texas had just been integrated when Barbara enrolled. Despite the intense racial tension and continuing prejudice, Barbara found acceptance in the music department. She was cast to play Dido in the opera Dido and Aeneas. When word got out that a black woman was playing opposite a white Aeneas, the Texas State Legislature threatened to withdraw funds. This was Texas in 1956. The story become national news, making even the New York Times. Harry Belafonte called and offered to get Ms. Smith admittance to the school of her choice. She chose to stick it out at Texas, not wanting to be "run out of her state", as she put it.
She became an immense international star, performing in opera houses the world over. The Texas legislature and UT have made an effort to right the wrong: Barbara Conrad Smith was given a distinguished alumnus award by the university, and the legislature held a day in her honor. Ms. Conrad accepted it all with graciousness. She currently holds master classes on the campus.
The film was moving for me, because it took me back to the racist conditions I was surrounded by as I grew up--depicting hateful signs, figures hung in effigy, and other images from the era in addition to describing the frightening hatred and threats directed toward the singer and those who befriended her.
There is also a bit of first class opera, for lovers of that music. And I always treasure hearing the dignified wisdom of Harry Belafonte, who assisted Barbara in moving to New York and getting the training she needed. This regal, talented, hard-working person said that, after her parents, Belafonte is the person she felt most determined not to disappoint.
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While I was sniffling my way through my film, my wife was seeing another that is receiving good reviews here, Skateistan: Four Wheels And A Board In Kabul. While our tax dollars are being funneled at the rate of $93 million a day into military activity in Afghanistan, a few people are trying to create something positive.
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This is my final film festival diary for this year, because I will be spending the weekend with my family.
One final thought about two Eastern bloc films that have been well-liked here, more by others than by me. There were, to me, striking similarities between Czech Republic offering Women In Temptation (Zeny V Pokuseni) and Croation film Just Between Us. Both are comedies focused on sexual mores. Taken together, they give me the impression that Eastern Europe is working on sexual liberation--frank talk about sex, honesty about how people engage in it. My prudish side may be showing, but I'm not a big fan of the ethos embraced. Both films accept that most people are generally promiscuous. The solution to unfaithful behavior, it seems, is to let time pass and get over it. This is true, it turns out, even when a mother has enjoyed a fling with her daughter's boyfriend. I'm not holding my nose in the air as high as it may seem; I understand that the candid sexual discussions may be progress in a place which has been sexually repressed (I don't know, just guessing). The more enjoyable film is The Czech one, which had some truly funny moments.
I'm guessing that there is a lot of pain underlying the gender struggles, pain sourced at least in part in war and other upheavals. When women can talk of nothing but sex (think Sex in the City), my bs meter pegs. I find it significant that all the celebrities from Sex in the City have taken pains to make clear that, no, they are not really like the women they protray. Men's fantasies about how they wish women thought, anyone?
The pain I'm sensing underlying these two films was made more explicit in the delightful, troubled surrealistic masterpiece (in my opinion) from the festival last year; Serbian Tears for Sale is based on the premise that most of the men have died in war--our heroines go in search for lovers.