Brazil gets real with film festival
Marc Burleigh

SAO PAULO—Documentary films, it was once thought, should be neutral windows on the world, objective investigations brought to the big screen. But not any more — not in our world of YouTube home videos and Michael Moore polemics and reality TV and feature narratives that borrow heavily from true stories.
Now, the documentary genre is getting personal. That is the trend seen this week at one of the biggest documentary showcases in the world: the “It’s All True” festival taking place in Brazil. Earnest staples of traditional sort still feature strongly in the line-up, which, while heavy with Brazilian fare, also has many foreign entries.
Among them is “Darfur Now,” a look at the crisis in western Sudan from a distinctly Los Angeles perspective (actor Don Cheadle is a producer and trains the camera briefly on buddy George Clooney as they lobby on the issue). There is also a French examination of the women who wait to see their husbands in prison in “The Other Side of the Wall” (“A Cote”); a Chinese woman’s recollection of the 1949 Cultural Revolution in “Fengming: A Chinese Memoir,” and “Anna, Seven Years on the Frontline,” about Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist shot dead in Moscow in 2006.
But two films creating a buzz were US documentaries in which the filmmakers were inextricably caught up in the subjects they covered. Cindy Kleine was nervous as she followed the crowd into a Sao Paulo movie theatre for the first-ever public screening of “Phyllis and Harold,” about her domineering self-satisfied father and her mother who never revealed to him a years-long extramarital love affair that coloured her whole life.
“I couldn’t finish the film until my father was dead,” she explained. Kleine added that the project in fact started off as research for a fiction film before she realized that her parents’ story was fascinating in itself. The process was “a very healing experience for me,” she said. Audiences were engrossed by the universal themes of mortality and lost love shown in the film, which took 12 years to make and is punctuated by glamorous, early home film footage and animated flights of fancy. Festival chiefs have also taken a strong interest in the documentary, which looks certain to nab distribution.
Another movie, “Operation Filmmaker,” was an equally personal enterprise by another US director, Nina Davenport. Following a young Iraqi film student who is plucked from war-torn Baghdad to work on a US fictional feature in Europe by a couple of well-meaning directors, it starts conventionally enough.
But as the subject, Muthana Mohmed, slowly alienates himself from his wouldbe benefactors, he and Davenport find themselves increasingly relying on each other — and disappointing each other — even as they keep collaborating on the documentary. Unexpectedly, the story tilts into an uncomfortable version of the relationship of the United States and Iraq told on a very small scale. Davenport acknowledges the echos with the bigger reality in her film when at one point she notes that she’s no longer looking for a happy ending, just an “exit strategy.”