Feb. 25--You will find no shortage of documentary film fests on the calendar. Hot Docs in Toronto is a big one, as is Full Frame in Durham, N.C. Now there is a new fest in Chicago called DOC10, which comes to the Music Box the first weekend in April.
In the Midwest, however, a key player has long been the annual True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo., which tends to spotlight films that challenge -- or entirely do away with -- the kind of stylistic norms that render so many documentaries rote and the opposite of cinematic. This year's fest takes place March 3-6, and among the films on the schedule is Deborah Stratman's "The Illinois Parables," an experimental doc that combines archival images with new footage that has been manipulated to look old and somewhat banged up.
A collage of 11 vignettes (it screened earlier this month at the Berlin International Film Festival), it spans the history of Illinois from settlement to present-day Chicago. "The trappings of modern day sit side-by-side with relics of the past," a seamless integration, per a review that ran in the London-based online magazine The Upcoming, that "really lends 'The Illinois Parables' a sense of authenticity."
True/False brands itself as a fest that "exists in a permeable, in-between land bounded by fiction and nonfiction." That description is a near-perfect encapsulation of an entry from 2015 that happens to be screening locally this weekend.
"Those Who Feel the Fire Burning," which comes to Chicago Filmmakers on Saturday (with an additional screening at Columbia College on Tuesday), is a wonderfully confounding blend of fact and fiction that chronicles migrant life among men and women from the Middle East and North Africa who have arrived in Europe only find themselves completely discombobulated.
They are never specifically identified as refugees, and though the film was made prior to the recent plight of Syrian refugees escaping into Europe, there is a strong (if unintentional) parallel.
The film begins in total darkness. Before there is any picture on the screen you hear the sound of someone breathing heavily. Then you hear and see (only barely) the crash of waves under the night sky. The person holding the camera is on a small motorboat, bouncing with the turbulent motion of the water, exposed to the storming rain. A child wails to her mother: "I don't want to go to Europe." The reply is swift. "Hush, everything will be fine."
And then: "Tall wave," someone warns, and the camera operator tips backward and falls into the water. "Grab my hand," someone yells, but it is too late. Presumably drowned, the man somehow resurfaces on land in a ghostly disembodied form, offering us his point of view as he floats from place to place observing his fellow immigrants.
"A guy drowns, shifts into a new reality and is dropped by some kind of mysterious power in a new universe," Dutch filmmaker Morgan Knibbe said in an interview last year with True/False's Dan Steffen. "This universe turns out to be something like Europe -- or hell -- but not what he expected it to be."
The storm, the drowning, the underwater chaos -- it is all deeply uncomfortable to watch, and all of it collided in my head with the devastating photos from a few months back of the tiny drowned Syrian boy lying face-down on the beach.
The subsequent footage in Knibbe's film adheres a little bit more traditionally to what we think of as observational documentary filmmaking, but it, too, is consciously manipulated. The camera is forever swooping around, up and down, focusing on the ceiling tiles of the immigration office one moment and darting to the pavement of the street outside in the next as a large truck zooms by honking its horn.
The camera has a habit of slinking away from one scene only to suddenly reappear in another, as if the transition was seamless. Often (using drone cinematography) we're given a bird's-eye view of the city. Locations are never identified -- the cities, the ports, the landscapes are simply a foreign place to these men and women. (Portions were shot in Greece and Italy.)
"What I always say about the way we made this film," Knibbe said in the True/False interview, "is that, in a way, we are really honest about the manipulation. It is a film that is supposed to be very cinematic, and the only way to do that is to manipulate. So the point was never realism or objectivity, because I think that's a big problem with the way this kind of subject is portrayed normally.
"There's always this kind of objectivity that people try to use. But I think that's not possible. It's an illusion. That's why we tried to get rid of that and make a very strong cinematic experience. I think that's a more honest way of filmmaking."
We only get snippets of any one person's life. A moment, here and there. "Look at us," a woman says with a certain amount of self-loathing as she ties off her arm, full of scars from her heroin habit. "Everything will be fine," says her companion. "Just give this to me," she says, reaching for the needle.
In another scene, a woman from Afghanistan sits next to her husband as their child plays at their feet while she reads a pamphlet: "When you apply for asylum, you will be photographed and a fingerprint will be taken," it instructs. "You must be aware that police may decide to detain you in exceptional cases for the sake of public order and national security."
Later, two men from Senegal talk over a cup of coffee. "When I woke up today, I didn't know where I was. I saw myself in Senegal. A very strange dream," the man tells his roommate. They sit at a table that holds a large, industrial-size roll of toilet paper and a canister of sugar. Behind one of the men, a cockroach skitters across the wall. The camera falls away from the men, leaving them to their conversation as it follows the cockroach through the doorway and into another room as if it were guiding the camera to its next stop.
Knibbe later eavesdrops on a man talking long-distance to his mate in Africa. "Yes, I'll bring stuff for your hair and new shoes," he promises. "The streets will be covered with new shoes!"
The film is in perpetual motion, but as a viewer you never know where you are. You never know what is going on. A feeling, one suspects, not unlike that experienced by the men and women Knibbe has filmed.
"Those Who Feel the Fire Burning" screens 8 p.m. Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark St., and 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Hokin Hall, Columbia College Chicago, 623 S. Wabash Ave. Go to www.chicagofilmmakers.org/screenings.
