Conscience and Controversy

B. Ruby Rich

From Film Quarterly, Summer 2022, Volume 75, Number 4

Not since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that ended its Prague Spring, and the Chilean coup of 1973 that ended the presidency of Salvador Allende, has the film world been as galvanized by one country’s struggle as it has been in 2022 by Ukraine’s—though, of course, countless other global conflicts, atrocities, and deaths (Brazil, Yemen, Syria, Gaza) have also deserved such attention.

Ukraine Calling

Members of the Russian filmmakers’ union Kino Soyuz—including directors Alexei Popogrebsky, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Marina Razbezhkina, and Boris Khlebnikov and a number of producers—signed a declaration protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.¹ Russia’s long-standing pro-Putin filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov was “arrested in absentia” in Ukraine. He’s been a controversial figure outside Russia for his support for Putin for a long time; among the controversies surrounding him were his inclusion in the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 and his appearance on Russian television, which has been widely denounced.² And Ukrainian film critic Natalia Serebryakova, who covered the Berlin Film Festival last February, only to end up hiding in the basement upon her return home, amid rubble and bombing, finally fled to Poland with her family.³

“Film is a weapon, and the current battle is also being waged on-screen” was the text conveyed in one article in France’s Le Monde in early April.⁴ But Le Monde went further, noting that “from calls to boycotting Russian films to social media guerilla warfare against ‘collaborators’ … Ukrainian film directors are leading the war on screen.”

And elsewhere? While screenings of Ukrainian films were being mounted in many locations, debates over the pros and cons of cultural boycotts of Russian cultural figures and filmmakers began to surface. In the United States, arguments multiplied in Facebook posts, though at this writing they had not yet emerged in more coherent form elsewhere.

In early spring, there were near-constant skirmishes online over questions of appropriate responses to the conflict. The tribute that most captured my attention was the superb exhibition of Ukrainian documentaries curated by Dorota Lech for the TIFF Bell Lightbox theaters in Toronto with charming, nuanced, intricate films by brilliant documentary filmmakers showing the world the forces in motion in their part of the world.

Two of my favorite films were included in the exhibition. Iryna Tsilyk’s The Earth Is Blue as an Orange (2020) portrays a family living in Krasnohorivka, in the eastern zone of Donbas. Though subject to near-constant bombardment, the family made films through it all as the two daughters trained: one in film school, one preparing to apply. Today, Tsilyk’s lovely, graceful, beautifully crafted documentary looks horribly prophetic: the unbearable situation of that family at that time is now the unbearable daily life of an entire nation under attack. Even worse, what looked like a horror situation then now seems idyllic, given the Russian bombardments of this past spring. Tsilyk herself had to flee Kyiv under fire with her young son, while her husband, the writer Artem Chekh, left to join the fight for Ukraine, circumstances so utterly unlike the Sundance screening (she won the award for best international documentary) where I met and interviewed her.

In her TIFF exhibition, Lech also included Putin’s Witnesses (Vitaly Mansky, 2018), a documentary about the night of December 31, 1999, when Russia changed forever. In the United States, everyone was focused on the possibility that the shift to the new millennium would break all computers, electronic systems, and digital infrastructures—a touted anxiety that turned out to be baseless (though “Y2K” certainly provided many computer programmers with excellent work throughout 1999). No, in Russia something much more consequential occurred that night: Boris Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV to abruptly announce that he was resigning and turning over the presidency—and the television screen—to his successor, Vladimir Putin, who proceeded with this bloodless coup and addressed the nation.

A boy watches his sisters prepare to film in The Earth is Blue as an Orange.

Mansky, born in Lviv, Ukraine, was a longtime Russian resident and videographer, having over the years filmed first Yeltsin, and then, on a daily basis, Putin at the time of his ascension. He moved to Riga, Latvia in 2014 after the Russian annexation of Crimea and the subsequent withdrawal of funding for the Artdocfest documentary festival he’d founded.

The Slap Heard round the World

Well, it wasn’t heard round the globe so much as round the internets and the gossip columns of Hollywood. I speak, of course, of Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock in the middle of the Academy Awards ceremony and subsequent cursing of him from the audience, all of it uninterrupted and unpunished during a live on-air event. But afterward? Oh my. Pundits and comics went wild for weeks as the Academy punted before issuing its statement: a ten-year ban on Smith’s future attendance. There’s nothing really left to say that hasn’t already been declaimed and dissected, apart from the inimitable Fran Lebowitz’s quip that the Oscar ceremony is by now so old-fashioned that it has come to resemble a telecast of a butter-churning contest (and I write this as an actual member of the Academy, mind you, concerned for its future).

Sadly, not as much attention has been paid to the controversy of the awards (including the award for short documentary) left out of the official ceremony to “shorten” it. They didn’t deserve the exclusion: after all, they didn’t slap anyone. Nor was there enough attention given to the Governors Awards, which deserve a more prominent place at the table of recognition—especially this year, with the Academy’s recognition of Danny Glover with an honorary Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, for his decades of activism and service. He’s a singular figure. Not only does he still live in the San Francisco neighborhood where he grew up, not only has he been a UN Goodwill Ambassador, but he teamed up with Joslyn Barnes to found Louverture Films, where, starting some fifteen years ago with Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako, he has helped filmmakers like RaMell Ross, Yance Ford, Lucrecia Martel, even Apichatpong Weerasethakul get their films made. And as an actor, starting with his star turn of brilliance in Charles Burnett’s masterpiece To Sleep with Anger (1990) over thirty years ago, the man has been a lodestar guiding audiences to the most important work on screens. Now, there’s someone who belongs on the Oscar stage in prime time.

I grew up with The Ed Sullivan Show, but I haven’t missed its form of inert variety fare in many a decade. Here’s a thought: give the assignment of producing the Oscars to someone adept in TikTok, and send runners out to the awardees’ homes to shoot their reactions and present their awards. The Oscars, whatever they are and whatever you think of them, deserve to be upgraded to at least the status and panache of the films they celebrate.

Documentary: When a Film Blows Up a Field

Two controversies roiled the ranks of documentary gatekeepers and practitioners in the early months of 2022, neither of which was expected, neither conclusively settled, signaling a sign of growth and ferment in the documentary world, and suggesting that serious change rarely transpires without a period of conflict.

The first controversy concerned exhibition: a documentary shown this year at Sundance, Meg Smaker’s Jihad Rehab, portrayed a group of Yemeni men who had been transferred out of the hell of Guantánamo to the “Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center” in Riyadh, following them over a period of time that, per Smaker, was five years. A public controversy began to swirl around the film in the days following the festival, though if it had been an in-person festival, the controversy probably would have unreeled in real time, since criticisms had been building behind the scenes for months before the public screening.

Concerns were focused on the film’s problematic title but also on its alleged veracity. Smaker’s claims to expertise were scrutinized and challenged, while the film was accused of doing the opposite of what it claimed: dehumanizing its subjects by picturing them as terrorists, judging them without evidence, and, though claiming sympathy, demonizing them all over again. In one festival review, Patrick Mullen was half-willing to give Smaker the benefit of the doubt, pointing to her past as a firefighter traumatized by 9/11, but Mullen nevertheless worried that her good intentions were not enough to offset the film’s problems.⁵

A group of Muslim American, Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian (MENASA) filmmakers sent a letter, with a long list of signatories, to Sundance criticizing the film’s inclusion in the festival and then publicized their charge by sending a copy to news outlets for publication.⁶ Two Sundance staffers, Brenda Coughlin and Karim Ahmad, resigned in the wake of the controversy. Journalists published a range of columns, both on film sites and on editorial pages, weighing the arguments, choosing sides.⁷ Finally, Tabitha Jackson, Sundance festival head, and Joana Vicente, CEO of Sundance Institute, issued a statement of contrition and vowed to do better with the festival’s and institution’s due process. Their statement read, in part, that “[t]his moment reflects the dynamic and continuing evolution of broader, fundamental issues that we have always considered in our work and must continue to grapple with as an organization, and as a field” and referenced a range of issues involving “best practices around ethics, journalism, and duty of care” and considering what “questions we should be asking of film teams before selection.”⁸

Such debates over meanings and practices are crucial to documentary evolution, and deserve to be broadened and explored further within documentary studies. Festival programmers are not curators: they sift through vast quantities of submissions that they did not necessarily play any part in inviting and it is not unusual for teams to lack the expertise to provide the critical evaluation that specific works might warrant. If the field errs, it has done so on the side of “good faith” and with the expectation that filmmakers are telling the truth about their work and, further, are equipped to understand their subject.

Perhaps it’s time to abandon such naivete? The documentary field is more frenzied and competitive than ever, especially after the distress and pressure of two years of COVID shutdowns, and so is the world of festivals. (If Sundance did not take it, would SXSW or Tribeca have jumped at the chance?) But there was something else operative here: the ascendancy of streaming services has injected money into the documentary field beyond anything that was there before, but now devoid of any checks and balances that traditional funders once seemed to offer. A new level of expertise is urgently required.

CEO and cofounder of Fork Films, Abigail Disney—a documentary funder widely respected in the field and a producer of Smaker’s film—issued a public statement acknowledging her error and calling for “more community input on inappropriate content, better procedures, and systems around access to resources, lifting marginalized voices, and a plan for the future of our field that is both accommodating of new commercial and nonprofit realities as well as respectful of perspectives that come from the margins.⁹ Firelight Media, a field leader in taking up questions of representation, convened a session in its “Beyond Resilience” series, titled “Muslim Filmmakers Roundtable,” that brought together some of the figures from the debates to discuss the film and its aftermath.¹⁰

Important issues—of representation, cultural buy-in, institutional responsibility, responsible curation, and marketplace pressures—raised by this film and controversy deserve to be explored and deepened by scholars, documentary studies programs, by anyone teaching or financing documentaries for new generations of practitioners. These are core issues for the future of the field. They demand attention across a range of specializations and locations if any serious progress is to be made.

Documentary: When a Field Organization Implodes

It was a season of trouble in the documentary field. Soon, another letter arrived online, this one about problems at another core institution, the International Documentary Association (IDA). Unlike the Sundance controversy, this fight was internal, focused explicitly on a change of leadership and on dissension within an organization, making it difficult for an outsider to parse the contours or implications.

A dispute was set off by the arrival of a new executive director, Rick (Richard Ray) Pérez, who had been hand-picked by the board to lead the organization forward (and out of COVID) after the voluntary departure of a very popular leader, Simon Kilmurry. Pérez seemed to have all the requisite credentials: a former documentary filmmaker (he made Cesar’s Last Fast [2014], about Cesar Chavez) who had also spent years in the trenches of such organizations as Brave New Films and the Sundance Documentary Film Program. He’d been part of NALIP (the National Association of Latino Independent Producers), too, a service organization explicitly dedicated to advancing representation in the field of documentary production.

In May 2021, Pérez was named to head the organization. On January 4, 2022, four key staff members, all women, resigned en masse: Maggie Bowman, then interim director of advocacy and programming; Jina Chung, senior director of partnerships and development; Amy Halpin, deputy director; and Poh Si Teng, director of the organization’s IDA Funds and Enterprise Program offices. On March 14, the remaining staff declared their intention to form a union and gave the IDA board twenty-four hours to respond. (They responded in forty-eight hours, but news stories went out in the interim.) Board members quit, too.

The best account of the controversies and events appeared in IndieWire.¹¹ It traced the entire history of the debacle, but could offer no analysis apart from leadership style to explain the turmoil that followed Pérez’s arrival. A series of conversations were initiated in early March. The IDA board’s Executive Committee, consisting of respected figures—Grace Lee, Chris Pérez, Amir Shahkhalili, Marcia Smith—issued a statement saying that the organization was facing an “existential crisis.”¹² Then, the IDA suddenly announced the hiring of two new senior staff members and a consultant—Abby Sun and Keisha Knight as staff, Louise Rosen as a consultant—and called their arrival “a major step forward.”¹³

Controversy jumped across the Atlantic when the International Film Festival Rotterdam fired its entire programming staff, leaving a relatively new executive director, Vanja Kaludjercic, in place. The announcement took place after the festival had ended, with its Tiger award presented to the great Paraguayan director Paz Encina for Eami.

In Memoriam

In such challenging times, leaders are more precious than ever. So it was a terrible blow to lose so many prized individuals who were dearly loved and key to their fields of film. This is a roll call of four names, some better known than others, all key to cinema, lost in one month. RIP.

John Korty
(June 22, 1936–March 9, 2022)

Korty belongs to an earlier generation of independent filmmakers.¹⁴ He made his mark directing film and television programs that addressed social issues, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), starring the young Cicely Tyson; Who Are the Debolts? And Where Did They Get 19 Kids? (1977); and Farewell to Manzanar (1976). A visit to his production base in Point Reyes Station in Northern California inspired Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas to start their own operations away from Hollywood.

Michelle Materre
(May 12, 1954–March 11, 2022)

This one’s personal: Michelle Materre was already a force of nature in New York City in the late 1980s when I lived there and was a key to the success of Women Make Movies (WMM) over the years.¹⁵ She’d come up through Blackside, Henry Hampton’s legendary documentary production company in Boston. In New York, she was a sort of fairy godmother to filmmakers, setting up the company KJM3 to run campaigns for Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (its first assignment and raison d’être) and many others. She then became a curator, establishing her Creatively Speaking series, which did so much to win audiences for the work of filmmakers of color and women directors. For the last two decades, she was on the faculty at the New School, inspiring students. She was a beacon for Black filmmakers—for those making women’s stories, in particular—with an undiminished faith in their work. Chair of the board of WMM at the time of her death, she never stopped shaping the field.

Marina Goldovskaya
(July 15, 1941–March 9, 2022)

Marina Goldovskaya lived in Los Angeles for many years, taught at UCLA, and made numerous acclaimed documentaries both there and in the former Soviet Union, most notably A Bitter Taste of Freedom (2011), about her close friend Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was assassinated outside her house in 2006.¹⁶ She studied at VGIK, the Russian state film school (her father having been one of its founders), and one of her first jobs was serving as a camera operator for Andrei Tarkovsky. After retiring from UCLA after two decades, and after more years in Los Angeles, she shocked her friends by moving to Latvia to be closer to her son. Filmmaker Vitaly Mansky wrote that “she was a woman documentary filmmaker with a camera in her hand at a time when she was the exception to all the rules. She made her own rules, and she was always victorious.”

Brian Winston
(November 7, 1941–April 8, 2022)

This one’s personal, too: Winston was a tornado force in the documentary field, a cofounder of the Visible Evidence conference, a fierce defender of justice, and an unreconstructed British leftist who boasted equally of his Oxford degree and Jewish working-class background. He was a shaper of academic initiatives, whether chairing the NYU Department of Cinema Studies or serving a long tenure at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, where he held the first Lincoln Professorship at the time of his death, having already been a pro-vice-chancellor of the university and former dean of Media and Humanities. He published more than twenty books and countless articles that shaped the field, but it was his indelible presence that really jump-started his ideas, forcefully communicating his deep belief in the efficacy of documentary as a force for good. Tributes have poured in ever since his recent, sudden death shocked colleagues, and will doubtless continue to do so in many forms. He was a fighting man, and documentary was his ring.

In This Issue

In her essay on Tsai Ming-liang’s Rizi (Days), Jean Ma considers the director’s long-established focus on a body ruled by drives, not stories or subjectivities, as a magnetic force that courses through his observations of the flesh and its daily needs. When Lee Kang-sheng, his muse and main actor, suffered a stroke, he began etching an ongoing portrait of pain and relief. In Days, he also introduces a new co-protagonist, played by Anong Houngheuangsy, and continues the themes of abjection, connection, and isolation that Ma traces throughout his work, up to and including Tsai’s signature “uncomfortable sex scenes.”

Patricia White uses the massive attention paid to Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog as an opportunity to think about the status of the woman-authored Western, dating all the way back to Nell Shipman and Ida Lupino—and forward to Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace and so many others. White situates Campion’s film within the contemporary terrain of Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (and her earlier films), of Chloé Zhao’s works, and of the recent documentary Bitterbrush (Emelie Mahdavian, 2021). Interrogating both settler identity and “the surplus symbolic value of white womanhood,” White undertakes an expansive reconsideration of the Western as auteurist genre.

Tiffany Sia probes the evolving nature of oppositional documentary through the work of the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, whose documentation of protests has created a model that “transcends surveillance cinema” in favor of “a filmmaking that itself joins the subjects portrayed in anonymity and fugitivity.” Revising the old point-and-shoot model of protest documentary, these communal anonymous works offer a new vision of empowered citizenry as a mass protagonist, faces blurred, insistently staking a claim to “opacity” as political strategy.

In a study of Andrea Arnold’s Cow and Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda, Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa undertakes a reconsideration of a different kind of documentary, positioning these two works in relation to ideas of indexicality, allegory, and agency. As distinct from “wildlife documentary,” these new agrarian visions position subjects and spectators within a “space for political and ethical reflection, contemplation, and judgment” and permit animals “to enter public political discourse not as alien outsiders but as fellow subjects of power.” He offers the domain of the nonhuman not only as history but, detouring into science fiction, as future.

Sadly, this year’s Sundance Film Festival was forced to move online due to a COVID spike two weeks prior to its opening night (making an in-person event impossible with the limited medical facilities of its Park City, Utah, location), but, as last year, a significantly wider audience than in pre-pandemic times flocked to attend, albeit online. In my report on the festival, I note its significant successes, including a stirring and prescient trilogy of films about the history of abortion and abortion rights in the 1960s and 1970s as seen through one feature documentary and two dramatic films (one American, one French) based on true events. And along with a number of outstanding documentaries, Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny marked the arrival of a new voice in horror, linking the supernatural to the mortal.

In a series of columns, FQ’s contributing editors bring readers up to date with ideas stirred by recent releases. Caetlin Benson-Allott takes up Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter in order to consider “privacy as a representational issue.” She points to the films’ shared cinematographer, Hélène Louvart, for her picturing of female subjectivity—a new sense of impenetrability that works in sync with acting styles. Manuel Betancourt is moved to revisit his own Colombian heritage by the near-simultaneous release of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria and Jared Bush and Byron Howard’s Encanto, both of which escape the long decades of pornomiseria for a land of magic and ghosts—whether a respectful outsider gaze or an “EPCOT-ized” commodification. Rebecca Wanzo, inspired by Rebecca Hall’s Passing, looks at the history, both cinephilic and sociological, of cultural ideas of blackness in order to consider the film’s signal aesthetic contributions, ending on a claim for the place of black beauty in the social-issue film as a precedent equal to the racial melodrama. Bilal Qureshi—in this, his final FQ column—discusses Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee as a different kind of animation, one that relies on its soundtrack so thoroughly as to constitute a new kind of documentary that offers a “master class in intimacy and immersion in the form of a radio film.”

Bruno Guaraná’s “Page Views” column features Lindsey B. Green-Simms and her new book, Queer African Cinemas, which explores the particular challenges and strategies of queer media making on the African continent. Encompassing but going beyond Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki, its best-known text, which was banned but went on to become the second-highest-grossing film in Kenya’s history, Green-Simms unpacks the strategies of circulation that govern queer film and video on the African continent. Full of unexpected stories, from the online posting of “queer-affirming clips from otherwise homophobic films” to the shutting down of the popular Queer Kampala International Film Festival, she builds a case for an “Afri-queer fugitivity,” drawing on such concepts as Fred Moten’s black fugitivity and José Esteban Muñoz’s queer futurity to imagine a new subject position.

Finally, an extraordinarily rich book-review section—the first under the direction of new book-review editor Nilo Couret—includes substantive considerations of works by Rosalind Galt, Rochona Majumdar, Charles L. Leavitt IV, Leslie L. Marsh, Catherine Knight Steele, Jacob Gaboury, and Nicole Starosielski. Thanks to this issue’s reviewers—Iggy Cortez, Trinankur Banerjee, David Forgacs, Hoor Elshafei, Briana Barner, Kyle Stine, and Samir Bhowmik—for their perceptive contributions.