Like any industry film festival, Slamdance has its different strands – Graham talked about the experimental shorts, joining that there are animated shorts, and narrative shorts as well as the more traditional documentary and narrative feature sections that are also sub-divided. Fields that have some impressive alumni, with the festival highlighting Sean Baker (The Florida Project & Tangerine) and the Russo Brothers (Avengers: End Game & Infinity War). Most interesting to me, however, is the documentary shorts category, primarily because of the nature of the subjects being much more fluid than you’d expect for the documentary format.
Port D’ Europa centres around a political talking point that the terminally out-of-touch Tory party are using as a racist dog whistle – boats transporting refugees. Director Samuel Müller condenses 30 hours of flights with a German flight crew off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy, to show the depth of the political apathy and the international laws broken. But on a basic level, human lives are being used as pawns, even when viewed from afar. The cinematography may be gorgeous and the sea beautiful, but the humanity of this story just by a camera passively observing the day-to-day reality of these tiny boats risking life and limb on choppy waters is emotionally, morally and cinematically striking. It’s a sobering account that shows how much can be achieved with a documentary by just having a camera present at the right place and time.
The Italian/Swiss Lady with Lipstick, by Francesca Coppola, is next, symbolising a running theme to the programming – deeply personal accounts of life. This short sees a woman look back over her life from 50 years prior, edited together with archival footage of her family. While a very strong piece of editing, it unfortunately doesn’t live up to its thin premise. The titular lady with lipstick has a lot to offer, whether advice or sage wisdom of a life well lived, but clocking in under 10 minutes, it feels as if the short form of this documentary is cutting her off before she gets going.
A Home on Every Floor by poet Signe Rosenlund-Hauglid was equally personal but more vivid and lived. The Norwegian talks nostalgically of the block of flats she used to live in with her family as a child, the experience of her youth and the community spirit. Something formative which made her the person she is today, an experience that saw her have “a home on every floor”. What brings this to life is the homemade miniatures that represent this now gentrified building’s former glory, a visual presentation and art that shares the experiences of her fellow former tenants better than words ever could. That something so whimsical makes everything feel real is something of a magic trick. A little trickier is the poetry, I won’t be as bold as to throw the entire art form under the bus – it is somewhat difficult to relate to poetry in a different language and syntax. Yet, as a document of a life lost and loved, A Home on Every Floor is both an indignant and a wonderful way to spend 10 minutes.
Equally joyous is the punk rock documentary Dumpster Archeology by Dustie Carter about the inventor of the new titular school of archeology, Lew Blink. A man who jumps into dumpsters to find art and parts of lives thrown away. Something in-line with the hardcore punk ethos that intersects with veganism (as punk rock vegan movie depicted last year) in that waste benefits no-one and so these pieces shall continue to live on, no matter how fringe or weird. It’s a fascinating mirror to society that shows how wasteful people are, especially when you see his entire flat decorated with salvage (or so he claims). As idealistic as this dumpster archeology is, the documentary also shows its negative side through the appearance of a diary that goes beyond restoration and into the invasion of privacy – bordering even on online stalking. A problematic subject depicted with punk rock energy.
The most experimental of the documentary shorts is Shirley Yumeng’s He’s Fortune. The only active photography sees the film observe a fortune cookie factory at work, beyond that we are talking about a film that is truly a “document”. 16mm cinematography observes the life, tourism and residents of an American Chinatown offering magical realism through some expressively edited black and white footage and sequences all observed from afar. Fortune presents a well-designed soundscape that captures the soul of the Chinese American community without ever uttering a word – beyond those half-heard in the sound mix, at least. A very impressive work of art that stretches the boundaries of what makes a documentary tick. And, to continue this year’s Slamdance theme of being very personal, it does so without a single subject coming remotely close to addressing the camera’s gaze.
Leaving the most personal and haunting to last is Florencia Portieri’s You Were Never Really Here. Occupied with two strands to the life of an Argentine filmmaker who moved to America to become a filmmaker, Portieri tells of the minutiae in Argentina that bothered her while she still lived at home, but once she became an immigrant in a far away and foreign land made her heart yearn for the familiar. Something which informs the more arresting string to this shorts bow: this is a retelling of domestic abuse and rape. She tells of how she tolerated this abuse because knowing something – even hateful and toxic – is better than being alone with little more than your thoughts in a foreign land. Through deep-focus cinematography and dreamlike recreations, the director reclaims her bodily autonomy and rebuilds herself through self-affirmations that give her the confidence to chase her dreams in the good old USA.
The benefit of festivals like Slamdance is that it is far from the mainstream concerns of bigger film festivals, and that distance is clearly freeing. Stories more personal than would ever be considered elsewhere receive the platform and recognition they deserve, and it also allows a more interesting intersection of experimental with traditional forms. Not all experiments have to be like the ones mentioned in Graham’s experimental shorts article – sometimes experimental means evolving what we already know, and without festivals like Slamdance we wouldn’t see fearless people tackle issues that would never see the light of day otherwise and nor would the documentary become the creative and cultural force that it is today. Slamdance might not have the sex appeal of its fellow Park City festival, but it’s every bit as important in the long term.
