DocuWeeks Shorts Program
The Barber of Birmingham
Maya Deren’s Sink
The Home Front
IFC Centre, August 16, 2011
Movie #61 for 2011
Every year the IFC Centre screens the IDA's documentary film festival to help docos qualify for Oscar nomination (something about the number of screens in the number of cities, or something). This includes a shorts program.
The Barber of Birmingham is a sweet film about a sweet man - an African-American Alabaman barber now in his 80s who was a civil rights ‘foot soldier’ in the 60s - one of the men and women who quietly and non-violently demanded their civil rights day after day, without being a Rosa Parks or a Dr. King. Using the presidential election of Barak Obama to kick start reflections on the civil rights movement, the film covers a lot of ground - it could easily have been spun out to feature length - from the very personal perspective of a player in the story, to the bigger picture of the story itself.
Maya Deren’s Sink is an experimental documentary about an experimental filmmaker from the 1940s and the houses where she lived. It's based on Deren's films being projected onto the spaces where she filmed them, and voiceover from friends, family, neighbours and the folk who now own the houses. I’ve never really got next to experimental film, and this one didn’t help.
In The Home Front, the adage “good fences make good neighbours” is given a test drive as feuding Danish neighbors call in a local council mediator to resolve conflicts about their shared boudaries. The mediator is an affable guy who understands how people get to the point where they need mediation, but thinks it’s kind of stupid. He’s perfect for the job, really, and brooks very little nonsense without being a bully. Mediation is required for overgrown hedges, drainage for dying hedges and for folks lopping down trees on another’s property. Without exception, the complainants are awful, cantankerous old men, belligerent about getting their own way. They’re both funny and sad in their self-righteous indignation and their isolation. Through keen, nonjudgmental observation, The Home Front finds something universal to say about human kind in the minutiae of shared boundary lines.
