The overcast afternoon, and now freezing rain, plus not getting enough sleep for the last few days has made today a little bit sleepy and surreal. Though the jurors have headed to the airport and everyone’s a bit tired, the last day of the festival has brought in crowds all the same, especially for the Awards programs.
I just got out of the first showing this afternoon. City to Yourself, a grainy, poetic essay-like documentary of Detroit, commenced the program with the city's shocking problems and romantic decay. It was so entrancing that I didn’t realized that my massive popcorn ended up being pretty much gone after the film's 24 minutes. Nora, winner of the Eileen Maitland Award for the film that best addresses women’s issues, followed the tense life moments of a dancer in Zimbabwe. Surrounded by settings saturated with varied textures and colors, Nora, the main character, acted out emotions through expressive movements, bringing in a rarely scene artistic medium in the already very holistic realm of film.
The Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival goes to O’er the Land, which I watched early in the afternoon. Though it’s a longer piece (at 51 minutes) , I plan to head back to the theater in a short while to catch it again. I found that the beauty of the compositions—all shot in 16mm and even more captivating with the Michigan Theater’s incredible projection system—often mesmerized me to a point that I lost focus of the story. I would definitely blame that more on the sleepiness than the director. Filmmaker Deborah Stratman uses intense sound accompaniments--like the repeated blare of a fire alarm, bug noises in the forest, or empty silence--to drive her sequencing of painterly scenes.
In some scenes, themes of war, death, and destruction are juxtaposed with narration, the most striking being a dramatic story of survival told by a military pilot. For the most part, the camera stays still or slowly panning, such as with some beautiful shots of trees with rustling leaves and undulating branches, and on occasion suddenly makes jarringly sharp movements that punctuate the emotion of the story. Shots of humans seemed dehumanized and automaton-like—lines of marching band members or civil war re-enactors stiffly stream by the camera lens. I’m not one to re-watch much of anything, but I’m sure that a second viewing of O’er the Land will reveal much more depth and dynamism than the first, as any fine work of art should do.