Festival Dispatch: Four Days of Peace and Love at the Woodstock Film Festival

Whereas so many crazed entertainment gatherings thrive on competition and duress, the [Woodstock Film Festival] bucks the trend with a snug communal spirit. This year’s four-day event wrapped on Sunday as it continued the sense of rising prestige that has marked the festival’s stature since it launched eight years ago. The appeal is surely bolstered by Woodstock’s indefatigable hominess: Quaint storefronts peddle adorable ti-dye shirts, and a scraggly hippy known as Grandfather Woodstock (above) prevails over the picturesque center of Tinker Street. The localized environment turns the festival into an all-inclusive affair, rather than a disjointed hierarchy of professionalism. Hence, on Friday, an acquaintance called to ask if I was attending “the Jew party or the other one.”  

As for the parties, I ended up going to both. For the movies, however, I maintained a selective stance. Neatly structured yet surprisingly dense, the festival contained a wealthy combination of high profile content and small gems. I had seen several of the stronger entries at this year’s larger festivals, ranging from the arena of established artists (such as the unforgettable dramedy [Lars and the Real Girl ](/print.cfm?content_id=19547)and Todd Haynes’ stunning [I’m Not There](/20/39/film/erickohn2.cfm)) to small fish in a big pond that deserve all the attention they can get (especially [Billy the Kid]). For the most part, the festival films showcased creative ambition and wrestled with weighty themes. At the conclusive awards ceremony on Saturday night, emcee Ron Nyswaner joked that winners were required to make politicized acceptance speeches, but the activist mentality didn’t need any prodding to dominate the room.

There were plenty of outlets in the program for politically-minded radicals. Brett Morgan’s original documentary Chicago 10, which [I wrote about when it premiered at Sundance] earlier this year, found a warm home with the Woodstock audience. Morgan, a producer of the popular Bob Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, attended the screening for his semi-animated meditation on the infamous Chicago 7 trial that followed massive rioting during the 1968 Democratic Convention. After the movie ended, Morgan discussed his project in light of Steven Spielberg’s upcoming Chicago 7 film, which accepts the traditional perspective that the members of the Yippie protest group put on trial were the sole ones blamed for the riots. Morgan’s story takes into account the trial’s affect on three additional individuals—and, using court transcripts as a guide, it reanimates the disastrous judicial proceedings. Having seen him discuss the movie on several occasions, I’ve noticed how Morgan tends to avoid talking about whether or not it supports the notion of radical protests, showing more interest in his highly original storytelling techniques, some of which work better than others (the animation is stellar; the contemporary soundtrack, less so). Morgan said he hopes to get the documentary into theaters this February “to get people thinking about the conventions.” There couldn’t be a better possible time.  

Speaking of political rabble-rousing, it seemed to play into the favor of Dorris Haddock—a.ka. “Granny D”—a ninety-seven year old woman from New Hampshire whose dedication to upstanding citizenry first caught the media’s attention in 1999, when, at age eighty nine, she hiked 3,200 miles to protest soft money campaigns. Her politically-tinged vision resurfaced five years later, when the Democratic frontrunner for New Hampshire’s Senate spot dropped out and Granny D decided she would take his place. Her grassroots campaign forms the centerpiece of [Run Granny Run], an endearing documentary that screened at Woodstock prior to its HBO premiere on October 18 (this Thursday). The movie is immediately poignant; Granny D comes across as the sort of the gentle woman from innocent times whose steady wisdom drives her sense of duty.

As her campaign grows in its intensity, the movie becomes increasingly exciting and the final act builds an incredible sense of anticipation. Granny D is a likable protagonist even if you don’t sympathize with her beliefs. Much like An Unreasonable Man, the Ralph Nader documentary from earlier this year, Run Granny Run avoids being dogmatic. It settles for humanizing the idea of running for office to make a positive difference, rather than abusing the political realm for personal gratification. The dogged Granny D paraded around the festival with sterling pride, looking not glamorous but relieved.    

At the opposite end of the age spectrum, former child actor Luke Eberl brought his own politically-charged storyline to the festival, although it was entirely of his own invention. [Choose Connor], an election thriller about a pious high school student whose apprenticeship with a local politician (the fantastically creepy Steven Weber) leads him down a dark corridor of empty suits and frightening corruption. At the Q&A session followed the premiere of Eberl’s film, audience members (mostly older women) were shocked to learn that the director was twenty-two. But their amazement eventually settled into pleasant surprise. Eberl, an energetic, incessantly excited filmmaker from Los Angeles, seems both aware of his youth and willing to let it play to his advantage. Refusing to go into details, he told the audience that he embarked on extensive research when writing this script, “using fake names, thing like that.” Later, Eberl told me that he had written an early draft prior to this foray into studying his subject, and altered it once he had figured out the background details. His subtle understanding of the subject comes through loud and clear. I can imagine Eberl pretending to be a kid not unlike the movie’s sprightly protagonist, entering the offices of disingenuous politicians with a tape recorder in his pocket and letting them lecture him on the politics of power, then transferring their yammerings directly into his screenplay. A few of Weber’s shady monologues suggest as much.  

Eberl was born in Colorado, but he has spent the last several years in Los Angeles, appearing in several high profile projects and gearing up for a big debut. The occasional choppy parts, such as the movie’s abrupt shift from literal storytelling to the realm of allegory, basically add to its appeal: At times, they mimic the main character’s adolescent confusion. What Choose Connor occasionally lacks in utterly cohesive storytelling Eberl smoothes over with his ambition. Confessing his undying love for the expansive filmmaking techniques of directors ranging from Andrei Tarkovsky to Paul Thomas Anderson, Eberl justified his decision to lead the story into abstract turf. As political thrillers go, Choose Connor feels completely unconventional—just like Eberl’s endorsement of Dennis Kucinich.

Politics provides a canvas for exploring the fragile state of making decisions when personal interest is at stake. It’s the core of every morality play. In Choose Connor, this idea sets the stage for a David and Goliath battle of wits. Intriguingly enough, shortly after watching Eberl’s film, I saw the same conceits at work in The Election, one of [several exceptionally strong short films ]that screened at Woodstock in five separate programs. A tense eight minute noir directed by Padraig Reynolds, The Election follows a political candidate and his freakishly influential wife as they decide what to do about the body of a little girl they accidentally hit while driving on a road shortly before election day. A quick shot of murderous intrigue and gallows humor, The Election is like Blood Simple meets Primary Colors (in eight minutes). The story has a shocking climax that makes you laugh in response to its grim finality. But it’s a nervous laugh.  

Formulaic stories don’t need to force their ideas to feel satisfactory, but great genre films, particularly those that deal with horror stories, often benefit from encoding ideas larger than the specifics of the stories into the frameworks of their plots. This often results in subversive, inimitably contextualized works of art. It’s undoubtedly the raison d’etre for that Jew party and its cause celebre, the 20 minute short film [Night of the Living Jews]. Directed by nineteen year old Woodstock local Oliver Noble and produced by the hip yids over at [Heeb magazine](http://heebmagazine.com/), NLJ contains direct visual references to George Romero’s inaugural walking dead classic—but the zombies in this narrative sport curly sidelocks and black hats, and the only way to stop their wave of demonic insanity is the ultimate non-kosher weapon of bacon cheeseburgers. Noble and his competent young crew show a surprisingly efficient capacity for complicated set-ups. At times they mimic the B-movie feel better than their source material. But it’s the wacky premise, of course, that defines the experience. As the ultra Orthodox corpses spring up and inch toward the camera, and the movie’s title splashes across the screen in blood red, the grooving soundtrack indulges the Hebrew chants from the Kaddish, a Jewish prayer for mourning. Could Noble be suggesting, with this tricky play of cinematic formalism and chutzpah, that religious dogma is anachronistic? Maybe, but that doesn’t stop the movie from being nothing more than an outlandish exercise in devilish kitsch. Fun stuff.

After energizing a theater full of Woodstock residents in attendance to support Noble’s work, Night of the Living Jews was paired with a most awkward follow-up: Ti West’s [Trigger Man], a shaky cam experiment in queasy boredom that might have made been a decent horror film if it had received a slightly more streamlined approach. Playing with the blasé mood generated by a group of young people hanging out that defines so many entries in the tenuous mumblecore arena of filmmaking, Trigger Man follows a trio of young men whose planned hunting trip goes horribly awry when an invisible figure picks them as his target. Shot on low grade digital video with an increasingly annoying handheld style, Trigger Man moves painfully, almost lethargically slow, with no major plot developments for its first half. When the body count starts and the tension rises, the movie suggests an interesting direction, but it never manages to build much steam.  

Structurally, I was reminded of a small movie that recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, King of the Hill, which featured a protagonist running through the woods avoiding an anonymous gunman for a good thirty minutes. In that film, however, the shooter’s identity is revealed in the third act and the climax illuminates very succinct ideas about gun control. In Trigger Man, West toys with themes of masculinity and violence, but they never get a chance to congeal. The director demonstrates a thinking man’s approach to the horror genre, but avoids any real conviction about the content of his story. So it’s no surprise that [he’s currently going mainstream ]by directing the sequel to Eli Roth’s popular horror debut Cabin Fever.

Back in the realm of camp, veteran independent animator Bill Plympton presented his latest short, a tongue-in-cheek shocker called Shut-eye Hotel, which was included in an [animated shorts program]. Plympton, one of the programmers for the festival, plays off noir conventions in his latest work, a wordless, highly atmospheric tale of supernatural murders taking place in the eponymous inn. Along with Shut-eye, the program included an incredibly impressive grouping of artistry. Consistent with Plympton’s faith in traditional animation, none of the work relied on extensive three-dimensional elements or any of the other crutches offered by computer effects. These works were funny, restrained, and often quite brilliant. Highlights included Fantaisie in Bubblewrap, a hilariously imaginative bit by Arthur Metcalf wherein plastic bubble characters contemplate their existence shortly before being popped, and Teat Beat of Sex, a three chapter study in sexual confusion (of the intimately humorous, R. Crumb variety) directed by Signe Bauman.  

Both aforementioned shorts were given awards at the festival’s conclusive ceremony on Saturday night. Among the other honorees was [HighFalls], the 33-minute short directed by Andrew Zuckerman and starring Maggie Gyllenhaall and Stellan Skarsgaard. A light amusement about a couple learning to communicate, the movie knocks around a hilarious premise for its strong middle section, showcasing the talents of its performers.

The appearance of these high profile actors in a small work available to only a niche audience bodes well for the necessity of a creative forum in the festival environment. The essence of that notion resonated throughout the awards ceremony when renowned independent producer Christine Vachon, whose Todd Haynes-directed film I’m Not There closed the festival, took the stage to accept Woodstock’s Maverick award. “I’ve had a great career,” Vachon said in her acceptance speech as she held back tears. “I’ve been able to make movies that people in these kinds of communities like to see. I’m so grateful that I can keep doing what I want to do.” When the crowd applauded, they were also cheering themselves.  

 Photos (from top to bottom): Woodstock Film Festival insignia, Grandfather Woodstock, animated members of the Chicago 10, Granny D, Luke Eberl, Night of the Living Jews poster, Shut-eye Hotel, Christine Vachon accepting the Maverick award. Photos of Grandfather Woodstock and Vachon by Eric Kohn.