The Wash-Up

Whenever I reach the end of a festival like this, I look back and wonder what I was thinking when I made my choices of what to see. I seemed to see a lot of obscure films, and I can't help but wonder if I would have enjoyed myself more if I'd just gone to see Werner Herzog, George Romero and Morgan Spurlock. Over the course of MIFF I saw thirteen feature documentaries and two shorts nights. Of the features 2 were Australian, 3 were American, 1 was Canadian, 1 was British, 1 was French, 1 Slovakian, 1 German, 2 Israeli and 1 Iranian. I'm pleased to say the Australian ones held up very well.


The strongest films I saw were To See If I'm Smiling, My Winnipeg and Rock N Roll Nerd. They differed substantially in style and subject matter, with the common thread being that in all three cases the film-maker had a strong personal connection to their subject matter.


The weakest were, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the American and British films, where the influence of YouTube and Reality TV culture was in evidence, with a home video style aesthetic and at times a disregard for manipulation of the subject matter. Of course, this may simply reflect my choice of which films to see, but it is interesting that I saw more films from the USA than anywhere else and the difference in aesthetic to other countries was marked.

In terms of story, few films could compare to the raw power of the tales coming out of the Middle East. If only more dialogue about the Middle East was as well thought out and incisive as the films on display at the festival. The surprise let-down, for me, was Terror's Advocate, which on the strength of its content should have been interesting but somehow struggled to keep my attention.


Where films didn't work for me, it was often a case of the film-maker doggedly pursuing either a style that didn't fit the subject matter or questions that were not as interesting as others raised in the course of the film. Both cases highlight the documentary maker's need for flexibility. Whereas for narrative films sometimes a director's heroic stubbornness is what brings a creative vision to life, a la Apocalypse Now, in documentary it can be a pitfall. Sometimes, even if you've just, say, hypothetically spent months travelling across a country to film old monuments, you've got to take a step back and ask yourself if it's working quite as well as you had anticipated.