An Extraordinary Place. Courtesy of CIFF
This year, Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) marked its 20th anniversary with—as described by its programmers—a lineup of highly political films. In their remarks on opening night, CIFF programmers Milton Guillén and Zaina Bseiso invited audiences to “enter into these films and figure out how we are compelled to build solidarity with other people as audiences.” CIFF stands out as one of the few festivals that both maintain a virtual component and take a clear political stance on the ongoing (mediatized) genocide in Palestine.
Bseiso, who is Palestinian, prompted further reflection: “What do we owe these messengers, these messengers of the urgent image, who have given their lives, their families, their futures, their memories, the heart and souls of their loved ones who will miss them, to bring us knowledge?”
Bseiso’s question gained further urgency a week after the festival screened No Other Land (which was not available to watch virtually), when an alarming message from Palestinian co-director Basel Adra circulated on social media: “This morning several occupation soldiers invaded my home and kidnapped my father toward the illegal Havat Maon outpost.” The post was followed by a harrowing photograph of his father blindfolded and tied up inside a settlement. Adra’s message is a reminder that the work does not end when the festival ends and that documentaries are not transformative by themselves. For documentaries to change the world, they require continued engagement. Solidarity is more than a trend or a single act—it’s a profound commitment that often comes with challenges.
I dare to share that for months I could barely enter a cinema or watch a film because cinema stopped making sense. While a genocide unfolds, I saw media institutions betraying the commitment we accepted when working on documentaries. When programs started to include films that directly addressed the Palestinian struggle—like the Anthology Film Archives series Cinema of Palestinian Return, curated by Kaleem Hawa and Nadine Fattaleh—with films that provided more knowledge and fought the hegemonic spread of misinformation, I was able to reconnect with cinema. This reconnection wasn’t only because of the films’ content but also because I saw us organizing with what we know best: films.
While the programming of CIFF highlights critical political themes, I was keenly aware of other factors that shape the politics of audience engagement beyond the films themselves. I was not able to attend the festival in person and had to watch the films mostly with press screeners because CIFF’s virtual festival employs Eventive, a platform that allows organizers to not only georestrict content but also block VPN usage. These limitations don’t originate from the festival organizers but from distributors or filmmakers adhering to potential buyers’ or future festivals’ requirements. This raises a crucial question: How can an “international” film festival foster solidarity and community across global cultures and histories in an exhibition system that unintentionally excludes the very cultures whose stories are being told? Considered outside of these forces, the 2024 CIFF program diligently wove together films that connected different modes of existence and resistance, and allowed me to stay engaged politically and cinematically.
Meditations on Silence
Sebastián Quiroz’s Meditations on Silence uses archival material produced in Chile between 1910 and 2022 to tell a hyper-sensorial story of a dismissed case of torture that was perpetrated by the carabineros (Chilean police) on a 22-year-old man in the Baquedano metro station during the historic civic uprising in 2019. (The protests began in response to a Santiago metro fee raise and expanded due to fury about the country’s inequality.) The film opens on a scene of the subway’s inauguration on September 15, 1975, as we see Pinochet and his cabinet in military uniforms, walking around the station and traveling in a wagon, with a multitude of people following them.
CIFF opened a day after the 51st anniversary of the Chilean coup d’état that marked the beginning of the Pinochet dictatorship. During this regime, more than 40,175 people were murdered, arrested, and disappeared, the whereabouts of the latter still unknown. For Latin Americans like myself, depictions of Pinochet and the military state wrench our hearts, evoking horror and painful memories of the people we have lost. It is as if Pinochet’s ghosts live wherever he walked, wherever he stood. And we have to deal with its effect, not only for what it does to our memory, but because one of the same train stations where he once walked has so recently been used as the venue for the torture of another young protestor (called “X” in the film for his protection).
The documentary interweaves sections of the young protestor’s declaration describing how he was tortured with archives of Chile’s past. Among these are military planes and parachuters, divers flying in the air, and the sequencing reminds us of the death flights used to disappear any opponent of Pinochet’s government. Quiroz never shows these flying men landing their planes, just as we have never again seen those who were flown and disappeared in the Pacific Ocean.
The narrator tells us the Chilean authorities dismissed the Baquedano case. Those who are aware of history know that the Baquedano case of torture is true, and that more than one person was tortured, but Quiroz does not refute the dismissal. This allows for multiple interpretations, the most dangerous of which is what many Chileans fear: that it feeds the arguments of those who deny that the dictatorship happened, in a country that still deals with its effects.
A Fidai Film
CIFF’s Cinematic Vision Award was awarded to Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film, which reminds us that what has been stolen can be taken back. According to the program notes, in Arabic fida’i means “to give oneself fully in service of another,” and is linked to the Fidayyin, the freedom fighters of the Palestinian revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. In the film, Aljafari reinterprets Palestinian archive footage that was seized from the PLO and recontextualized by the Israeli army, turning it into a statement of cinematic resistance.
A Fidai Film takes us on a journey across time, through black-and-white and color footage, to see what Palestinian life was like—nonstop destruction committed by the IDF, bombing of civilian buildings, checkpoints, death, children, settlers—interspersed with text from letters from writer, journalist, and political activist Ghassan Kanafani and intellectual, writer, and scholar Anis Sayegh. There is also a scene that for us in film is quite familiar, a continuous, real-time shot of a train pulling into a station while people look at the camera. Though the images in the film are decades old, their expressions are strikingly similar to what we have been witnessing during the past 11 months. The pain we see now has long existed. Now that more film institutions are programming Palestinian films, it’s up to us to reckon with what Palestinians have been and continue to document while we haven’t been able to stop it. Just like Kamal Aljafari, I also believe that films should be fida’i: acts of sacrifice and resistance.
Apple Cider Vinegar
While Sofie Benoot’s film, one of my favorites at the festival, is premised as a surface-level nature documentary, watching it revealed a deeper message about the interconnectedness of all things. Apple Cider Vinegar opens with a night shot of wildlife set to the playful and whimsical narration by veteran nature documentary narrator Siân Phillips, who immediately starts to unravel tender treasures about nature, human life, and the universe. After the removal of a kidney stone, she embarks on a journey between the UK, Palestine, the U.S., and the island of Fogo, exploring how we are related through minerals and stones that have made up our planet for millions of years.
In California, Phillips meets with Charlotte, a woman who feels the earth’s pain, something that does not sound too far-fetched right now. In Palestine, Phillips visits one of the quarries that produce material for Israeli houses. She meets stonecutter Juma’a, who very skillfully splits rocks in two to reveal their secrets: fossilized flowers and fish dating back millions of years. It acts as a reminder that these rocks have long been witnesses to time and history, and that while they may be taken away to build houses inside of an occupied territory, they still hold the truth inside them, What particularly caught my attention was Phillips’s narration, which relates her inner reflections on the present: “What if I started sharing my sadness with you? What images would I show you?”
Short Films
If documentary—by operating a camera when things are happening—opens doors to lives and situations to which we wouldn’t ordinarily have access, how should documentaries represent contemporary lives, when many of our interactions take place inside our phones? We fall in love, share memories, create highly visual new languages in the form of stickers and emojis. We are communicating differently. The short films Familia 💖💎, Dull Spots of Greenish Colours, and You Can’t Get What You Want But You Can Get Me are a window to the intimacy inside our phones that a camera cannot reach. To tell these stories, the active participants take control of how and what is shared.
Recently awarded Best Short Film at the Santiago International Film Festival, Familia 💖💎, by directors Picho García and Gabriela Pena, playfully weaves together screens to show us what happens inside Picho’s phone, and therefore in his life. With generous amounts of humor and tenderness, the directors showcase Picho’s nuanced family dynamic, friends’ unconditional support, how he met and fell in love with his life and work partner, Gabriela—and, very subtly, his journey handling gender expectations in a Latin American society.
In the supersensory and animated Dull Spots of Greenish Colours by Sasha Svirsky, moving images blend and deconstruct to push us to reflect on doom scrolling’s war for our attention. Similarly, You Can’t Get What You Want But You Can Get Me, awarded this year with a Special Mention by CIFF’s short jury, fiercely tells the story of two transmasculine artists falling madly in love. Filmmakers Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh split the story of their effervescent relationship into three parts, using fragments of the screen to portray the more intimate, steamy, and raw aspects of their relationship.
I will always applaud the efforts made by festivals that include local work. The cities that welcome film festivals for a short period of time receive a group of people with new ideas and perspectives, adapting to the festival. But in the best cases, the festival also adapts to the city and its inhabitants. There cannot be an authentic exchange of ideas without considering what is happening in the space that we visit and share with others. CIFF’s dedicated program for “Made in Maine” films Heritable, Waldo County Woodshed, The Great Big Nothingness, and An Extraordinary Place tell different stories about life in Maine.
In Heritable, director Eli Kao pushes back against white supremacist ideas attempting to build an ethnostate in Maine. While telling the story of community support by creating a wood bank for those in need, the super short Waldo County Woodshed by Julia Dunlavey makes us aware that most of us are closer to homeless people than millionaires. And directed by Tom Bell, An Extraordinary Place is about a truly extraordinary place: independent radio station WMPG 90.9 and the people who make it possible. The music radio station is mostly run by volunteers from all backgrounds and ages, and each of them programs very different and diverse shows that do not answer to any private interest. They are a community that serves each other—something the documentary film industry should learn to replicate.
Mariana Sanson is a 2022 Documentary Magazine Editorial Fellow, a former film festival worker, and the communications manager at Chicken & Egg Pictures.