The New Generation of America Independent film-makers is growing, if only by means of incestuous interconnections. “The Mountain, The River, and The Road,” (Oct. 2 at 7 pm) the opening night film at the Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings Festival (Oct. 2-7) looks and feels like a West Coast version of “Mutual Appreciation” or “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” with the decadent urban grime of those pictures replaced by the airy mountains, clean flowing rivers, and open roads of the Northwest.
Although it is director Michael Harring’s first feature, it is well-pedigreed by virtue of its cast. Justin Rice, who is so familiar from Andrew Bujalski’s “Mutual Appreciation” that this seems like a sequel, continues to exploit his natural persona of one who is dull on the outside but interesting on the inside. As his sidekick who abandons him at the beginning of their road trip, Joe Swanberg, writer/director/cinematographer of “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” anchors the film with his quiet intelligence. Tipper Newton, the love interest, had a featured role in “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” and has recently completed her own short film with Swanberg. J
ust as the participation of Mark Duplass helped draw national attention to Lynn Shelton’s “Humpday,” Rice, Swanberg, and Newton’s contributions to “The Mountain, the River, and The Road” should be a further push toward getting Seattle wired into the national community of independent film-makers.
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Documentaries about eccentrics are often exploitive things that play on the viewers’ sense of superiority to the on-screen subjects, Not so “American Collectors,” (Oct. 5 at 7 pm) which respects the obsessions of those afflicted with “More-itis” without denying the entertainment value of entering the private worlds of borderline maniacs.
From a relatively tasteful collection of handcrafted purses to the near-catastrophic proliferation of AOL promotional discs, directors Bob Ridgley and Terri Krantz offer a fast-paced romp through the bedrooms and garages of our most single-minded citizens. We meet a young woman who feeds all her quarters into gumball machines as if they were slot machines and an old woman who still delights in playing with her Barbie dolls. One of the most articulate subjects explains that by collecting the toys he owned as a child he can trigger lost memories, while a guy who boasts the world’s most complete collection of Duran Duran posters is on the edge of tears as he tries to communicate just how far this band has gone to defining his own life. I
n addition to the excellent interviews, the film is a wealth of visual delight. Hundreds of bobble-headed dolls shimmy and shake to generic metal music. A theme-park for artifacts from science fiction movies of the fifties takes up residency in a donut shop. Finally, the sight of 100 idle tractors on a plot of unbroken land is a once-in-a-lifetime vision of displaced consumerism gone wild.
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Too many documentarians use the medium to express their own outrage. In “River Ways,” (Oct. 6 at 7pm) director Colin Stryker leaves the editorializing to his subjects, refusing to put a personal slant on the issue of whether or not the four dams on the Snake River in Eastern Washington should be removed to restore endangered salmon runs. The result is a provocative outburst of dissatisfaction with a situation that cannot help one person without hurting another. The conflict between fishing and farming interests is both timely and timeless, harkening back to the cattle wars between the ranchers and farmers and looking ahead to the showdown between industry and environmentalists.
Stryker records the death rattle of American individualism in his interviews with these sons of the pioneers who can no longer make their home on the range. He also shows the continuing struggle of native Americans to hold onto the fishing rights promised them in treaties with the government. From Frank Sutterlict, a stoic fisherman caught between white racism and tribal law, to Ben Barstow, a wheat farmer who would be out of business were he not subsidized by his wife’s parents, their voices tremble with anger and impotence as they fight their losing battles against a diminishing future.
ou are unlikely to see a truer portrait of what America has been and what it is becoming.
Complete schedule of films: http://www.nwfilmforum.org/go/localsightings/schedule.html
