Taking aim at the best and worst of movies and television.
War criminal Issa Sesay, subject of the documentary 'War Don Don' at the South by Southwest film festival.
Documentaries have always been one of the strong suits of the South by Southwest Film Festival -- and this year is no exception. Even as the event grows exponentially and threatens to be swallowed by the Hollywood hype machine, there were a handful of titles that were scrappy, original and independent-minded. You can’t call SXSW a sell-out just yet.
Sunday afternoon brought the United States premiere of Google Baby, which also screened at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. The movie takes a clear-eyed, thoughtful look at what might be described as the "global baby making industry," from a small town in Tennessee, where a young women earns money to have her eggs harvested, to Tel Aviv, where a gay man runs a low-cost surrogacy service, to India, where a surrogate earns far less than what she might in the United States -- but still enough to buy a house.
Directed by Zippi Brand Frank, the movie does what the best documentaries do: It opens your eyes to a world you didn’t know previously existed. Frank doesn’t take sides, and she doesn’t try to oversell her points. Instead, Google Baby lays out the facts -- and allows us to understand the moral and ethnical dilemmas at play -- and then asks us to make up our own minds. It’s a terrific effort that -- luckily -- is set to play on HBO in April. Keep your eyes peeled.
Less successful, but still worthwhile is War Don Don -- one of the films in the documentary competition at the festival. Director Rebecca Richman Cohen takes us behind the scenes at the trial of Issa Sesay, who was charged with war crimes as one of the leaders of the RUF, the rebel organization that terrorized Sierra Leone for a decade.
The first half of the picture, which explains the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone and its tenuous resolution in 2002, is gripping and lucid; the second half -- in which Cohen does backflips to try to argue that Sesay was railroaded by the international criminal court -- devolves into a liberal naivite. (The movie basically argues that, even though he oversaw the murder, decapitation and rape of thousands of people, he somehow took the fall for RUF members who committed even greater atrocities.) Still, this is a notable effort that kept the audience rapt at its premiere on Saturday afternoon.
A third title -- 11/4/08 -- is less a documentary than an intriguing time capsule: The creator, Jeff Deutschman, asked a group of his filmmaker friends to make video accounts of what they were doing on Election Day in 2008. As he explains at the start of the film, "I wanted to see what history looked like.”
The movie ultimately goes on too long, and it doesn’t exactly offer a variety of perspective (most of Deutschman’s friends are white, well-educated and liberal, just like himself). But as a study in boundless optimism that's yet to be tested by political reality, this is a fascinating snapshot of a moment. If Deutschman decides to carry forth with the project, he might even end up with something as historically resonant and complex as Michael Apted’s famed “Up” documentaries (7Up, 14Up, 21Up and so forth), which revisit the lives of the same Brits every seven years.
