The Earth is Blue as an Orange (2020 | 74 minutes | Iryna Tsilyk)
My experience with a lot of the documentaries at the festival has been a far cry from the addictive pop documentaries that have skyrocketed to prominence on cable or streaming services. Whereas an army of talking heads, voice-overs, captions, and suspenseful editing spoon-feed every detail of a scandalous murder, unearthed secret, or salacious scandal, many of the films in competition at SIFF have been downright withholding. It’s often unclear where something is set, over what time period it was filmed, or who the characters are in relation to each other, requiring a deeper sense of patience and surrender.
Such was the case for me and The Earth is Blue as an Orange. With a title borrowed from Paul Eluard’s surrealist poem, it is unsurprising that this puzzling film packages so many shots of astonishing beauty into a multi-layered story at the edge of an ongoing war in Ukraine without providing much in the way of a roadmap. As the film opens, the family is constructing a makeshift set to film documentary-style interviews. But before we can get to these stories, we flash to other scenes of their homelife on the front: exploring neighborhood shellings, huddling in a bomb shelter, sure. But between bombings, the days of this single mother and her daughters are spent at home in the company of their family, wily cats, curious pet turtles, and neighborhood kids who they enlist as they create art, compose music, and make films. Later, we learn that one of the daughters, Mira, is applying for film school to study cinematography. As we see her and her friends amid the quiet the desolation of their abandoned town, we begin to wonder whose film it is that we’re watching. It’s not until the end that the initial interviews come to fruition, but here, director Iryna Tsilyk (who spent over two years filming the family filming each other) makes the choice of showing the monologues not as the camera saw them, but as they were experienced in the rooms where they were films and the auditorium where they were exhibited. Ultimately, the film feels like an aloof dance of co-creation.
I miss theaters for many reasons, but suspect that that in a dark cinema with no distractions I would have been better up to the task of allowing myself to sink into its mysterious rhythms and indulge in its painterly tableaux rather than impatiently wishing I could decode a linear storyline amid the distractions of home.
The Earth is Blue as an Orange is playing in SIFF’s Documentary Competition; a pre-recorded Q&A with director Iryna Tsilyk is available as part of the screening.
Chuck Connelly: Into the Light (2020 | 74 minutes | Benjamin Schwartz)
Part documentary, part therapy sessions, director Benjamin Schwartz spends much of the running time of his film trying to get the cantankerous painter Chuck Connelley to leave the house where he spends nearly every day creating a new piece of art. Having reached the precipice of success in the New York art world in the 1980s (a major piece sold to Saatchi looms over his self-mythology), his alcoholism eventually caught up with him, crashing him out of the scene, into rehab, and landing in a house in suburban Philadelphia. With limited human contact — a kindly neighbor here, a dedicated old friend there — he has spent the better part of the ensuing decades filling every room with stacks of canvases. The movie does its best to show as much of his vast archives as it can fit on screen in heavily-scored montages (the music by Connor Ragas does a lot of lifting throughout the film). As challenging as it is to find major themes running through the eclectic collection, it is impossible to deny the talent underlying it. With Connelly’s moods swinging between extreme poles of introspection and self- and interview-directed rants and rages, both the causes and consequences of his reclusive life become evident.
Though there is plenty of darkness in his past, Schwartz’s film is, after all, subtitled “Into the Light” — a clear signal of his primary interests in hope over despair and of capturing a creative spirit embracing work over self-destruction. Through prodding, composed fortitude, and the catalyzing sale of that monumental Saatchi piece, he captures the stirrings of Connelley’s personal renaissance that involves teaching up-and-coming talent, gingerly re-engaging with the world, and yes, bringing some of those dusty old paintings back into the light where they belong.
Chuck Connelley: Into the Light is playing in SIFF’s Documentary Competition. Director Ben Schwartz is scheduled to participate in a “Bold Virtuosos” Roundtable along with Cassandra Jabola (Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir) and Mariem Pérez Riera (Rita Moreno: Just A Girl Who Decided To Go For It) on Saturday April 17th at 6:30 pm.
Little Girl (2020 | 85 minutes | Sébastien Lifshitz)
For as long as anyone in her family can remember Sascha has wanted to grow up to be a girl. When Sébastien Lifshitz’s ambiently-observed documentary picks up in them in Northern France, that’s exactly what the second-grader is doing. But at her school and ballet class, teachers and a hidebound principal insist that she present as a boy and use male pronouns. Sascha’s mom both frets she caused her child’s gender identity by wanting a girl while she was pregnant and stalwartly commits to battling the school to give her daughter a happy, uncomplicated childhood. Her dad and siblings can’t fathom why anyone would be up in arms about a kid’s gender expression and are also stalwartly on Sascha’s side. While we see occasional tears — for instance, while visiting an extremely affirming child psychologist in Paris, often holding back feelings to shield her mother — just as the family rallies around Sascha in a kind of protective cocoon, the film also strives to bathe her childhood in a warm embrace. In its soft warm light, we see her playing at home, forming friendships with another girl from school, and going on trips with her family. Parental clashes with the school system and worries about their child’s future are kept almost entirely off-screen or confined to interviews. In doing so, the film succeeds in its quieter but still powerful path to advocacy, eschewing overt conflicts in favor of spotlighting the deeply human journey of one particularly brave child.
Little Girl is playing in the Official Competition; it will be released by Music Box Films.
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