The Neutral Ground (2021 | USA | 82 minutes | CJ Hunt)
Before the summer of 2020, when the dismantling of Confederate statues reached the critical mass to become a national flash point, the process was already well underway in New Orleans. In 2015, that city’s council had authorized the removal of four such monuments, but it took the concerted effort of activists all the way through 2017 to finally see that small action to completion. As white supremacists (and “not white supremacists”) set up roadblock after roadblock to the process, director CJ Hunt, who was on hand to film that city council vote and initially produced a comedic short video about the proceedings, realized there was a lot more to this story, and kept filming.
Hunt is a comedian, who currently works as a field producer on “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah, and this could not be more obvious. Many sections of this film read exactly like “Daily Show” field segments, featuring man-on-the-street interviews where he catches bigots in their tangled un-logic or higher-risk interludes where he embeds himself in the enemy’s camp to find out how they think.
Hunt’s persona in these interviews lands in an easy comparison zone somewhere between Jason Jones and Hari Kondabolu: credulous, sardonic, witty and whip-smart. He’s of mixed Black and Filipino heritage, and takes the opportunity of exploring this issue to explore some of the implications of his own Blackness as well, making this a personal journey of discovery on top of the political elements, including several filmed talks with his supportive and passionate Black father. It’s all the more affecting, then, when his comedic tools fail him after observing the 2016 Charlottesville march, and his reaction betrays a more sincere kind of fear than we’ve grown used to seeing.
A great companion to the SIFF 2021 documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, this film takes an excellent, well-researched, and yet somehow still funny deep dive into the history of these Confederate monuments, those who defend them, the great lie of the “Lost Cause” narrative, and the reckoning with white supremacy in which America at large has only just begun to engage.
North By Current (2021 | USA | 86 minutes | Angelo Madsen Minax)
Angelo Madsen Minax’s debut feature, after a series of experimental shorts, is an intensely personal essay film, a self-referential documentary with some experimental tendencies, some gestures toward explorations of broader cultural issues such as addiction, wrongful incarceration, masculinity, and trans identity, but mostly an excavation of personal family trauma.
It takes a few minutes to even discern what the subject of this film exactly is, as we meet the filmmaker – a trans man, who includes skillfully collaged footage from his childhood, people using his birth/dead name, and a voiceover conversation with his childhood self. Then Mormons and the small Michigan town of Houghton Lake both come into play, each with a little backstory on their history that feels like feints in the directions of making the documentary fully about one or the other of those two subjects. But finally we settle on the filmmaker’s sister, Jessie, whose two-year-old daughter suddenly died, leading to a suspicious legal eye pointed toward herself and her new boyfriend, who would go on to be the father of several more children to whom she seemed to begin compulsively giving birth.
It turns out the subject of the film is all of these things, held together by the common thread of this family facing tragedy and trauma, and very slowly healing from it. Minax started filming early on in the case after the death of the baby, but he takes several years to get to the questions he really wants to ask and find truthful answers from both his mother and his sister, each of whom are healing from wounds he’s caused them as well as regretting injuries they’d caused to him. The whole thing feels a bit messy and necessarily incomplete, but the music of Julien Baker helps contribute a weighty atmosphere to tie together all these separate and connected forms of grieving and reconciliation into a deeply intimate portrait of a troubled small-town American family.
The Neutral Ground and North By Current played in-person on prior dates at SIFF DocFest, but are both available virtually now through Thursday, October 7th. Both are restricted to US audiences.
Follow other updates from this year’s festival via our SIFF DocFest coverage.