DC Film Society: Adam's Rib June 2019 -- AFI Docs

AFI DOCS: It's Always the Film

AFI DOCS, now in its 17th year, has become an institution both in DC and in the documentary film community. The 2019 festival runs from June 19-23, featuring 72 films from 17 countries. Once again the films are split between DC venues and the AFI Silver in Silver Spring, MD. Tickets are available here. Festival Director Michael Lumpkin recently talked with me about this year’s festival:

Adam Spector: To start off, what are some of the biggest changes that people can expect going into this year’s AFI DOCS?
Michael Lumpkin: One of the major changes that I think people will notice is that we organized our program into sections to make it easier for audiences to find the kind of films they like. Some of that was informed by the films that are available this year but we expect some of these sections to be kind of evergreen and will always be in the festival moving forward. One section is Portrait, which are portraits, biographies films about people. We want it to cast a wider net and so that it’s not just biographies of people. We have films that are portraits of a family or portrait of a team, a group of people doing something. That’s one of the new sections. Another one is Truth and Justice.

AS: What prompted that section, which seems to be the largest one?
ML: It’s just that in the last number of years there have been a number of films that that are about human rights and civil rights and justice. There are films that that are in our Impact Labs, which is a program of AFI DOCS that happens in conjunction with the festival every year. And those are films that will have very robust impact campaigns that are tied to the films. The lab gives them the tools and the information that they need to execute a successful campaign to have an impact in the world. So a number of those films in the lab are in this section, but it’s just the nature of documentary -- being a format and an art form that can highlight a particular situation, an injustice, if you will, in our world with hopes of changing that.

We always have a number of documentaries related to music and there were a number of them this year. That section is Anthem. With this one we're taking a broad perspective on what falls into that category as well.

For example, Gay Chorus Deep South, which is a film about the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and a tour that they do through the south part of the United States, primarily performing in churches. That film could have very well lived in our Truth and Justice section of the festival, but we thought that it showed a way that music can build bridges, between different people in our country. I thought it would be great to put that in the music section, so that it’s there with films about great musicians like David Crosby and Linda Ronstadt and Miles Davis. And also another film the music section, Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements, which is a great film by Irene Taylor Brodsky. She has a son who is deaf, her parents are deaf and her son is also learning music and so it’s how music, and hearing relate to each other. It's a great film, and then The Apollo, it’s a great documentary about the Apollo Theater in Harlem and that was one where we were like, this could be a Portrait because it’s a portrait of this building, an important place in Harlem as a community center, a cultural center. But that ended up in our music section as well.

AS: Your opening film and your closing film both seem to be somewhat biographical. One about Bryan Stevenson True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality and the other one about Molly Ivins Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins who both looked to upset the status quo in their own way. Is that a conscious choice, to have two of them be the bookends for the festival?
ML: Both of these two people have really, really strong connections to Washington and they simply both are films that we be we really wanted to bring to Washington and show in Washington. Certainly the work of Bryan Stevenson is very relevant to Washington with numerous Supreme Court cases. Molly Ivins, though she was a Texas journalist, I think what she was covering in Texas has a lot of correlations to what’s happening on a national level now. Bryan is somebody who is working now and certainly the work he's doing isn’t over and his work will be going on for years and years and years. Molly is somebody we lost several years ago. Looking back at her life and her work --- really the relevant connections that just keep popping up in the film as we learned about her story that just ring really true to current situation in our country today.

AS: Along with Molly Ivins you also have a documentary about Mike Wallace Mike Wallace Is Here. And one way to look at those two would be “They don't make them like that anymore,” an elegy to journalism gone by. But another way would be, as you were alluding to, seeing what lessons can be learned from their careers that could still be relevant in today’s world. Is that how you see it?
ML: Journalists, and coverage commentary of the goings on, of our government and how our society works is, I think, becoming more and more prevalent now with the constant 24-7 breaking news atmosphere we live in. I think it’s very interesting to go back and look at journalists who were doing very much the same thing decades ago. Thinking about how Mike Wallace or Molly Ivins would be doing if they were covering what's going on today. I think that world is shifting and shifting very quickly. So I think it’s interesting to stop and look back and see how the giants of journalism, really not that long ago, what it was like for them to be covering politics at that time.

AS: And you also have one of your special programs about protecting journalists. Certainly, in the wake of Jamal Khashoggi’s death last year, that seems to be responding to an emerging need.
ML: Yes, I think that that journalism and documentary are very much adjacent kind of disciplines so I think more and more documentary is journalism and journalism is documentary. I think those two worlds are kind of overlapping more and more. There's a back and forth of journalists, working in documentary and vice versa so I think it's important to look at the world of journalism and what's going on there because it’s very close and very similar to work as documentary filmmakers.

AS: Your Guggenheim symposium honoree this year, Freida Lee Mock, doesn't have the same name recognition as some of the other ones you had in years past. What went into selecting her? Was part of the idea exposing her work to people that may not be familiar with it?
ML: The Guggenheim symposium is to both celebrate and look at master documentary filmmakers. Freida Lee Mock is somebody that I know as a master of documentary filmmaker for quite some time. It was the early-mid 90s when she won her Oscar for the Maya Lin documentary. She’s somebody who's been making films fairly regularly since then. I’ve shown her films at other festivals I’ve run over the past thirty-something years.

AS: You have a past Guggenheim honoree, Stanley Nelson, coming back with Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, that you were referred to earlier. When you have people like him, or Liz Garbus or Morgan Neville just to give a couple of examples -- is it the film or the filmmaker? If Stanley Nelson or Morgan Neville were to come with anything would you guys want to take it just because of the reputation and the quality of their past work, or does it really depend more on their particular film?
ML: It’s the film, it’s a film festival. And yes, we have the filmmakers presenting their films but I think the audiences are coming for the film. Morgan opened the festival a few years ago and we've had Liz Garbus at the festival and Stanley Nelson so they're all familiar with us, we're familiar with them, but, you know, more often than not it's the timing. The festival happens in June and all of these people are making films, and more often than not, the timing is usually the biggest kind of thing that determines if something’s in the festival or not because it’s released at a certain time of the year. The festival happens once a year, which is why we have our film series throughout the year to be able to show films that are being released at other times of the year. But going back to your question, it’s the films. That’s what we're looking at because that’s what the audience is coming to see.

AS: What films are most likely to surprise people, where they would come in and say, “I just had no idea that this existed,” or “I had no idea it was like that,” and, maybe, change their vantage point?
ML: I think there's a number of films like that. One of those films is Cold Case Hammarskjöld. I think that's one of the films where I keep hearing of people who see it for the first time and they’re blown away, like “I had no idea.” It's about the 1961 plane crash that killed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. Some of it’s like investigative journalism, but it’s much, much more than that. Another film that I had for myself that experience is Maiden, which is a documentary about a yachting race around the world and a female sailor who put together an all-female crew to compete in that race. On the surface, it sounds a bit like a competition film about a contest and who’s going to win. This film is way more than that and is a very eye-opening film. I think one of the main things is that the race happened 30 years ago. And then getting the background on this this kind of sporting event, and the way that films made, it’s just a really, really great experience. And very similarly, Gay Chorus Deep South, which I mentioned earlier, when you get into it is not what you expect.

I think that that your question gets to, for me, what is kind of a core fundamental thing that I look for in film. Surprise me, take me somewhere that I didn't expect to be taken when I walked into the theater and sat down. I think if a film can accomplish that, to me is just my favorite part of watching films and showing films. I want the film to take me somewhere I’ve never been, show me something I’ve never even thought about or introduce me to a person I don't know about or introduce me to a person that I thought I knew everything about and find out that I don’t.

AS: It’s going to be 50 years since the moon landing in July, and you have a pretty extensive film, Chasing the Moon, which clocks in at 361 minutes. I can't imagine it’s easy to book a film that’s going to take up that amount of time, but obviously you and your colleagues looked at it and said, it’s worth it.
ML: Certainly this year, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing is a significant moment. This is not the only documentary out this year or that will be coming out this year that looks at the space program. This one for me and for our programming team. The subject matter is so rich, and it’s so significant that that I think that this particular film really shows that you need the six hours to tell the story. It’s not just the detail you’re getting but you get so much critical important context, and it comes out in ways just kept surprising me with what I learned. I had no idea that that was part of the story or that this person was part of the story, and it connects so well to the time and it’s about the entire Apollo program. And it really gives you some great background on the space program as a whole. It’s a history of the space race and the race to the moon but it’s really a great documentary of that period in our history. It’s one of the best documentaries of the year at six hours.

AS: One other film I wanted to ask you about is After Parkland. That’s the flip side of the moon landing as Parkland was something that happened very recently, and something that dominated the news for a while, even for several weeks after the after the tragedy. Do you think this film will surprise people and what role do you see it playing in the discourse about that shooting?
ML: What grabbed me about this film is what’s happened since Parkland there, the reaction of the students. It’s been a very well covered story since it happened. We know a lot about it, and this film struck me as far from a rehash of what you know. It’s the film we need to see now in how they covered the subject matter, what they covered and how they covered it. It was motivating in terms of what needs to change in our world, but also brought together a lot of loose ends. Yeah, I just came away from it saying this is what we need right now. It gives you the kind of information that I think will help us, the country, move forward from it and move in the direction that, that we need to move. It’s interesting, it was one that surprised me in what it was, what it was actually doing and how it made me feel. So yeah, I’m excited to see how it plays with audiences and the discussion after the film.

AS: I noticed that, after many years where the number of films had increased pretty steadily, that in the past couple of years, the total number of films has gotten smaller. Is that a conscious choice to winnow the festival down a little bit more, or is that more just a reflection of current circumstances?
ML: I don’t know. We didn't go into it wanting to show less. We were looking at the films and what we wanted to show. The program to me feels like the same size and it’s different films. When you show a six-hour film that takes up a few slots as well (Laughs). Yeah, it’s just balancing all of the all of those things and it wasn’t a goal to show fewer. You're putting it together and that's what we came up with.

AS: Where do you see the festival going in the next few years?
ML: We want to build on what we’re doing. I think that that we’ve developed great partnerships, in the last few years, with organizations and media outlets and sponsors and such. We’ve been looking at our audience base. Where’s our audience? Where do they live? Where are they coming from? I’m not sure where we will be. I think just looking at how we can do more of what we’re doing, really.

Adam Spector
June 17, 2019