The first two Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festivals that took place during my time as a resident of Ithaca, New York were online-only affairs thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year’s festival did feature in-person events, but all films were still screened virtually. Although FLEFF provided me with a number of great movie memories prior to this year, including my favorite film of 2021 in Ahed’s Knee, I definitely didn’t feel like I ever got anywhere near the full festival experience and was therefore excited to dive into this year’s program!
As Girish Shambu noted in his blog post about attending FLEFF in 2019, event organizers define the word “environmental” so broadly that “the purview of the festival turns out to be all-encompassing.” The two films I was most eager to see, recent documentaries by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, are good examples of this. Neither Babi Yar. Context nor The Natural History of Destruction (despite its name) takes nature (which I would normally assume to be the focus of an event like this) as its subject, but the way they each combine restored footage found in archives across Europe with original audio and portray the same events from different vantage points perfectly embodies the festival’s theme of “polyphonies,” which as the FLEFF website explains “offer an embrace of the many, the multiple, and the diverse into a more energized whole, rejecting the singular, the mono, and the linear.”
Babi Yar. Context is about a ravine in the vicinity of Kiev where tens of thousands of Jewish and other inhabitants of the city were massacred during World War II, but wasn’t commemorated in any way until decades later. The Natural History of Destruction is essentially a history of the war narrowly focused on bombing and missile attacks on non-military targets. Both are harrowing depictions of humanity at its absolute worst which use their too-perfect soundtracks to shift our attention from the fact that they are historical, i.e. about events that actually happened, to the idea that people are responsible for these things and might do them again. This was further underscored by festival Patricia Zimmerman’s introduction for Babi Yar, during which she noted that Loznitsa originally intended to come to Ithaca in person, then planned to answer audience questions via Zoom, but couldn’t ultimately do either because he’s in the field making a new film about the war currently raging in Ukraine.
A munitions factory sequence in The Natural History of Destruction is reminiscent of my favorite movie from this year’s festival, Matter Out of Place, which travels around the world to show how the inhabitants of a variety of far-flung locales solve their common problem of what to do with their trash. The film’s title is borrowed from a euphemism used by the volunteers who clean up after the Burning Man festival in Nevada, and just as director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread forever changed the way I look at the food I eat, I suspect this film has permanently altered the way I think about the concept of “waste.” Some particularly unforgettable moments include the opening, which cuts from a pristine mountain lake to a close up of a beach covered in plastic, and a dump in Kathmandu where garbage trucks can only navigate the narrow, muddy path that leads to it with the aid of bulldozers to push them along when they get stuck.
Less obviously connected to the festival’s themes, but in keeping with one of its longstanding traditions, were the silent films I saw, both of which are celebrating their hundredth birthdays this year. Introductory speaker Michael Richardson encouraged us to ponder about what lessons the German Expressionist Warning Shadows, which was accompanied by local ensemble Cloud Chamber Orchestra, might offer for the present day. With a timeless extended shadow puppet dream sequence and a plot that could easily be described in terms of “toxic masculinity,” this wasn’t hard to do. The Harold Lloyd vehicle Safety Last!, which screened on an absolutely gorgeous spring day and was accompanied by “deep groove zydeco” band Li’l Anne and Hot Cayenne, is a trickier case. Looking back on it with Richardson’s challenge in mind, I believe that it does perhaps train the viewer’s eye to look differently at the built landscape? There is, of course, Lloyd’s famously effects-free scaling of the Bolton Building, but also a POV shot from an ambulance and enough ingenious techniques for avoiding detection by bosses, landlords, and police officers to make a how-to manual.
My final FLEFF film was No Bears, which somewhat embarrassingly is the first one I’ve ever seen by director Jafar Panahi, although I did catch his son Panah’s latest Hit the Road at Cinemapolis (where all the screenings mentioned in this blog post took place, by the way) last year. Like that movie, No Bears is set near the border between Iran and Turkey. In fact, the character played by Panahi inadvertently crosses it at one point despite the fact that, like his real-life doppelgänger (although thankfully not any more, apparently), he has been forbidden by the Iranian government to travel abroad. I loved the film’s strangely (at first) artificial opening shot, which doubles as the beginning of a docudrama that the fictional Panahi is making. The latter takes a tragic turn late in No Bears just as things also fall apart in the small village that the director is staying in to be closer to his film shoot as the result of a controversy over a picture he may or may not have taken of two star-crossed lovers. Much of the discussion during “Talk Back” session which followed the film focused on its humorous and political aspects and how they play against and with each other, but I think I’ll remember this primarily as a master class by one who would know on the many ways in which making movies about “real issues,” which sounds so noble, can be horrifyingly costly for the people both in front of and behind the camera.
My biggest regret about this year’s FLEFF was that my schedule got in the way of all the free screenings I was targeting, which also means I didn’t catch anything with an Ithaca connection. Looking ahead to the future, I’d also like to try to attend at least one or two roundtable discussions or other events not tethered to a screening. But that’s the nice thing about a local film festival, isn’t it? You always do have next year!
The Prodigal Cinephile 