SXSW 2008: INTIMIDAD, BULLETPROOF SALESMAN and the Search For Deeper Meaning

Festival coverage sponsored by IndiePix.

The Austin of SXSW is abuzz and crowded.  Packs of 20- and 30-somethings walking purposefully down city streets, multi-colored credentials hanging around their necks.  Filmmakers and film lovers pass by gamers and web titans for days until finally, on Tuesday, the musicians arrive and the city, which had been at a steady boil, finally explodes.

For five days, movies and panels compete for attention with parties laden with queso and chips or, if you're lucky, bbq and a cold Lone Star.  Unlike at Sundance, where one wears the challenges as a badge of honor (I'm off to walk to the Library in the snow and its 18 degrees and I'm not sure I'm going to get a seat), the smallest inconvenience in Austin (it's playing at the Dobie?  I can't take my coffee in to the Paramount?) is enough to encourage everyone to stay put, grab a margarita or head to another happy hour.

WIthin this environment is a film conference (the word "festival" almost seems an inaccurate description) with an embarassment of riches - premieres from leading filmmakers, Sundance favorites and a raft of music related film titles - that can boggle the mind.  And it's all set against a backdrop of a shifting context for SXSW itself. 

A number of articles have hit in the past week - including a couple in the Hollywood trades - creating raised expectations and speculation about where, exactly, SXSW is headed.  The fevered reaction to IFC's acquisition of Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig's NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS (the first-ever pick-up of a SXSW premiere during the festival) only enhanced the questions.

For those of us in the nonfiction world, the idea of an emerging SXSW strikes as old news.  If you want to ascribe great meaning to SXSW's increased narrative profile, be our guest, but the documentary line-up has been strong for years - with a number of titles that began life at SXSW reaching far beyond Austin's city limits (a short list includes SPELLBOUND, MY COUNTRY MY COUNTRY, BOYS OF BARAKA, BILLY THE KID and HELVETICA).  Hell, we think it's one of the top 5 festivals for documentary in the world, but if the rest of the world wants to imagine that success at SXSW rises or falls with Bujalski, Duplass and co., who are we to fight it. 

But sometimes a rose is a rose and SXSW is a thoroughly straightforward festival.  From distributors to festival programmers to film writers (of which there were plenty), there is little attempt at subterfuge.  Everyone is here to have a good time, to enjoy a large, good festival that lacks some of the dealing and wheeling of Park City, and if that queso or BBQ or coffee gets in the way, well, so be it.  This isn't always understandable to filmmakers, of course, and will probably be less understood in the aftermath of the current rash of "is SXSW the next Sundance or is it the festival Slamdance always wished it could be" press pieces. 

Fact is, SXSW is SXSW - only more so than it was the year before.  More people, more films, more filmmakers, more bloggers, more outside entities looking to rub up against SXSW and receive a bit of its hipster charms.  Was this way in 2002 when I traveled to SXSW for the first time and is still this way six years hence.

What then to make of this year's documentary line-up, more than 60 films that run the gamut and are by turns intimate, political, funny and, in some cases, purposefully small.  Must we elevate the familial and the miniature into grander ideas and themes?   

The search for greater meaning was on full display at the Q&A for David Redmon and Ashley Sabin's INTIMIDAD, a beautiful portrait study of one Mexican family struggling to make a life for themselves.  Faced with few prospects in their small, remote village, Cecy and Camilo move to the urban city of Reynosa where they work multiple jobs, trying desperately to save money so that they can buy a piece of land.  Their decision also meant them leaving their toddler daughter back in the village with Cecy's parents, a choice that Redmon and Sabin illuminate with great humanistic restraint.

There is a universality to Cecy and Camilo's story - them wanting to make a better world for their child - but for some in Friday night's premiere audience, the larger concern seemed to be the disparity in incomes and costs of goods (the land and the house will cost $7000 US).  When Redmon was asked how he found his subjects, he related how he and Sabin had been researching a possible project that might trace the origins of Victoria's Secret products and had met Cecy, who had been working at a factory that made bras for the retailer.

This was all that some in the audience needed to hear as the remainder of the Q&A focused on the idea that INTIMIDAD was, in fact, a film with a political agenda (and for the lefty audience, an agenda that they wholeheartedly endorsed), a notion that Redmon rejected out of hand.  But that didn't stop audience members from proposing boycotts of Victoria's Secret or voicing their outrage.

While INTIMIDAD never shies away from the underlying conditions at play, the magic of Redmon and Sabin's film is in its ability to keep their focus on the humanity at play.  Cecy and Camilo's choice to leave their daughter and their subsequent longing for her provides an emotionality that deepens the film's exploration of the mundane and looming stuggles of the everyday and it's to the filmmakers' great credit that their observant camera is both intimate and unobtrusive.

What happens when the backdrop is Baghdad rather than the border towns of northern Mexico?  Can Iraq - and all the negative implications of that conflict - ever truly recede?

Debra Zimmerman of Women Make Movies, in her now-famous IDFA showdown with OPERATION HOMECOMING director Richard Robbins, argued that it was impossible or naive to create an apolitical film about war.  For the most part I agree with her, but you might argue that BULLETPROOF SALESMAN - the latest film from Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein (previously of GUNNER PALACE and THE PRISONER OR: HOW I PLANNED TO KILL TONY BLAIR) comes close.

Drawing from footage originally shot at the top of the US invasion of Iraq, Tucker and Epperlein offer a clear-eyed profile of Fedelis Cloer, a man who's in the business of war.  Specifically, Cloer has gone to Iraq in order to sell his wares - bulletproof cars, vests and other protective devices.  Arriving soon after the invasion, Cloer at first encounters diplomats and workers who presume that they will have no need for his products - greeted as liberators, flowers in the streets and all that.  But Cloer knows what the future holds, even if Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney did not, and once chaos ensues, Cloer is on hand to provide the necessary goods.

Cloer is matter-of-fact about his job.  When he sees a sign reading PEACE, he says that he doesn't want peace, he wants war.  Late in the film he notes that the best way for his product to improve is for people to die.  His product must fail in some way (bullets get through, bomb blasts are too big) in order for him to see where the deficiencies are.  Tucker is quoted in an indieWIRE piece as saying, "While it is a film about a man who profits from war, it's more a film about the pathology of violence." 

One of the things that has defined Tucker and Epperlein's work in Iraq has been their respect for the visual.  Nowhere was this more apparent than in THE PRISONER, for which Epperlein created a series of striking, graphic novel-like stills to tell portions of their subject's story.  That same flair is apparent in BULLETPROOF SALESMAN, starting with the initial title sequence that seems like something out of THE MAN WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD.

While war looms over the shoulder of Tucker and Epperlein's subject, this is a film that knows it's long past the time of debating the merits of that particular conflict and satisfies itself with examining one small part of those who benefit from war's existence.  However, some critics still seem to be under the impression that every film must aim for NO END IN SIGHT summarization or DARFUR NOW styled activism, that it isn't enough for a film, whether it be BULLETPROOF or FULL BATTLE RATTLE or ORDER OF MYTHS, to concern itself with the capturing of one human's story - that there must be some grander payoff, one that occurs outside of the cinematic realm perhaps, wherein films change lives. 

Both BULLETPROOF SALESMAN and INTIMIDAD feel like they could be even shorter than they are (neither runs longer than an hour and 15 minutes) and perhaps you'll ultimately see them in a length closer to 55 minutes - a running time that's ideal for television but seemingly problematic for festivals.  In choosing small stories, personal portraits and intimate profiles, the teams behind both films are not shying away from larger themes, nor are they implying that the backdrop is, in reality, the story.  The greater meaning to be found in either film is within the hearts of the subjects and not in the political bent of the viewer.

More to come...

Comments

[Timo]

Thank you...

[Bulletproof Jackets]

Great title, "Bulletproof Salesman" the title alone makes me want to see this film. Kudos to all independent filmmakers. I'm talking about the real "Mcoys" the ones without the backing of a major studio.

[Bulleproof Vests]

Yeah i agree with you Bulletproof Jackets. This film appears that it would do really well.