Tag Archives: documentary

Education, Health, News

Seattle Documentary Filmmakers Talk About a Subject’s Suicide

Special to The SunBreak by Odawni AJ Palmer.

Suicide is an increasingly significant global public health problem but stigma and other cultural and social factors keep suicide out of public discourse. It’s a silent and solitary act that needs to be talked about at a higher volume.

After viewing a 30-minute rough cut of Scott Squire and Amy Benson’s documentary footage of The Girl Who Knew Too Much, which explores their subject’s suicide in Nepal, this is exactly what we did — a panel-led audience of filmmakers, educators, human rights activists, mental health specialists, and native Nepalese — we talked.

Before they rolled footage, local filmmakers Squire and Benson gave a brief introduction of how they arrived at West Seattle’s Youngstown Cultural Center, presenting this concept piece. In 2008, the couple traveled to Nepal to begin a documentary about education changing the lives of girls who’d received school scholarships via a non-governmental organization’s program.

One of the girls, Shanta, captured their attention with her intelligence and ambition, so they followed her on her journey.  The following year, after the couple returned to Seattle to take a break from filmmaking, they learned that Shanta had hung herself. Devastated and confused, Squire and Benson returned to Nepal and interviewed her family about Shanta’s suicide. They wanted to try to understand what happened. What went wrong? What could have been done to help Shanta? Why did Shanta commit suicide?

Why does anyone commit suicide?

With The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Squire and Benson have the tragic opportunity to show us what it looks like before someone acts to take her life. They asked us to consider some questions as we watched the footage: What theme speaks to you? What did Shanta need? Why should we care? What can we do?

It’s clear that Shanta was isolated by her pursuit of education.

“Being smart is difficult in my situation,” she says. She has moved to the city to attend school, and away from her parents and younger sister who live in a low-resource rural community. She now lives in a crammed studio space with her brother, sister-in-law, and toddler-aged niece. Shanta sits at her “desk,” the edge of the family’s shared bed, maintaining focus on her studies as her niece makes many attempts to play and her sister-in-law sits nearby.

The film cuts to a later interview with her sister-in-law: “It’s not good to be over intelligent. Look what happened to her,” she says after Shanta has killed herself. The sister-in-law blames intelligence and Shanta’s drive to learn, rather than consider that Shanta’s decision to kill herself was possibly a result of a deep internal pain. (Suicide is illegal and punishable in Nepal.) The disconnect is clear.

Additionally, Shanta is a Dalit, a member of a lower Indian caste. She gets shoved out of line by women of a higher caste when she goes to town to collect water.  She is met with regular social oppression and discrimination but Shanta keeps with the “culture of silence.” Women in Nepal are pressured to suppress their negative emotions. Could this be a precipitating factor in Shanta’s decision to hang herself? Did she have friends or adult figures to talk to? Who did Shanta look to for emotional support? Did she feel as though she could seek support?

These are questions that Squire and Benson hope to find answers to.

In fact, Shanta’s story is one of many stories of suicide in Nepal. Her story is one of many, many stories of suicide in countries around the world. Stigma is a globally pervasive factor in our ignorance of a major public health problem, one that keeps suicide a silent issue.

Recent research finds that “[m]ental disorders account for 11.1% of the total burden of disease in low-resource countries such as Nepal.” In their conclusion, the authors suggest culture-specific approaches to addressing suicide based on their research findings. A 2010 report by the World Health Organization tells us, “[i]n low and middle-income countries 75% of people do not get the mental health services they need.” But WHO’s mental health Gap Action Program (mhGAP) argues that “with costs as low as US $2 per person per year, and with proper care, assistance and medication, millions can be treated.”

In Squire and Benson’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much, they’re working to unearth the causes of a single suicide in Nepal. But their film will have the power to ignite and inspire conversations about suicide in private and public spheres wherever it’s shown. Suicide is not any individual’s issue. It’s a global public health problem, one complicated by the fact that treatment “will need to be tailored to suit the different etiology, culture, expectations, resources, skills and spiritual beliefs of both patient and doctor” (Benson & Shakya).

Because suicide is so often an act shrouded in shame, silence, and secrecy, there are a lot of questions to ask. A suicide survivor, J.D. Schramm, said at a TED Talk, “because of our taboos around suicide, we’re not sure what to say, and so quite often we say nothing…. It’s a conversation worth having.”

Scott Squire and Amy Benson are raising funds to return to Nepal in January 2013 to complete their film.  They will follow up with Shanta’s sister and conduct interviews and on-the-ground research to learn more about what happened in Shanta’s case and to learn more about suicide in Nepal. Benson tells us that Nepal’s first suicide hotline will be set up, “This will help us to see who’s calling in and why.”

Contributions to The Girl Who Knew Too Much project can be made at this Kickstarter page. You can find project updates here.

***

  • The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
  • For Hearing & Speech Impaired with TTY Equipment: 1-800-799-4TTY (4889): For veterans, press 1; en Español oprima el 2.
  •  The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
  • International suicide prevention and crisis center contact information

 

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

At SIFF, Gregory Crewdson’s Visions & an Agoraphobic’s Nightmare

Besides a special engagement of Life of Pi in 3D, SIFF this week is showing the documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters (at the SIFF Film Center on Seattle Center campus, through November 29), which illustrates a different kind of wizardry. If it’s not a documentary with that much heft (everyone in it is reasonably agreeable to the notion that Crewdson’s art is fine, indeed), it’s at least interesting to see someone working with the facts of the physical world, instead of pixels, primarily.

Brief Encounters mostly trails Crewdson around as he set designs his photographs–the process is similar to a movie shoot, beginning with location scouting scouting, the acquisition of permits (sometimes), casting locals, and art directing the set. But it’s all for perhaps 40 or 50 frames of the same shot. You get a little resumé of his childhood, his discovery of photography, that time he was in The Speedies, and, without much context, you also get the thoughts of authors Russell Banks and Rick Moody.

With its unquestioning gaze, the documentary comes to feel like a promotional video for Crewdson’s collection “Beneath the Roses.” Only one person dares to quibble with his visions: the shopkeeper in a small town who wants to shovel his snowy walk so no customers slip and fall. Art demands otherwise. Much time is spent in small towns, chronicling not the lives of the inhabitants so much as their evocation of Crewdson’s inner disquiet, calmed by having given the transient and unordered a frame.

A little goes a long way, when everything is a psychodrama. At its best, Crewdson’s photography can be a masterful still nature sleight-of-hand, a subversion of the tendency to privilege naturalism as real, or a surrealist glimpse of a working-poor scene. In more mundane moments, it’s an ad for Six Feet Under.

Opening November 30 at SIFF Uptown is the Irish horror film Citadel, starring Welsh actor Aneurin Barnard as a young man terrorized by agoraphobia and packs of feral children in hoodies who lurch around a tenement block like pint-sized zombies. (I guess not everyone thinks Shameless is funny.)

Writer-director Ciarán Foy is drawing upon his own experience with agoraphobia, after being randomly attacked, and these scenes–conveying a heart-pounding disorientation–are gripping. But the movie can’t decide if it’s a thriller, a social parable, or a bloody slash-fest. It’s also hampered by the fact that Barnard looks very much like a strung-out Frodo with bedhead, and by  James Cosmo’s irascible, profane priest feeling drawn from a number of graphic novels. Still, if you have a needle or hoodie phobia, this is the horror film for you.

Announcements, News, Sports

Sonicsgate Documentary Gets an Assist from Shawn Kemp

Today, an updated version of the grassroots documentary Sonicsgate was to have re-aired on CNBC, but thanks to Facebook’s IPO being hot news, they’ve been bumped for later. The filmmakers are not taking this lying down, though: You can still watch Sonicsgate: Requiem for a Team at the previously announced time, online.

UPDATE: No, you can’t. Just got word that the Sonicsgaters would like take-backsies on that news release. They can’t offer the new version online. But you can still watch the ’09 Director’s Cut, below.

The new 2012 version of the film will be free for 24 hours starting at 5:00 p.m.(PDT) on Monday, May 14. If you follow the Sonicsgate Twitter feed, they’ll let you know when it’s live. Besides new archival footage, director Jason Reid has scored new interviews with Sonics forward Shawn Kemp, and Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament.

The rebroadcast was to follow its national broadcast premiere on April 27 (repeated on April 29). Apparently it was popular enough for CNBC to bring it back for a third time, to the likely chagrin of former Sonics owner Howard Schultz.

Ironically, given producer Adam Brown’s ejection from Howard Schultz book-signing at Costco in 2011, director Reid is joining Reign Man Kemp for a DVD signing at the SoDo Costco from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. this Thursday, May 17. It looks like you need to be a Costco member to get in, in which case you already know the address: 4401 4th Avenue South. (This is your chance to get some of your own back, Howard!)

Why Costco? Because they are carrying the new Sonicsgate on DVD, at 12 warehouse locations in the Seattle, Portland, and Sacramento markets. (Around Seattle, besides the SoDo location, your Costco-purchase options are Aurora Village, Issaquah, Kirkland, Woodinville, South Center, and Covington.) Why Kemp? Well, he’s also got a new restaurant, Oskar’s Kitchen on Lower Queen Anne, to promote.

If you can’t wait until 5 p.m., tide yourself over with this 2009 director’s cut:

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV, Music

Ne Change Rien, the Half-Light of a French Chanteuse

To accompany the ongoing Earshot Jazz Festival, Northwest Film Forum is screening Pedro Costa’s Ne Change Rien (Don’t Change a Thing), through November 3. It’s almost iconically a French arthouse film, a music documentary done in long static shots, in deep black shadows where skin luminesces. There’s smoking and wine drinking and rigor.

It’s a departure, topically, for director Pedro Costa, I’m told, but it is terrifically Gallic: in its foregrounding of a surface aesthetic, in its intellectual inquiry, in its refusal to submit to entertainment. There is a French self-sufficiency (Costa is Portugese, but big in France) that can be taken for pretension, but isn’t. That’s why artists love France–whatever else is true, there you can say you are an artist and people won’t ask what you do “really.”

Here, you learn what Jeanne Balibar, actrice, chanteuse, does “really.” Costa, I think, displays a wry sense of humor by having the film open with Balibar singing “Torture.” (You can find most of the songs here, with guitarist/songwriter Rudolphe Burger, on her album Paramour.) The camera’s obsessive focus aside, there’s no glamor here, no enormous swells of applause, if there’s an audience, it barely registers.

The heart of movie–finally “heart” is what it is, a rhythmic muscle–is a scene that will defeat the unwary. Balibar in rehearsal struggles with a tricky song in which she vocalizes against a syncopated bass line, trying to count out the vocal line’s beat, but falling off it. She tries again, she tries again, it becomes almost the equivalent of the desert scene in Lawrence of Arabia. She wants it completely internalized, and it becomes a yoga–for her and the audience in the theater.

When you hear the song in its finished form, it incorporates a sample from Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly.” That also is terrifically Gallic.

So there are these episodic scenes, from performance in nightclubs, cramped studios, impromptu rehearsals, to the party for a single. It’s always night, or near enough. A répétiteur for a production of Offenbach’s La Périchole works Balibar over, making sure she understands that pop singers don’t get to interpret–there is a proper way to sing it. You hit the consonants like so. The “O” is rounder here. She’s not corrected on each single syllable, but you get the sense that they are making concessions to time. Balibar stifles yawns, begins to make faces, swears at herself. The indomitable coach demonstrates.

If you get restless or bored, lose focus–exactly. This is not a film that performs for you; the static shots make you sit still for it. It doesn’t make you a better or worse person, if you can or can’t at any given moment. Costa won’t even let you dreamily doze to the music. He pulls the music out from behind Balibar’s vocals to (she’s in the studio, with headphones), drops them in (you’re watching from the booth), depending on the perspective.

If the half-light elicits reverie, it’s like one of those fugue-like “office” dreams you get when over-tired, where the tasks repeat, papers keep piling on. But that is “the work” for an artist, to keep steadily at it. The film doesn’t end, in that sense; it’s interrupted, but the shifting islets of white in darkness persist, in new, perhaps better arrangements.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV, Music

The Northwest Film Forum Brings Octubre and Inni to Town

Now that City Arts Fest is over, how about something completely different? By which I mean Octubre, a film about down-on-their-luck Peruvians–is there any other kind?–running through Thursday at the Northwest Film Forum. Brothers Daniel and Diego Vega Vidal received the Un Certain Regard designation at Cannes last year for their debut feature film, the story of Clemente, a two-bit pawnbroker and loan shark, who comes home one day to find a baby, the product of one of his many trips to the local brothel. Of course, Clemente needs help with his new son, and an an unlikely family develops when friends and strangers start pitching in.

And looking ahead to the weekend, the NWFF is sponsoring the screening of Inni, Sigur Rós’ second live concert film, at the Neptune this Saturday night. Unlike their first film Heima which also spent a lot of time exploring the Icelandic vistas from whence the band came, Inni is comprised of concert performances in London last year, as filmed by French-Canadian director Vincent Moon, here going as Vincent Morisset (as he did for Arcade Fire’s Miroir Noir).

Overall, Inni does a great job of depicting how it feels to experience Sigur Rós live, while also interspersing archival footage from the band’s history as far back as 1998, when they were just little Icelandic babies. Tickets are going to be all sold out before Saturday, so hurry up and get yours already. Added bonus: if you preorder Inni in any format (2 cd/dvd, blu-ray/2 cd, or 3 lp/dvd) at Easy Street or Silver Platters, you’ll get a free ticket to the screening at the Neptune. Of course, tickets for this pre-order promotion are also limited.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV, Music

Black Happy Celebrates Twenty Years of Punk Funk with Their Live DVD

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The cover to Black Happy's live DVD, Settin' Dogs on Fire.

Between Soundgarden’s reformation, Pearl Jam’s forthcoming documentary PJ20, and the impending 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, you can’t throw a stick without hitting a reunion by (or retrospective about) a Northwest band that enjoyed its heyday during the so-called Grunge Era’s peak.

Add Black Happy to that growing list. The Idaho funk-punk-rock octet never became the household name that some of the aforementioned acts did, but they packed venues all over the Northwest in the early nineties before imploding in 1995. And like the household names above, they’ve got a 20-year milestone of their own to celebrate.

The band recently commemorated the twentieth anniversary of its formation by independently releasing Settin’ Dogs on Fire, a DVD souvenir of the sold-out reunion gigs they played at the Crocodile and Spokane’s Knitting Factory in 2010. It’s a well-shot and engaging memento, and definitely a must for the band’s devoted fan base.

Formed from the ashes of a Christian metal band, Black Happy were one of the few Northwest ensembles of their era to openly embrace funk and horns alongside metallic guitars and shout-along choruses. It wasn’t a sound born in a complete vacuum, of course: The eight-piece worked a similar side of the street as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, and the many ska-revival bands that proliferated then. But they were probably the only Northwest-grown outfit at the time that could successfully get crowds of their fellow flannel-flyers to shake some serious tail feathers.

Settin’ Dogs on Fire shows that these guys can still kick up some major dust. Despite a fifteen-year hiatus (and next to no rehearsal time), the band plays with awe-inspiring tightness: The rhythm section of bassist Mark Hemenway and drummers Jim Bruce and Scott Jessick is stop-on-a-dime precise; guitarist Greg Hjort navigates metallic arpeggios and smooth funk rhythm guitar with equal finesse; and the band’s horn section still bounces like they’re spring-loaded.

A lot of the songs still hold up famously, too: “Moflo” is one flat-out sublime funk jam, replete with evocative wah-wah from Hjort and a charismatic lead vocal from frontman Paul Hemenway (if only the Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis sang this evocatively). “Three Day Weekend” suggests Van Halen with swing-band horn muscle behind ‘em, and “Garlic” jumps around with the spastic abandon of a great old Oingo Boingo track. Drummer Bruce co-directed the DVD with Jake McClure, and there’s real kinetic visual energy to match the musical restlessness.

The documentary that precedes the live music section gives a warm, sometimes funny Cliffs Notes account of Black Happy’s history, and if it glosses over the guts of the band’s ’95 split, so be it: You don’t grab a souvenir from a party band expecting–or hoping for–confrontational catharsis. Even with the genial vibe flowing through the proceedings, Settin’ Dogs on Fire still offers wistful glimpses at what could’ve been for these guys. Black Happy’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sound was still in its infancy when the band called it quits, and even at their best they sounded like they were in search of a sonic identity. The mind boggles at what might’ve happened had they held things together for long enough to really find it.