Tag: Documentary

REVIEW: Aurora’s Sunrise

Ella Larsen Leave a comment

3:00pm • Friday, Sept. 29, 2023 • State Theater

Content warning: genocide, violence against the Armenian community

Aurora’s Sunrise, directed by Inna Sahakyan (who was in attendance for a Q&A session at Friday’s screenings), tells the unlikely story of Aurora Mardiganian, a young woman who survived the Armenian genocide of 1915-1923. In 1918, Mardiganian escaped to America and through an unlikely series of events became a silent film star, playing herself in Ravished Armenia (Auction of Souls). The silent film was produced in 1919, purportedly to raise money for Near East Relief, a charitable organization working to protect refugees in the Ottoman Empire during WWI. Through its unique combination of animation, archival footage, and interviews, Aurora’s Sunrise provides a platform for the often-erased history of the Armenian genocide, while raising important questions about ethical storytelling.

For me, exploitation and revictimization were two of the documentary’s most striking motifs. Not only did we witness the horrors Mardiganian faced as a young girl in Armenia, which included watching the murders of her entire family and being repeatedly sold into slavery, but we also saw how she was forced to relive those traumas again and again for an American audience. Filming Auction of Souls was physically grueling, and when Mardiganian broke her ankle in a fall, she was forced to continue acting on it for weeks. Not only did Mardiganian re-enact her two years in exile for the film: At every screening, she shared the details of her story with private audiences of American women, enticing them to donate to Near East Relief. At a turning point in the film, Mardiganian fainted on stage at a speaking engagement. The director of Auction of Souls (who had taken legal guardianship of the young woman) told her she had ruined the event and abandoned her at a convent. Rather than providing a platform for Mardiganian’s own voice, we saw how powerful individuals in Old Hollywood co-opted her story and controlled her personal life.

Aurora’s Sunrise exposes how the Armenian community’s trauma was commodified and minimized for the sake of Hollywood spectacle, under the guise of humanitarian awareness-raising. Mardiganian’s work to spread her story and the realities of the Armenian genocide was highly impactful, raising over 30 million dollars for humanitarian efforts in the Ottoman Empire, but at what cost? The documentary raises essential questions about the ethics of representation: Can narratives of suffering be told without perpetuating harm and revictimization?

Despite the horror and injustice of her circumstances, Mardiganian’s strength and dedication to her community shine throughout the entire documentary. In her Q&A at the end of the film, director Inna Sahakyan prefaced the discussion with the fact that over 100 years after Mardiganian’s story took place, Armenians are facing renewed ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan. I was struck by the parallels between the director and her subject, both of whom have chosen to convey deeply painful stories to removed audiences, out of a profound commitment to their people. Sahakyan urged moviegoers on Friday to share the film with friends and family, so I am using this opportunity to encourage readers to go watch Aurora’s Sunrise, and prevent this important story from being lost.

REVIEW: Schwarze Adler (Black Eagles)

Himaja Leave a comment

Last Friday the German Department hosted a free curated screening of the 2021 independent documentary film “Schwarze Adler” (translated from German: “Black Eagles”). The space they held it in at North Quad was great – it was huge, with floor-to-ceiling windows spanning the length of one wall, whiteboards and cushy chairs spanning the other, and a big blank wall up front to project the film onto. The physically-distanced chairs they’d set up in the room were fairly packed with people coming for the event.

Watching this documentary was a pretty emotional experience for me (which is why it took me so long to write this review!).

Steffi Jones, former defender for the national team

Seeing footage in 2021 of fans at a soccer game doing the Hitler salute will do something to your psyche. I’m privileged — some people don’t have the choice of whether to turn away from the screen, because they live through this every day. Imagine being a player on a professional sports team where the only difference between you and your teammates is that your skin is a shade darker. You’re trying to focus on the game you’ve trained for for most of your life when you suddenly hear 1000s of fans in the stands surrounding you, most of which are from your own country where you were born and raised, yelling at you to go back where you came from. That’s an experience that was recounted by every single German soccer player interviewed in this documentary.

The way fans treat athletes is something worth having a whole discussion on. Cheering for your favorite players and booing when the other team scores is all good fun. But when that morphs into jeering, chanting hateful racial slurs, and hurling insults at players, that’s when it becomes absolutely cruel. Michigan football games are not immune to this behavior. We put athletes on pedestals, but they are not made of titanium, they’re made of flesh and blood! They’re humans just like us and when fans dehumanize them, they deprive them of so much: joy from being on the field, joy from being with their teammates, and the focus they need to stay in the game.

Gerald Asamoah, former forward

Many of the players in the documentary talked about how hearing those shouts of “go back to your country” and “kick out the negro” would affect their playing, and they thought about it for the whole rest of the game. At one point one of the players, Gerald Asamoah said he had “never seen such hate anywhere else before.” One of his fellow teammates of color left Germany to play for Ghana because of the experience. Another player, after being subjected to it for half a game, picked up a small red crate on the sidelines and threw it down in a fit of anger. His teammates said nothing to him — the referee just handed him a yellow card. Another recounted how sad it made him when he saw that not only were the parents chanting slurs, but their small children were too.

Almost all of the players also made connections between the way they were treated to Germany’s dark history. “How can you show this behavior when we have seen exactly where it leads?” I think the same could be said of racism in our country. The U.S. has an equally dark history, it’s just that it’s usually glossed over in our history textbooks.

When the credits began to roll, I was feeling kind of hopeless and defeated. I know that’s not the right response to world issues, but I couldn’t help it. But then one of the professors from the German department got up to say a few words.
Here’s what she said, paraphrased:
“Don’t be disheartened. These thoughts of racism have accrued over centuries and it will take time to undo them. Martin Luther King Jr. was only assassinated 52 years ago so really we’re just at the beginning of the work to undo it. And don’t feel bad if you are not the one who goes out and marches and shows up in a big way. The small acts matter to. Every act of kindness, and every act that does something to acknowledge the humanity in others matters.”

So go out and show up in a small or in a big way this week, and know that we have a long way to go but every act matters.

PREVIEW: Schwarze Adler (Black Eagles)

Himaja Leave a comment

Tomorrow afternoon, you could kick off the weekend as I usually do — plant yourself down at the library and glue your eyeballs to your laptop screen for two hours.

ALTERNATELY, you could plant yourself down in a comfy chair in the neat North Quad collaborative space and glue your eyeballs to a different screen to live and learn through the experiences of Black players on the German national soccer team.

UM’s German department is hosting a curated screening of the 2021 documentary film “Schwarze Adler” or “Black Eagles” tomorrow from 2-4PM in North Quad 2435. https://events.umich.edu/event/90023

“The documentary lets black players of the German national soccer team tell their personal stories for the first time. What road did they take and what obstacles did they have to overcome before they got to where we cheer for them?”

As we head into a weekend of events celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, I strongly encourage you to make time to reflect on the values that drove his and countless other lesser-mentioned civil rights leaders to fight inequities in their community, and how you are upholding those values.

I think we can all agree that working and living as an athlete is extremely challenging. There are a heap of pressures riding on these people’s backs: the internal drive to win, press and media attention, and the demands of your coach and teammates. It’s stressful at all levels, from high school to the NCAA to the pro leagues.

Those pressures are multiplied for athletes of color, who are often dehumanized. In the U.S. today, Black athletes are dogged by stereotypes that chalk their talent up to “inherent physical ability” rather than the actual years of hard training and practice they put into the game. They have to deal with antiquated competition restrictions that center the needs of their white counterparts (Exhibit A: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/style/olympics-soul-cap-ban-swimming.html), and then are shamed for using their platforms to protest their unjust treatment or prioritizing their mental health (ex: Colin Kaepernick, Naomi Osaka). Here’s an interesting history of Black athletes at our very own university: https://heritage.umich.edu/stories/lonely-as-hell/.

Now move the map to Germany. The personal stories of these players will likely be entirely different, and yet…similar in some fundamental ways to what we see in our country. What I think will be invaluable about this film is that the soccer players will be telling their own stories directly to the camera — no filtering or watering down included. This will be a thought-provoking way to get out of the U.S-centric perspective bubble I live in.

I hope to see some of you there!

Hidden Life of Trees

PREVIEW: The Hidden Life of Trees

Abigail Fox Leave a comment

I first picked up Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees over the summer of 2019 looking for something different to add to my summer reading selection. The book is a well-written exploration of the surprisingly complex social life of trees and forests and I couldn’t put it down. Even as someone who has spent a lot of time around trees, the notion of trees being able to “talk” to each other with such detail and depth and the concept of each forest acting as a community was surprising to me. Wohlleben did an excellent job conveying the majesty and scale of forests through the written word, but I think the big screen might be an even better medium to convey the awe they deserve.

Peter Wohlleben’s 2015 nonfiction masterpiece The Hidden Life of Trees has arrived for the big screen and will be showing this Tuesday (10/19) at 5pm at the Michigan Theater. This is currently the only showing scheduled in Ann Arbor, so grab your tickets now if you’re interested!

REVIEW: Film Screening: The River and The Wall

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

“Building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security.”

-Will Hurd, Republican Congressman of Texas

A politicized landscape can be both metaphorical and physical. We preoccupy ourselves with the issues, and the solid ground they concern disappears. But for all those who benefit from this space–wildlife, nature enthusiasts, fishers,–forgetting is impossible. The land is sacred, life-giving, the means for making a living. Politicians in faraway places decide what happens, unaffected by the cascading effects a complete wall would have on the life here.

Important populations which have historically struggled to survive are put at risk by Trump’s border wall. Black bears and mountain lions, just coming back from local near-extinction, will suffer geographic isolation, decreasing genetic diversity and weakening the populations’ ability to withstand disease or other destructors. The meandering nature of the Rio Grande and the unrelenting straight edge of the wall necessitates a wide swath of no man’s land by the river, unjustly punishing local landowners and workers. The US side will lack the river, along with its aesthetic, spiritual, and bodily supportive value.

It’s impossible not to draw a connection from this to Robert Moses’ tyrannical reconstruction of New York during the mid-20th century. Caring not for the residents of its “slums” (read: people of color, the impoverished, undesirable white ethnic groups), he cut straight through with expressways and less-than-affordable new public housing. Rich, dense communities were reduced to identical buildings cut off from the rest of the city. The cultural and physical landscape of their old home had completely changed. He, like the Trump administration, was detached from the people he affected, and in this he lacked the knowledge and empathy necessary to be a leader of that kind. 

The river is our equalizer between us and our neighbors. A source of life, a means of survival and emotional wellbeing. The alluvial river plains, fertilized by upwelling of rich sediments during floods, are extremely productive areas. Losing out on this agricultural resource would be disastrous for farmers and the communities they support.

What bothered me about this documentary was the clearly elevated position on which its subjects stood. It really was not an accurate approximation of a migrant’s dangerous journey. They’re equipped with strong horses, expensive bikes and hiking gear, nice canoes. They are all young, in good health, physically strong. All the methods of transportation the five used (bikes, horses, canoes) are physically taxing. The film failed to bring up the unique dangers that elderly migrants face on their way, and also children, pregnant women, the ill. That side of the issue is an even darker facet, and it should be represented here.

Luckily, the film was able to balance the tragedy of our likely future with the joys of past and present. The cinematography was graceful and rugged at once, the environment lending itself to an exploration of the simultaneous existence of fear and awe. It seems to reflect a migrant’s experience because of that.

The ending was too idyllic for my taste, a little too naively hopeful. We see little direction for viewers to seize and act from. Emotion alone is not enough to argue against the political situation in which we find ourselves.

This website is a great resource for investigating what you can do.

 

REVIEW: Oscar Nominated Shorts: Documentary

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

Not the most uplifting selection of shorts, but these five documentaries were certainly thoughtful and artistic.

They combined beauty with a quiet sadness in the background that came forward only in brief moments. We are offered such an intimate look into personal tragedies and journeys in

this group of films, and that doesn’t always feel completely right. In Life Overtakes Me especially, we observe several refugee children caught in the coma-like state of Resignation Syndrome; they are unaware at that moment of our watching them being taken care of like invalids. The cool, pretty sunlight comes through the window to highlight a delicate hand, the rising and falling of the chest filling with unconscious breath. Their parents are filmed almost as a performance of parenthood, having to ignore the cameras’s eye and the incredible pain of not knowing–their family’s refugee status, whether their child will regain consciousness, what would happen if they were deported. It feels like an intrusion, something I don’t deserve to see.

Walk Run Cha-Cha was the most light-hearted of the five, though it was also the only one that made me cry. Ageism, particularly with women, is strong in the film industry, so I was happy to see an older couple featured in a way that connected them to their bodies and to each other. Too often mature subjects are discounted in their sensuality and ability, instead cast aside as static figures who do not (implied: cannot)

offer anything but old-fashioned wisdom, always from a seated position. They have less 
agency than their younger counterparts, often in a position of needing someone to take care of them. In Hollywood’s eyes, life seems to end somewhere around 35, maybe 50 for men.This shows that as we age there is still plenty more room for learning, for joy, for romance.

St. Louis Superman was touching without letting the audience forget its reality of systematic, racially-charged violence. The incorporation of Franks’ young son King was simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking (he learns so much so young: his father’s bravery, the effect that one’s drivenness can produce, the hypocrisy of institutions meant to protect, how deeply racism permeates those structures). His innocent eyes take in too much, and as we see him cling fiercely to his father, we’re forced to wonder whether his future will be painted more by cynicism or tenacity. 

 

In the Absence seemed the most abstract. We see almost no video of the passengers of the ferry, which makes sense as most of their phone recordings were destroyed as the ship sank. A large portion of the documentary featured the slowly tilting boat, a big beast of a structure, looking like a dying creature, maybe a whale. It brings to the mind a guilty kind of disgust; we’re meant to be second-hand mourners, but instead we see the government’s ineptitude and this huge, ugly thing taking its sweet time drowning hundreds trapped on board.

Finally is the documentary shorts winner: Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl). The movie was a well-thought-out mix of history, interview, and politics, while getting closer to the heart through a close connection to a group of talented, spunky young girls. In a land that does not allow for any of the activities depicted in the film, it would have been more accurate to incorporate a touch more seriousness here, rather than depicting Skateistan as a magical safe haven. The point was empowerment and fighting for human rights, but these things can so easily be rosily shown, without the terror and violence involved in their capture.

If you haven’t seen these shorts, I’d recommend taking a pal down to your local theater, as it’s still playing for a few more days most places. This website will find a location near you that is showing them.