DC/DOX 2023: Wrap of the Inaugural Festival – Nell Minow reports
When the Washington DC-based AFI Docs festival was merged with the LA festival, PR Collaborative’s Jamie Shor and Sky Sitney, director of the film and media studies program at Georgetown, created DC/Dox, which had its premiere last week.
The line-up included history (The Lady Bird Diaries, The Space Race), journalism (the first of four chapters of Dawn Porter’s Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court, The Body Politic, 20 Days in Mariupol, Breaking the News), medicine (Our Body, A Still Small Voice, Between Life & Death: Terri Schiavo’s Story), LGBTQIA (Queendom, Kokomo City), sports (Stephen Curry: Underrated), arts (It’s Only Life After All about the Indigo Girls, Uncharted, Maestra, about women conductors, and Art for Everyone about Thomas Kinkade), politics and advocacy (Pay or Die), and biography (Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, the D.C. premiere of Joan Baez: I Am a Noise). And there is the very personal, with Penny Lane’s story of donating a kidney to a stranger (Confessions of a Good Samaritan) and documentarian Ralph Arlyck confronting his own mortality (I Like it Here).
The festival included 31 features and 21 shorts from eight countries, screening in venues including the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the National Archives’ William G. McGowan Theater, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
Some highlights:
The Lady Bird Diaries As Lady Bird Johnson suddenly became the First Lady of the United States, following the shocking murder of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, her aide Liz Carpenter presented her with a small tape recorder. Mrs. Johnson used that throughout her husband’s time in office, including the election of 1964 with her “whistle-stop” train tour through the South. Meticulously culled from 123 hours of tapes and matched with archival footage from news reports, the White House, and the family’s own collection, Mrs. Johnson’s gentle voice discusses events and feelings with modesty and immeasurable grace. “I felt I was walking on stage for a part I’ve never rehearsed,” she said. She describes the nine-page handwritten letter she sent her husband with the pros and cons of running for election in 1964 and 68 and her headline-making encounter with Eartha Kitt, who confronted her about Vietnam at a White House party. She gently describes her statement after LBJ’s close aide was arrested for having sex with a man and we hear her quietly insist on supporting him with compassion despite her husband’s telling her to stay out of it. We see her gracious handling of hecklers and her judging her husband and herself for their public appearances. This indispensable piece of history is a genuine treasure.
A Still Small Voice A young trainee chaplain and her exhausted supervisor try to help patients and their families face some of life’s most painful experiences as COVID-19 adds additional stress. We see that in the direst moments, patients facing death, their families facing devastating loss, words that might seem corny are all that is left. And we see the chaplains and health care workers try to manage their own stress, sometimes unsuccessfully. The supervisor says that sometimes, instead of the advice, “don’t just stand there; do something,” what matters more is just being there, being present, being a witness. We see the young trainee give people permission to feel whatever they feel, advising someone panicking about losing a parent to focus on the moments left. We see her share her own experiences with her colleagues when she needs support and with a family member in mourning when she thinks it might be reassuring. We see her difficulty in maintaining boundaries to protect herself, and we see her lash out at a colleague. And we see her rising to the occasion, a Jewish chaplain called on to perform a baptism of an infant who has died, with words of extraordinary wisdom and comfort.
Art for Everyone Critics and museum curators held his kitschy paintings of little cottages in the woods and villages in the snow in contempt. But people loved him. And Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed “painter of light™,” became the most successful artist in America, with one out of every 20 families owning one of his creations. Not a painting; a print, or a mug, or plates, or a ceramic tchotchke, or furniture, or a house (really) with his brand. This film shows us his early years, including darker, more adventurous work in college and backgrounds for a Ralph Bakshi animated feature, his marriage to his childhood sweetheart and their four beautiful, blonde daughters, and his rise as the creator of a vast merchandising juggernaut. And then we see it all fall apart. The movie explores issues of art and commerce, of popular taste and cultural gatekeepers. But most of all, it is the rise and fall of an American dreamer.
I Like it Here Documentarian Ralph Arlyck considers life, loss, aging, and death in a meditative, discursive exploration of encounters, some contrived, some happenstance, even into his doctor’s office (the doctor politely asks him to stop filming at one point, not because he might be inhibited in discussing personal information, but because he is concerned that Arlyck might be). In a highlight, he asks a neighbor about his exceptionally strenuous exercise routine, dragging a huge tire, if he is trying to defeat death. No, he says, he is not that ambitious; he just wants to cheat it a little. Arlyk looks back at his past, including a conversation with his college girlfriend and his present, including marital aids. “Have you thought about what if he goes first?” “Will I become a man who falls asleep in my son’s house?” He and his subjects consider time, family, meaning, obituaries, a spider and a squirrel, understanding the past, making peace with the diminishing future.
Maestra My favorite film of the festival is from another first-time director, Maggie Contreras, about a competition in Paris for female conductors. Their balletic gestures to the orchestra, their expressive faces, their immediate sisterhood, their devotion to the music – all are vivid, perceptively filmed, with superb editing and sound design. We follow a small number of the competitors and try to discern the differences the judges are looking for as they hear the same compositions over and over. As candidates are eliminated, it is infuriating to hear feedback like “smile more” and “be less expressive.” But as they all support each other and the film supports them all, we come away inspired by the gifts and determination of each of them.
