These are bleak times. A few days after the opening night of the Movies that Matter festival (MTM) in The Hague, the world was startled by the attacks in Brussels. For an event focusing on human rights issues, a sign that the violent consequences of international conflicts seem to be getting closer.
This raises the question of whether an audience saturated by the constant stream of reports on attacks, war violence and the refugee crisis still has the puff for a film festival that focuses on the world's ills. After all, it is mainly feel bad movies as MTM employee Annika Wubbolt once pointed out sharply in an article. A difficult undertaking on paper, then, but in practice, MTM 2016 once again produced a surprising and varied festival without compromising on its main objective; to inform a wide audience about what is happening in our world and provide a modest platform to discuss possible solutions.
Many a moviegoer will see MTM primarily as a documentary festival that is more thematically defined compared to IDFA. Programmers at MTM also often fish in the Amsterdam festival's large film pond. For instance, were A Sinner in Mecca and IDFA audience favourite Sonita shown in The Hague. Somewhat more contrived was the addition of larger audience films that had had previous theatrical releases such as Selma, Mustang and Dheepan. An understandable attempt to attract a wider audience to the festival with films that have already proven their reputation. I must confess that I would have preferred a programme featuring only titles that have received little or no attention in Dutch cinemas. It was mainly those new and still unknown films that stood out and highlighted the importance of MTM. The highlights.
The True Cost
For several years, MTM has selected documentaries that catchily address global issues from a kaleidoscopic and global perspective. Examples from previous editions include the ambitious docu Big Men On the influence of multinationals in Africa and Drone On the controversial use of unmanned aircraft in the war on terror. In their approach, these films are characterised by a critical eye for the different sides of international problems. And they prove that in these tumultuous times, we are more interconnected than we often dare to admit.
This year's confrontational docu The True Cost an example of that illuminating method. Director Andrew Morgan focuses on the garment industry in the film and comes up with unpleasant and suppressed facts. After the oil industry, the clothing industry the most polluting sector on earth. This is evident from images of polluted rivers in India where tanneries discharge chemical waste. Invisible sides behind the production of our clothes are also revealed, such as the immense cotton plantations in Texas where the use of aggressive pesticides is linked to the increase in cancer among cotton growers. The large-scale nature of cotton cultivation is the result of increasing demand. Fuelled by the fast fashion concept, adopted by large clothing shops, clothes are becoming cheaper and the turnover rate higher.
The True Cost is beautifully shot and switches confidently from country to country and macro to micro level. From economists still trying to defend the business model as a beneficial step in a development process of poor countries to the people in the sweatshops working for ever lower wages. Morgan also manages to hold up a painful mirror to us by using images of the buying frenzy during black friday. Being confronted with our greedy and insatiable consumption habits is not very hopeful. However, the film manages to argue well that we pay too high an ethical and environmental price for our clothes and that radical changes are needed.
Deep Web
Documentary filmmakers are increasingly focusing on the ubiquitous internet. In addition to freedom and anonymity, the digital revolution has enabled unprecedented forms of surveillance. Documentaries such as InRealLife and Citizenfour previously focused on the contradictory sides of the internet and Deep Web constitutes an important new addition.
In 2011, Silk Road as an idealistic virtual marketplace for anything that could not be sold through legal means. The site was part of the dark web and could be accessed via the secure Tor network. Alex Winters docu focuses on the strange crypto-anarchist and libertarian ideals behind the site and the mysterious founder whose real identity is hidden behind the username Dread Pirate Roberts.
Out of the virtual anonymity of the dark web, Winters slowly manages to unravel a tangible story as he focuses on the US government wanting to shut down the illegal site. The FBI soon gets on the trail of Ross William Ulbricht who is seen as the mastermind behind Silk Road. Ulbricht gradually becomes the main subject of Winter's film. In trying to find out his motives, Winter discovers that Ulbricht is just a cog in a larger network of hackers. Deep Web proves how technology is ahead of legislation and adapts almost organically to new restrictive rules and stricter surveillance. The new paradigm of anarchy and freedom aspired to by hackers and programmers is in reality, though, subject to a paranoid worldview where nothing is what it seems.
Chuck Norris vs Communism
A wonderful mix of pop culture and cold war intrigue was Chuck Norris vs communism. An exciting docuthriller about the appeal of American pulp cinema in a totalitarian regime. In Ceausescu's Romania, copies of American films are secretly distributed on VHS tapes. A central role in that illicit trade is played by Irina Nistor who dubs all the films. Her voice could be heard in thousands of copied films of Rocky and Scarface as far as Doctor Zhivago and Last Tango in Paris.
Ilinca Calugareanu's entertaining docu mixes dramatised segments about Nistor's forbidden activities with interviews where Romanians talk passionately about the films they watched in secret. The isolated cocoon of dictatorship was thus broken by the universal power of film. Chuck Norris vs Communism is thus an impassioned love letter to the potential of cinema to reveal another world at odds with the state propaganda that was sold as reality.
Experimenter
Among the fiction films at the festival was Micheal Almereyda's Experimenter a breath of fresh air. Almereyda is an odd director who built a modest cult status with the melancholic Another girl Another planet and vampire film Nadja, but equally made a docu about photographer William Eggleston. That idiosyncratic diversity can also be seen in Experimenter, where he highlights the life of psychologist Stanley Milgram in an original way.
How do you turn a scientist's life into an engaging film that also appropriately elucidates his discoveries to the viewer? In the case of Experimenter do so with unusual narrative structure and Brechtian tricks like breaking the fourth wall. Or through sets that are deliberately artificial. That method fits perfectly with Milgram's urge as a social psychologist to pierce through the facade we see as normal or civilised. In his famous research shows that our behaviour can be at odds with what we perceive to be right or correct. In Almereyda, this experiment remains an unsolved riddle for Milgram, who is portrayed by Peter Sarsgaard as a detached but incisive psychologist. It is the elephant in the room who really pops up at times and reminds us of how inscrutable our behaviour can sometimes be.
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