Film Festival: Docos bite into reality

By PETER CALDER

In the Australian documentary Rats in the Ranks, a standout of the 1996 film festivals, one of the schemers for political power in the Sydney borough of Leichhardt does something quite extraordinary.

With the cameras rolling, he tiptoes across his office floor and closes the door, so that his secretary will not hear what he's about to say to the film-makers, their sound recordist and posterity.

It is as stark an illustration as might be imagined of the way the patient documentary maker can inhabit the life of his or her subject - and there's plenty more of that special artifice on show in the fine lineup of non-fiction films, probably the best yet, in this year's festivals.

Whether walking the corridors of the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service, where refugees' pleas for political asylum are daily decided (Well-Founded Fear); following the progress of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as it seeks to confront 30 years of apartheid in South Africa (Long Night's Journey Into Day); or penetrating to the dark and mysterious heart of a man who has devoted his life to improving the way we kill people without, apparently, ever asking why (Mr Death), the makers of some of this year's great crop of documentaries have insinuated themselves into places we could never have gone.

The proliferation of commercially-sponsored, so-called "reality" TV, makes it less likely than ever that good non-fiction film-making will make television. Neither, with a couple of local exceptions, will these films make it onto our small screens. Of inconvenient length or not edited to the seven-minute rhythms dictated by commercial requirements, they live their own life. If you're playing the game of picking which festival movies won't be seen here again, start your selection below.

Space restrictions preclude a full assessment of all we've glimpsed, and some, like the Oscar-winner One Day in September, about the massacre at the Munich Olympics, will command attention anyway. There are plenty of audience favourites and award winners here too, yet it's often the smaller, slighter movies which most enchant.

The astonishing Highway, which follows a down-at-heel family of travelling performers along a highway in Kazakhstan, achieves much with little, observing its subjects but finding no need to tell us what we are seeing, and Black and White in Colour is this year's Buena Vista Social Club, a riveting portrait of a corpulent Slovakian gypsy singer who is sometimes shocking to watch but heaven to hear. She says she's more Czech than gypsy, but when she opens her mouth to sing we may doubt that. Recommended.

For all the charm of smaller offerings, among this year's selection the bigger productions stand out, repaying their investment in time and production values. Long Night's Journey, mentioned above, drives home to us, as the television coverage never did, quite what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission meant to those whose lives were touched by it. The film follows four of the 7000 who sought amnesty (soberingly, 80 per cent were black) and their stories are often heart-wrenching. When black killers face the black mothers they bereaved or when those women wail and swoon as police videos of their sons' murders are shown, it is mesmerising.

It never editorialises, but the juxtaposition of different stories is telling: blacks' contrition - and forgiveness - is conspicuously more abundant than whites' and as a policeman struggles to understand why he can't hedge his bets - he wants to wait till he's charged before requesting amnesty - it makes one wonder how much hearts and minds have changed.

In another part of Africa, Mobutu ruled, and Mobutu, King of Zaire, is, at 135 minutes, one of the festival's documentary epics. Like all the best dictators, he had his own personal film crew and so this French film traces in dense detail the career of a man who moved from military promise to absolute power and absolute corruption. Along the way he is sickeningly courted by Western leaders and displays himself as a man of such carefully cultivated vanity and hypocrisy that the patriotic tears he sheds at the podium are doubtless sincere. His pretentiously European affectations and his lifelong childishness (he loved party hats and paper whistles) would be funny if they were not parts of a life of such destructive plunder.

Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann returns with one of the documentary standouts. Honigmann, equally at home making Underground Orchestra, about buskers in the Paris Metro or Au Revoir, a passionate feature of adulterous love, takes the apparently unprepossessing subject of Dutch UN peacekeepers and makes magic. Interviewing them about their chaotic and morally ambiguous tours of duty in such diverse hotspots as Korea, Cambodia, Rwanda and Srebrenica, she hits on the device of playing a piece of music they associate with their service and filming them with a stationary camera as they listen. The result, among the most inventive uses of music in film I can remember, makes an otherwise standard doco into something quite special.

It should come as no surprise that Errol Morris, who made the landmark documentary The Thin Blue Line, has served up one of this year's best in Mr Death. The process by which a slightly nerdish engineer who liked improving execution systems became a self-appointed witness against the truth of the Holocaust is a sobering, even frightening, inversion of the American Dream. It's also coolly and sickeningly funny.

This year's lineup may seem short on laughs - non-fiction is often less palatable than fantasy - but if it's enchantment you're looking for, rely on Lighthouse. Though not previewed, it's the work of the team which made the sublime Atlantic, a few years back. If it's half what that film was - and intelligence from abroad suggests it's at least that - it will be unforgettable. Enjoy.

* The Auckland International Film Festival is at the Civic, Sky City Theatre, Force Entertainment Centre, from Friday, July 7 to Sunday, July 23.

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