Sheffield Doc/Fest round-up

Sheffield’s annual Doc/Fest is Britain’s largest documentary film festival. Every year established and aspiring filmmakers and documentary fans converge on the city to watch films, attend workshops and corner commissioning editors in the bar. Edward Lawrenson learnt a few new things by taking the train north.

Don’t forget to call home
The weepie of the festival was ‘Junior’, Jenna Rosher’s beautifully observed study of seventy-something Eddie Belasco’s relationship with his 98-year-old mother in their San Francisco home. A volatile Italian-American with a wild sense of humour and hair-trigger temper, Eddie’s struggle to cope with his mother’s terminal illness and the effects of his own diabetes make for a deeply touching portrait of the ageing process. Eddie was a surprise guest after the screening and was visibly moved having seen his mother alive again on the big screen. But he was a model of composure compared to many of us in the audience, undone by this poignant, soulful movie about the importance of family. When I told Rosher that I had phoned my mum after the screening, her smile of satisfaction seemed to indicate her job was done.

It’s okay to work with children and animals
Two of the strongest films I saw at Sheffied gleefully disregarded that old injunction against working with animals or children. Liz Mermins’s ‘Horses’ depicts Ireland’s horse-racing scene from the point of view of three thoroughbreds. Possessing a lyricism that belies its TV origins, the movie subtly portrays the ‘personalities’ of its three equine stars without indulging in crass anthropomorphism. Even better was Laura Bari’s ‘Antoine', her beguiling study of a six-year-old blind boy from Montreal. Working closely with the endearingly bossy Antoine, she mixes footage of the boy and his sighted classmates with playful recreations of Antoine’s fantasy of working as a private detective. Blown along by the whimsical gusts of a young boy’s imagination, this is a film of featherlike charm that happily blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction to create a vivid portrait of childhood.

Documentary directors make useless midwives
One of the biggest revelations of the festival was Kazuo Hara’s ‘Extreme Private Eros’. Showing in a strand celebrating neglected Japanese documentaries, this 1974 film sees Tokyo filmmaker Hara deal with his traumatic break-up with his girlfriend Miyuki, by following her to her new home in Okinawa and obsessively filming her with her new lovers. The process, he tells us in an eerily dispassionate voiceover, was his way of getting over his heartache, but you can’t imagine a more gruelling way to move on. Having charted Miyuki’s relationship with a lesbian lover and a US GI who fathers her child, Hara concludes by filming her giving birth to her daughter on a plastic sheet in his cramped Tokyo apartment. Hara was too nervous to focus properly, so the scene unravels in a merciful blur (although he doesn’t think to put down his camera and comfort Miyuki). After this uncomfortably personal film, Hara took the stage at Sheffield: ‘What can I say,’ he said of the film’s extreme confessional intimacy in between fits of polite giggles. ‘I was young.’

Hebden Bridge tourist board have their work cut out
The most intense screening I attended was Jez Lewis’s ‘Shed Your Tears and Walk Away’. Following Lewis’s return to his home town of Hebden Bridge to find out why so many of his childhood friends have either committed suicide or are lost to drugs and drink, this harrowing and achingly honest film had already screened at the London Film Festival. But the Sheffield premiere was given a sombre charge because one of the on-screen contributors to Lewis’s film had last week died of an overdose. Attended by residents of this picturesque Yorkshire town, the post-film Q&A was a difficult and heated affair, with a handful objecting to Lewis’s portrayal of Hebden Bridge while others, still raw from a funeral of yet another friend, defended it. Feeling a little like an eavesdropper on a family argument, I nonetheless found the film a powerful and heartfelt work.

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