Anger, Artistry Characterize AFI Docs Audience Award Winner

Last updated on: June 23, 2015 at 5:21 am by Christian Hamaker

Anger, Artistry Characterize AFI Docs Audience Award Winner 2015-06-23T05:21:12-06:00 Christian Hamaker

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Last year’s AFI Docs’ festival opener, Scott Teems’ Holbrook/Twain, provided a model for showbiz documentaries. Not only is actor Hal Holbrook a fascinating subject when discussing his best-known performance (a one-man show in which he plays Mark Twain), but director Teems includes Holbrook’s’ children discussing the impact of their father’s constant time on the road while they were young. While not exclusively negative, their regrets, and Holbrook’s’ own rueful comments about what he missed out on during those years, elevate Holbrook/Twain to a level of poignancy and insight rarely achieved by documentary profiles of famous artists.

Earlier this year, FilmFest DC screened a series of documentaries focused on another type of performer—the jazz musician—with the bracing Be Known, about percussionist Kahil El’Zabar, and Jaco, about jazz bass superstar Jaco Pastorius. The two films, each of which included outstanding performance clips of the musicians, took different approaches to discussing their subjects’ personal lives. Be Known bluntly addressed El’Zabar’s prickly personality and destructive physical appetites, as acknowledged (to some extent) by El’Zabar himself and those close to him, while Jaco was comprised mainly of famous people saying mostly laudatory things about Pastorius, whose downward spiral was not entirely self-inflicted. In the film, even Pastorius’ offspring find silver linings to describe the father who was mostly absent from their lives.

I was only able to see one feature on Day 3 of AFI Docs, What Happened, Miss Simone?, which would go on to win the festival’s Audience award for Best Feature. The story of jazz icon Nina Simone, the film is, like the aforementioned jazz documentaries, at its best in the performance clips of Simone on stage. Yet while its on-camera interview subjects (Simone died in 2003) include Simone’s daughter Lisa acknowledging the difficulty of life with her mother (“My mother was Nina Simone 24/7, and that’s where it became a problem.”), the only infrequently transcends its largely standard documentary presentation methods. Among the film’s standout moments are Simone’s scribbled missives acknowledging her unceasing sense of anger. While her disposition was sometimes justified—external forces like the civil rights struggle and a husband who turned abusive fed her hostility—Simone herself once told Martin Luther King Jr. she had no interest in his philosophy of nonviolence.

Image Source: AFI Docs

Whether a product of her upbringing (the discipline required for her training to be a Classical pianist made her a de facto social outcast), racism (the suspected reason she wasn’t admitted into a key music program, which would lead her to eventually play jazz clubs and learn to be a vocalist), depression or just the darker side of human nature taking hold, What Happened, Miss Simone? leaves us asking the question posed by its title.

Trying to Find Peace

“I was a witness to a homicide,” says sheriff “Dub” Lawrence in Peace Officer, a look at the militarization of the nation’s police. “I have waited for years for a just verdict. It does not appear to be forthcoming.”

Lawrence is speaking about the death of his son-in-law at the hands of the SWAT team he helped to establish, and as long he’s on camera and Peace Officer is focused on what happened to Lawrence’s son-in-law, it’s a compelling look at a complex issue. But filmmakers Brad Barber and Scott Christopherson want to use Lawrence’s case as a microcosm of a larger issue, and the film slips as it broadens its scope to make a larger case.

Peace Officer recovers somewhat when it returns to Lawrence, allowing him to speak authoritatively and compassionately on a subject that has consumed him late in life.

“I don’t think mankind is equipped to tolerate injustice forever,” Lawrence says of what’s happening with police overreactions across the country. But, he adds, “Hopefully we can be big enough to forgive. Hopefully the truth can cut its way to the surface.”

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AFI Docs Highlight the Role of Faith, Family in Making a ‘Better World’

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