Documentaries
by Becky Tan

What place do documentaries have in a film festival? This year I counted more than 15 as well as some docudramas (or biopics) based on the life of real people.

With AFTER WORK, director Erik Gandini goes to Sweden, Italy, Norway, South Korea, Kuwait, Germany, and the USA to compare the meaning of work and its relationship to the population. In the USA Americans have no more than two weeks’ annual vacation—very little compared to Germany. A government official in South Korea sleeps only five hours a night. Some people are addicted and work 14 hours daily. But “maybe work isn’t supposed to be fun.” We follow Astrid as she delivers packages for Amazon; we go to an oil company in Kuwait. We met Rory who lives from a trust fund and thinks that free time is a problem. An average of 30% of young people do “nothing.” A gardener has a father who “never worked.” Work is the center of most lives.

This year would have been the 100th birthday of comedian Victor von Bülow, born November 12, 1923. In the film LORIOT 100, director André Schäfer shares various events in the life of von Bülow who grew up living with his grandmother. He began as a cartoonist in the 1950s, e.g., with a series in Stern magazine. His cartoons were printed in a book called Auf den Hund gekommen. He expanded his career to become an actor, director, artist, comedian, on stage and TV and in film. We learn that it’s easy to upset people with comedy; not everyone accepted his sense of humor. He wrote, directed, and starred in the film ÖDIPUSSI in 1988. He did the same with his second film PAPA ANTE PORTAS in 1991. All his work was under the name Loriot, which he called his “alter ego.” Loriot is a French word for the oriole (the bird) in English. Hape Kerkeling, who is 40 years younger and appears in similar comedies, helps carry us through the biography. Von Bülow died on August 22, 2011. This excellent biography showed during the film festival under the category “Television” and we can look forward to seeing it on our own screens at home.

In RAZING LIBERTY SQUARE director Katja Esson takes us to a neighborhood in Miami, Florida, USA. Called Liberty City, it was built in 1933, eight miles from the coastline and one of the oldest public housing projects in the USA. It was purely “black” as Black people with low incomes were forced to move from other areas into this one. We talk with Carlos Giménez, former mayor of the district 2011-2020, as well as people who remember their childhoods there in the 1950s. Now due to an expected rise of five feet of water along the coast in the next decades, white homeowners are leaving their expensive shoreline apartments and houses to move further inland. They land in Liberty Square, which has been being renovated since 2017. We talk with Aaron McKinney, a development manager; we talk with Albert Milo, the president of the Related Urban Development Group. This mix of residents causes problems, both political and financial, as specific groups are forced to reorganize due to climate change. This is just one example of what will be happening around the world with an expected 400 million residents.

PRISCILLA follows the docudrama mode which means that actors play the roles telling the stories of real people. Here Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla Presley, the wife of Elvis Presley, played by Jacob Elordi. The film reveals real facts. Elvis was stationed in a U.S. air force base in Germany at age 24, when he met Priscilla, 10 years younger. After two years of seeing each other, he returns to the United States, thinking that his life would continue without her. But it didn’t. She follows Elvis to Graceland, where she attends an all-girls Catholic high school. They marry in 1967 when Priscilla comes of age; their daughter, Lisa Marie, is born. Priscilla always seems to be much smarter than husband Elvis, so that divorce is not surprising six years later. Priscilla concentrates on her own life. Her book Elvis and Me appears in 1985 and is the basis for this film by director Sofia Coppola.

For more about documentaries at the festival see my article in this issue about HEAVEN CAN WAIT and IN OUR DAY.