To start things off, ill talk about the biggest fuking disappointment of the festival for me... Act of God by Jennifer Baichwal was a convoluted mess from the director of the rather fantastic Manufactured Landscapes. How one drops the balls so quickly and so drastically is really hard for me to grasp. Everything from the wondering tone and style to the poorly shot b-roll and the apparent complete lack of organization or script leads me to believe that this was a early working cut that got released just alittle to early. I will generally be very liberal with my acceptance of irregular works, but this film pushes it in the wrong way. Baichwal, who was at the screening prefaced the film by telling the audience that unlike most documentaries which "answer questions" this film "asks questions". At first this statement left me baffled and intrigued-baffled because I would never agree with this statement(?!?) and intrigued because I understood her to be saying that the film would be raising maverick questions that I would ponder for days...Right now I should probably mention that the film is basically about the phenomenon of getting struck by lightning and how people respond to it across the globe. A interesting subject but a terrible film. The only questions I found myself asking after the screening was why would a reputable director release this, and why did I take absolutely nothing away from such strong material? In the post screening Q and A the term "abstract" came up alot, and as is usually the case the A-word was used as a passive aggressive euphemism to disguise a descenting opinion.
*In hindsight I have come to realize that the only question I could really glean from this experience was Why did Baichwal open her film with her own view of this film? Was she perhaps insecure about the product??
Surprisingly that turned out to be much longer than I had anticipated, but for good reason-so stay tuned for further installments from SilverDocs.
