INTERVIEW: HEATHER COURTNEY

Director Heather Courtney.

To heed the call up

By Don Simpson

Research shows that for the most part U.S. soldiers come from poor, uneducated, rural families, and Heather Courtney’s documentary, Where Soldiers Come From, gives us an example of one such group of young soldiers from the Upper Peninsula of Northern Michigan. These five childhood friends -- with Dominic and Cole as their de facto leaders -- joined the National Guard when they graduated from high school because they were enticed by the college tuition support and $20,000 signing-bonus.

When Courtney first meets the young soldiers, they are 19-years old. Where Soldiers Come From follows the soldiers for four years, beginning with their once-a-month training sojourns at the local National Guard base and remaining by their sides as they are deployed to Afghanistan to sweep for IEDs. The narrative then returns stateside as the five 23-year-old combat veterans attempt to readjust to their civilian lives again.

JEsther Entertainment chatted with Heather Courtney just before the premiere of Where Soldiers Come From at the 2011 South by Southwest Film Festival.

JEsther Entertainment: As a documentary filmmaker, what is your approach to capturing reality?

Heather Courtney: I actually just saw a documentary about documentary filmmaking and one of the filmmakers said: What happens in front of the camera is not always completely the truth, what I hope is to capture a moment that is true and allow the viewers to see a truth for themselves. For me that is a very significant statement because any time you are piecing something together, it becomes an edited and filtered version of reality. What I hope I capture are sincere moments that will help people learn something about themselves and connect with the people on the screen. I try to just let the people in my films say what they want to say. I do not push them at all.

JE: At times it seems very obvious that  the subjects are talking to you, the director. Occasionally, they even say your name. It seems as though you are purposefully informing the audience that this is a film. This is not complete reality. There is someone behind the camera.

HC: [Laughs.] We tried to take a lot of that out, but one person in the film in particular would always say my name and it would always be during very true and emotional moments. But let’s be honest, it is a documentary. There is clearly someone behind the camera asking the questions and the subjects would not be answering these questions if I was not there.

JE: Economics play a major factor in Where Soldiers Come From, specifically because that seems to be the driving force that prompts the subjects of your film to initially join the military.

HC:The the subjects of the film are from the very northern tip of the Upper Peninsula of Northern Michigan; it is a very rural area, very isolated. The nearest city -- Green Bay, Wisconsin -- is over four hours away. For people from any small town in isolated rural areas, economics are always a factor. Research has been published by Bill Bishop that shows that rural America has been effected much more so than other areas by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, because a significant proportion of young men and women from those areas have joined the armed services, often because they do not have any other economic options. The recent economic crisis has made things even more difficult for them.

JE: What changes did you notice in your subjects regarding their opinions of American politics as time progressed?

HC: They were pretty apathetic before going to Afghanistan, whereas their parents were not apathetic at all; they had some very strong opinions. The subjects were also just really freaked out about going to war. That is all they could focus on, all they could handle. Once they arrived in Afghanistan, their political opinions grew directly from their personal experiences. That seems so much stronger to me than someone who forms their political opinions from something they saw on television or read in the newspaper. When they would talk amongst themselves, they would form very informed and articulate opinions. It seems to all come out of their disillusionment and bitterness towards what has happened during their time in Afghanistan.

JE: How much freedom did you have in Afghanistan as far as when and what you could film?

HC: They let me go on almost every mission. They were pretty open to me being there. I was surprised.

JE: Can you explain how you captured the footage while out on military maneuvers from the perspective of the soldiers?

HC: I had these little helmet cams that they would attach to the gun turret on the top of their vehicle and they would attach others to the dashboard to shoot their faces as they were driving. Sometimes they would attach the cameras to their helmets too. There was also a military camera that was installed on the top of the trucks that captured the visuals of the IED explosions.

JE: What has the military’s reaction been to Where Soldiers Come From?

HC: They have not really given me any reaction. They had to vet it to make sure there were not any security issues, but that is the only thing they have commented on.

LAFF 2011: THE DYNAMITER

Robbie (Patrick Ruffin) and Fess (John Alex Nunnery) in The Dynamiter.

Stealing time

By Don Simpson

The ramshackle old cottage in the back woods of Mississippi where Fess (John Alex Nunnery) and Robbie (William Patrick Ruffin) live with their aged grandmother is almost identical to the homes in Winter’s Bone and Two Gates of Sleep.

Twenty-plus miles from town, we meet 14-year-old Robbie as he frolics in a field near his home teaching his younger half-brother, Fess, how to battle hay bales with hand-carved spears and knives. Left to their own devices, things do not seem all that bad for the two footloose and fancy-free young lads. The boys lack any adult supervision, their absentee mother is reportedly in California nursing some sort of mental breakdown while their seemingly senile grandmother (Joyce Baldwin) utters nary a syllable as her glassy-eyes stare blankly; and who knows or cares where their fathers are. Robbie is not adverse to thievery when he and Fess need something to eat and the brothers have mastered the manipulation of small change in order to coax Cokes from a gas station vending machine.

Robbie stands out at school as a sweaty and smelly white trash kid and he has a difficult time staying out of trouble. It is the end of his eighth grade term and he is hauled into office of the Principal (Layne Rodgers) for stealing. Plagued by failing grades, the principal offers Robbie a ticket to high school: Robbie must write an essay over the summer; if the essay is deemed well-written, he will graduate eighth grade and proceed to high school. In turn, Robbie pens a series of letters which he reads aloud via voiceovers throughout the remainder of the film.

Out of the blue, Lucas (Patrick Rutherford), a sibling ten years Robbie’s senior, appears back at home. In his prime, Lucas was a star high school quarterback; he has since de-evolved into low-life parasite who dates women who are naive enough to support him. Whenever Lucas is unable to find a willing female host to suck dry, he goes home to clear his mind. Robbie worships his older brother, so when Lucas instructs Robbie to find a job in order to support their family, Robbie jumps to task. Robbie thus begins waking up at the (ass)crack of dawn in order to work a shit-job at a local gas station for a measly wage.

Robbie eventually discovers that Lucas is not worth idolizing. It also becomes increasingly obvious that the boys’ mother is never coming home. Worst of all, there is an ever-looming threat that social services will become cognizant of the lack of adequate adult supervision in the household. Forced to grow up much earlier than most boys, Robbie must take these burdens and responsibilities by the horns in a last-ditch attempt to retain his and Fess’ freedom.

Writer-director Matthew Gordon’s The Dynamiter personifies the struggles of the poor as they attempt to claw their way up from their non-existent income bracket. Robbie is destined to remain poor because of his failure in the education system, his family history and lack of a support structure at home. His only chance to escape this poverty is to leave town and start over somewhere else. The inherent class conflict becomes most apparent during Kissy’s (Sarah Fortner) graduation party. Just like at school, Robbie stands out like a sore thumb. Kissy has a crush on Robbie but he seems to recognize that the caste system would never allow them to come together. Instead, Robbie befriends a poor black girl, Mamie (Ciara McMillan) -- it is worth noting that her race never factors into the equation. Both kids have been beaten down and have the bruises to prove it; together they are looking for a way out of their current predicament.

LAFF 2011: THE NIGHT WATCHMAN

Martin in a scene from The Night Watchman.

Gates of hell

By John Esther

The latest documentary by Natalia Almada (To the Other Side; El General), few films or documentaries laboriously and quietly examine the life of the working poor as well as The Night Watchman (El Velador).

Set in the infamous Cualican cemetery called "El Jardin" ("The Garden"), the night watchman, Martin, and others construct crass gravesites and mausoleums for the victims -- or soldiers ("capos"), depending on how one looks at it -- murdered as a result of the highly profitable narcotic trafficking in the northern Mexico area. Day by day, under the sun, gravediggers, bricklayers, cleaning women, food vendors, etc., do their low-paying jobs as the rich are put to rest. Without visible exception, the ones doing the work have already existed longer than the recently deceased. 

Rather than explore the more visibly sensationalized aspects of drug trafficking, the documentary maintains its focus on the aftermath of violence. Almada never investigates the live and death of the victims or their families beyond the tributes (pictures, personal belongings, etc.) the latter have made at the burial plot. (However, there is one chilling scene where a mother wails over her son's death off-camera as we watch workers continue creating future burial sites.) Instead Almada focuses on the mind-numbing days and nights of Martin and the workers as they earn their meek wages caring por los nuevos ricos muerto, whose extermination brings the trabajadores a little steady income. To put it more bluntly than the documentary does: in this rare incidence, murder is good business for the working poor.

Although there were only about 40 people attending the Sunday night screening at the Los Angeles Film Festival, despite its method of deconstructing some of the destruction and construction due to violence, I only noticed one person leaving this unusually poetic documentary before it was over.

DVD REVIEW: COME UNDONE

Domenico (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Anna (Alba Rohrwacher) in Come Undone.

Unraveling at the sheets

By Don Simpson

Anna (Alba Rohrwacher) and Alessio’s (Giuseppe Battinston) relationship begins to come undone when a charming waiter named Domenico (Pierfrancesco Favino) enters the picture. Prior to Anna’s first interaction with the talk, dark and handsome Domenico (he is from the south), we sense that her relationship with Alessio is friendly and comfortable but there is nothing sexy about it. Even their body types — Anna is attractive and petite, Alessio is frumpy and rotund — signal that they might be romantically incompatible. I often found myself wondering how Anna and Alessio became a couple in the first place.

The affair between Anna and Domenico is clumsy from the get go, as they not so clandestinely exchange each other’s digits outside of the insurance office where Anna works as an accountant. At their first rendezvous, Anna crashes into Domenico as she frantically rushes out of the cafe; she is intending to chicken out, but instead she has to lie about having to go to her office to send an email. The sexual chemistry between the two of them is incredibly magnetic, but it seems as though whenever they have an opportunity to see each other, they are unable to consummate their relationship. They stop the charade before it even begins, but then they decide to try again…and again. Eventually they develop a plan: every Wednesday evening, while Domenico is supposed to be snorkeling at the pool, they will meet in a sleazy motel room (with red walls and lots of mirrors) to have incredible sex.

The situation between Anna and Domenico becomes incredibly complicated because it is based upon a web of lies and deceptions. Domenico is married to Miriam (Teresa Saponangelo), with whom he has two young children. When Miriam becomes suspicious that Domenico is having an affair, suddenly Wednesdays evenings are no longer a convenient time for Domenico’s sexual forays. Anna, on the other hand, decides to be honest with Alessio, but she fails to confide in her family, friends or co-workers.

Come Undone is just as much about the working-class struggle to put bread on the table as it is about Anna and Domenico’s affair. Both Anna and Domenico’s households are struggling financially. The only reason Anna and Alessio are able to enjoy a middle class existence is because they are childless, otherwise they would be stuck in the very same dire financial straits as Miriam and Domenico. According to Domenico, everything comes down to money; and given Domenico’s limited working class income, every expenditure comes with a painful choice (such as: ballet lessons for his daughter or a secret vacation with his lover)? When Anna and Domenico are together, however, money is not part of the equation, which is probably why they are so happy together.

Writer-director Silvio Soldini (Agata and the Storm, Days & Clouds) often allows the most minute gestures and actions to speak for themselves (fleeting glances, unconscious smiles, furtive flirtations, nervous conversations, etc.). Soldini also opts to focus on the more mundane and arbitrary aspects of life within the structure of his narrative, delegating very little time and attention to the traditionally important moments, such as the birth of a niece. These non-traditional storytelling techniques promote an impressively organic atmosphere in which scenes and dialogue develop (or come undone) naturally and flow at the normal speed of life.

Come Undone is now available on DVD. For more information: www.filmmovement.com

SXSW 2011: WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM

Dominic Fredianelli in Where the Soliders Come From.

Class warfare

By Don Simpson

So, where do soldiers come from? As far as I can determine, soldiers are not delivered by a stork nor are they created by the gratuitous mating of birds and bees, but there have been several military decisions made in the last decade to make one think that soldiers are totally expendable beings.

Research shows that, for the most part, U.S. soldiers come from poor, uneducated, rural families and Heather Courtney’s documentary Where Soldiers Come From gives us an example of one such group of young soldiers from the Upper Peninsula of Northern Michigan. Dominic Fredianelli and four of his friends joined the National Guard when they graduated from high school because they were enticed by the college tuition support and $20,000 signing-bonus (the average annual income in their county is only $21,186).

When Courtney first meets the young soldiers, they are just 19. Where Soldiers Come From follows the soldiers for four years, beginning with their monthly training sojourns at the local National Guard base and remaining by their sides until the inevitable happens -- they are deployed to Afghanistan to sweep for IEDs. (While the young men are awar, Courtney makes a few return trips to Michigan to find out how the soldiers’ families are holding up.)

Then the narrative returns stateside as the five 23-year-old combat veterans attempt to readjust to their civilian lives . The most amazing aspect of Where Soldiers Come From is watching Courtney’s five subjects evolve from being politically apathetic -- showcased brilliantly as they listlessly observe Barack Obama win the 2008 Presidential election on television -- to becoming damningly incredulous about the U.S. military and its role in Afghanistan.

Despite the obvious temptation of bombarding the audience with additional footage of the war-torn soldiers and their families railing against U.S. economic, military and foreign policies, Courtney refrains from turning Where Soldiers Come From into a heavy handed political diatribe. Instead, the resulting film is a deeply humanistic tale of five young men yearning to earn some basic financial stability in their futures.

Americans rarely acknowledge the existence of a rigid class system. Instead we are led to believe that free market capitalism allows everyone equal opportunities to become successful, but that is far from true. Since the nation’s poor cannot afford higher education, they are left with only a few options, one of which is to join the military (during a perpetual state of wartime, no less). It is a sorry state of affairs when an entire segment of our population has to risk their lives -- for senseless wars, no less -- for the sole purpose of having a chance to claw their way up from the lowest economic rung of our oppressive class system.

With two full-immersion documentaries about the Afghanistan war -- Where Soldiers Come From and Armadillo -- screening at SXSW 2011, it is difficult to avoid comparing them. Courtney’s film utilizes an array of styles and techniques of cinematography to keep things visually stimulating, though Where Soldiers Come From never becomes as over-stylized as Armadillo. In fact, other than both documentaries utilizing cameras mounted on the soldiers (and their vehicles) while out on maneuvers -- thus throwing the audience right into the middle of the action -- Where Soldiers Come From and Armadillo could not be more different. Not only does Where Soldiers Come From approach its subjects with much more intimacy, but (thanks in part to its more humble production values) it also seems more honest and, dare I say, real.