ChrisJarmick's Full Review: Full Frame Documentary Shorts
7 Documentary Shorts from emerging filmmakers to Academy Award Nominated shorts are featured in Full Frame. This was the first in a continuing series of DVDs (there are several volumes) and was originally released in 2003.
First up is Mira Nair's Laughing Club of India. A doctor was inspired by the Reader's Digest feature Laughter is the Best Medicine to start a laughing club in a local park in Bombay.
At first two or three people regularly gathered to tell jokes to each other and laugh. Soon a dozen people were regularly attending. Eventually a loose regime of exercising and laughter was adopted.
Today there are more than 70 informal laughing clubs throughout Bombay. And it has spread throughout India.
The Doctor has started a laughter movement and he informally prescribes laughter as part of his patients' treatment. He takes the time to show them techniques to make themselves laugh, amd relieve tension, hopefully brighten spirits. The laughter he knows does not cure disease, but it does help people with depression and there are patients who have benefitted from regular doses of laughter. (footnote: I won't tell you the story of Norman Cousins from many years ago...but look it up if you would like).
We briefly look at the lives of several people living in Bombay. Some are very poor, a few are rich and all of them have gained from the laughing club. For some it re-directs their anger and frustration, for others it has made friendships, for others it takes the place of aerobic exercise (and is very effective).
The documentary shows a few of the laughter club meetings which attract a mixture of people to the park. It begins and ends with a group of workers in small electrical company of about 20 employees doing warm up morning exercises.
Dr. Maran Kataria now holds workshops on starting Laughing clubs, showing his technique of running the meeting and various exercises that are very simple to do to encourage different types of laughter, including competitive laughing 'fights'. He has travelled to New York and sponsored a country wide Laughing contest. We meet the 1998 Laughing contest winner.
If you wish life to be a beautiful journey then come here and laugh like this every day.
At 35 minutes the film is a little too long....but I'm going to make a point of laughing more in my life. It wasn't just an entertaining interesting short documentary but it's downright therapeutic.
In 2003 there were over 450 laughing clubs throughout India. And there are many throughout the world.
Why Can't We Be a Family Again? is an Academy Award Nominated film by Rover Weisberg and Murray Nossel narrated by Ossie Davis. We meet two brothers who are being raised by their Grandmother because their mother abandoned them several years ago. The mother re-unites with her kids just before going into an intensive drug rehab program. If the mother does not complete the program she will lose her parental rights.
The Documentary films the children talking about the pain they feel regarding their mother. Older brother Raymond recalls times when he was 5 years old that he cooked and took care of his younger brother, begged for money on the street to get money so that he could go on a bus with his brother to visit his Grandmother who has taken care of them for several years.
The mom goes through six months of an intense program, meets with her mom and kids expecting to be another 6 months in the program, but then the mom relapses and goes to the streets. She goes to her grandmother to tell her that she has given up, doesn't believe she can ever get better and talks about committing suicide.
Remarkably the mom gets another chance with the courts to go back into the program, but the children are getting fed up with their mom who keeps blowing every chance she gets. It's a heart wrenching story to watch. The Grandmother eventually does file for adoption. The Mom doesn't show up for court and has 90 days to file a petition to stop the adoption and prove she is a fit mother. The kids still love their mother and hold onto hope that she can become responsible. A graduation party, a Christmas celebration and the mom is absent. Still the brothers want their mother to keep her rights figuring if she lost them she would really give up and perhaps commit suicide. It's a bittersweet 27 minute true life tale
We Got Us, a film by Joan Brooker captures 4 elderly Jewish women talking, and joking at their weekly Mah Jong game they play with each other.
We get a brief history of each woman (appropriate old photo-stills are used) and watch them play, listen in on their very amusing conversation and get a glimpse of how the four women are coping with their elderly retired life. It's a pleasant film, the conversations about how they met their husbands and boyfriends wonderfully frank and open and there's a few surprising and funny moments like a conversation about the movie Boogie Nights and a memory of a trip to a nudist colony.
Eventually we learn a little more about their husbands and boyfriends, coping with the death of a spouse, coping with a spouse who has Alzheimer’s. Some of women have lost two husbands and yet they keep a positive attitude about their lives both then and now. It might not be the most compelling film you've ever seen, but stick with it....it's a compassionate, warm and sometimes humorous 25 minute film.
Lucy Tsak Tsak is an experimental 2 minute movie tribute to Lucy who while making the Bulgarian film Tuvalu clapped the slate 100 times a day or about 7200 times, In 30 years of film work she's never appeared in a movie before until she does here very briefly clapping the slate 67 times. It's a film by Andey Paounov.
Family Values is an interesting short film by Eva Saks. It starts like a 1950s educational film and then we learn about a messy business that is run by half of a lesbian couple called Trauma Scene Restoration. Yes, you can hire them to clean up a crime scene or after medical emergencies. It's a fascinating rather grisly business to hear about. We learn about their work and they tell some very gory stories about picking up body parts and intestines and cleaning up blood and crime scenes. We see a few black and white stills of blood in a bathtub, but nothing is show that will make you sick to your stomach.. however some of the stories that are told are pretty amazing. Every once in a while 50s style music accompanies a few shots of the couple on a shopping trip at Home Depot.
The couple, one is a cop and works part-time for the company, the other works full time at the business. We learn about their relationship and how they live in a house in the suburbs and plan to get married.
Gallows humor is a pre-requisite for the job. Eventually we see them at work at a crime scene and although it’s in black and white, watching them clean up dried blood from a bathroom and rip up soiled carpet.. is unpleasant to watch. Proceed with viewing this one with caution. I suspect it was an inspiration for the recent film Sunshine Cleaners.
This was a N.Y.U student film and won a student Academy Award as well as several other awards and honorable mentions at various film festivals Saks has written and directed several short films and was working on a documentary about her 103 year old Uncle called Uncle Harry Goes to Gettysburg. (This information is from the DVD.. you can click a button About the filmmaker and learn the back ground of all the filmmakers featured.
The 6th film is by Phil Bertelsen and is called Sunshine. It's a look at the residents of one of the last remaining flop houses located in New York's Bowery. It's called the Sunshine Hotel a rundown place of shared Bathrooms, and tiny closet sized rooms that's populated by more than 100 alcoholics and gamblers.
We meet Bruce who originally checked in to stay at the Sunshine for a week and now years later still lives there and earns a few dollars by running down to the store for a few dollars to pick up beer and food for other residents. He's a bit of a street philosopher as well.
Jonesy works as a janitor and he talks about his constant fights against the bed bugs that are everywhere in the hotel. They are far worse than the roaches. He tells about one resident's room that had so many bed bugs he could fill up a large Mayonnaise jar with them.
There's a man who talks through a mechanical voice box that takes care of several birds in his tiny room. He's a methadone addict and alcoholic and has lived a 'life of nothing' for many years.
An old depressed black man who wishes there were a few women around.
There's a transsexual who has had many plastic surgeries and works the streets as a prostitute. He lives in one of the shared rooms with several other men. No privacy at all.
We briefly hear the stories. We meet Mike the general manager of the Hotel who runs a small business. He explains the bars have closed, a lot of the buildings have been fixed up and there are only a few flop houses left in the Bowery.
It's a fascinating peek at the New York Bowery, skid row, circa 2000.
AND
A long time ago a lone phone booth was placed in the Mojave desert to be used by miners (in the 1960s). It was about 14 miles off a paved road on a sandy road about 75 miles outside Las Vegas. You should have a four wheel drive to make the trip. In 1997 the phone began to ring. The film is called Mojave Mirage
People take trips to the desert just to answer the phone and talk to strangers and the 7th film by Kaarina Cleverley and Derek Roberto is an Avante Garde documentary movie called Mojave Mirage that focuses on the people who travel to see the phone booth in the middle of nowhere and either answer the calls that come into it or make a call to friends and relatives from the phone booth. It's a surprisingly interesting film.
The phone booth was removed by the parks department and the phone company in May of 2000 because too many tourists were showing up getting stuck on the road, or using the location to have parties. The film ends with some tourists taking a picture of the site where the phone booth once stood with about an inch of snow on the ground. Nicely done and a great way to end this 7 short film package. Bravo.
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