By Peter Keough
This is the time of the year when film festivals proliferate and now they are more accessible than ever because the pandemic has forced them to go virtual.
Great documentary films can be seen in the comfort and safety of your home courtesy of the Boston Latino International Film Festival (Sept. 23-27; www.bliff.org), Boston Film Festival (Sept. 24-27; www.bostonfilmfestival.org/index.shtml), and Roxbury International Film Festival (Sept. 30-Oct. 5; www.roxfilmfest.com). And two festivals in the coming weeks — the GlobeDocs Film Festival (Oct. 1-12; globedocs2020.eventive.org/welcome), which I will cover next week, and Camden International Film Festival (Oct. 1-12) — focus exclusively on documentaries.
The latter, usually held in picturesque Camden, Maine, and neighbouring towns, has reliably programmed recent nonfiction films that are ambitious both in style and content. Here are three such films I recommend — inventive and unique studies of people interacting with their habitat and surroundings.
Maine filmmaker Ian Cheney’s “The Long Coast” (it can be streamed on Oct. 4 and is available within a 72-hour window) is a gorgeous and engrossing tour of his state’s coastline and those who live and work there. It evokes films as disparate as Frederick Wiseman’s rigorously observational “Belfast, Maine” (1999) and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s intimately rhapsodic “Leviathan” (2012).
Divided into five parts and an epilogue, “The Long Coast” features seascapes as ravishing as paintings by Whistler and Turner and down-to-earth conversations with those who make their living from the sea. The latter includes a “Winkler,” who pries periwinkles from cracks in mossy stones, and the proprietors of fish-processing plants where a slab of frozen lobster bait is a surreal plank of pink ice with eyes. Cheney excels in showing the relationship between the environment and its inhabitants, hinting at the possibility of a sustainable interdependence but warning of environmental dangers ahead. Lots of kelp on display, but who knew kelp could be so photogenic?
This piece was prepared online by Panuruji Kenta, Publisher, SEVENSEAS Media