CIFF40 Diary Days 9 & 10: Connecting Dots
Werner Herzog certainly doesn’t seem like the most likely candidate to team up with a network systems company like Netscout for an examination of the digital world but of course being one of the world’s greatest living documentarians never hurts matters. Instead of what could have been a bumbling catalogue of an old man’s misunderstandings about technology Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is a thoughtful, if somewhat scattershot, essay on connectivity and its impact that never fails to enlighten and entertain throughout its ten chapters. Grounding the audience with the knowledge that a single day’s worth internet data if burned onto disc would produce a stack of CDs so large that it would reach to Mars and back, the director explores the history of the internet as well its future and what it all means for people. Starting from the UCLA computer lab where the first internet connection was made before moving on to to robotics the film flits around the digital landscape exploring subjects as diverse as gaming addicts, radio signal enthusiasts, digital signal sensitivities and even Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars. Of course there’s also plenty of Herzog’s quirky sensibility to go around such as his “the corridors here look repulsive” description of UCLA, asking a a robotics engineer who builds soccer robots if he loves his best “player” and most strangely his interview with the family of “Porsche Girl” Nikki Catsouras whose fatal accident photos were sickeningly turned into internet meme. Herzog frames the family, dressed in nearly all black, standing behind three large, full trays of baked goods. “I think the internet is the manifestation of the Antichrist . . .” His camera watches as a woman goes from sympathetic grieving mother to tragically obsessed fanatic with a large selection of muffins and scones on full display. It isn’t one of Herzog’s best but it’s still a Herzog film and that alone makes it better than most of the rest.
When New Zealand-based journalist David Farrier came across a FaceBook ad offering all-expenses-paid trips to Los Angeles and hefty compensation, to young male athletes for the purpose of participating in competitive ticking events, he thought he had found perfect fodder for his “News of the Weird”-style TV segment. After contacting the company responsible for the ad, Farrier was subjected to a barrage of harassment over his homosexuality and threats of lawsuits for reporting on the company and the sport of competitive tickling. Tickled is the kind of documentary from which the primary pleasure is derived by the blindsiding nature of many of the unexpected twists and turns so to describe more of it would be to spoil it. Farrier and his co-director Dylan Reeve do their best to keep the mood and tone of the film tongue-in-cheek and the pace brisk while doing their globe-trotting sleuth job buts it’s clear that they swing from the instinct to just laugh at these guys to being scared shitless to pure outrage. Tickled is much more about the journey than the destination and there isn’t much of a takeaway other than that people can be deeply strange and access to large amounts of money can exacerbate and enable those eccentricities in some pretty scary ways.
Anna Rose Holmer’s debut feature The Fits is a film with a narrative so slight it threatens to vanish into the either. 11-year-old Toni (Royalty Hightower) spends most of her spare time training as a boxer with her older brother at the local community center. One day she catches a glimpse of a dance class in progress and her interest is sparked. As her fascination grows and she joins the troupe, one by one the become afflicted with mysterious uncontrollable convulsions. Rather than exposition, the director allows mood, texture and just a splash of magical realism to do the film’s work. In the post-screening Q & A, Holmer revealed that after she had cast West End Cincinnati dance troupe the Q-Kidz in the primary roles, she worked with the girls to transform the dialogue she had written with her co-writers (Saela Davis, Lisa Kjerulff) into the dancers’ own words. This type of egoless approach allowed her capture believable, naturalistic performances from group of non-professional children. That’s no easy feat for a director of any experience. The Fits is a remarkably assured first feature that avoids nearly all of the major pitfalls usually associate with a novice director.










