The 48th Denver Film Festival opens tonight and will run through Oct. 9. The festival shows features, documentaries and short films from all over the world — 140 films in all. Among the highlights are three remarkable documentaries.
Underland
Rob Petit’s Underland overwhelms us with the magical phenomena of the Earth. It begins with a breathy narrator taking the film into the world deep beneath a huge ash tree.
Our journey begins somewhere beneath the skin of the Earth, where darkness thickens
In Norse mythology, the tree is called Yggdrasil and it stands at the center of all existence. While Underland is mostly about scientific exploration of what lies beneath the surface of the Earth, the film has a dreamy side.
The main locations are in a cave in Mexico’s Yucatan, an underground research complex in Canada, and a storm drain beneath the city of Las Vegas. In Mexico and Las Vegas, the search is for evidence about human life – of the distant Mayan past, and a refuge for the homeless in the present. In Canada, the researchers are looking for dark matter.
It’s a fascinating and gorgeous picture, with images of undulating rock formations, stalactites and stalagmites, water dripping over rocks, ancient handprints on the cave walls in Mexico – revealed by the eerie light from headlamps and flashlights.
A Simple Soldier
A Simple Soldier is a first-person film made by a Ukranian cinematographer, Artem Ryzhykov, working with a Colombian-born documentary filmmaker, Juan Camilo Cruz. Ryzhykov speaks directly to the camera as he describes joining the army to fight against the invading Russians.
In a way, it’s an artless film; it’s blunt and at times the connections between scenes feel accidental. But the intimacy of A Simple Soldier brushes that aside. Ryzhykov shows his transformation from being what he calls a simple cinematographer to becoming a simple soldier.
He films scenes of horrible devastation, charred bodies, the sight of him and others listening to shells exploding outside their shelter. He FaceTimes with his mother and the young woman he marries. As they try to hold back their fears, he minimizes the danger he faces every minute. And they’re not people far away at home; they too are in Ukraine with the threat of attack always with them.
In America, we have a long cinematic tradition of men going off to war – over there – but this war is right here, so the mix of war and daily life is constant, and A Simple Soldier can break your heart.
Seeds
Brittany Shyne’s Seeds uses no interviews, no narrator, only touches of music, and it’s in black and white.
The subject is Black farmers in Georgia who are being cut out of the crucial federal aid that farmers depend on – and is going primarily to white farmers. The Black farmers know it, and are of course not happy when they see white neighbors getting payments almost for the asking.
Seeds is an elegant film which honors the dignity in these farmers and their families, and the beauty in their lives.
After a funeral, a grandmother tells her young granddaughter about death. The film shows the huge, slow-moving cotton harvesters making their mechanical way along the rows, men gathering pecans, the wrinkled hands of the mostly old farmers.
None of these farmers is close to being well-off, but one brings turnips and mustard greens to a woman who’s had a stroke, and tells her to pay another time.
The film’s eye for detail and gesture makes it so deeply human you might want to watch it over and over.
