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Tom Hooper's Longford
Based on a True Story Watching a youth tattoo a sexual slur on a teenage girl’s abdomen in Tommy O’Haver’s An American Crime, or a psychopath sardonically describe the “wriggling” of a child victim in Tom Hooper’s Longford, it becomes all too clear that the makers of such films, even those with dashes of magical realism or drollness, are willing to rub our noses in sadism and moral squalor.
Why factual films are emerging now and why they are hammering home their truths so explicitly can be explained in several ways: the rise of documentary as a box-office commodity, the scripted nature of reality television, the barrage of unanalyzed 24-hour news. But the hunger for factual drama (and sometimes comedy) can also be attributed to the way perceptions of the world have changed in the last five and a half years. The September 11 terrorists destroyed much more than the Twin Towers and a wedge of the Pentagon. Hurricane Katrina swept away more than thousands of homes and livelihoods in New Orleans, as Zach Godshall’s Low and Behold, about a hapless post-Katrina claims adjuster, makes evident. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has destabilized the Middle East while increasing fears about homeland security. No one feels safe any more. While escapist movies are always likely to sell the most tickets, fantasy somehow does not speak to us as resonantly now as films about actual people in perilous situations. Culled from over 4,000 pages of trial testimony, An American Crime depicts, in graphic detail, the story of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens, who was incarcerated in the basement of an Indianapolis house by Gertrude Baniszewski, whose children and other kids tortured the girl to death. “I wanted to do a hypothetical interpretation of events whereby a group of people could be pushed into a realm of evil,” O’Haver said. “I wanted to shake people up.” A young life is destroyed in a different way in Ezra. Newton I. Aduaka’s film shows how children were kidnapped and brainwashed by rebel forces during the Sierra Leone civil war, with effective and terrifying results. The title character, who is an amalgam of two former child combatants, is still an adolescent when, stoned out of his mind, he slaughters his parents during the raid in which his sister has her tongue sliced out. “I was a war child born in the eastern part of Nigeria, which seceded and became the Republic of Biafra,” Aduaka said. “I was 15 months old when the Biafran war started and the next three years of my life were lived in a country under siege. It was one of the first post-colonial African civil wars. Millions died there. I suppose I wanted to try to understand war in Africa, which has raged ever since.”
Whether the topic is young people who kill or compassion for a convicted child-killer, posing unanswerable questions about conscience, forgiveness, and morality is often what these films do best. Longford’s screenwriter Peter Morgan, who also wrote The Queen and The Last King of Scotland, does not focus on the so-called Moors Murders in his film about the British moral reformer Lord Longford, who offended public opinion by campaigning for the parole of Myra Hindley, one of the two murderers. Morgan’s subject is Longford’s humanism—specifically, his capacity to forgive one of the most reviled women in British criminal history. Hindley and Ian Brady’s horrific crimes are evoked through a partial re-creation of an audiotape they made during one of the killings and archival news footage of police scouring the moor where they buried their victims. Exactly how much reality to portray is a question each of these filmmakers had to confront. Nelson George’s Life Support, about the cultural denial of HIV/AIDS within the black community, is based on the life of his sister Andrea, who appears in the film’s roundtable discussions with other HIV-positive Brooklyn women. Ana (Queen Latifah), the protagonist, is an HIV-positive outreach worker struggling with her resentful daughter, who is embarrassed by her mother’s condition. Rooted in personal experience, this is truth-telling with a direct social purpose. “AIDS has shifted from being an overwhelmingly white, gay male disease to a black female disease,” George said. “It’s an issue that’s been documented but never previously dealt with in a narrative film. To that degree, Life Support is educational, with a ‘protect yourself’ message, but hopefully it’s not preachy.”
Nick Broomfield’s social conscience was stirred by the plight of illegal immigrants. Having attended the Festival with such documentaries as Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer in 1993 and Biggie & Tupac in 2002, Broomfield this year arrived with a vérité-style drama, s, which traces the miserable progress in the U.K. of a Chinese illegal immigrant (played by Aiqin Lin, whose own experience the film mirrors). Broomfield’s most urgent movie, it was prompted by the drowning of 23 Chinese cockle pickers at a northern English bay in 2004 and targets the exploitation of immigrants by corporations that hire cheap labor, especially in the food industry. “I wanted to do a film about modern slavery,” Broomfield said. “Although we’re celebrating the abolition of 200 years of slavery in Britain, there’s more than 13 million slaves in the world today, according to U.N. figures, and both the British and American economies depend on these people, who receive less than the minimum wage and live in terrible conditions. This seems amazing to me in countries that call themselves Western democracies.” All of these topics could have been treated as documentaries—and some of them have. So, with all the tools available to documentarians (reenactment, animation, voice-over, etc.), why make a fiction film about an actual event? “People who are illegal and those who are employing them illegally don’t want to be filmed, so you can only approach an illicit subject like this in a narrative way,” Broomfield said of Ghosts. “The advantage of drama is that you can tell a very personal story in areas where you couldn’t get a documentary camera in.” |
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