PDX FILM FEST

[April 25th, 2007] For the sixth occasion of the Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival, the Matt McCormick-led team at Peripheral Produce has harvested a crop of politically charged films. If this sounds ominous, concerns are momentarily alleviated when the opening-night feature of PDX Film Fest is dedicated to "the Law" and begins with a poem. I admire the legal profession and love poetry; this shouldn't be so bad. The poem, titled "Evil," is by Langston Hughes: "Looks like what drives me crazy/ Don't have no effect on you—/ But I'm gonna keep on at it/ Till it drives you crazy too."

As with much great poetry, Hughes' work is a straightforward lament using clear words, and in this case it proves prophetic: The movie that follows is utterly maddening. Charged in the Name of Terror: Portraits of Contemporary Artists , ostensibly a study of constitutional abuses by our power-mad executive branch, is instead dedicated to the proposition that nice people shouldn't be prosecuted for crimes. Exhibit A: Lynne Stewart, a New York defense attorney who once read John Ashbury couplets to juries and now worries about her grandkids. She also is convicted of communicating messages from terrorist leader Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, willfully violating a contract she signed with federal officials. Paul Chan's 17-minute interview with Stewart establishes the first two traits with insistence and some low-budget style. He ignores the third. And so it goes: The following propaganda pieces find a suitably nuanced tone with creepily blinking icons of John Ashcroft. And they often undermine the cases of the dissidents they rally behind. Of Professor Steve Kurtz, accused by the FBI of bioterror, you will not learn what he was up to with his computers and Petri dishes: he was using harmless bacteria on guinea pigs to replicate a 1952 British test. You will learn that he is a sweet person. So much for "the Law."

Matters should improve dramatically as the Fest progresses. Several of the selected shorts (especially the absurdly pro-cocaine I'm Keith Hernandez) are inspired, while two films not screened for critics also look promising. (Helvetica celebrates the font of every blessing, while Strange Culture examines Kurtz again—only this time with Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry Fool) in the title role.) The Lynne Sachs and Nir Zats collaboration States of UnBelonging considers the murder of an Israeli woman within the context of mutual brutality in the West Bank, and does so to no small effect. But it also spends a great deal of time watching Sachs dither for over a year about whether she should actually visit Israel. The best works at PDX this year lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity—and convicts.