During a weeklong event like a film festival, certain themes begin to formulate. Most are intentional, naturally, as the programmers design an event to follow certain laylines of emotion or filmmaking styles. In my viewing habits so far, the idea of simply “existing” during hard times seems to be at the forefront.
One of the better films to relay this idea is a documentary by Elizabeth Day and Jonathan Olshefski titled Without Arrows. Following the Fiddler family for over a decade as they simple “live” their lives on a South Dakota Indian reservation, the film is an entertaining, heartbreaking, and meditative examination on the small miracles of what it means to be a Native American family in the United States today.
Mostly focusing on Delwin Fiddler Jr. as he rotates between a meager lifestyle working in Philadelphia and his jaunts home to be with his elderly mother and father back in South Dakota, the film refuses to make grand statements about the unjust relocation of his Sioux heritage, instead focusing on their desire to keep traditions alive and future generations aware of their rich past. And rich present. By using footage from 2011 to 2023, Without Arrows manages to show us sorrow, joy, hard truths, and survival as people pass on, children play, and the Fiddler family sets up tents for big family dinners. It’s full of the little moments as well as the big ones and reveals a family in rich flux. I mean, honestly, who ever imagined the hard process of getting a buffalo head and fur into the trunk of a Mazda?
As this wonderful documentary ended, I felt as if I’d lived within an ecosystem of plains life never quite witnessed before. Great documentaries are meant to educate, illuminate, and show us new things. Without Arrows manages to plug all of that into 90 minutes of observational human drama. I hope it wins some awards this week.
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By the time Rod Lurie’s true-life tale of a 59-year old man returning to play football after losing his senior year to expulsion, it felt like the inspirational well had been drained dry.
The real-life man is named Michael Flynt, played in the film by Michael Chiklis, and it’s a story tailor made for a movie of the week, which is exactly what The Senior ultimately becomes. Every plot contrivance is structured for maximum effect. The characters are drawn from cardboard assertions. The football scenes themselves inspire no great excitement or catharsis, and Lurie- the capable director of such films like The Contender (2000) and The Outpost (2019)- certainly knows how to excitedly frame and shoot scenes of movement and action. In The Senior, the excitement in both the football scenes and the more pointed human drama scenes fall incredibly flat. Add to that some generational conflict about toxic masculinity and The Senior fumbles in most instances.
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There’s no easy way to handle a mass school shooting like the one that occurred in Uvalde, Texas in 2022. It’s an unbelievably heavy topic that no image or idea can fully reckon. But director Tomas Navia does his best by focusing on two tangents of the tragedy- the reporting and duties from the local newspaper (The Uvalde Leader News), and the incendiary path forward blazed by a mother (Kimberly Rubio) who lost her daughter at Robb Elementary.
Taking its title from the now legendary front black page printed by the paper after the shooting, Print It Black is a necessary work that goes deep into the societal framework of the city for a year after someone took 21 lives away from them. Constantly, immensely sorrowful with pangs of deep humanity in how everyone processes the trauma, Navia manages to fuse together the inside and outside perspectives. Kimberly Rubio and her husband are beacons for change, and the film follows their day-to-day struggle to not only carry on, but to push for real change in gun legislation.
Juxtaposed against her personal fight, Print It Black has access to everyone at the small newspaper- from the photographer to the managing editor- and the film is also a pretty damn good look at the inner workings of a media entity that’s also struggling to make ends meet. Through both threads (and the fact that Kimberly used to work as a crime reporter at the paper), Print It Black takes a comprehensive look at the tragedy from multiple angles.
While watching the film, it’s hard not to get angry. Angry at the seemingly sensical ideas for curbing gun access. Angry at the social divide that cuts a swath through the town of Uvalde when it comes to election time. One scene has the crew filming a group of Uvalde parents outside a voting hall when an unknown voice driving by yells out “move on!” And it’s especially galling that no matter how many massacres we endure as a nation, the needle is barely moving. Moving on (but for change) is the only hope we have and Print It Black reveals the uphill battle for both the sake of life and print media.
The 2024 Dallas International Film Festival runs through Thursday May 2nd.
Dallas Film Now. 