American Chronicles

Attempting to determine what defines a country’s national identity is a tricky proposition. An even trickier one is determining to what extent this identity represents the beliefs and ideals of that country’s inhabitants.

Americans still don’t have universal healthcare. We have significant populations of people without homes. We passively accept corporate greed and thievery. After eight years of leadership from a President whose foreign policy helped turn a “nation of dreams” into one of hate, there has been increasing intolerance in cultural and racial diversity. We have one of the most domestically violent societies on the planet, and also have spent a good deal of time in this new century invading other lands. Can we dare to hope our young nation grows out of this epidemic of self-infantilization where we are always looking to government, to any other entity to take care of us, to tell us what to think and what to do and how to be? Has the American Dream, or the notion of the independent–minded American free spirit, gone missing? Did they ever really exist?

It can be said that all of these conditions of modern American culture are reflected most strongly within the family unit. And so, in presenting a vital and fresh program of nonfiction films made in America at this year’s DocPoint, we decided to focus on family stories. In all of its various incarnations, the family unit can provide somewhat of an accurate portrait of a country’s philosophical angst (and also its celebration of itself), and a fairly accurate mirror from which we can watch ourselves in medias res, where the mid-stream narrative provides an intimate detail of the weave that makes up the larger tapestry, showing us, in part, what we’re really made of.

The filmmakers who created these cinematic works have used this storytelling method to gorgeous affect, capturing the zeitgeist in deeply personal and small-scale stories like Jill Orschel does in Sister Wife (2009); the way Peter Jordan does in his story of an Iraq War veteran in Left in Baghdad (2007). Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher collaborated with Mosher’s family to create a story of transcendent beauty in October Country (2009); and Darius Marder’s Loot (2008) takes us on a quixotic quest that makes for an incredibly compelling and poignant film. Every piece in this “American” collection realizes an exceedingly hard thing to accomplish—they are works of cinema that ring with an audacious truth, a truth that involves inordinate amounts of trust between artist and subject, most especially if that artist and subject happen to share a bloodline.

None of these films was fully commissioned by a funding entity, a broadcaster, a national endowment or patron of the arts. Certainly these partnerships between artists and benefactors exist, but American independent filmmakers—the ones we rely upon to bring us films like these—are not dependent for their artistry on anyone or anything. There is an acknowledged scarcity of funds and lack of resources. Some make and finish their films anyway. Not because of the hardships, but despite them, what you will see is uncompromising vision and a generosity of spirit, which acknowledges that, in America, the myth of the nation of dreams perhaps isn’t such an illusion after all.

Pamela Cohn
Media Producer, Programmer, Writer, Film Journalist