The 2022 lineup for the Wexner Center for the Arts annual program of nonfiction filmmaking, Unorthodocs, connects theatrical screening with online viewing, past to present, reality and virtual reality. Chris Stults, the Wex’s Assistant Film/Video Curator, answers some questions about how this will all work out.
Hope Madden: You’re back in person! Well, mostly in person – there’s a theatrical and virtual component to this year’s Unorthodocs.
Chris Stults: The past couple of years, Unorthodocs has mainly been online. That’s been really great in terms of accessibility and creating a wider viewership. We didn’t want to let that go.
We’re showing online a group of shorts, mainly from the ’60s and ’70s, from the Sudanese Film Group that had recently been restored. In conjunction, we’re showing Talking about Trees in the cinema. It looks at the guys from the Sudanese Film Group who are much older.
There are really no surviving cinemas in operation in Sudan, so they’re working to build an outdoor cinema and bring back the art of communal filmgoing. It’s so charming, these guys who were just lifelong cinema lovers working to bring that culture back in their country. It’ll just be a great film to watch with an audience.
HM: The Wex has had a retrospective of Sam Green’s work. You’ll end that with a block of his short films during the program?
CS: We’ve been showing Sam Green’s films all month and had a performance with him a couple of weeks ago, and this will be the last program of his. It’s a super eclectic program that captures the range of Sam’s curiosities, and the films about the Esperanto language, including a weird film that was made in Esperanto starring William Shatner (Incubus, 1966).
HM: Another unusual offering this year is Charlie Shakleton’s As Mine Exactly. What can you say about that?
CS: It’s a virtual reality performance piece, a 30-minute performance for an audience of one. Charlie Shackleton, the filmmaker who was here earlier this year with his film After Lights, is at a little table and the audience member will be sitting on the other side of the table. They’ll get a VR headset and then Charlie will be controlling what they see and narrating this piece about when he was a kid. His mom was diagnosed with epilepsy and she asked him to record some of her tests. It deals with that and features footage that Charlie shot back then, but also conversations that he had with her later as he was working on this piece.
Charlie reads the script live and then the sound of his mom is from a speaker behind the audience member. So, you’re almost sitting directly in between their conversations. It’s so unique and intimate, yet kind of distanced. And it’s about presence and absence.
He’ll be doing seven performances a day for four days. Twenty-eight people will get to experience this. It’s both showing off new technologies but then also using them in really unconventional ways.
HM: Subject looks fascinating to me.
CS: For me, that’s kind of the centerpiece of the whole festival. It’s the first night and it will probably inform everything people watch after that.
This film, it’s kind of amazing nobody’s made it before now. It’s a documentary about people who have been subjects of documentaries. So, Hoop Dreams or Capturing the Friedmans, The Staircase – just checking in with them and seeing how it affected their lives. And really surveying people who work in the field and talking about the ethics of how involved subjects can get with the final product or how participation in contracts can be written. It just really makes you think about the responsibilities filmmakers should have toward people that they’re making films about.
The really exciting thing is that one of the directors will be here, and also three of the subjects. We’ll have somebody from The Staircase, somebody from Capturing the Friedmans and somebody from The Square. And they each had such different experiences being involved with those films. So having them all here together should be a unique chance to talk to folks who have been prominent in major documentaries. Anybody who watches documentaries or true crime films I think will get a lot out of this.
HM: And you’re screening Sirens just a couple weeks ahead of its international release?
CS: Yeah. The filmmaker is coming in and it’s a real crowd-pleaser about the first all-female heavy metal band in Lebanon. It’s a great rock doc. There’s lots of the grind of being in a rock band and then you get a lot of political intrigue. There was a big explosion on the bay in Beirut while this was being filmed and just a lot of political chaos and instability. So, it satisfies as just a great heavy metal rock and roll film, but then also so much more.
HM: And then the Monday screening of My Imaginary Country is free. What do we know about that one?
CS: My Imaginary Country is Patricio Guzman, a Chilean documentary filmmaker who’s been documenting the political arc of Chile’s history for the past 40 years through really progressive regimes, through the Pinochet dictatorship. He’s made really some of the best political documentaries of the past 50 years. We always love to show these films, but this new one provides a little glimmer of hope at a time when I think a lot of folks could use it. Documenting the recent protests that have happened in Santiago and some of the most progressive governmental regimes that have come into power as a result of these protests, it’s kind of a culmination of leftist Chilean history. Patricio Guzman making the film he’s kind of been hoping to make his whole life. But, you know, you never know if you’re ever going to be able to make this kind of story.
HM: Tell me about one more.
CS: I think one other film that’s going to be a highlight plays Saturday night. We have the film After Sherman with the filmmaker Jon Sesrie Goff coming in. It’s kind of both a personal and larger cultural essay film. The specifics of Gullah culture in South Carolina are very, very specific – a culture that’s retained a lot of African heritage. But then also, Jon’s dad was the pastor at the church in Charleston that had the mass shooting with Dylann Roof. So, that takes the documentary in a whole new way. His dad is very much about healing and tending to the community. It’s amazing how you can feel a sense of hope through something like that. It’s just a really powerful film that’s both so personal but also speaks to America right now. So that’s another real highlight.
Complete Unorthodocs schedule:
- October 27 – 30 – As Mine Exactly
- Thursday, October 27, 7 p.m. – Subject
- Friday, October 28, 5 p.m. – Unorthodocs Shorts
- Friday, October 28, 7 p.m. – Sirens
- Saturday, October 29, 2:15 p.m. – La Mami
- Saturday, October 29, 4 p.m. – Cane Fire
- Saturday, October 29, 6 p.m. – Filmmaker reception
- Saturday, October 29, 7 p.m. – After Sherman
- Sunday, October 30, 12:15 p.m. – Sam Green Shorts
- Sunday, October 30, 2 p.m. – Sediments
- Sunday, October. 30, 4 p.m. – Tantura
- Monday, October 31, 4:30 p.m. – My Imaginary Country
- October 29 – November 4: Shorts by The Sudanese Film Group (virtual presentation)
For ticketing and price information and more visit wexarts.org.