Director Kirsten Johnson "Kills Off" Her Father in Playful, Profound 'Dick Johnson Is Dead'10/2/2020 Sundance award-winning film now streaming on Netflix In her acclaimed 2016 film Cameraperson, director Kirsten Johnson pondered her long career as a documentary cinematographer, exploring the implications of mediating true stories through the apparatus of the camera. As part of it, she included poignant footage of her mother, who struggled with Alzheimer's disease for seven years before her death in 2007. She was close to her mother, and is to her father too -- C. Richard "Dick" Johnson, an amiable man and psychiatrist by training who made an enormous difference in his daughter's life. "He has treasured me for the [person] that I am and allowed me to be sort of as big as I wanted to be," Johnson tells me. "In some ways he saw me. I think so many of us struggle with not being seen or not being allowed." It was devastating then when, as her father entered his mid-80s, he too began to show signs of dementia. "Honestly, I was so mad to have had my mom already have it. I was sort of like, 'Are you kidding me?'" Johnson recalls. "I was sort of enraged at the idea of having to face it again." What loving demands is that we face the fear of losing each other. Face it, though, she has, in a way unique to Kirsten Johnson. Her new documentary, Dick Johnson Is Dead, now streaming on Netflix, is the product of her attempt to deal with her father's deteriorating memory and the prospect of his eventual demise. Johnson's idea, what you might call her coping mechanism, was to enact ways in which she could lose her father -- staging his death for the camera in a series of faux accidents, from a fall down a flight of stairs to a fatal encounter with a cascading air conditioner. These invented incidents, conceived to be comedic and absurdist, would serve as a cinematic proxy for a reality almost too painful to accept. "I loved Harold and Maude, I loved Groundhog Day. Suddenly that playfulness in movies gave me [the idea], like, 'Ohmygod, we could do this film,'" Johnson shares. "We'll just kill dad over and over again and he'll come back to life and we can do it until he really dies for real. And that's what I said to my dad and he thought that was hilarious and it was like, 'Okay, we're doing this. We're doing his funeral.'" On its surface, the idea might sound morbid. Johnson essentially acknowledged that in a director's statement: "When I started to make this film in 2017, I had a lot of gallows-humor hooks that I would throw at people and then watch their expressions as they stared back at me, half in disbelief," Johnson wrote. "I would say, 'It’s a film about never wanting my dad to die and figuring out as many ways to kill him off as possible as a form of pre-traumatic stress therapy.'” The audience for the finished film hasn't shuddered in horror or taken offense. Quite the opposite, Johnson says. "What's been wonderful about the response, people know this pain is here. It's just that we mostly don't talk about it," she observes. "Facing the pain and being defiant or being transgressive in response to it -- I think people are like, 'Right on! Do it!'" ...My incapacity to accept the possibility of my own father’s death was so great, I wished to make a film about his dying in order that he might live forever. As is perhaps appropriate for the child of a psychiatrist, Johnson traces the origins of the film to a subconscious vision. "I had this crazy dream where there was this casket and a man sat up and said -- and it wasn't my dad -- he said, 'I'm Dick Johnson and I'm not dead yet,'" the director remembers. "I probably did unconsciously understand that my dad -- that the dementia had begun. I wasn't consciously aware of it at that moment, but I think in the way that dreams and brains try to tell you things, now when I think about it, it was an unrecognizable man who was my father, which is sort of what the dementia would do. I think in some ways that dream was like, 'Wake up! Your dad is changing.'" Making a film about someone with dementia raises questions about agency and consent, but the bond between Kirsten and her father makes it seem clear that at any stage of his life he would do anything for his daughter. What's more, he's an easygoing man with a ready smile. "I'm pretty good at living in the here and now," he comments in the film. And indeed he takes endearing pleasure in simple things -- a slice of chocolate cake, a scoop of chocolate ice cream; taking a seat in his favorite chair, he says with a smile, "How sweet it is!" Johnson experienced a nagging fear that she had waited too long to embark on the film.
"I had this terrible feeling that I was failing, that I started too late, that I wasn't gathering my father -- like the presence of him had already so transformed that it wasn't him," she tells me. "Then probably in November of last year we had a screening and it was coming together and I had sort of rebuilt him and I realized, 'We got him. It isn't all gone. I have evidence of who he was.' And the dementia was already enough ahead of us that I could see that we had done it." Dick Johnson Is Dead is a New York Times Critic's Pick, described by reviewer Manohla Dargis as "pitched artfully between the celebratory and the elegiac." At the Sundance Film Festival last January, where the film premiered, it won a Special Jury Award for Innovation in Nonfiction Storytelling. It's a marvelously inventive film, suffused with a kind of magical realism, and manages to be both humorous and profound. "We had some fun doing it," Johnson says of making the documentary, "and we had some tears doing it." Oscar winner Alex Gibney's film debuts on VOD October 13 President Trump has consistently downplayed the seriousness of COVID-19 since the early days of the pandemic. "It's gonna be just fine," Trump declared about the coronavirus back in January, a moment captured in the trailer for Alex Gibney's new documentary Totally Under Control. At a later White House appearance, the president commented, "Whatever happens, we're totally prepared." The statistics belie those comments: more than 200,000 COVID deaths in the United States and more than seven million people infected. Now the president of the United States is among those battling the disease. He was taken by helicopter to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland Friday, experiencing symptoms that are said to include a cough, congestion and fever. The president is expected to remain hospitalized for several days. The diagnosis and condition of the president is a reality check for the White House that has repeatedly attempted to dismiss concerns about the severity of COVID-19, for instance, urging states to "re-open" even when their infection levels were rising. On Thursday night, in pre-recorded remarks delivered in a video played at the Al Smith Dinner in New York, the president assured the audience, "I just want to say that the end of the pandemic is in sight." Totally Under Control will stand as the definitive account of the Trump administration's incompetence, corruption and denial in the face of this global pandemic. Totally Under Control, co-directed by Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, was made in "total secrecy" over the last five months, according to the trailer, based on interviews with "countless scientists, medical professionals, and government officials on the inside" who detail an endless string of missteps, obfuscations and denials that led to catastrophe. "The truth is that political leaders caused avoidable death and destruction," states one of those medical professionals, Dr. Tom Frieden, former direct of the CDC. Totally Under Control will be released on VOD platforms on October 13, including iTunes, Amazon, Fandango Now, Google Play/YouTube and for rent or purchase via neonrated.com. It will become available for viewing on Hulu on October 20. Watch the trailer here: Melissa Haizlip directed documentary about her uncle, Ellis Haizlip, pioneering host of "America's first 'Black Tonight Show'" Mr. Soul!, the award-winning documentary about remarkable television host Ellis Haizlip and his pioneering show SOUL!, is connecting with moviegoers in the virtual space. The film directed by Melissa Haizlip, Ellis' niece, remains available in more than 60 cinemas heading into its second month of virtual release [for a full list of theaters, click here]. Mr. Soul! documents the significance of Ellis Haizlip's unprecedented variety show, described as "America's first 'Black Tonight Show.'" It aired on public television in New York from 1968 to 1973, hosted by the diminutive and openly gay Haizlip. An extraordinary array of leading African-American cultural figures appeared on the program, including Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, Betty Shabazz (widow of Malcolm X), Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Cicely Tyson, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Odetta, and Bill Withers, among many others. SOUL! was the first national show to provide expanded images of African Americans on television, shifting the gaze from inner-city poverty and violence to the vibrancy of the Black Arts Movement. "It's been beautiful to see and hear from viewers around the nation who are both entertained and uplifted by our film, and inspired as they discover Mr. SOUL!," Melissa Haizlip said in a press release provided to Nonfictionfilm.com, "Sharing my uncle's story and the legacy of his groundbreaking show is super important right now... [I]t allows more people to discover Ellis Haizlip's life and the impact that SOUL! had on our country, both then and now, during this pivotal moment." The voice of Ellis Haizlip in the film is provided by actor Blair Underwood, who also executive produced the documentary. Belafonte, poet Nikki Giovanni, and Dr. Alvin Poussaint, who co-hosted SOUL! in its earliest days, are among those interviewed for the film. Mr. Soul!, co-produced by Doug Blush, has won numerous awards since its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, including Best Music Documentary at the IDA Awards in 2018, and Best Feature Documentary at the Woodstock Film Festival, Urbanworld Film Festival, Pan African Film Festival, Out on Film Atlanta, and the Martha's Vineyard African-American Film Festival. It also won the Audience Award at the AFI Docs Festival and was a finalist for the Inaugural Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize For Film. "SOUL!, guided by the enigmatic producer and host Ellis Haizlip, offered an unfiltered, uncompromising celebration of Black literature, poetry, music, and politics—voices that had few other options for national exposure, and, as a result, found the program an improbable place to call home," the film's website states. "The series was among the first to provide expanded images of African Americans on television, shifting the gaze from inner-city poverty and violence to the vibrancy of the Black Arts Movement." Film by Sam Soko now playing in virtual cinemas ahead of PBS POV debut The Kenyan activist turned political candidate Boniface Mwangi is known as "Softie," a nickname he got as a kid. "I was the softest child," Mwangi explains in the new documentary Softie. "I was the smallest child and they thought I was very weak. So they would call me 'Softie.'" The nickname stuck, although its meaning is belied by the man Boniface became. He has displayed remarkable strength, first as a war photographer braving violence in the streets to document his country and later as an activist and candidate for parliament subjected to beatings, arrest and death threats. You have given your country your life. The documentary directed by Sam Soko and produced by Soko and Toni Kamau is now playing in virtual cinemas in the U.S. (click here for theater options), and is set to debut on the PBS series POV on October 12. The film follows "Softie" as he tries to balance his commitment to his family — his wife Njeri and their three young children — and his compulsion to bring desperately needed political change to Kenya. "He rose to become one of, if not the biggest activists in Kenya," Soko told me at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where Softie premiered. "It kind of felt to him like a natural progression to get into politics because in his experience he saw that activism only went so far in terms of engaging with the political class and people in power. So the idea of getting into politics was to fight them in the inside, so to speak." Some of the reforms Mwangi sees as vital to his country stem from the pernicious legacy of British colonial rule in Kenya. The British fostered an identity politics new to Kenya, pitting members of one tribe against another — citizen against citizen. "We are culturally flawed to a point based on how the British interacted with us and the relics of what they left," Soko explains. "I think our tribal separations are the biggest example of that in terms of how they defined how we view each other and they, over time, changed our view of the other person. Instead of seeing people as human beings they defined [us] as a tribe." That tribalism continued even after Kenya gained independence in 1963. "With the historical divisions that were emphasized by the British among tribes, successive governments — people who were positions of power — used the exact same toolbook to divide and rule," Kamau observes. "People in power will always try to divide the 'proles' [proletariat]. They will also try to divide the masses, you're going to always emphasize the differences." Boniface's mission has been to end that form of divisive politics, beginning with a symbolic gesture close to home. "He chose not to give his kids a name from his tribe," Soko comments. "That's something that as Kenyans, [you think], 'Oh, I can do that?' You don't think it's something that's in your power to do. Well, it is. You can do it. And when that happens and we see this family grow and interact in that space you see how it is possible for us to change these relics that were left [by the British]." Becoming an activist and then a candidate put Mwangi's life at risk. There are multiple scenes in Softie where Boniface is attacked by police or military while engaging in peaceful protest. "I have many fears of losing him," his wife Njeri admits in the film. After he announced his run for parliament, Mwangi became an increasing target of death threats. Eventually those threats expanded to include his wife and children. "I'm not afraid of death. That's not a scary thing for me," Boniface comments. "I'm just concerned about my family and [their] well-being." Among the other major obstacles Boniface encountered was trying to get people to believe in the viability of his candidacy as an outsider to the power structure. "When Boniface was running in the elections some people admired him, but a lot of times they were like, 'Oh, he has an independent party. He's not aligned with the big parties. Who's this guy? He has no chance of winning,'" Kamau notes. "America in particular has this kind of culture of telling David and Goliath narratives, you know, the underdogs. Sometimes they don't win, but it's important that you tell the story of the journey. In Kenya, we do not tell underdog narratives at all. Even when it comes to politics, when it comes to everything, the mass media always frames the stories from the perspective of the big person, the person with power, the person in control is the one who will always win." Softie was an official selection of CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina and the opening night selection of the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival in Toronto. At Sundance, the film won a Special Jury Award for Editing. It was first Kenyan film to be accepted at the festival. "One of the big personalities in Kenya posted when we got into Sundance. They said they're proud of us not because we got into Sundance but we had the audacity to apply to Sundance," Soko recalls. "And we had the same audacity to talk to POV and they bought the film. I hope they're ready for the amazing stories that are coming from our space, like not only from us but there's such incredible narratives that exist in Africa and East Africa, in Kenya, that relate to the world, that connect to the world and speak to where we're going as human beings and how we need to grow as human beings in embracing each other's lives and cultures. Just love for each other." Kamau underscores the significance of Softie getting into Sundance and playing on American television. "We've been receiving a lot of American content [in Kenya] for a long time now — it's been a one-way stream, I wouldn't even say 'conversation,' it's been a one-way blasting of information," Kamau tells Nonfictionfilm.com. "And now we're saying, 'This is our point of view. This is where we come from and can you understand who we are so we can start actually having conversations.'" Adds Soko, "And learning from each other." 16 Shots, Midnight Traveler, The Serengeti Rules, The Nightcrawlers among night's other winners The Silence of Others, the Oscar shortlisted film about Spain's willful act of amnesia over the horrors of the Franco era, won two awards at the News and Documentary Emmy ceremony Tuesday night, including Best Documentary. The film directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar also won Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary at the virtual event. "We are really super-thrilled," Carracedo commented after the announcement of Best Documentary, a category that included 16 Shots, The King, Under the Wire, and At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal. Bahar added, "We dedicate this award to all our protagonists." The 41st. Annual News & Documentary Emmy® Awards honors programming content from more than 2000 submissions that originally premiered in calendar-year 2019, judged by a pool of 875 peer professionals from across the television and streaming/digital media News & Documentary industry. Among those protagonists is elderly María Martín, whose mother was killed in the early years of Franco's fascist rule, which extended from 1939 until the dictator's death in 1975, and Chato Galante, who was tortured by the regime's police state in 1968. After Franco's passing, Spain transitioned to democracy and the national legislature adopted a "pact of forgetting" meant to formally ignore the past and ignore its traumas, but Martín and Galante were among the many who refused to accept papering over state-orchestrated crimes. Evidence of those atrocities is scattered around Spain, though often unmarked. "There's still more than 100,000 bodies buried in mass graves," Bahar told Nonfictionfilm.com, referring to dissidents wiped out during Franco's reign. Carracedo noted, "[It] was basically a systematic repression, a systematic sort of extermination and repression of not just political opponents, but anyone who dared to think different." Related: |
AuthorMatthew Carey is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. His work has appeared on Deadline.com, CNN, CNN.com, TheWrap.com, NBCNews.com and in Documentary magazine. |