Day three

BELLINGCAT: TRUTH IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

As a newspaper reporter, the most harrowing moments of the documentary “Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World” were when it was highlighting the limits of professional journalism’s powers to combat the spread of misinformation.

As the film points out, many professional journalists are little paid, and even less trained, to conduct investigative journalism by the news organizations that employ them, a number of which have a negligible interest in paying their people to perform such investigative journalism in the first place.

While my own circumstances with The Leader are a bit more favorable, this still makes citizen journalists essential partners in informing the public, and this film portrays the international online network of activist researchers for the Bellingcat website as both astutely analytical and conscientious in their self-appointed duties.

Bellingcat’s citizen reporters explain how purveyors of “fake news,” including governments, rely on tactics ranging from presenting video game screen shots as military surveillance, to staging actors as the victims of car bombings.

Unpaid journalists, whose schedules aren’t dictated by news cycles, can spend more time tugging at loose threads to reveal the truth about supposed evidence that they consider suspect.

What they lack is the shielding that comes from working for a news organization, as we see those same governments attempt to sabotage the professional and personal credibility of the Bellingcat journalists.

Worse yet, as the film itself concedes, many of the bad actors’ ultimate goal is simply to undermine the credibility of anyone who might dispute their claims.

So even when their own claims are disproven, it contributes to the overall climate of skepticism, which at least one of the film’s interviewees warned could drive would-be media consumers even harder toward sources of information that merely confirm their biases.

Because online citizen journalist networks such as Bellingcat cannot offer the inherited esteem of an established journalistic brand, those citizen journalists instead make the transparency of their information the basis of their credibility.

Given that the United Nations’ International Criminal Court in 2017 indicted Libyan commander Mahmoud al-Werfalli on the war crime of murder, based almost entirely on evidence drawn from social media, these are now literally life-and-death distinctions.

THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR

Director Ben Shedd won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject for “The Flight of the Gossamer Condor” in 1978, and because the Port Townsend Film Festival is ringing in its 20th anniversary this year, its organizers suggested to Shedd that they could screen his film to celebrate its belated 40th anniversary.

Shedd shot his documentary about Paul MacCready’s Gossamer Condor, the first human-powered aircraft officially recognized as capable of controlled and sustained flight, on 16-millimeter film, and while it was transferred to video in the 1980s, before eventually being released in DVD form, the original film master wasn’t transferred to a digital format until literally the Friday before this year’s PT Film Festival.

Shedd explained how his film schooling in California led him to shoot a documentary about Mars for the California Institute of Technology in 1971, “which suddenly earned me a reputation as a science filmmaker,” and ultimately led to him becoming one of the founding producers of PBS’s “Nova” in 1974.

“I was making lots of films about test tubes, which don’t make for great visuals, when I heard this guy say he was going to win the Kremer Prize,” Shedd said, elaborating that the Kremer Prize promised to award £50,000, or $95,000, for a human-powered aircraft that could complete an official circuit of a figure-eight course around pylons one-half mile apart, with a 10-foot hurdle at the beginning and the end, covering 1.15 miles.

According to Shedd, he knew MacCready would win the prize, not only because his aircraft had one-tenth of the weight of its competitors, but also because its structure was based on triangles, and Shedd recalled how architect Buckminster Fuller always championed the strength of the triangle.

“The only real bet was how much time it would take (MacCready) to do it,” Shedd said.

“The Flight of the Gossamer Condor” became a staple of science classrooms for a solid decade after its release, complete with a coda informing viewers that MacCready had made a second human-powered aircraft, that managed to cross the English Channel in two hours and 55 minutes in 1979.

TWELVE CONVERSATIONS

For two guys who don’t even live in Port Townsend, Italian director Emanuele Valla and first-time screenwriter Joshua Scott have crafted an irresistibly winning tribute to this town with the romantic comedy “Twelve Conversations,” my favorite of all the films I watched on Sunday.

Although Scott hails from Poulsbo, he visits Port Townsend “all the time,” and after he provided songs for three of Valla’s previous films, the two decided to work together on a modestly staged meet-cute that could double as a love letter to the town where it was filmed.

Valla and Scott had a filming availability of eight days, in January of 2018, and a total budget of roughly $4,000 to make their film, whose onscreen star-crossed duo — stuck-in-a-rut record store clerk Noah, and free-spirited fellow music aficionado Jane — are played by real-life married couple Gabe Smith and Laurie Getchell.

“In fact, in the one scene where Noah walks past a father and son, the father is Gabe’s father Craig, and the son is Gabe’s son,” Scott said.

Smith and Getchell were the only two actors Valla auditioned for Noah and Jane, and once he saw them, “I said, ‘Well, I guess we’re done.’”

Their offscreen relationship can be felt in the instant, charming chemistry of their characters, while Scott’s dialogue for Noah and Jane, which positions the two as curiously yet cautiously circling around each other, evokes the wandering yet thematically significant exchanges between would-be couples in any number of 1990s portrayals of young love (Stephen Schumacher, with whom I saw this film, sagely compared it to Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s 1995 “Before Sunrise”).

Both Scott and Valla credited cinematographer Claudio Coloretti with not only capturing the quaint picturesque scenery of downtown Port Townsend, but also managing to stage most of the film in the Quimper Sound Records store, where Noah and Jane share all but one of their 12 conversations, without it coming across as claustrophobic.

Valla and Scott expressed their appreciation to their screening audiences, and the Port Townsend Film Festival as a whole, for taking a chance on their first film together.

“As the airlines say, thank you for flying with us,” Valla said. “As a guy who grew up watching American movies, I will forever remember this. You are all in my heart.”

TOXIC PUZZLE: HUNT FOR THE HIDDEN KILLER

Blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, a byproduct of a type of blue-green algae, are becoming increasingly common not only in the Pacific Northwest, but around the world.

The frightening possibility that the documentary “Toxic Puzzle: Hunt for the Hidden Killer” presents its audiences with is that these algae blooms could be connected to the worldwide rises in reports of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — a.k.a. ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease — as well as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Director Bo Landin follows ethnobotanist Paul Cox and his fellow scientists as they investigate the correlations of ALS cases with algae blooms in and around the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, Sweden and even the bone-dry deserts of Qatar.

It’s in Qatar and New Hampshire that the scientists ask themselves whether cyanobacteria particulates can be inhaled through the air, even in the absence of moisture, while the film warns that irrigation in Australia might lead to cyanobacteria being absorbed into the country’s crops.

On the brighter side, Cox’s hunt for a locale where ALS rarely ever occurs leads him to a village in Okinawa, Japan, where the residents routinely live past the age of 100, retaining spry minds and bodies, which he suspects owes to their traditional foodstuffs being rich in the amino acid L-serine.

Indeed, Cox visits an ALS patient in Paris who reported experiencing easier breathing since she began taking supplements of L-serine, to the point that a hospital stay which deprived her of the food supplement saw her labored breathing return.

Dr. Sandra Banack, one of the scientists on Cox’s team, explained to screening audiences that exposure to algae blooms alone is likely not enough to cause ALS.

“It’s like holding a gun to your head,” Banack said. “The gun is your genetics, and the environmental conditions are the trigger. It’s a matter of chronic exposure to small amounts over the long term.”

“Toxic Puzzle” was followed by the documentary short “Grateful,” about ALS patient Jenni Berebitsky, who retained her positive attitude even as she balanced the challenges of her condition with the responsibilities of being a wife and mother, as well as completing a triathlon with help from her friends.

Although her initial diagnosis gave her only months to live, she managed to live for more than 10 years with ALS, celebrating her 40th birthday and writing a book about her experiences.

Jenni’s mom, Joyce Kleinman, thanked the Port Townsend Film Festival for screening “Grateful,” even as she noted that her daughter had passed away three weeks before.

“I feel like our roles reversed when she had ALS,” Kleinman said. “She became like my mom, teaching me that death should be regarded as part of the beauty of life, rather than being forbidden or taboo to speak about. We were very honest about everything, and she was all about the quality of life.”

COLEWELL

While “Ernie & Joe” won this year’s award for Best Documentary Feature — and deservedly so in my opinion, in spite of my affection for “The Primary Instinct” — it was the return of Karen Allen to the screens of the Port Townsend Film Festival that nabbed her contribution, “Colewell,” the award for Best Narrative Feature.

Writer-director Tom Quinn furnishes Allen with a superb vehicle for her earthy, understated acting talents, as she plays Nora, the postmaster of the tiny town of Colewell, Pennsylvania, whose quiet life is governed by the routines of her morning meetings with fellow post office worker Charles (played by the always welcome and underrated Kevin J. O’Connor) and her day-to-day chats with the town residents who stop by the Colewell Post Office.

Cinematographer Paul Yee’s languorously paced shots of Nora cooking up her eggs and coffee, and of the mists rolling over the autumnal hills of the rural Pennsylvania countryside, recall director David Lynch’s frequent remonstrations to his peers, that they should allow their scenes to “breathe” more.

This film is excellent when Nora and the townsfolk learn that the U.S. Post Office plans on shutting down its Colewell branch, as well as a number of equally rural and remote offices, because Quinn so authentically captures the dynamic of an isolated community at odds with a bureaucracy that means them no ill will, but is frankly unconcerned with the extent to which those folks rely on the resources that are about to be taken away from them.

When the town’s retirees object that the loss of the Colewell Post Office will deprive them of the one place where the community comes together, and the U.S. Post Office representatives coldly point out that providing such a place is not their job, it feels all too real in how both sides are talking past each other.

Where I’d argue “Colewell” errs is a subplot involving a young woman named Ella (Hannah Gross) who briefly visits Nora before she heads back out onto the open road, and whose continued story never intersects with the rest of the characters again.

Also, while I recognize that real-life events rarely wrap up their plot threads with a neat and tidy bow, I wish more modern filmmakers who are seeking to evoke a sense of realism would recognize that a cold stop is not the same thing as a proper conclusion.

On that note, having broken my previous attendance records for the Port Townsend Film Festival, my conclusion will be a well-earned nap, after I help my colleagues get the rest of the newspaper out the door for this week.