COLUMN: A rewarding live experience at Macon Film Festival
The first week of 2020’s Macon Film Festival is a wrap and worthy of a few observations.
Personal ones.
Taking note of last weekend’s live presentations of “Chuck Leavell: The Tree Man” and “Indirect Actions” can only encourage seeing films yet to show live or online through August.
There are plenty to look forward to as entertainment and in terms of film’s historic role of examining ideas.
Like most, I admit I was torn whether to attend live showings. I stick pretty close to home these days. Did I want to get out amid the pandemic to attend? Not really. But did I want to miss what I knew would be a highly entertaining and moving biopic about one of rock and roll’s greatest, most respected keyboard players for the past 50 years who calls Macon home and is an avid community supporter?
And who’s an award-winning conservationist and local tree-farmer?
Give me a break. This is Chuck Leavell – yes, I went. After all, I sat about five rows from the stage in the early 1970s and saw Leavell play an early gig with the Allman Brothers Band in the very Grand Opera House where the film showed.
Filmmaker Allen Farst told me in an earlier interview, “From the very first I wanted the film to look at Chuck from many angles, not just as the superstar. I wanted it to be about his music but also his relationship with his wife Rose Lane and about what he’s done for the environment.”
Farst has known Leavell a long time, first meeting him when Farst ran a recording studio in Ohio. To make the film, Leavell introduced Farst to the elite of rock and roll, to people he’s played with through the years.
“Chuck gets a lot of love and respect from these guys,” Farst said. “A lot of love and respect. The common denominator is they know Chuck is a special guy and a remarkably talented gentleman who fits a lot in life, doing everything well. People think there must be six of him to get it all done.”
The film documents over-the-top comments about Leavell from Mick Jagger, John Mayer and many more complementing him and his work. Then it jumps to Leavell casually cooking breakfast at home for Rose Lane. They talk about early days and their life together while wandering the forests of the farm and the streets of Paris.
They hold hands and smile a lot.
The film glows with great cinematography and in capturing Leavell and Rose Lane as people.
Farst said he thinks Leavell was surprised how well the film turned out. Answering questions after the festival showing, Leavell confirmed his delight and turned the spotlight on Farst and the superlative job he did editing and pulling all the bits and pieces together to make a well-told story.
And that’s a fact.
“Chuck Leavell: The Tree Man” could have been a much lesser film and audiences would have loved it, especially here in Macon. But it went the distance to become an artful work.
Indirect Actions
“Indirect Actions,” on the other hand, is not a warm, pretty film but excels in its storytelling along a path director Maranatha Hay and producer Ryan Moore didn’t expect.
It’s not the story they set out to tell.
“Indirect Actions” is a documentary on the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests where members of the Sioux Nation at Standing Rock Reservation stood against an oil pipeline that potentially threatened their and others’ water supply and sacred tribal lands.
Harsh physical responses to protesters that went viral on social media drew national attention and multitudes of outside protesters – and Moore’s team.
Moore is an immersive, fulldome, 360-degree content creator who runs the multimedia company Experience360 (experience360vr.com). Hay is an Emmy-winning documentarian. What the small crew found went beyond protests to the challenge of whether or not they would follow facts or merely play to preconceived points of view – and social media inspired points of view at that.
A promo for the film says this: “A documentary filmmaker on a mission for justice follows social media-driven outrage to the icy prairie of North Dakota at Standing Rock only to discover the dangers of a single-minded perspective and the surprising unintended consequences of Internet activism.”
If that’s not a worthy contemporary exploration of ideas for a documentary to undertake, then what is?
To be clear, the journey wasn’t from pro-Native American to anti or from anti-pipeline to pro. As I see it, the point is so much bigger than that. The point involves whether to listen to more than one side of a story if it’s there and about being open to the validity of ideas beyond the shouts and screams of who you like on social or other media.
Hay told me it was difficult and she worried certain decisions would kill her career. To me, they garner respect. She said she was worried about being on the ground, frozen Dakota ground at that, and calling Moore back in California with what the team was discovering. Kudos to Moore, deep in the ins-and-outs of finding funds for the project, for telling her to follow what she found no matter what.
I took away the message that hearing only one point of view to the exclusion of reasonably listening to other voices has made the American social landscape as bleak and unfriendly as the wintery Dakota plains “Indirect Actions” was shot on.
Complete with a surprise blizzard.
The fact “Indirect Action” is the first-ever feature-length documentary made for fulldome viewing makes it appealing and noteworthy. The fact the technology wasn’t the main focus of the film but rather a well-used storytelling tool helps make it the compelling, important film it is.
These personal thoughts about the films and festival also reflect this truth: we don’t know what we have ‘til it’s gone and with COVID-19 at play, the film festival as a local treasure was almost gone apart from the heroic efforts of the festival committee to make it happen.
Has attendance at live showings been disappointing? They were to me and others I talked to but were certainly understandable. Yet among those I talked to, I found that though turnouts might be disappointing, no one who turned out was disappointed.
There’s still time to take in much of the festival, especially with daily fulldome attractions at the museum and online features and shorts getting two showings each online.
You can still see much of what you may have missed.
Featured live this weekend is “The Sound of Identity” at the Grand Opera House on Saturday, the story of the first transgender woman to perform as Don Giovanni in a professional opera. Friday at 7 p.m. under the fulldome at the museum there will be an Art Immersive Showcase featuring short fulldome films. For information on these and other films, follow the festival links provided.
Contact writer Michael W. Pannell at mwpannell@gmail.com.
LINKS TO THE MACON FILM FESTIVAL:
maconfilmfestival.com/tickets2020
filmfestivalflix.com/festival/macon-film-festival
This story was originally published August 21, 2020 at 7:00 AM.