25th Annual Maryland Film Festival: Reviews and Reactions Part II
From festival-circuit features to local documentaries.
BALTIMORE - The 25th Annual Maryland Film Festival is now behind us, the four day celebration of cinema, technology, artistry, and discovery now a memory. What follows is the second half of my weekend diary, reacting to everything from local stories to festival darlings, including my two favorite screenings of the entire weekend.
A special thanks to the folks at MDFF, the SNF Parkway Theatre, and the creatives behind these projects for making it all happen.
Smoking Tigers (2023)
Following her parents’ divorce, Korean American teenager Hayoung spends her time bouncing between two very different households. Terrified that her daughter will end up at a dreaded "state college,” Hayoung’s mother forces her to enroll in an expensive summer SAT boot camp. Meanwhile, her father, an easygoing door-to-door carpet salesman, lives in a storage unit and couldn’t care less about his daughter’s academic proficiency.
This review originally ran in my coverage of the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival.
Not enough coming-of-age films show the main character dealing with one of the worst things about coming-of-age: the SATs.
Hayoung’s grades are fine, but not good enough for anything more than a state school - something that would fall way below her mother’s plans for her. Unfortunately, her mother’s plans for herself have fallen apart (she and Hayoung’s father are separated, they can only afford a cramped apartment, and she’s having to take on odd jobs) and she needs things to go right for her oldest child. As a result, Hayoung is enrolled in a high-intensity (and expensive) academic boot camp, or hagwon, where the wealthy student populace only makes her feel more like an outsider.
In 2022, writer/director So Young Shelly Yo and producer Guo Guo pitched Smoking Tigers to Tribeca and AT&T’s Untold Stories initiative, winning the $1 million funding to produce the film and the opportunity to premiere at this year’s festival and the chance to land on Max.
With what seems like a pretty speedy turnaround time, the filmmakers have put together an impressive debut. It’s easy to make films about teenagers that spend time at prom or show them wrecking their first car or packing up for college. It’s a lot more difficult, and commendable, to make a movie about the SATs or taking care of a younger sister or daydreaming of a better life. In fact, that’s my favorite thing about Smoking Tigers - there’s a scene where Hayoung (an interesting Ji-young Yoo) sneaks into a house much nicer than the crappy apartment she hates (a house that compares to those lived in by the hagwon’s other students) and literally dreams of a better life. Her parents are not only together, but cuddling up. Homemade haemul pajeon is on the dinner table. The house is bright and joyful and filled with a loving family. It all plays out in front of her as if it was real.
I think anyone whose teenagehood consisted of worries usually reserved for adults will understand this feeling. That's what Smoking Tigers gets right.
Detention (1998)
Released the very year that MdFF was being created, shot on Super-16mm film and supported by MdFF’s Producer’s Club, Detention is the 1998 feature debut of Baltimore’s own Darryl Wharton-Rigby, an accomplished TV writer and professor at Temple University’s Japan campus. Based on Wharton-Rigby’s own recollections of the Baltimore public school system, the film follows five exceptional students and one dedicated teacher as they experience an afternoon of detention. That particular event turns out to be a pivotal life changing experience for everyone involved.
Saturday evening brought a 25th-anniversary screening of a Baltimore film from the same year that the MDFF first opened, but one that didn’t make that inaugural programming slate. However, as they said in the pre-show speech, “It’s never too late to make a thing right.” Detention may not have made the cut in 1998, but this screening was a highlight of this year’s festival. Attended by the filmmaker Darryl Wharton-Rigby, the film’s actors and production team, and many of their longtime supporters, it was a standing-room-only celebration of independent filmmaking, local artists, and a damn fine movie.
Detention is the story of five Baltimore City high school kids, all with issues that include, but are not limited to “attendance, apathy, arrogance, and attitude” and little of that has become anything resembling ambition. When their teacher Mrs. Deacon holds them for an extended detention one afternoon, she’s insistent on showing these kids the talents and skills that will keep them out of trouble, inside and outside of school.
Despite an obvious connection (and at least one direct line-lift), The Breakfast Club this is not. A film where five white kids reinvent themselves throughout a Saturday afternoon is a fantasy at best, (don’t get me wrong, I love The Breakfast Club - so does writer/director Wharton-Rigby.) This film (which may largely be a result of their low budget and totally non-polished 16mm photography and only surviving print we saw projected), is an authentic look at life in the city. It's not a story about reinvention, it's about who you truly are and who you can be. You don't have to aspire to teenage motherhood, you can pursue a career as an artist. You don't have to hang it all on making it to the NBA, you can study horticulture. You can use those impressively quick math skills for better use than counting drug money.
At the end of the credits, the film is dedicated to TEACHERS and as a Baltimore City educator myself, I appreciate not only the shoutout but the all-caps enthusiasm. And the excellent feature, which deserves much wider availability. I hope that you can see it soon.
The Hypnosis (2023)
In this clever satirical social commentary, young couple Vera and André attend a competition where they pitch their female health app. As the competition progresses it becomes clear that Vera’s hypnotherapy may have done more than help her quit smoking, while André’s behavior changes under the mounting pressure. All of this culminates in an unforgettable family dinner in the final scene.
“You stepped on my dog. It’s just a puppy. Are you a sadist?”
Then her scowl becomes a smirk. Her eyes open knowingly.
“I scared you a little bit. Did you pee your pants?”
There’s no dog. It’s a bizarre prank that the victim doesn’t take too kindly.
Vera shouldn’t be playing these tricks on people, particularly the potential investors who are supposed to listen to her start-up pitch tomorrow. But Vera (Asta Kamma August) has been hypnotized and she’s screwing up everything that she and her boyfriend/business partner Andre (Herbert Nordrum) have planned. If she’s not yelling at people for stepping on her imaginary dog, she’s stealing milk from behind the bar and rationing it into her wine glass. It’s ironic because their app is all about improving women’s health and her mental health is an immediate crisis.
She’s totally lost it and it’s all because she’s a victim of the titular hypnosis. Or so we think…
Director Ernst De Geer has created a heartfelt comedy all about how fun it can be to be weird. Vera stays up late blasting music in her hotel room, dancing alone without a care in the world. She goes off-script in their pitches and presentations and meetings, much to the chagrin of the gawky Andre - it’s also an excellent comedy about the anxieties of social interactions. Every time Vera embarrasses Andre, he gets shifty and stammery. We shift in our seats along with him. It’s a true awkward nightmare.
But that comedy turns all too real when we reflect on the rigid structures we've built around our lives and think about how the whole thing could be just a little more carefree.
Divine Trash (1998)
John Waters’ Pink Flamingos is one of the most notorious cult films ever made. Filmmaker Steve Yeager was shooting behind-the-scenes footage of the production. Decades later, he combined that footage with other archival materials and newly shot interviews with the likes of Steve Buscemi, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, to create Divine Trash, a documentary that serves as not only a time capsule of Waters’ early Dreamland Productions days, but also the 1990s world of indie filmmaking. The film features the charming look of that decade’s low-budget 16mm filmmaking, just before the digital revolution changed the indie film landscape.
"What really is camp?" It's a question asked by underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar early in Divine Trash. It's a question still asked and argued today, just as it was when this documentary came out in 1998, just as it was when the focus of the documentary, John Waters' 1972 cult classic Pink Flamingos, was released.
Danny Peary tries to wrangle that definition in the Pink Flamingos chapter of his 1981 book Cult Movies when he writes, "Sometime back John Waters must gotten the notion that he'd like to make films that are so disgusting and sexually perverse that critics couldn't write about them without seeming like absolute perverts to their readers for having sat through them."
That's the focus of Steve Yaeger's winner of the Filmmakers Trophy for Best Documentary at the 1998 Sundance Festival and a film celebrating 25 years along with the Maryland Film Festival - this movie was part of the original slate. Yaeger, a friend of Waters and the Dreamland crew, was there throughout all of Pink Flamingos, filming hours and hours of footage that then sat in his refrigerator for years until it was time to make this documentary. It's not only a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a low-budget cult classic, it's a career retrospective of Waters' work, a dear obituary for Divine, a tongue-in-cheek look at film censorship, and an answer to that question, "What really is camp?"
Squeegee (2023)
This unflinching multi-layered portrait of the harsh realities of growing up in Baltimore takes the viewer on a journey, as seen through the eyes of four young people in the worlds they inhabit. Leroy Brown, Ericka Sparks, Desmond Rogers, and “Peanut” Davis transition to adulthood and fight for their futures as they squeegee to make a living in a city that treats them as disposable. Working collaboratively with the young people, the film interweaves verite´ footage shot by the filmmakers, along with lyrical, diaristic footage shot by the participants, offering unparalleled, unfiltered access into their lives.
Squeegee is a documentary about the squeegee kids of Baltimore, those who wander the cars stopped at red lights offering a quick squeegee clean of a windshield for a buck or two. It's a hustle for these kids, a way to make ends meet in a city that constantly kicks them down with its racism, segregation, poverty, gun violence, inadequate policing, and failing school system. Unfortunately, it's a short-term solution to a long-term problem, one that weighs heavily on their mental health which often, in turn, affects their physical health and safety.
It has also been a topic of debate in the city for decades. Every mayor seems to have a new plan for this issue that has troubled law enforcement and angered drivers. Every talk radio program has an opinion, as conservatives gripe and politicians pander on public radio.
It's difficult to bring something new to the conversation as it's all been said again and again - whether anything ever gets done about it is a different story.
This documentary, directed by Clarke Lyons and Gabe Dinsmoor, does not say or do anything new. Aside from a quick prologue for context, the propaganda waged against them is rarely, if ever, mentioned and the political pawning they're used for isn't addressed. Instead, the film follows four teenage squeegee kids: Leroy, Ericka, Desmond, and Peanut, as well as their friends and family and other lesser-seen members of the community. We follow their lives, meet their families, learn about what's troubling them and what finds them on the street. Their participation is brave and vulnerable and the filmmakers do make a strong choice to hand the kids their own cameras so we can see things from their perspective, on the medians, at home, at family gatherings. They're given the space to express themselves, vent their frustrations, and openly and honestly dream for a better life.
But the filmmakers' dedication to humanizing these children, although a noble effort, comes across as stagnant. This movie already exists in our daily lives, those talk radio segments, the evening news, newspaper columns, films (I saw a narrative short on this same subject yesterday), and other, better documentaries. Squeegee might be unique in that it's a feature documentary dedicated solely to this issue, but I've seen this movie multiple times in other ways. Without a particular point of view, it's a passive document while the issues of the film are passing it by. At only 97 minutes, these moments in their lives feel more like happenstance than a thematically-linked exploration of the city, a place the filmmakers posit is represented by these four children.
It's shot well, it looks nice, and the kids' honesty and openness demand your respect, but filming on the block outside the Parkway Theatre isn't a statement.
Secret Mall Apartment (2023)
In 2003, eight young Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment in a hidden space inside the Providence Place Mall and lived in it for four years, filming everything along the way. They snuck in furniture, tapped into the mall’s electricity, and even secretly constructed a brick wall with a locking door, smuggling in over 2 tons of cinderblock. Far more than just a wild prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all its inhabitants – a personal expression of defiance against local gentrification, a boundary-pushing work of public/private art, a clubhouse to coordinate their artistic charity, and finally, a 750 square foot space that sticks it to the man.
There's no false advertising with Secret Mall Apartment, the story of eight artists who found a lost space in the Providence Place Mall, created an apartment between the concrete slabs, and lived there for four years. It sounds like a wacky tale of penniless ne'er-do wells who skate by on free rent and dine exclusively on food court trash. Maybe they sneak in at first, but eventually get too lax with their precautions until they get busted.
And you'd be right. But this film, and these characters, are so much deeper than that Buried Life-esque logline would lead you to believe. Local artists Michael Townsend and his band of merry men and women aren't simply stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, i.e. themselves. No, the inspiration here is multi-faceted. It's partially a protest against the gentrification of their city, the consumerist greed that took housing and art studios away from them. It's partially an act of performance art, a physical space that represents themselves as having to live on the edges of this shiny and new society, as the apartment begins to mirror a real-life living situation with sleeping arrangements, nice china, photo albums strewn about, and a Playstation to waste the day away. And, as the art they create outside the mall suggests, it's a living, breathing metaphor for the feeling of impermanence that results from living in a post-9/11 world.
It's filled with tomfoolery, yes, and the film is plenty laugh-out-loud funny and always unexpected. But it's also wonderfully sincere, they get you on their side early and keep you there until the end. As their art begins to take over their lives full-time, their very existence becomes its own artistic exploration. You root for them every step of the way because you believe in what they're doing, silly as it may be. Director Jeremy Workman knows that documentaries should have something to say and his is a highlight of this year's Maryland Film Festival - and the perfect film for me to end my weekend with.
Each plot synopsis and all photos are from MDFilmFest.com