October Country (2010)

A family in haunting focus
By Michael O'Sullivan
Friday, April 9, 2010

A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words. In some cases, more.

Case in point: the still photographs of artist Donal Mosher, whose "October Country" portfolio (focusing on Mosher's family and home town in Upstate New York's Mohawk Valley) are haunting but mute. Who are these people, and what are their stories?

Now we know. An award-winning documentary inspired by Mosher's photographs -- "October Country" took the Sterling Grand Jury Prize for best U.S. documentary feature at last year's Silverdocs festival -- invites the pictures' formerly silent subjects to speak about their lives, directly to the camera. Directed by Mosher and his life partner, filmmaker Michael Palmieri, the result is a powerful portrait of the American working poor and the dynamics that govern all families, regardless of economic class.

It is a portrait both harrowing and hopeful.

Shot over the course of a year, from Halloween to Halloween, "October Country" takes ghosts as its metaphorical theme. They're not the poltergeist kind. Despite one family member who is a Wiccan and spends one scene trying to tape spirits in a graveyard, the only specters here are those of persistent dysfunction, the cycles of bad behavior that continue to haunt many families from generation to generation.

But not many families are quite as troubled as this one is.

At the center of the movie are Mosher's parents, Don and Dottie. He's a former policeman and a war veteran (Vietnam, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Desert Shield) now suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She's the mother hen presiding over a brood of mostly wayward chicks. A history of teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, theft, battering and molestation swirls in the background of almost every interview.

The cast of characters includes Mosher's sister Donna, mother to 19-year-old Daneal (pronounced Danielle). Like her mother, Daneal became a teenage dropout on welfare, with a kid she can hardly afford to raise and an ex who beat her. Daneal's little sister, Desiree (known as Desi), is a victim of sexual abuse by one of Donna's former husbands, who's now in jail. Dottie's foster son, Chris, is a repeat-offender thief and druggie. He has been in and out of trouble with the law, and he will be again before the movie is over. Don is estranged from his sister Denise, the Wiccan.

Into this milieu came Mosher and Palmieri. (They mostly remain unseen and unheard, except for a few off-camera questions.) Mosher has been photographing his family for years, and the connection he shares with them lends "October Country" the quality of a home movie, something not meant to be seen by anyone but blood. Palmieri's outsider status balances the almost uncomfortable closeness, giving the movie a tone of journalistic detachment.

The Moshers are almost hyper-articulate and self-aware, making the fact that so many of them seem so trapped in patterns of self-destructive behavior all the more poignant. On camera, it is Desi who evokes the strongest sense that someone may someday break the cycle of misery.

But off camera, there's another glimmer of hope. That's from Donal Mosher himself, who has managed with the help of his family -- credited on screen as the filmmakers' collaborators, not subjects -- to make art out of such intimate raw material.

Contains obscenity, smoking, brief scenes of video-game violence and discussion of sex, drugs, sexual molestation and spousal abuse.