A famous movie quote occurred to me recently while sampling the 100-plus film program of this year’s AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival. The line isn’t from a nonfiction film but from a 1970s sci-fi classic.
“It’s people.”
Granted, in “Soylent Green,” that line conveyed a decidedly shocking and unsavory meaning. But when it comes to documentaries, both the blessing and the curse of the form is that the subjects themselves — rather than the formal, aesthetic or technical sophistication of the narrative — are what make or break the film.
A core sample of movies with strong local ties proves the rule. Although none of the films takes many narrative risks — hewing to the straightforward, un-narrated format favored by documentary filmmakers these days — each introduces viewers to unforgettable characters whose perseverance and clear-eyed focus would spark envy in any Hollywood screenwriter trying to come up with a compelling protagonist.
Take Tony Geraci, the star of Richard Chisolm’s “Cafeteria Man.” In 2008, Geraci arrived in Baltimore to take over the city’s school lunch program, promising healthier meals for the system’s 85,000 kids. The film traces Geraci’s two-year fight to start a farm and a central kitchen, teach underserved children how to cook high-quality meals and fight a bureaucracy mired in pre-packaged thinking. But, contrary to its title, “Cafeteria Man” comes most alive when the kids are on screen, starting gardens, learning how to cook and advocating for their nutritional futures in Congress.
Geraci, who left his post a year ago, emerges as a sympathetic but frustrating would-be hero, brimming with bravado and vision but lacking the patience and political skills necessary to bring them to fruition. A perhaps more worthy subject might have been Alice Sheehan, or “Cafeteria Girl,” who despite the fecklessness of grown-ups around her emerges as a determined avatar of structural change.
The Baltimore school system provides a different kind of backdrop for “The Learning,” about four teachers from the Philippines who arrive to teach in the city’s public schools. Ramona Diaz’s illuminating, absorbing documentary doesn’t delve into the political or legal implications of the little-known guest-worker program in American education. Instead, the filmmaker concentrates on Dorotea, Grace, Rhea and Angel, who can earn up to 25 times as much here as they do at home, where their families impatiently wait for their regular remittances.
Suffering culture shock (“It’s all bricks,” one teacher mutters, looking at Baltimore’s “Wire”-worthy mean streets), chaotic classrooms and intense pressure from their families to send back money, Diaz’s heroines become the unforgettable faces of a story all the more shocking for being so little-known. (The film’s most gratifying scenes are when the small, meek Angel finally stands up to her family members back home, giving them a schooling in filial responsibility they’ll never forget.)
Viewers are privy to sometimes uncomfortably intimate glimpses of the four heroines’ lives in “The Learning,” but they’re kept at arm’s length in “Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey,” about Baltimore-bred puppeteer Kevin Clash. Still, it may come as a shock for “Sesame Street” fans to learn that the persona behind little red, cuddly Elmo is a tall, 50-year-old African American man. “Being Elmo” rarely delves deeper than the average resume, but Constance Marks’s film nonetheless tells the inspiring story of a gifted artist who, despite being teased for playing with dolls as a kid, bravely took up his mom’s needle and thread and just kept on sewing.
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