Inside Full Frame: Part Two

Facets' Amy Boyd's five-part series on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which ran from April 8-11 in Durham, North Carolina, continues.


One of nine world premieres out of fifty-seven films overall in the New Docs Program is investigative reporter/director Peter Bull’s journalistic and earnest look at the coal industry, Dirty Business: ‘Clean Coal’ and the Battle for Our Energy Future (2009). Full Frame Executive Director Deirdre Haj introduces Dirty Business by saying, “Documentaries are made to spread the truth… we’ll hear a lot about (this one) beyond this screening.”

The film is narrated by Rolling Stone reporter and author Jeff Goodell (Big Coal, the Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future) who begins by laying out film’s goal: he wants to “somehow come up with what it really means to be dependent on coal”. The opening beauty-shots of sun drenched oil derricks and perfectly conical coal piles convince me that we’re in the capable hands of a curious mind and a meticulous eye.

I consider myself a well-informed citizen, but before I saw this film I’m not sure I could say exactly what’s involved in making coal “clean”. And despite a huge corporate and political public relations campaign, I’m willing to bet that the average American can’t put their finger on it either. Dirty Business seeks to educate the public about “clean coal” technology, as well as innovative and viable alternatives already being implemented by average concerned citizens.

Where another informative environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), walks the viewer through a multi-media presentation by long-time activist Al Gore, Dirty Business derives its strength from a series of first person stories shot in China, Saskatchewan, Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada and New York.

We gaze with mother and decorated community activist Maria Gunnoe over her rapidly dissolving West Virginia mountains and disappearing traditional rural culture. We beam with pride at Rebecca Tarbotton of Rainforest Action Network as she stands up to and trips up a clueless, unrepentant Robert Rubin, the former senior counselor at Citigroup (the largest financier of coal companies like Massey Energy), at the 2009 National Clean Energy Summit.

We become privy to a very telling and what must be much-coveted interview with Don Blankenship, CEO of coal giant Massey Energy. While we can follow his company’s manipulative, often contemptuous actions in our daily newspapers and on trusted news programs, Dirty Business gives us a rare glimpse into the cold-hearted inner-workings, complex business calculations and single-minded (read: profit-minded) agenda behind the headlines. The film presents a well-composed businessman who becomes volatile in an instant, reminding us of the discipline and also the vulnerability at the heart of the corporate machines that affect our livelihood and directly influence our governments.

Blankenship relates, “Well, everybody’s going to have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist society and capitalism from a business viewpoint is survival of the most productive.”

While Dirty Business focuses on the social and environmental problems that result from maintaining the status quo, Bull points out that the way to solve such problems is through politics. He sparks a call to arms, motivating people of conscious minds to collective action on behalf of the people who are denied their basic human rights in the interest of production. And this group of people is growing.

I asked Peter Bull if he considers himself an activist. He’s happy if activist groups and other organizations use the film, but he is careful not to cross the line into activism. Activists use facts to suit an agenda, whereas Bull simply, but effectively, presents the facts he’s labored to track down, garnering his gradually emerging opinion from a dogged examination of them.

Seeing the film in the context of the Full Frame Festival allows an all too familiar class struggle emerge. Bull doesn’t see the energy revolution as having a class bias, but by taking a non-biased journalist’s approach, he has constructed a film that lays out a classic, but not hopeless, David and Goliath story. But this David is millions of people strong.

Dirty Business received an Honorable Mention for the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights at Full Frame. It made me wonder--if more and more journalists dig this deep and present facts in such a compelling, human way, maybe we would have more people--more informed people--fighting on the side of human rights instead of alongside coal companies, wealthy corporations and banks.

Also in the New Docs program is Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s third film, 12th and Delaware (2010). It opens on a still, dark, orange-tinged dawn where a lone white-haired woman, restlessly peeks around corners and paces up and down an empty suburban sidewalk, carefully toeing invisible property lines. She has been waiting for the car that now enters the gravel parking lot opposite her. She calls to the emerging woman by name, imploring her to think of the children, her own grandchildren--repeatedly the children--as the other figure disappears silently into a side door. She has accomplished her purpose, her first desperate action of the day.

12th and Delaware is an intimate and powerful film about a pro-life center and an abortion clinic situated across the street from each other on an intersection in a typical, unassuming neighborhood in southeastern Florida. The otherwise serene street is punctuated by grotesque protest signs left in full view of a schoolyard not far away and the quiet is broken by the souped-up engine of a bright yellow 90s model car slipping in and out of a covered garage, bearing a ghostly, sheet-draped passenger.

While the proximity of the pro-life center (Pregnancy Care Center) to the clinic (A Women’s World) makes for inherent tension and drama, Grady and Ewing navigate this terrain in a rare, non-biased, almost gentle way, gaining full access and trust from the pro-life doctor and clinic nurse alike. We are invited into both worlds and watch as a fly on the wall as two women somberly perform their daily work on opposite sides of the street and opposite sides of a polarizing issue, keenly aware of each other and the arbitrary space that separates them.

The film paints its subjects with patience and even brush strokes allowing us to see each woman as a person, a truly caring person, and not as a villain or saint. We’re privy to the solemnly, painfully sincere thought processes behind their actions and their work. They are each necessitated by the other. The clinic and the care center themselves are so inconspicuous and ordinary that they are often confused by patients who seek to visit one, but accidentally enter the other.

Grady and Ewing underscore this murkiness by shooting through gauzy curtains fluttering in a feeble breeze and rain soaked windows, over tropical fronds and by presenting the outside through gritty closed circuit home surveillance cameras. This approach amplifies the complexity of the issue; what happens when society is forced to chose between competing values.

I asked the directors if they found the film hard to make due to the extreme, controversial views and (quite literally) borderline illegal actions of some of their subjects. They said that their previous film, Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp (2006) prepared them for this film in a way. The films are not about them; they are vessels who focus on bringing the stories of their subjects to light.

Ewing goes on to say that, as women, they felt affection and compassion for their subjects and the women they helped. However, at certain points during filming, they had to step back and call each other (they do not shoot at the same time) for reassurance, support and to remain objective.

Grady and Ewing are quick to point out that 12th and Delaware is not an isolated intersection--there are hundreds of these same microcosms all over the United States. By allowing us in to relate to these women and to gain a deeper understanding of the human forces behind this issue through their film, we as a society can achieve more understanding and the courage to speak to one another on a real level as opposed to sound bites. 12th and Delaware won the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights this year at Full Frame.

Part three of this five-part series looks at Full Frame’s Opening Night Film and more.