Inside Full Frame: Part Four

We're taking a short break from our Cannes coverage to re-join Facets' Amy Boyd's series on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which ran from April 8-11 in Durham, North Carolina.


This year at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the Invited Program consists of a diverse group of nineteen features, most with a personal narrative at their core. One of the most moving is How To Fold a Flag (2009) by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker. This is not a story about war, but a story about how America deals with its soldiers returning home from war.

How To Fold a Flag follows four Iraq veterans as they return home to North Carolina, New York, Texas and Colorado. Epperlein and Tucker’s work is to film these sincere and personal stories and their work resonates because, despite all of our good intentions, yellow ribbons and bumper stickers, these stories aren’t being told in the news.

At dawn they lit up a car crossing through the checkpoint, only to find children now slumped and riddled with bullets in the backseat. This is what is seen on the news. A soldier cradling a girl in his arms as his hand sinks through the back of her head, cut to a shot of him back home, sliding his sleeping daughter out of the backseat of his own car. This is what is behind the headlines.

I spoke with Michael Tucker about filming combat soldiers in Iraq and the public’s perception of filmmakers who make a living in the war zone and he said that you want it to end, but “the war just goes on and on and on--and it’s something I’m good at.”

In 2003, Tucker (with Epperlein) shot the Iraq War doc, Gunner Palace (2005), and he managed to keep in contact with some of the soldiers profiled in that film. After they returned home, the soldiers reached out to him, asking to continue telling their stories. This is how How To Fold a Flag came about.

Asked about the profusion of “war films” in the marketplace, Tucker thinks that it’s a good thing. Our news has turned into entertainment. Network and cable news programs cover the war and our sacrifices in canned, dutiful sound bites or not at all. But Tucker points out that it’s not the public’s fault.

Fellow filmmaker Steve James (War Tapes, 2006) agrees, citing media fatigue as a potential cause for the drop off in coverage. “By now, you could almost program a whole festival of films about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he says.

Reporter (2009), which screened at Full Frame last year, talks about the causes of this numbing of the public’s psyche to these images of war and mass suffering. Director Eric Daniel Metzgar follows New York Times investigative journalist Nicholas Kristof as he searches for moving stories in places like war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, which he hopes may stir the public to not only feel compassion, but to act.

Within films like War Tapes and How to Fold a Flag, we’re able to see how varied the experience of war (and the coming home experience) is for the men and women living and fighting through it. The media portrays the coming home experience for all soldiers as being the same, but How to Fold a Flag shows that their reintegration experiences are as diverse as they are themselves.

At home, I turn on the television to find that my favorite primetime crime shows all have plots involving an always-troubled soldier returning home from the Middle East. It makes me wonder: When news is entertainment and entertainment is taken for news, what are we--citizens, soldiers, families, workers--getting out of this cycle?

One of two Kartemquin produced films being screened at Full Frame this year is No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson (2010) directed by Steve James as part of ESPN’s 30 For 30 documentary series. It’s both a personal film about James’ home town of Hampton, Virginia and a film about race. James believes this is a subject that we don’t talk enough about, so he went back home and brought it up.

No Crossover examines the 1993 trial of the talented high school athlete Allen Iverson through newspaper articles, media coverage, family photos and interviews with hometown citizens from all walks of life. James talks with the people Iverson grew up with, the people that live on the other side of the tracks and the people who not only remember the trial but who had a stake in it.

Everyone says they saw what happened, or else they have a theory about what happened, one ordinary February night at the local bowling alley when a brawl suddenly broke out between a group of black kids and a group of white kids. Some place blame on one side; some, the other, and some expose an array of far-reaching conspiracy theories involving town officials and college recruiters. James’ real success with the film is bringing the conversation back around to a more nuanced and complex issue which nobody really wanted to acknowledge. He wants us to realize that we all have a stake in it.

As I watched the film, I find myself wanting a concrete answer; a who-what-when-where kind of answer. I want to find it in the trial, some overlooked evidence, new witness or repentant judge; something concrete coming from a very civilized and infallible process to explain the original and persisting inequalities and prejudices that Hampton reminds us all of.

But it’s not that easy. And it doesn’t settle-in until you’re on your way home or you have an ordinary, quiet little moment standing alone among strangers you stand amongst every day, either at the bus stop or in line at the grocery store where you have to run-in because you forgot to buy milk for your morning coffee. Then you look around and you recall the exchange between James and a doubtful Hampton resident when she defensively, suspiciously asks him why. What’s the purpose of this film?

He says he wants to understand, and if that’s not possible, then there’s no hope for any of us. Then her expression changes. Her face softens and the camera lingers on her for just a moment. And that’s the moment when the film leaves it’s mark; where it plants seeds that will build slowly like Thai spices until you’re sitting on the bus bench or handing a debit card to a cashier for a $2.00 carton of milk and all of a sudden you realize the power of the film and it’s immediate relevance.

This is not a call to action. This is a call for reflection, acceptance, understanding and, most importantly, dialogue. It seems as if the film’s audiences aren’t letting James down on that point. I asked him about his experiences taking No Crossover around the country and how the local audience received the film at Full Frame.

“At screenings both in the Hampton area and at Full Frame, the audience had a very strong and passionate response to the film. I fully expected it in Hampton, but to see it at Full Frame really spoke to the depth of feelings there are about issues of race in the South. At Full Frame, people wanted to give heartfelt speeches more than ask questions – most unusual in my experience for a film festival audience.

“Nonetheless, audiences in Austin, Cleveland, Chicago, and the D.C. area have commented on how the issues raised in this film also apply to their parts of the country. The film does seem to make people want to talk – something we don’t do enough of when it comes to race.”

Inside Full Frame: Part Five will feature Freedom Riders and a festival wrap-up. Stay tuned!

You can catch a reprise screening of No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson on ESPN U on May 20th, 2010 at 01:00pm EDT.

Click here to listen to an interview with How to Fold a Flag’s Javorn Drummond and The Story’s Dick Gordon.

Watch a NOW on PBS interview with Reporter director Eric Daniel Metzgar on the experiences of filming in a war zone and the challenges of getting the public’s attention here.