Once again, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival cements its reputation as the regional Mecca for documentaries, thanks to an exciting selection featuring some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking along with newcomers making a splash with their remarkable films.
The most notable of the biopics featured in the fifth edition of the fest are Liz Garbus’ “Bobby Fischer Against the World” and Cindy Meehl’s “Buck.”
Garbus’ HBO-produced film traces the rise and fall of Bobby Fischer, former world chess champion who is widely regarded as the greatest chess player of all time. Garbus traces Fischer’s humble beginnings, his rise to fame at age 14 after being crowned the youngest US champion, his legendary match with Soviet master Boris Spassky in 1972, his gradual descent to paranoia, his sudden withdrawal from public life for 20 years and his reemergence in the early 1990s as an angry anti-Semite, a sentiment that later fed his anti-Americanism and subsequent exile.
Garbus relies on various footage of Fischer along with testimonials of chess experts and former acquaintances, the majority of whom he had fallen out with. She doesn’t attempt to decipher the Fischer mystery, but offers facts: his estrangement from his father, his non-existent relationship with his political activist mother, his isolation, and his fanatical obsession with the game. She allows viewers to draw their own conclusions.
The cold war panic might have shaped the course he took following the Spassky match, but the roots of his personality lie in his childhood. Fischer found in chess a sanctuary from a world he was never able to understand or adapt to. His behavior always appeared out of the ordinary, and the success he rightfully earned couldn’t mend the void left by his parents.
A character study, “Bobby Fischer” is a film about a genius who never felt comfortable in his own skin; a lonely, tortured soul driven to madness by the unprecedented adulation showered upon him and his overwhelming desire to succeed. It’s a fascinating story about a tragic figure treated with rare tact and compassion.
Traces of another wretched childhood are also featured in Meehl’s “Buck,” a gentle portrait of famous horse trainer Buck Brannaman. Known as the ‘original horse whisperer,” Brannaman was the inspiration for Nick Evans’ best-selling novel and Robert Redford’s film adaptation.
Meehl traces Brannaman’s unusual training methods (“Each one of us have got a trick or two,” a fellow trainer says, “Buck got an arsenal”), his relationship with horses and his many philosophies.
Underneath this straightforward narrative is a heartbreaking story about an abusive childhood. After the death of his mother, Brannaman reveals, he and his brother (whose fate is never disclosed) were subjected to months of physical abuse at the hands of their alcoholic father. They were later put up for foster care before they were adopted.
“I’ve never been able to get over the hurt he’s caused me to suffer,” the soft-spoken Brannaman says, in one of the few confessional moments in the film. The relationship he developed with horses was, in many ways, a way to heal his wounds and start a new life. The incredible delicacy informing his techniques is magical. Brannaman not only understands these creatures, he feels them.
The picturesque pastoral Southern world into which Meehl plunges her viewers is completely absorbing; serene, dreamy and humane. The ethos governing the world Brannaman operates in is simple and innocent despite the occasional rude awakenings.
The connection between Brannaman and horses is seen as an extension of human relationships. “When you’re dealing with a horse, you bring your own personal issues,” he says at one point. “It becomes about how you treat your wife or children.”
In that sense, Brannaman ultimately emerges as a life coach; a man who sees behind the masks people put on when dealing with their horses. “All horses are mirrors to your soul,” he says, “and sometimes you don’t like what you see in that mirror, and sometimes you do.” The power of “Buck” — a big summer hit at the American box-office — is undeniable, and for the swift duration of the film, faith in human goodness is restored.
One of the most relevant entries in the stellar documentary cannon is Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman’s “If a Tree Falls,” a thought-provoking account of radical American environmental group, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).
The central character in the film is former ELF activist Daniel G. McGowan, charting his transformation from a cordial, determined student to an extremist activist in the mid-1990s. Through portraying his struggle to protect the destruction of America’s tree-plants, Curry and Cullman relay startling information, such as the fact that 95 percent of native American forests have been cut down or that the Ministry of Agriculture regards forests as crops in no need of protection or preservation.
The film seems to be saying that the violent path taken by McGowan and the ELF was inevitable. The group targeted a variety of sites, burning to the ground a ranger station, a lumber company and a slaughterhouse for processing horses.
“When you’re speaking at the top of your lungs and no one hears you, what are you supposed to do?” McGowan explains, adding that damage inflicted in one night “did more than what years of letter-sending and pleading failed to accomplish.”
McGowan soon admits that he never considered the long-term consequences of the group vandalism and chaos the group incited. He realizes that there could be other effective methods than "burning things down.”
Curry and Cullman give no clear-cut conclusions or easy answers, pushing the viewers to continuously query the ELF principles.
The question of what constitutes acts of terrorism hovers over the course of the film. “How can you define terrorism?” one character asks. “When you burn an empty house, would you call that terrorism?” “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” another character asserts.
The film plays like a police procedural, complete with double-crossings, secret dealings, and a Judas-like figure. It’s also a story about a generation searching for meaning, of dubious ideologies, of betrayal and moral compromise.
Buck
