The elusive woodpecker and troubled children of divorce

By Michael Fox

There may be some disagreement whether an Oscar-winning social-issue tearjerker rates higher on the documentary food chain than a multimillion-dollar-grossing political satire. But there’s little question that so-called educational films with specific social-welfare goals don’t get much respect, as examples of craft or art. So what happens when a gifted filmmaker steps into the educational arena? We’ll find out when Ellen Bruno (Samsara) finishes Split, a half-hour film aimed at 6-12-year-olds with separated or divorced parents and the first piece in a planned trilogy, with the second targeted to teenagers and the third to parents.

"This is media where kids are talking about their experiences, opening conversations, really looking at the monsters under their bed," Bruno declares. "The need is enormous. I just spent four days with friends who are splitting up, talking to their 10-year-old daughter, and she needs to hear from other kids that she’s going to survive."

Bruno asked children of divorced parents to describe on-camera what they think other kids need to hear. "It’s very much a collaboration," she says. "I guess that’s what we do as filmmakers—we give them a platform. We bring our technical skills or technology to them, right?" Bruno enlisted an old friend, star cinematographer Ellen Kuras, to film the interviews as invitingly as possible. "The kids in the film are cool, not yucky," Bruno says. "It’s very intimately shot, very close and very warm, so you feel like you’re sitting next to a friend. The kids are funny, they’re profound, there’s a whole range of emotion. It’s not a downer kind of film. It’s very alive."

There’s less distance between this project and her portraits of Tibetan Buddhist nuns (Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy) and child prostitutes in Burma (Sacrifice) than it might appear at first blush, Bruno points out, because they all deal with survivors of traumatic events putting their lives back together after some trauma. When I wondered how her experiential, mood-drenched visual style would fit with Split, she had a prompt response.

"Everybody goes to the idea of this clinical or ugly educational [film]. That would not work for me. I bring the same aesthetic, the same sensibilities to this project. There are children sitting there talking, but the way they are allowed to tell their stories and the other images I will be using are not literal images per se. It’s going to be the inner world of these children. There won’t be attention given to their external physical environment."

To that end, the San Francisco filmmaker uses symbols of childhood shot impressionistically, and she’s considering animating some of the kids’ drawings. The music, meanwhile, is being composed by a 6-year-old.

Bruno notes that half the children in the country have split-up parents, which gives you an idea of the potential market for Split—and the challenge. "I want to get into every courtroom in the country, every mediator, every family lawyer," Bruno says. "I want it on the shelf in Wal-Mart, at Amazon, so if people get freaked out they can go online and get it sent to them with a discussion guide. This is slated for use in the home, for kids to sit down and watch with an adult." To view a five-minute clip of the work-in-progress, go to www.brunofilms.com.

I hear you knocking

In May 2005, the news broke that the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker had been rediscovered in an Arkansas swamp. Or had it? As has long been the case with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, video footage and eyewitness sightings were inconclusive. But everyone from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to the citizens of the nearby town of Brinkley had high hopes. Some were even obsessed, like the cameraman who spent 14 months trying to shoot HD video of the bird, only to emerge from the woods empty-handed to find his wife had left him.

Scott Crocker happened to meet this unlucky man at the Jackson Hole Film Festival, and (with a good deal more level-headedness) set off to make a documentary, Ghost Bird, about the phenomenon, the people and, as it’s also known, the Lord God bird. Crocker had made a couple of previous films— Boneshop of the Heart, a 1990 profile of five outsider artists in the Deep South, and the 1994 screwball comedy The Understudy—so he wasn’t going off half-cocked.

"I was trained [as a visual anthropologist] to be skeptical not only about anthropology but the documentary form itself," Crocker relates on the phone from his East Bay home. "I’ve long had an interest in identity, memory and what I call the narrative impulse, which is our desire to connect dots and fill in blanks, which serves us well when we don’t have an interest in the outcome. But when there’s something we’re looking for, we begin to see patterns when there aren’t any there—in this case, the white trailing edges on wings. This bird did exist, unlike Bigfoot, but you only ever believed you saw it if you didn’t see the head or didn’t see the tail."

One of the marvelous things about the trailer (go to www.ghostbirdmovie.com) is that Crocker’s interviews with the locals are plenty amusing while avoiding Coen Bros.-style condescension. Sure, it’s just a trailer, but one gets a sense of authentic characters that are in on the joke, but aren’t the joke.

"It’s something I’m really aware of and have never been comfortable with when it shows its head in other films," Crocker concurs. "It’s important to me to have these people reveal themselves honestly in a way they’d approve of. We have empathy with them, and if we’re ever laughing it’s with them, not at them. The bird is such a tragic loss that we even empathize with those who wanted it to be there most—scientists and ornithologists and birders. We don’t come away having somehow elevated ourselves above them and their effort. It’s a shared loss, and there’s something even noble about having wanted it to be there even if it wasn’t."

It’s that time of the year when filmmakers are racing to make Sundance’s deadline and hoping to make the festival cut. Crocker might have a slight advantage with music by the Pixies, White Stripes, Black Keys, Hazmat Modine, Sonny Terry and an original score by local cellist Zoë Keating. Bird’s the word.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, film festivals, sundance film festival

09.02.2008