Asmall Maine seacoast town hosts one of the best documentary film festivals in New England. Since 2005, the Camden International Film Festival has traced the evolution of the genre, how it has expanded beyond being a mirror of objective reality to becoming a probe into the mysteries of subjective truth. This year’s fest runs from Sept. 15-18.
The titles of some of the 2016 selections indicate their ambition. Italian filmmaker Laura Viezzoli’s “La Natura Delle Cose (The Nature of Things)’’ ponders two extremes of the human condition, the increasingly shuttered world of a victim of ALS versus the freedom from gravity and other mundane constraints of Apollo astronauts. Angelo Santagostino, a 60ish former priest, can communicate only by glancing at letters on a computer screen. His reflections on his life and on the title subject are punctuated by majestic images of spacecraft, of the Earth from space, and of men in space suits frolicking about in the reduced gravity of the moon.
Norwegian filmmaker Aslaug Holm’s “Brothers,’’ a chronicle from infancy to their teens of her two sons, has been compared to Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.’’ Both trace the growth of boys into young men over the course of several years. The key difference, other than the obvious fact that these are Holm’s actual sons and not actors, lies in her own involvement in the story. The film is as much about her relationship to the boys and her need to record their lives as it is about the lives she is observing. Her voice-over reflections about the passage of time seem banal, but when repeated by her sons, who are realizing such truths for the first time, their profundity is experienced anew.
Perhaps the boldest of the documentaries at the festival is Belgian filmmaker Pieter-Jan De Pue’s “The Land of the Enlightened.’’ It takes a subject of grave consequence which is still very much a matter of headlines and news reports — the war in Afghanistan — and transforms it into an absurdist myth. In it a bandit gang on horseback dominates a war economy involving the recycling of wrecked and discarded military equipment, the smuggling of lapis lazuli, and the illicit trade in opium.
What is jarring about this is that the gang is all boys barely into their teens. Their warlord is a thoughtful, handsome adolescent with frighteningly adult skills who dreams of taking his beloved (who is all of 6) as his bride and sweeping her off to a palace to live like a khan.
Despite the clearly staged and scripted sequences, it is all undeniably real — the wrecked tanks, the bearded old men, the slaughtered goat, the bored US troops unleashing a barrage onto a possibly imaginary target, and the bandits themselves. They are the Lost Boys by way of “Apocalypse Now,’’ and their fate — and ours — has become unhinged from reason and plunged into the nightmare of history.
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Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.
