Forget that Full Frame is screening documentaries for a moment. In those pauses between one film and the   next—when you see the event itself—Full Frame has the easy-going   bustle of a company picnic, and everything is so damned, surefire pleasant.  Perhaps I expected a tart sort of haut sommet, pardon my French,  but the festival was much more pink lemonade than Pinot noir. 

A sunny courtyard connects the Durham Convention Center and the Carolina Theatre, two of the event’s three venues, and people flow through in full summer casual—flip-flops   and cut-offs can be spotted about as often as large, audacious sunglasses   and cute, teased-up hairdos. The third venue, Durham Arts Council, is   right around the corner, making the whole event imminently walkable,  and easy to navigate. Outdoor tents sell foods off the grill, and everywhere people balance bottles of cold beer and steaming, little paper trays   with plastic forks sticking out. Truly, it is one part Vanity Fair and one part State Fair. 

But it’s not simply casual; it’s comfortable. In every interaction, the volunteers were friendly   and helpful. Fairly high-strung by nature, I could hardly find any of the usual excuses to feel rushed or huffy, the event was so well-staffed   and smoothly managed.

Over Friday and Saturday evenings,  I caught seven shows and three conversations with directors—Robert   Kenner’s Food, Inc., Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s   Baadasssss Song, Eva Weber’s Steel Homes, Gary Hustwit’s Objectified, Elli Rintala’s Oil Blue, Sandy Cioffi’s (left) Sweet Crude, and Vincent Morisset’s Miroir Noir—about   8 ½ hours of film and discussion all together. Full Frame inspires   this kind of gleeful cinema gluttony.

Food, Inc.

Food, Inc. was my first   show, and first time inside Carolina Theatre’s historic Fletcher Hall,  a mammoth and ornate 1920’s-era auditorium trimmed in blue and gold.  The film tells the story of the American factory farm system and the   hard impact its rapid growth has had on all levels of the food chain,  including animals, farm owners, laborers, and consumers. The film has   turned heads since it’s U.S. premiere at AFI Dallas last month, and   was hyped as part of the festival’s special programming series. It   played in Durham to a packed house. 

If you’re familiar with a   certain kind of polished, high production value political documentary,  there aren’t a lot of surprises in content or style. This film plays   much like The Corporation (2003), Super Size Me (2004)  or Fast Food Nation (2006), only more pastoral. The film’s   frequent meditations on animals grazing and colorful fields of grain   over the tranquil swell of instrumental music made me feel like I was   watching a kind of Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser version of Brokeback   Mountain. Watch the trailer and maybe you’ll see what I mean.  

The film is essentially a mash-up   of Pollan and Schlosser’s best-known books, Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation, respectively, and Pollan and Schlosser   figure heavily in the film’s interviews. Schlosser also co-produced   it. The film’s villains, as it turns out, are McDonald’s, Monsanto,  and corn. Um, sorry: spoiler alert.  

Yes, the film has polish, with nicely done titles and interspersing headers. Unfortunately, these were among the biggest standouts of the film, with the exception, perhaps, of small farm owner Joel Salatin, who steals the movie with his brash,  folksy charm.  

Farmer Salatin joined Kenner (left)  for a conversation after the film, moderated by NPR’s Frank Stasio.  On stage, Salatin played the role of documentary film star, and Kenner   the nervous elephant handler, looking a little afraid of what might,  at any time, drop out of Salatin’s mouth. Salatin has the passionate   air of a man you wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find out has   written a manifesto. To compensate, Kenner chuckled at everything Salatin   said—just to make it absolutely clear to everyone in the audience   that Salatin was saying funny things. 

Oil Blue & Sweet Crude

A real treat was the new Finnish   film Oil Blue, a purely visual tale of an oil tanker’s journey   across the Baltic Sea. The 25-minute film has no dialogue, only the   sounds of the ship and the sea, mixed seamlessly with an instrumental   score. The film has a quiet brilliance, and it’s easy to lose yourself   in its lonely beauty.  Oil Blue won the Full Frame President’s Award.

One film to really seek out   is Sweet Crude, which covers the struggle by indigenous peoples   in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region against gross pollution and resource   exploitation by oil companies like Chevron and Shell.  

To give a taste of how rotten   the natural landscape of the Delta has gotten in the half century since   oil was discovered there, life expectancy in the region has since dropped   by an average of 20 years. Now most Delta natives will only live to   around the age of forty.  

When positive-minded, non-violent   resistance groups begin to form to push back against human rights abuses   and spur a dialogue about indigenous resource control, they are met   with atrocious brutality from Nigeria’s oil-money complicit government.  Their resistance is punished with routine physical intimidation and   assassinations.  

Cioffi skillfully portrays   a people with their backs against the wall—unable to live in their   hellishly degraded river basin, and yet with nowhere to turn for representation   or even diplomatic intervention. In response, militant groups form—ready   to meet the oil companies and government stooges gun for gun, and bullet   for bullet.  

Cioffi’s film succeeds, not   only because she humanizes the members of these oft-maligned resistance   groups, but because she makes their approach seem like the only logical   and available option. 

Sweet Crude was, hands   down, the most fresh and interesting documentary I saw at Full Frame, and I got busted later by another New Raleigh writer, who had been somewhere else in the crowd at the Sweet Crude screening,  for starting what became a roaring standing ovation for the film. And really, there’s no harm in that.