Recess previews Full Frame documentaries

Durham’s own Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has grown with every passing year, inevitably drawing submissions from Duke itself. This year, that includes Erin Espelie, instructor, visiting artist and MFA candidate in the Experimental and Documentary Arts. Full Frame will mark the North American premiere of her documentary, True-Life Adventure.

“I’m trying to subvert your expectations,” said Espelie, who paired footage of a stream in the Rocky Mountains with narration from a 1948 Disney nature series, True-Life Adventures, from which she borrowed the title.

Espelie is particularly interested in how wildlife is presented to younger generations. This interaction is “increasingly mediated by some form of presentation by other people,” whether through narration, music or some other accompaniment, said Espelie.

She noted that the nature presented in her documentary is “not as exotic as the African safari, nor as dynamic as the jungle of South America,” while the modified narrations she sampled could be described as more grandiose.

Her short film, less than five minutes in length, will play between two longer documentaries on Saturday. Honoring her idea that interpretations are increasingly skewed by presentation, Espelie wouldn’t divulge her desired effect for the documentary. “I’ll leave that for you to decide,” she said.

—Jamie Kessler

Tending flocks has occupied humans for thousands of years. In many parts of the world, it is still a common way to put food on the table. But in more developed parts of the world, pastoral herders are all but phased out. The Last Shepherd (L’Ultimo Pastore in the original Italian) tells the story of Renato Zuchelli, the last working pastoral shepherd in Milan. With shots of his herds crossing both expansive green pastures and urban roadways, filmmaker Marco Bonfanti shows us a troubling separation of nature and society as well as an exploration of the current economic crisis in Europe.

Zuchelli, whose girth shrouds his mobile occupation, promises to be a compelling protagonist. He manages his flock with nothing but dogs and the characteristic shepherd’s crook, albeit a reduced version of Bo Peep’s, and his affable Italian lilt charms. He comes off as a bit of a crackpot, but his efforts to bring his flock into the center of Milan should be in parts inspiring, hilarious and beautiful.

The film was created during spring break last year, when Gibson went to Uganda for a week-long workshop to teach locals about how to work with film. Nile Perch is a short documentary capturing the process of how Nile perch, an aggressive invasive species, are caught on a fisherman’s line in Lake Victoria and eventually transformed into an export commodity. Through the course of the documentary, Gibson reveals the sociological and economic impacts of this process on the local people.

However, Nile Perch is also a meditation on the aesthetics of 35 mm film—a rare medium that is slowly becoming extinct. Consequently, this will be the only new Full Frame entry that will have to be shown on a film, rather than digital, projector. The unmatched images produced on hand-processed celluloid will engender a world that, at the very least, will provide a unique view into a vanishing art.

­—Derek Saffe