THIS IS US

Boulder’s Mimesis Documentary Festival offers revelation with a dash of hope

BY MICHAEL J. CASEY

What is the story of us?

That’s a question many movies try to answer, sometimes with the “us” meaning you and me, sometimes with the “us” meaning everyone. Few ever get there, but it’s still a question worth asking, whether the answer is comforting or conclusive. And for the movies playing the Mimesis Documentary Festival — Aug. 15 through 20 at the Dairy Arts Center and CU Boulder’s B2 Center — the answers certainly feel conclusive, even if they’re not always comforting.

For the fourth summer in a row, Mimesis returns to Boulder with screenings, workshops and visiting artists. It’s a festival you don’t want to miss, even if you’ve never ventured into the foray of nonfiction filmmaking. Here the palette is diverse, and the canvas is broad; stories are personal, and technique rises to the top.

Jessica Beshir, a Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker, is Mimesis’ 2023 artist-infocus. She will be in attendance for a conversation on Aug. 19 about her debut feature, Faya dayi, a hallucinatory black-and-white dream, playing a day earlier at the Boedecker Theater.

In addition to Beshir, the festival will feature an offsite “spatial performance lecture” by Saeed Taji Farouky, 13 documentary blocks grouped by a common theme, and discussions galore. Pick anything from the program, and you’ll be in for a treat.

But you’ve got to make time for the Thin Strips block (Aug. 19): five shorts looking at our built environment, how it erases our history and shapes our future through eminent domain of every kind. A town is burned to the ground to make way for a dam (The Fall of Cannonsville), another is razed for a planned community (Brutal Utopia), vast plains become a neverending street of commerce (13th Ave

Fargo Mine Cart), an experimental university is remembered (Growing Up Absurd), and a team of gravediggers helps a family move remains from a cemetery soon to be turned into a park (Section 59).

Of that bunch, Section 59 feels the most personal. It should; the remains dug up are that of director Yasaman Baghban’s father. Talk about first-person cinema. Brutal Utopia has more remove — it’s constructed primarily by archival footage and narration — but it tells a story of America so succinctly that your allegiances are bound to shift at least twice while watching it.

Then there’s The Fall of Cannonsville, a modern-day doc working in tandem with another: 1960’s Indian Summer (Aug. 17-20). The connective tissue between the two is Charles Cadkin, the director of the former and the restoration director of the latter. Sixty years separate the two, yet both feel prescient. If you think the government has overreach now, wait until you see these.

But documentary filmmaking needn’t always wallow in the misdeeds of the past. For those seeking hope and a beautiful future, make time for the Speaking in Tongues block (Aug. 19), specifically Emily Packer’s Holding Back the Tide, a treatise on how oysters might save us environmentally and socially. If you were one of the millions who saw Fantastic Fungi and learned to embrace the allmighty mushroom, then here is your chance to fall under the spell of another optimistic sustenance.