True Tales
Doclands A festival built solely on documentary films has become a big success. BY KIRSTEN JONES NEFF
“He said, ‘You know what I want to do, I want to start a documentary film festival.’ ”
of the night, a donor had stepped up to offer Teddy Kane funding to go into Serenity Knolls treatment and rehabilitation center in Forest Knolls. According to Bathrick, Kane is thriving in the treatment program and will have housing and job support when he graduates. “With this film we want to humanize folks behind bars. We want viewers to stop and say, ‘Wow, these are real people with real stories. They are trying and are imperfect and deserve a second chance,’ ” Bathrick says. Having witnessed the power of this film, he feels a greater responsibility to develop a distribution plan aimed at education — in high schools, jails, police departments — and at fundraising for prison-reform nonprofits. Joni Cooper, Doclands director of programming, has been producing or programming documentary films for 20 years, but she still gets chills and shivers at screenings, as she did at this one. “This is the power of documentary,” she says. “Although I love narrative films, these are amazing real stories about real superheroes.” Cooper, who was executive director at Doxa Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver and director of the Banff Mountain Film Festival, had worked on and off with the Mill Valley Film Festival when, in 2015, MVFF founder/executive director Mark Fishkin approached her with an idea. “He said, ‘You know what
16 Bars
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T IS CLOSING night of the Doclands Documentary Film Festival, May 2018, and 16 Bars, a film about the United States incarceration system, has just had its world premiere in a packed Smith Rafael theater. The film, featuring Arrested Development singer-songwriter Speech Thomas and four inmates in a Richmond, Virginia, jail, weaves a big-picture story of the addiction, mental health, race and class issues that lead to imprisonment. Teddy Kane, a former inmate and central figure in the film who is living homeless on the streets of Miami, has been flown to San Rafael for the opening. After the film, Kane takes the stage to recite a poem he has written. When he finishes, the audience stands in ovation. Then it is time for questions, and the room is silent. All eyes turn toward a woman holding the microphone, preparing to ask a question. But no words come, only tears. “She just stood there crying,” says 16 Bars director Sam Bathrick. “The Doclands screening opened our eyes to the power of this film, and the power of what can happen in a room with a live audience.” By the end
