Father Geek here with another great report sent in by our Pacific editor Moon Yun on the Film Fest out in the beautiful Hawaiian Islands, one that has got a definite political bent to it...

VOTE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW - DOCUMENTARIES EXAMINE VOTING IN AMERICA

by Albert Lanier

Sunday, September 19 saw audience attendance start to dip compared to the excellent turnout at screenings on the first two days of the festival.

For example, the World Premiere of the documentary EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA (one of the few premieres at Cinema Paradise) was screened before a crowd that encompassed perhaps half of one of the Varsity Theaters.

That seemed somewhat of a shame since EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA-directed by Matt Kohn- is an extremely watchable, highly relevant doc that dissects voting machines and systems in states across the country and looks at the problems inherent in voting especially with the new onslaught of electronic touch machines that will undoubtedly play an impact in this year's elections.

There are interesting facts and arguments abounding in EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA. Take for example, the John F. Kennedy/ Richard Nixon contest for the Presidency in 1960 which before the George W. Bush and Al Gore Presidential Election of 2000 was the closest Presidential race in U.S. history.

Though Nixon formally accepted the results and conceeded to Kennedy, Republicans actually mounted court challenges to results in several states and contested some vote tallies.

Here's another interesting point brought up in EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA. In the same election, the state of Hawaii-my home state-conducted a recount of the Presidential vote after the state was first declared a Nixon victory.

The recount which took place in December of 1960 eventually found that Kennedy won the majority fo the state's votes.

Now, here's the important argument: the Supreme Court's majority argument in their decision on Bush v. Gore that extending the recount of votes in Florida further into December and January would irreparably harm the Presidential transition of power and needlessly delay said transition is shown to be an oversimplification on their part when contrasted with the Hawaii recount which also took place after the Presidential election but did not serve to delegitimize and handicap the eventual transfer of power from Republican Dwight Eisenhower to Democrat John F. Kennedy.

EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA also looks at a little remembered move on the part of Indiana Senator Birch Bayh in the early to late 1970's to lobby for a constitutional amendment that make the popular vote the sole statistical basis for detemining the President of the United States.

Appearing in the documentary, Bayh argued that the current electoral college (composed of a number of different voting representatives or electors) system is unfair to voters since a candidate needs states with smaller electoral college votes as much if not more than he needs states with larger vote tallies.

So, even if ,say, John Kerry won California and New York with their mammoth electoral vote tallies this November, Kerry would still not have enough votes to win outright (reaching 276 electoral votes) he would need more votes from fairly large electoral states (like Florida) and smaller vote tally states (like Iowa and Rhode Island).

The same is true of George W. Bush. If Bush fails to pick up New York or California, he needs a state like Florida and more than likely sweep the South, pick up a number of Western states and try and penetrate the Midwest and the East if he wants to be reelected to the White House this year.

Anyway, Bayh felt at the time and still feels that voters across the country should be able to directly elect the President without the Electoral College as a filter.

The proposed 24 and 26 amendments were eventually defeated in Congress, the last in the Senate by 15 votes in 1979.

EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA features an array of law professors and attorneys including Defense Attorney Alan Dershowitz and former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi who are both scathing in their criticism of the Supreme Court's majority decision in Bush v. Gore calling the Justices actions "treasonable" and noting that they are the only 9 judges unable to be recalled or subject to judicial review.

Both men also disagreed with the 5 Supreme Court justices argument in the majority that stopping the vote count in Florida buttressed or supported equal protection rights for voters deeming this contradictory reasoning.

Perhaps the most disturbing content found in EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA revolves around the electronic touch machines that are begining to sprout up with weeds in a few states.

These machines are supposed to a vast improvement over the punch card systems that were focus of contention in Florida in 2000. The problem? A number of these machines lack paper ballots or paper readouts which leave a hard copy record of which candidate a citizen voted for.

Diebold, a company that makes ATMs, also manufactures what are known as DRE-Direct Recorded Electronic voting machines or the touch machines in question which lack paper ballots.

It just so happens that the CEO of Diebold is on record as stating that he intends to deliver all of Ohio's votes to George W.Bush.

Gee, I wonder how that could happen?

You think that's bad? It gets worse. More than a few of these electronic voting machines have lousy keys or are lazily encripted. In fact, a number of machines have the same key, the SAME KEY which means that any decent hacker could break through and create havoc on election night.

As a now former Freelance Journalist who has covered a couple of elections and actually read official vote tallies, I found EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA to be extremely fascinating and well-worth watching.

While not an inflammatory, barn-burning film of the Michael Moore variety, EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA finds its strength in research, effective interview scenes and intelligent argumentation of its positions.

Director Kohn crafts a cheapish looking DV film that may not be much to took at visually but is highly stimulating intellectually due to its clear ability to articulate the inherent problems and dilemmas facing the voting process this year and perhaps in years to come.

EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA takes almost a soup to nuts approach to its subject. Whereas other docs might skimp here or skimp there on facts, Kohn provides enough information through titled factoids, interviews and old news footage from the 70's that the sum total seems more like a well-written newspaper article than a documentary film.

Frankly, although I have been more of a journalistic observer of politics at times and not a partisan or a voter, I predict that George W. Bush will win re-election to the White House with just enough votes come November 2 and that John Kerry might earn enough electoral votes to call it a horse race.

The reason? I think the electronic voting machines like the ones shown in the film will play an important factor in some states and help ensure a victory.

After all, if there is no record of a vote, the vote doesn't exist.

Even though there have some changes as EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA notes as a result of the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002 which funnels $3.9 billion dollars to states to not only pay for new machines but also train county election officials and workers across the country.

Still, it is very clear that although the major parties, political advocacy groups and every other kind of political organization under the sun says that every vote counts, it is very clear that they do not count every vote.

It was Primary Election day in the state of Hawaii on Saturday, September 18 but while voter turnout was deemed low by the local news media, audience turnout appeared to be somewhat robust at the 3rd annual Cinema Paradise Film Festival in Honolulu.

Take the informative and effective documentary BUSH'S BRAIN which played during the 3:15 p.m. slot here filling one of Varsity's two theaters nearly to capacity.

Based on the book by reporters James Moore and Wayne Slater, BUSH'S BRAIN attempted to penetrate the fog around George W. Bush's key advisor Karl Rove by looking back as his past including his ties to FBI agent Greg Rampton (who investigated a number of Democratic office holders in Texas in what appeared to be highly selective and political probes) as well as the Whisper campaign against Senator John McCain during the South Carolina Presidential Primary in 2000.

As I noted in my earlier review on AICN, BUSH'S BRAIN works overall despite the lack of coverage on Rove's childhood and formative years and a segment featuring the family of an officer killed in Iraq that serves as critical but inappropriate antiwar fodder.

The highly entertaining (if slightly overacted) short PRESS GANG-directed by Brendan Doyle-is set in 2006 when the the military draft has been reactivated and tv shows like "Homeland Security's Most Wanted Draft Dodgers" feature military/SWAT type units who round up draftees eluding military service.

The Iranian feature DEAD HEAT UNDER THE SCRUBS was the next film on my schedule.

What a piece of shit! This drama-a sort of sandy cinematic miasma- directed by Esmael Barari was easily the worst film of the festival.

The plot and story are really quite simplistic (and really quite boring). A middle-aged woman drives a light blue car into a isolated, barren, desert-like locale. A young boy is in the immediate vicinity colecting shrubs (he later says that he works to support his mother and sister).

The boy climbs up a nearby sandy hill and crouches down behnd a shrub to see the mystery woman get out her car, open the runk and struggle to remove a long object in a burlap bag which she them dumps into a rocky aqueduct.

That "object" turns out to be the slighty bloody corpse of a man which wind up being exposed as the bag starts unravel as the woman pushes the body down the slopes of the aqueduct.

The woman then gets into her car and starts to drive away when the boy (in an act of sheer stupidity and illogic) runs after her saying "hey".

Now, the woman has to get rid of this young witness to her disposal of the corpse and thus begins a manic series of chases-on foot, over sand dunes, on roads-in which the female murderer seeks to kill the young child.

I guess I could reveal the end but-No, what the hell, I'll do it anyway: someone gets killed.

Oops, no spoiler warning there. Sorry, talkback geeks!

Anyway, DEAD HEAT is the acme of bad foreign-language films. This is a piss-poor Iranian film, third world filmmaking at its worst and not to mention a pathetic persian picture.

The characters (and I think I'm being generous in calling them that) are so flat they make E.M. Forster read like Mickey Spillane.

The performance from lead actress Leila Boosheri as the unnamed murderer is soap opera acting at its most transparent. Her acting range in this film can essentially be reduced to screaming, running up and down and back and forth and spinning around almost endlessly.

DEAD HEAT is essentially a lifeless melodrama filmed in a largely lifeless stretch of land and devoid of any inherent drama, meaning, pathos or life.

I should note that DEAD HEAT was preceeded by the short RIDING SHOTGUN, a watchable but lackluster film directed by J.M. Finholt about a reality show cameraman who-on a ride along with two LAPD cops filmming footage for his show-winds up confronting and tagging along with juvenile gang members.

Thankfully, the day was saved by Liz Merman's documentary THE BEAUTY ACADEMY OF KABUL which screened in the 7:30 p.m. slot.

Merman traveled to Afghanistan to document the opening of a beauty school and salon in the summer of 2003. Three hairdressers from New York (a couple more will arrive later on to relieve the hairdressers who have preceeded them) have come to run the school and teach classes including Afghan expatriate named Sima who left her native country more than 20 years ago.

The 74 minute doc not only captures the headaches and problems attendant in opening up the school (for example, Patricia-an Englishwoman who serves as the school's director-is fully engaged in the some of the early scenes with tracking down the 19 dummy heads on which students will tease, comb, cut and brush hair) but also profiles some of the Afghan women in the classes taught and provides unforgettable images of decimated buidings on urban streets.

In BEAUTY ACADEMY not only do we get to see the normal clash between a prosperous secular culture and poor religious culture but more importantly, in highlighting some of the students at the school and their stories as well as their take on life, we get at least a taste of the inherent duties and tasks required of an Afghan woman (which is basically the same for most women around the world) such as caring for children and cooking for their families.

One of the profiles that stand out for me is a young woman who talks to Patricia about romance. In Afghanistan, marriages are arranged and this young lady states on camera that if she were in love her brother would beat her.

But it turns out that she is in love and has secretly been for 9 years. When she discusses this, her face lights up and she smiles, her face just shines with warmth and love and for a moment or two she briefly jettisons her wariness and caution and just seems like a beautiful young lady not just an abstract symbol of female oppression in Afghanistan.

I didn't want to see BEAUTY ACADEMY OF KABUL at first. A doc about a beauty shop? No, thanks. I'd rather see THE STEPFORD WIVES shown on a continual loop.

But after getting over my initial concern, I was pleasantly surprised with the results.

BEAUTY ACADEMY is entertaining and thus easy to swallow for the most brain dead of audiences ( and trust me, I have seen more than my share of such audiences over the years attending film fests) but more importantly Merman doesn't just show us the de Rigeur contrast between East and West but open a door to the lives of Afghan women who must keep themselves covered and pliant in public or else fear violent reprisals from men.

The real beauty of BEAUTY ACADEMY OF KABUL lies not in the brand new school or its mostly American instructors or the scissors and other tools but in its students, these female hairdressers and wanna bes in Kabul, some of whom have operated their own beauty shops in their own homes for years even during the reign of the Taliban.

Never has a woman getting her hair done seemed so touching and so assertive a individual choice as it is here in BEAUTY ACADEMY OF KABUL.

Attendance began to dip on Sunday, September 19, the third day of the independent Cinema Paradise Film Festival in Honolulu, Hawaii but this did not alter the fact that there were some fine films being screened.

The day began for me with the highly interesting doc EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA directed by Matt Kohn. Kohn looks at the voting mechanisms and systems with an emphasis on Presidential elections and casts a jaundiced eye at new electronic voting machines which have certified and installed in several states thus far ( although a number of these machines including those manufactured by Diebold do not have paper hard copies of ballots available, kind of odd when you consider that Diebold makes ATMs which can give you a paper receipt after a transaction but somehow these voting machines are somehow technologically incapable of making a paper printout of votes and ballots).

TIDES, a short which was shown before EVERYWHERE BUT FLORIDA told the story of an Albanian father-a survivor of war-torn Macedonia- who tries to abandon his son in a Catholic Church courtyard in Venice, Italy. Director James Pellerito does a decent job helming this 15 minute film shot on location in Venice. An obvious "imaginary violin" tug at the heartsring kind of drama that is a so-so short.

WOODEN CAMERA was the next film on my list and it turned out to be one of the best pictures screened here at Cinema Paradise this year.

Set in contemporary South Africa, WOODEN CAMERA focuses on two black lads-Madiba and Sipho- from a township on the edges of Capetown.

Sipho is loud and outgoing while Madiba is quiet and introspective. The two friends have become quite close, almost like brothers.

While playing with a soccer ball at a trainyard at the very beginning of the picture, the two boys find a dead man near the tracks. Sipho kinds a gun in the man's jacket pocket and keeps it. Opening the man's briefcase, Sipho finds a Panasonic video camera which he insists Madiba take.

These are fateful choices for both items will impact both boy's lives throughout the course of the film.

Sipho will take his gun and use it to rob passerby after falling in with a group of layabouts and leaving the township to hang out on the fringes of downtown Capetown.

Madiba is fascinated by his video camera. After placing in a wooden shell like container shaped like a old-fashioned film camera made by one his friends, Madiba sets out to records everything around. First his sister, his father and other people in the township. Then he starts shooting footage in urban Capetown and it is here that here that he first sees Estelle, a white girl in her early teens from the suburbs, shoplifting in a bookstore wile he outside shooting footage of the city

The two meet up again while Madiba is hanging out in Capetown just shooting images. Estelle and Madiba soon become friends but Sipho also enters the picture and quickly becomes friends with Sipho as well.

It is almost inevitable that tragedy must occur in WOODEN CAMERA-the choices are diametrical, the personalities polar opposites, the action of the protagonists clearly delineated-and of course, I will not reveal what occurs in the film's climax and end nor how it occurs.

Yet, WOODEN CAMERA is more than just a drama centering the cross-sections of race, class and personal choice in South Africa.

What is appealing about WOODEN CAMERA is that it never lectures, never pontificates. We don't get speeches from characters tipping us off on to how to feel but we see these individuals trying to navigate the borders of their worlds-township shanties, suburban two-story houses, even urban streets-and make sense of the actions of friends and family members as well as their own choices.

Choice is an important word here because Madiba and Sipho do not just take and use their found treasures but are defined by their objects and ultimately by their actions.

Madiba is as defined by his camera, peering into the wooden shell and capturing as much footage as possible as Sipho is by his gun which makes him feel tough, invincible and allows a recklessness that soon pushes him past the brink of self-control.

WOODEN CAMERA reminded me of Akira Kurosawa's STRAY DOG about a police officer who loses his revolver in postwar Tokyo and mounts his own personal search to recover the weapon.

In STRAY DOG, the pistol isn't just a sidearm used in the commission of law enforement duties, it is essential part of the identity of the officer. He needs the gun to protect him or help capture criminals thus the gun is tied to his status as a cop. Without he is ineffective and dare I say impotent in carrying out his duties.

Likewise in WOODEN CAMERA, the video camera comes to subsume Madiba. It is not only a electronic device but a way to record the world and demonstrate artistic impulses.The camera is not merely an extension of his choice of locations, people and objects to shoot but tied and tethered to him mentally and perhaps emotionally. The camera is a part of Madiba.

Director Ntshaveni Wa Laruli does fine job in helming this feature and especially in showing the child as artist and the artsitic impulses within children and early teens.

WOODEN CAMERA is the kind of film that Hollywood would screw up with needless exposition and obvious speeches about poverty and injustice. Here, Wa Laruli lets the characters and the story speak for themselves.

The short JELLY DONUT FREESTYLES is largely a silly DV home video type film about would-be rapper dressed up in a dout costume who battles with several rappers during a freestyle competition. Funny but largely dumb.

I'm not going to go into detail about Bianca Li's DANCE CHALLENGE, a French film about break dancers in Paris because there's not much of a story here, the film is largely designed to show off choreographed break dancing enmasse.

What little story is here concerns Benji (played by Benji Chaouat), a break dancer who winds up getting into a spat with his mother Elena (played by the film's director Bianca Li) who owns a upscale clothing store.

Benji moves out to stay with one of his break dancing friends. Elena is concerned about Benji and decides to hook up with a rival break dance group in order to familarize herself with this subculture and try to get closer to her son.

The only reason to see DANCE CHALLENGE is to gawk at the highly choreographed breakdance numbers which I must admit are filmed and scored with a sense of style and pinache. One terrific sequence in particular is slowed down and scored to Gershwin-type music as the break dancers spin to their heart's delight (there's a nice Busby Berkeley type overhead camera shot here as well).

I ended the night by watching a program of 7 short films under the title "Love is a Battlefield".

The best of the bunch were DATE 1.0 a silly but entertaining short directed by Ryan Denmark about two scientists who design robots as romantic proxies for their own lustful desires and RIFT directed by Sam Goldberg about a troubled young teenage boy who tries to get away from his abusive stepfather and finds shelter with other teenagers at cabin retreat.

All in all, a solid day of filmgoing at the Cinema Paradise festival.

END.