April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 9- Never Rarely
Sometimes Always
Eliza Hittman, US/UK
American director Eliza Hittman has a
knack for portraying the pains and cruelty
as well as the uncanny grace of teenagehood.
In both her accomplished debut It Felt like
Love (2013) and her second feature Beach
Rats (2017), photographed by the French
cinematographer Hélène Louvart, Hittman has
told nuanced, visceral coming-of-age stories.
Hittman and Louvart have paired up again for
Never Rarely Sometimes Always, in which 17-year-
old Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), unable to get an
abortion in her native Pennsylvania, travels to
New York. Sidney’s anger at not being loved or
heard spills over as she navigates the treacherous
metropolis with her cousin (Talia Ryder).
As always, Hittman keeps her script
attuned to the slightest drops in emotional
temperature – a boy’s vulgar disdain, a father’s
suave chauvinism or a pious doctor’s wilful
ignorance. In Hittman’s taciturn jewel of a film,
youth isn’t a wasteland that precedes adulthood;
on the contrary, it’s the gateway to maturity.
Ela Bittencourt
9. Shirley
Josephine Decker, USA
It’s hard to capture what writers do without
being a bore. Josephine Decker’s seductive
and intelligent new film Shirley, based on
the life of the horror and mystery writer
Shirley Jackson, draws a portrait of a brilliant
woman not just hunched over her typewriter
but also immersed in the thick of life.
Elisabeth Moss plays the abrasive Jackson- author of The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
- whose seclusion is fuelled by agoraphobia
and alcoholism. Shirley’s open marriage to the
Bennington College professor Stanley (Michael
Stuhlbarg) is her lifeline, but also her cross to bear.
Needing academic help, Stanley offers lodging to
a young man and his pregnant wife Rose (Odessa
Young). Soon Jackson’s feverish imagination
casts Rose as the heroine of her latest novel – a
lonely girl whose illicit affair leads to her death.
Decker uses handheld camera to fabulous
effect in this unlikely tale of passion, in which
the creative process emerges as a bit of witchery,
and Jackson’s residence as a haunted house.
Ela Bittencourt
- Boys State
Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, US
This engrossing documentary looks at a youth
camp in Texas, where 17-year-old boys gather to
debate politics and run in mock elections. The
film watches them hone their messages, canvass
teenage constituents, and face victory or crushing
defeat. Moss and McBaine keep the pace brisk, and
focus on charismatic candidates: plucky Texan
Robert, whose cynical pro-gun, anti-abortion
platform plays to his base (he even tries secession);
Steven, an erudite Chicagoan with a centrist
agenda; and Ben, a spirited advocate for people
with disabilities and a calculated social media wiz.
It starts as sublime comedy: squirrels rampage
in the garbage, boys propose silly bills to
ban pineapple pizza. But infighting, zealous
party-line adherence and manipulation of
public opinion soon trump lofty ideals. And
if it seems like a harmless charade, we must
remember that boys become men fast.
Ela Bittencourt
By Sophie Monks Kaufman
Crip Camp co-director Jim LeBrecht was born
in New York in the 1950s with spina bifida
and a lust for life. His debut documentary,
executive-produced by Barack and Michelle
Obama, is a vital and joyful work that puts
a lesser-known part of American civil rights
history on the map using archive footage of a
summer camp for disabled teens unearthed
by LeBrecht and co-director Nicole Newnham.
Crip Camp introduces LeBrecht before diving
back to the summer of 1971 when he visited
Camp Jened, a hippie utopia in the Catskill
Mountains in New York State designed to
provide disabled teenagers with games, music,
make-out sessions and cheerful community.
In the film, subjects behave freely before the
camera, speaking with humour and acuity
about navigating a world built to exclude them.
The documentary goes on to show how the
disability rights movement in 1970s California
was powered by attendees from the camp, who
went on to set up the Center for Independent
Living and organise a 28-day federal building
sit-in over the lacklustre enforcement of key
disability rights legislation. Internationally
renowned activist Judy Heumann, a counsellor
at Camp Jened, emerges as a rallying force,
rousing disabled teens to fight for their rights
in an atmosphere of practical kindness.
Before Crip Camp, LeBrecht worked as a
sound mixer and designer; when he told his
regular collaborator Newnham about the camp,
they tracked down the radical video collective
who shot there in 1971. In a Deadline interview,
the pair talk with wonder about a hard-drive
that was a time-capsule with hours of digitised
footage of people Jim once knew and loved.
“We don’t see things about teenagers with
disabilities,” said LeBrecht. “And here we are
just playing around... The naturalness of all
that, because of what we don’t see in the
media, was quite vivid and amazing.”
Crip Camp screens on 17, 18, 20 March at
the Human Rights Watch Festival in London
and will stream on Netflix from 25 MarchA joyful portrait of a 70s summer
camp for disabled teens reveals a
community ahead of its time that
was a catalyst for disability rightsIt starts as sublime comedy, but
infighting, zealous party-line
adherence and manipulation of
public opinion soon trump ideals
Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham’s Crip CampSUNDANCE SPOTLIGHT
CRIP CAMP8
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