Jujitsuing Reality: Documentary Shorts (Chetin Chabuk 2012): US

Reviewed by Lynn Montgomery. Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival.

I love documentaries. I especially love documentary shorts. When they are good, they are sublime, like a poem. I had high hopes for this year’s program. Ultimately, the quality of a shorts program  depends on the personal taste of the programming director.

Meet Michael Albright, a man of great heart and a true poet’s sensibility. Of course Roger Durling has heart, everyone knows that, the man opens his mouth and I’m a believer.

Michael and Roger are not cynics. This year’s festival was the anti cynic film festival. Every film I saw enlightened the human condition and emboldened the independent filmmaker to touch people’s hearts, not just their adrenal glands. Michael says there were more than 3,000 submissions. When they discover an excellent movie, they still need to consider cohesion. How will this film play with another  leading contender? Michael, Roger and their team came up with over 100 features and 0ver 50 shorts to include in this year’s festival.

Some shorts are a perfect fit to air before a particular feature, such as The Chef at the Little Washingtonplays before the excellent, audience award winning documentary, Spinning Plates. Some shorts are comedies, and some fit into a special category like examining issues in Israel and Palestine.

But for me, its all about the excellent program Michael Albright put together for this year’s Documentary Shorts: “A diverse range of short documentary portraits on professions and people whose life  experiences bring insights and depth into the human condition.” Seven films were included in this excellent assortment.  One of the standouts was Jujitsuing Reality, a 17 minute film by Director Chetin Chabuk about Scott Lew, a screenwriter with ALS, also known as Lou Gerhrig’s disease.

When the film opens we see actors rehearsing a scene on a soundstage. The movie is a dark comedy called, Sexy Evil Genius. Miranda (Michelle Trachtenberg) tells Zachary (Seth Green) the sentence every man hates to hear – You lost your mojo. Everyone laughs at Seth.

Before we have a chance to understand the meaning of this scene, we cut to the closeup of a man’s bloated, expressionless face staring at a computer. There’s an infrared dot on his forehead.  A voice says, “I am writing to you from the inside. I still have a voice.” The infrared dot highlights a letter on the screen. This is Scott Lew, screenwriter of Sexy Evil Genius.

Writing is a laborious process for Scott. It can take an hour to compose a sentence.  It takes 4 hours and two attendants just to get out of bed.  Then he spends the next 4 hours writing. Scott is happily married to a beautiful woman and he’s the father of two bouncing toddlers who help “suction Daddy” and “play with Daddy’s lizard tongue.”

Chabuk’s film takes us inside Scott’s wicked, agile mind. The camera embraces the close up grace  of Scott’s brilliant eyes. Jujitsuing Reality is reminiscent of Jessica Yu’s Academy Award winning documentary, Breathing Lessons about Mark O’Brien, the Berkley poet who spent four decades in an iron lung. O’Brien was also the inspiration for this year’s Academy Award nominated film, The Sessions.  In Yu’s film, O’Brien says,”The two mythologies about disabled people break down to one: we can’t do anything, or two: we can do everything. But the truth is, we’re just human.”

In Jijitsuing Reality, when Scott’s computer voice says, “I know you can’t see it but I’m smiling,” he is speaking for everyone in the darkened audience.  In the final scene, we return to the soundstage of Sexy Evil Genius and hear the words brought to life by Scott’s infrared dot, words that apply to everybody, regardless of what condition your body is in: “Find your mojo.”

Thank you to Michael Albright, Roger Durling, Sean Pratt and everyone else who made this year’s SBIFF a success.