by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

I closed out DOCNYC with a long holiday weekend of documentaries, a mad dash to see what I could before the fest wrapped. In the end, the five films I saw end up almost as two pairs similar in topic and theme, and a fifth completely different.

The Home Game
dir. Smari Gunn and Logi Sigursveinsson

Soccer’s been getting bigger and bigger in Iceland over the past few years, with the men’s team miraculously making the World Cup in 2018 and the women’s side an occasional participant in the Women’s European Championships. But The Home Game shows that football mania goes farther back and is more deeply felt than I ever realized from the folks doing the Viking Clap in Russia in ‘18. 

This feature takes us to the ground of Reynir FC, hailing from the village of Hellissandur, a small fishing village in the northwest of Iceland. I’m talking really small, to the point where Ólafsvík, home to Reynir’s larger rival club Vikingur, has triple the population of Hellissandur — with about 1,200 people. Yet Reynir’s home is one of the most beautiful pitches in the country, the dream of coach Vidar Gylfason, a field that has never been played on in full competition. Reynir had the chance at hosting an Icelandic FA Cup match, but instead was drawn away to the footballing division of Grindvik Golfklub…and lost, ten to nil. 

It’s up to Vidar’s son, Karl Vidarsson, to carry on his father’s legacy. An artist, creative director, and hostel manager by day, he brings together some of the old heads from the original Reynir squad, their kids, some of his youth teammates (including former pro and women’s national team member Freydís Bjarnadóttir), and a Portuguese hostel guest who came up in the Benfica academy as a kid. Over the course of a year, they train and prepare for another chance at a home game. And when they do get that home game in the FA Cup draw, it’s a moving experience. Co-directors Gunn and Sigursveinsson, given complete access to the town and the team, ably convey their local pride, and the chance at redemption. The result on the pitch against first-division member Afturelding, while surprising, doesn’t matter. The community, already tightly knit, getting together to take in this game is a victory unto itself. Come matchday, complete with flags unfurled, signs drawn, and cakes baked with the Reynir crest, I too was a Reynir supporter, a vicarious pride for a place I’ve never been and likely never will be.

Lucha: A Wrestling Tale
dir. Marco Ricci

Lucha is similarly in the “underdog sports story” vein, but with a completely different demographic of protagonist compared to The Home Game. From the Icelandic coast, we head to the Bronx, just off the Grand Concourse, and the wrestling mats of Taft High School. (Often found in the school’s cafeteria.) Taft, as wrestling coach Josh Lee notes, was among the first schools in the city to have metal detectors after a teacher got stabbed. Socioeconomically, its students are some of the poorest in the city, in the poorest congressional district in America.

Marco Ricci takes us through two seasons in the life of the Taft girls’ wrestling team, introducing us to an engaging cast of characters. From Shirley, who’s trying to make her way out of the Bronx and into college amid chronic homelessness as team captain; to Alba, a recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic; to Nyasia, who as a sophomore misses out on competition due to low grades and redeems herself academically and athletically in her junior year, the Taft Eagles are a compelling subject. Ricci does well to humanize these student-athletes and their coaches, as “the toughest girls in the city” become a competitive program. While at times the structure is a bit rote — occasionally sliding into “Brooklyn Castle but for wrestling” territory —  I was still pulling for Taft’s success and growth as students, as wrestlers, and as the next generation of New Yorkers. And apparently, so did the DOCNYC jury, as Lucha was honored with the Metropolis prize at this year’s fest.

The Lady Bird Diaries
dir. Dawn Porter
Now streaming on Hulu

It’s the sixtieth anniversary of the JFK assassination. (It’s also twenty years since the song “Sleeping In” came out. Everybody gets to feel old this year!) The historical commemoration and reexamination has extended further to the ensuing five year tenure of Lyndon Johnson, who (along with Dwight Eisenhower) is probably the president I find most interesting. His year in office completing Kennedy’s term, and the term won in a landslide in 1964, was marked with some of the great successes of 20th Century domestic policy: the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the War on Poverty. But LBJ’s Great Society was marred by diving full-bore into the Vietnam War and a string of assassinations — Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., in March 1968, and Robert F. Kennedy two months later — shaking the core of the nation.

Instead of focusing on Lyndon, Dawn Porter turns to Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, and her 125 hours of audio diary recordings begun in late November 1963 and running all the way through to her husband’s last day in office, January 20, 1969. And in a period where we remember Rosalynn Carter as a political force (“my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” as Jimmy Carter put it), Lady Bird gets a similar, timely, reappraisal. Through those archival recordings, interviews, archival video, and a sprinkling of animation, we see this critical period through Lady Bird’s eyes. From Douglas MacArthur’s state funeral, to the civil rights and voting rights campaigns, to Lady Bird’s whistle stop tour of the South in 1964 campaigning for Lyndon, we get a sense of her role in the Johnson administration. And similarly, we feel the exhaustion of the last years of the Great Society — the riots and ensuing Kerner Commission report, Vietnam bringing national upheaval and protest, and the aftereffects of Lyndon’s gallbladder surgery and recovery in 1965. At the same time, there’s the relief and joy from Lyndon and Lady Bird’s daughters (Luci Baines and Linda Bird) getting married, with Linda’s wedding at the White House. If you’re a presidential history nut like me, some of the film will seem stale (I can only see the same shots of Vietnam protests and Walter Cronkite’s “stalemate” column before my eyes glaze over) but the emotional core of the film, and its primary subject, still makes it worthwhile.

The Riot Report
dir. Michelle Ferrar
Coming soon to PBS’ American Experience and PBS Passport

So, about that Kerner Commission report I mentioned earlier. The National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders was empaneled by Lyndon Johnson to get to the causes of riots across seventy-six cities the summer of 1967 (chiefest among them, Detroit and Newark), but to also give LBJ some breathing room from the fires emerging seemingly just outside his doorstep. With archival footage and interviews with some of the commission members and staff and an array of experts (Jelani Cobb, Elisabeth Hinton, Joshua Zeitz, et al.), The Riot Report examines the full arc of the Kerner Commission’s work and the riots themselves. 

In fact, perhaps Michelle Ferrari uses too wide a lens, and may have been better served constraining the scope to the commission’s work and its fallout. Perhaps it’s necessary to get into what came before (the Great Society, the Great Migration, the shift from nonviolence to the age of “Black Power,” and the rightward turn of the Republican Party with Barry Goldwater as its standard-bearer), but it leads to the Venn diagram intersection of themes and footage between Riot and The Lady Bird Diaries to be overly large. At its best, the film examines the commission’s work — unique among blue ribbon committees, actually going out into the cities and talking to people to deliver a searing report — and its aftermath. As one commissioner put it, “The Commission told the truth, but it was a hard truth,” that America’s ghettos were created and sustained through white racism. And it was one America didn’t really listen to. The costs of the solutions, especially amid Vietnam, were too high, the demand for law and order (and militarized police departments) too great, the thought that the Great Society somehow spoiled deindustrializing Black communities too strong. And I think the film does well (both in content and in Matthew Head’s horns-heavy score) casting the tone of a promise unfulfilled, showing the impact of the report on the Nixon administration, the War on Crime, the Rodney King riots, and the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Grasshopper Republic
dir. Daniel McCabe

Let’s be honest, insects are basically the shrimp of the land and air. (Try some fried crickets when you get the chance, you’ll be glad you did.) But, as Grasshopper Republic shows, such a delicacy comes at a cost.

The grasshoppers, or nsenene, of Uganda are not farmed and raised — they’re solely trapped in the wild, using metal drums, corrugated steel, and bright lights powered by generators and wired by hand in rural fields. In a country where the 300,000 shillings to rent the trapping area amounts to about eighty US dollars, the grasshoppers are a potential goldmine, and fauna of national pride. Daniel McCabe’s spare documentary shows the majesty of grasshoppers as a species, the economic fortune spawned from catching them, and the toll of the trappers’ work on their bodies. 

We don’t get a sense of the trappers’ lives or families, which is a bit of a shame. A bit more introduction beyond the moving around of generators and sheet metal and the spawning of grasshoppers in reedy strings of egg sacs, would have helped build the emotional heft. But the scenes later on, at the pharmacy where the trappers are prescribed skin cream and medication for their blindness from the bright lights, show the true price of their work. And the awe-inspiring night shots, combined with Robert Aiki and Aubrey Lowe’s haunting score, present the payoff: thousands of grasshoppers pelting the sheet metal and making their way into the drums, a veritable blizzard of insects.