by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

In the 24 hours between Saturday and Sunday nights, I saw four festival-selected documentaries, bookended by an absolutely awful rainstorm and a glorious sunny pseudo-Spring Sunday. (I wrote one of these reviews outside in a sweater, it was so lovely for early March!) Without further ado, here’s the last of my Athena flicks, in three parts:

Three Films I Saw on the Big Screen

Q [ق ]
Directed, written, co-produced, and shot by Jude Chehab
In Arabic with English subtitles
93 mins.
Coming to Middle East and North Africa theaters this summer

Jude Chehab is quick to clarify in her debut feature Q that this is not a film about a cult. That, in fact, it’s a story of three generations of Lebanese (and in Chehab’s case, Lebanese American) women and their relationship to their faith. That it’s not about the Qubasiyat, the all-female Muslim order Jude’s grandmother, mother, and aunt joined, identified by their white hijab and led by the deeply charismatic Anisa (or teacher). That it’s not about her mother Hiba’s departure, or perhaps excommunication, from that order. Which is all correct, to a point. Q isn’t about those things directly, but it is a contemplative, peripatetic piece about life amid the environment of “the group,” as it’s called throughout the film. And it’s a story of how someone could have profound love for a religious guide and their magnetism, all while falling out of love with the environment that guide had created.

Chehab primarily focuses on her mother, mixing in time with grandmother and aunt to discuss their time in al-Qubasiyat. Also present are her brother Muhammad, a skateboarding sheikh-in-training, and her father, who is less devout and wary of the Anisa. Interspersed, we see home video of Jude’s American upbringing, that same Americanization in Hiba that the Anisa was wary of. (That this same upbringing still brought Jude to hold fast to her Muslim identity, and wear hijab herself, is irrelevant to the Anisa.) And Chehab includes something that is, initially, difficult to explain: footage from a small play in French. It’s unclear whether that was staged in Lebanon or the US, but we eventually learn that it was Hiba in that play, her head uncovered. But it led to her departure (forced or otherwise) from the group. 

It’s this departure, and Hiba’s response, that provides the emotional core of the film. In interviews and in the recitation of letters to and poems in honor of the Anisa, Hiba’s deep adoration for and ardent devotion to her former religious leader is clear. So, too, is the pain from being cast aside. It’s these moments where the film shines. 

Unfortunately, along the way, it meanders, from Hiba’s story, to Jude’s, to other family members. There isn’t really a sense of time or place, or a history of the group to give any context. As a result, one person’s “contemplative and ethereal” can be another’s “snoozy.” And I’m afraid that, owing to a combination of factors environmental (a steady rain throughout the morning and afternoon), logistic (this was my third dang movie in about six hours), and gastronomic (I downed a double Veggie Shack and a root beer float from Shake Shack about twenty minutes before the movie), I listed into the latter category. But aside from perhaps trimming fifteen minutes or so from the film, I can’t really fault Chehab for my response here. (I do fault Danny Meyer a little.) Q isn’t meant to be a thrilling film about the Qubasiyat. It’s meant to be a thoughtful film about family, and when that’s clearly in the focus, it’s at its best.

Is There Anybody Out There?
Directed by (and starring) Ella Glendining
87 mins.
Now streaming for Canadian audiences on CBC Gem and on VOD in the UK

As I mentioned in my note on Barbie in my “top 10 films of 2023” contribution to MovieJawn (which, by the way, would totally include Poor Things if not for seeing it on New Year’s 2024), stuff about embodiment hits me hard. As someone living with an admittedly light case of Crohn’s Disease, my body acts in ways different from people without the disease. While I wouldn’t describe it as a disability (merely literal buttload of gas on a regular basis and having a keen knowledge of where my bowel movements end up on the Bristol scale) my Crohn’s leads me regularly to the belief that having a body is among the hardest things there is, and that if I could be anything else, I’d rather be a beam of light than plain old Daniel. And because I’m the only person in my family (that I’m aware of) or my friend group with Crohn’s, I often feel like I’m in the dark, not knowing if other people feel or think about the disease in the same way as me.

So I was glad that my fellow ‘90s kid Ella Glendining doesn’t have the same morose sadsackery as me, and her debut feature Is There Anybody Out There? may prove to be a step on the campaign of “you were born to live in your body, Daniel, so love the hell out of it.” Her self-assuredness, curiosity, fierce push against ableism, and her sense of humor make the intensely personal Is There Anybody Out There? an enlightening, thoughtful, joyous film. Ella was born with a rare bone and joint condition, and occasionally uses a wheelchair for greater ease of movement. As she notes at the start of the film, it’s a rare condition, especially in her case where it’s bilateral — many people with this specific disability are born with one leg similarly affected rather than both. Her parents’ and pediatrician’s “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset and as seen through interviews and childhood home video helped give Ella a life filled with art and storymaking. It pales in comparison with the Facebook group she joins to find others with a similar bone and joint condition as her — with the film’s titular question propelling a multi-year search — where every thought comes back to surgery, either amputation or increasingly a series of operations conceived by Dr. Dror Paley, whom Glendining interviews via Zoom and again in-person at his practice in Florida. (It’s generally a well-meaning set of questions in the Facebook group, but one that comes back to a baseline ableism, a search for normalcy.) 

She documents this search in a series of video diary entries which make up the bulk of the film, tracking her search for someone like her, along with her pregnancy. (She gives birth to an AMAB kiddo named River, and this film is as much a story of Glendining’s early life as a mother as it is her search for people with similar disabilities as her.) Eventually, Ella learns of a makeup artist named Priscilla born with the same disability, along with Ricardo Benitez, a handsome vlogger with the handle “No Femur Kid” who tackles ableism with the same fervor as he played middle and high school football. Eventually they meet in Texas after Covid restrictions begin to lift in the UK, along with a young boy with a similar disability and his parent, who (like Ella’s parents) would rather ensure that he has a life without pain and as much of a full, rich childhood as possible rather than multiple surgeries. 

These meetings, plus time with Ella’s friend Naomi, who has autism, and an elder in the disability rights movement, whom we meet in late-‘60s archival footage of pretty blatantly ableist documentaries about young people and went on to decades of activism with the group DAN (the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network), are helpful to showing the diversity of disabled people’s lives. But ultimately, it’s Glendining realizing that there’s no one definition for her disability (or really even a well-established typology) that’s core to the film. It centers her disability as unique to her, and her uniqueness as something to be embraced — and all the more showing how the ableist world needs to change to be more inclusive, rather than her or anyone with a similar disability needing to change for a “normal” world. Indeed, an intriguing meta-commentary midway through the film is a microcosm of this where Ella explicitly notes that her non-disabled partner, Scott, is (despite some consideration to feature him more in the film) not going to become the “non-disabled hero” the audience wants. And thankfully, Glendining sticks to this, because (as ever) a non-disabled hero was never needed for this outstanding documentary.

Your Fat Friend
Written, Directed, and Produced by Jeanie Finlay
Starring Aubrey Gordon, Michael Hobbes, and Rusty, Pam, and Zack
94 mins.

(stating the obvious, but TW: fatphobia and eating disorders)

The Sunday “deeply personal docs about marginalized bodies” theme continued with Your Fat Friend, covering Aubrey Gordon’s path from anonymous blogger to book author and award-winning podcaster. I only came to learn of Aubrey from her podcast, Maintenance Phase, and the publicly visible phase of her career, so much of the film’s longitudinal lens was new to me. But what was unsurprising was how much director-writer producer Jeanie Finlay tenderly centers Gordon’s thoughtful, intense, humorous personality, while also featuring Aubrey’s parents (Rusty and Pam) and Rusty’s partner Zack seeing this phase of their daughter’s life.

The film begins not long after Gordon published what was originally a letter to a friend as “A Letter from Your Fat Friend,” when at this point Your Fat Friend is a phenomenon on the internet shedding light on how the world treats fat people. How anti-fatness is pervasive in media, in medicine, and in public settings (airplanes, theaters, even the Portland Bike Share). And how every diet is, in Aubrey’s words, the same four or five diets repackaged, and none of them have worked since they were created in the 1940s, yet they represent a multi-trillion dollar industry. All the while, her identity as the author of these posts is known only to her family and to some close friends, while Gordon works as a nonprofit manager. In a sense, her blog becomes a further extension of her ethos that every facet of the world can change for the better if people put in the work and the resources to do so. Soon enough, the posts go viral and Gordon gets a book deal, leading to What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and her podcast with Michael Hobbes.

It clearly took an intense amount of trust from Gordon to agree to work on this project with Finlay. It was remarkable to see these six years of Gordon’s life, especially in the anonymous phase. There is, even among the points of success (the book deal, the subscriber count going up, a supportive note on an article about Adele by Adele) a constant sense of fear and reprisal from fatphobic jerks. (Indeed, before her book came out and she had control over the narrative, Aubrey got doxxed, and I really felt her intense pain and fear.) That this part of the story is being seen at all feels exceptionally rare. Similarly intimate are the perspectives of Rusty and Pam, and how they realize looking back on all the photos and videos that they rue some parental decisions and try to make things better in their relationships with Aubrey, leading up to their appearance in the final major scene of the film, Aubrey’s book talk at Powell’s Books, her first public appearance ever in a place as close to her as “a childhood home.”

The ultimate product is a film where Gordon’s personality can shine. For Maintenance Phase listeners, the Aubrey-isms will be easy to find (including scenes featuring her bonkers collection of historical diet books, attending Portland Thorns and Portland Timbers games, and inevitable “oh, buddy” response to a fan). And the film is grounded in Gordon’s life in the Pacific Northwest, with Finlay regularly featuring the vistas Gordon saw as she wrote her blogs and her books. There’s a great theme of water in the film; it’s how the film begins, with Gordon swimming in a pool, something she’s done since she was a child (as we see in archival video shown throughout the doc). It’s in the motif that anti-fatness is “the water we swim in every day.” It represents the restrictions of the world, but it also represents the possibility for liberation. And if “restrictions to liberation” isn’t a great way of describing Aubrey Gordon’s work, throughout the time we see in Your Fat Friend, oh buddy, I don’t know what is.

Breaking the News
Directed by Heather Courtney, Chelsea Hernandez, and Princess A. Hairston
Written by Jamie Boyle
94 mins.
Now streaming on PBS Passport

I imagine we’ll have to relive 2020 in the media over and over again as the years and decades go on. Breaking the News is, inevitably, a document of that epochal year and what followed, through the lens of the launch of The 19th*, from their pre-launch stage in March 2020 to their first all-staff retreat in summer 2022. If anything, Breaking the News shows one of the few silver linings of what I call “deep Covid,” a traumatic time that, as time goes on, feels connected yet is also a whole other universe. The 19th*, Heather Courtney, Chelsea Hernandez, and Princess A. Hairston shows, had successes and missteps in its first two years, like any organization — but clearly the former won out. 

The film covers the initial core team at The 19th*, named for the amendment giving women suffrage, the asterisk representing both those who were not enfranchised in 1920 and as a kind of talisman for stories focusing on gender and marginalization that don’t fall in the “white progressive women” lens. In Austin, Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora leave their leadership positions at the Texas Tribune to launch the new site, inspired by Emily’s daughter coming of age in the Trump administration and Zamora looking to create a journalistic organization that, as a light-skinned Latina, won’t pigeonhole her or tokenize her. Along with these two co-founders (Ramshaw as CEO, Zamora as publisher), the directorial trio introduces us to Errin Haines (editor-at-large), Chabeli Carrazana (economy reporter), Kate Sosin (LGBTQ+ reporter), Shefali Luthra (health reporter), and Sereena Henderson (community manager). Courtney, Hernandez, and Hairston take us behind the scenes of their remote newsroom, primarily Haines in Philadelphia, Carrazana in Orlando, and Sosin in Los Angeles. It’s an array of Zoom meeting chimes, article pitches, major co-published pieces (including Haines’s story on Brionna Taylor, the first coverage of her murder), and eventually day-one-proper of the publication as its own site. From there, the film hits the expected major beats over the next two years, with the many pieces published by The 19th* as the signposts.

The timeline at times feels a bit rote, in part because we’ve lived through it. The year in Covid (and, as Carrazana detailed in her pieces, how the pandemic and its resulting recession impacted women), and the severe impact on media budgets that we’re still experiencing today.  The 2020 presidential campaign — including Kamala Harris conducting her first major interview with Haines — the exhaustion of early voting and Election Day, and January 6. SB 8 in Texas, the Dobbs opinion leak and delivery, and the post-Roe aftermath. The flurry of anti-trans legislation and Dobbs’ impacts on all gender and sexuality-inclusive court decisions, not just abortion access. All that’s really missing is a section on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, and frankly it’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t directly go there.

Where Breaking the News (and, so it seems, The 19th* as a publication) succeeds is where the stories veer off the beaten path. Carrazana travels to Branson to cover the pandemic’s impact on diaper banks in the Ozarks. Kosin, the first (and for a while) only trans and nonbinary writer on staff, heads to western Massachusetts to cover one of the sole trans-led, gender-inclusive rural health clinics in the country (and afterward visits their alma mater, Hampshire College). Indeed, Kosin’s storyline (and to a lesser extent Zamora’s) are the best parts of the doc, as they force the publication and the film to examine where things are going wrong. Early on, Kosin needs to push back against collective misgendering and fears their own isolation while covering a bunch of stories that basically all amount to ‘how trans people, and LGBTQ+ people are dehumanized.’ Zamora grapples with being optically a co-founder of The 19th*, while not having the same power as Ramshaw at the publication. 

Working in these early days at The 19th* was clearly a challenge — anything at the intersection of startup and nonprofit is. (At best, it results in a tight-knit but exhausting team; at worst, as I’ve experienced, it’s downright exploitative.) But by the end of the film, it’s clear that across the organization cares deeply about one another. Looking the masthead today, it’s only grown, and the original players are still present (with the exception of Zamora, who has moved on to more of an advisory role). And the mid-credits scene shows that the work continues, with a funded fellowship for HBCU graduates to support the next generation of journalists. Courtney, Hernandez, and Hairston show how the publication developed, and the hiccups along the way: its culture, including a revised mission statement to kick off year two at Kosin’s suggestion; its editorial style, including an attempt to break out of a lefty niche by interviewing Kellyanne Conway; and the impact of their reporting, especially when they looked for “the asterisk story,” the lens that looked beyond the traditional scope and dismantled (or, uh, broke) traditional media storylines.