By David D’Arcy

A trio of good documentaries: Benita, Flophouse America, and The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs and Who Has Control.

A scene from Benita. Photo: Doc NYC

In any documentary festival there are going to be films about filmmakers. The one that made the strongest impression on me at this year’s DOC NYC was Benita, a portrait of the dazzlingly imaginative artist and filmmaker Benita Raphan, an independent spirit who took her own life in 2021 at the age of 58.

The director of the film is veteran documentarian Alan Berliner, an admirer, friend and, for a while, an employer of Raphan. Berliner’s remembrance of her takes the form of a personal narrative, a collage of memories from someone who knew her well. Like many homages to a friend lost to suicide – Raphan hanged herself – it’s a grim reminder of how distant and impenetrable a close friend’s anguish can be.

Berliner bridges some of that distance, taking us back through decades of a creative life, assembling a portrait from fragments of images as well as reminiscences from those who knew her, some wondering on camera how they might have intervened. The doc is mournful, but this is also an elegant film, all the more elegant given its subject.

Raphan was known among her peers for her short films about Emily Dickinson, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall Arisman, and others. There was also Pete the Dog, a doc about a rescue dog Raphan adopted. The animal became more unmanageable the longer he stayed with her, draining her already meagre resources, meagre even by doc filmmaker standards. (How Raphan was able to regularly persuade her friends to work for nothing is a question that runs throughout Berliner’s remembrance. Other independent filmmakers will be envious.)

Yet the uncontrollable Pete, whom she re-homed, was not Raphan’s last dog. She adopted another one, the terrier-sized Rothko, whom she trained and filmed with an intense devotion. Some of the most touching moments of Berliner’s deeply moving film show the camera watching Raphan and Rothko concentrating with determination together. The pair had developed what looked like a magical bond, one so strong that one might have thought it would have been reason enough for her to keep living. For me it became one more case of wondering how things turned out the way they did.

Berliner captures a special quality of Raphan’s artistry, the way a spurt of creativity would pivot in directions that seem to come out of nowhere, and keep multiplying. You wonder how much Berliner had to leave out of the film, but what’s there is often magnificent. This is the portrait of an artist who never stopped growing, which makes her passing all the sadder. Let’s hope this heartfelt doc brings a broader public to her films.

Mikal in a scene from Flophouse America. Photo: Doc NYC

Flophouse America is such a generic title that it could refer to anything from a TV series to a podcast to a gonzo hotel chain. In this case, it is the name for a documentary by a Norwegian director exploring what life is like living in a motel room every day – think of Groundhog Day from hell. The experience of one family stands as an example of what millions of families in the US have to struggle with every day. Director Monica Stromdahl decided to go for a literal thud in naming her film, instead of searching for a weighty metaphor. So much the better. Her doc supplies a hard punch of reality. The title makes the point.

This is no-frills cinema, just like the motel, although the action has its moments of Grand Guignol. The ‘every family’ here, resembling so many who live in grinding poverty, is made up of two adults and a pre-teen boy, Mikal. They are living in a motel room because that’s what their benefits pay for. In high-minded liberal Portland, Oregon, a real apartment or house would be out of the question.

The family is struggling with what some social scientists call ‘compound stress.’ They’re poor, the parents drink, and they are what some might call unemployable. One problem compounds the others. Neither the alcohol nor lack of money makes them any healthier. Mikal avoids going to school, where he says he gets beaten up. Watching him play video games as his parents yell at him and at each other gives you a sense of the deep hole where he’s stuck.

The look of Flophouse America can be claustrophobic, but the atmosphere is even more oppressive. Stromdahl’s approach here seems to have been first to earn the family’s trust and then to let her camera roll — for years. I don’t envy her editing challenge given the endless footage (if that’s what they still call it), but what we see rings true, from the fighting of the adults to Mikal’s search for solitude wherever he can find it, after domestic spurts of cursing. When things die down, the self-destructive behavior resumes; it is what happens with addicts and with people who have nowhere else to go.

You could watch Flophouse America and dismiss it as old news; a generic and familiar look at the underclass. But that’s Stromdahl’s point. A photographer as well as a filmmaker, she communicates the specificity of her three subjects, revealing close-ups of people struggling in America. The flophouse is a shelter and a confinement. At the risk of spoiling the domestic drama, I can report that Mikal emerges from his hellish isolation, thanks in part to the film team’s commitment to showing their work-in-progress to the family. Full disclosure: the team also sought psychological help for the film’s subjects. This act of intervention in their lives might be seen as heretical by anthropologists or documentary purists. Forget doc fundamentalism.  The film’s realism is anything but pretty — but thanks in part to the filmmakers, it’s not hopeless.

(l) Cindy Eckert in The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs and Who Has Control; (r) Packaging for Addyi.
Photo: Addyi; Catalyst Works

The Pink Pill, directed by Aisling Chin-Yee, tells the story of Addyi, also called Flibanserin, a women’s libido drug prescribed to counteract hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or HSDD, a drop in sexual desire in premenopausal women.

The doc focuses on Cindy Eckert, a confident conversationalist of an entrepreneur who promotes what she calls the pink pill. She dresses in pink to promote her product. The color scheme of this doc might have you thinking of Barbie, but there is a determination in Eckert’s strategic lightheartedness. Early efforts to have the pill approved by the FDA for premenopausal women were unsuccessful. The agency’s objections were that the drug had too many side effects, yet those issues, at least as shown in the film, seem to be far less harmful than those some men face when they take Viagra. (Addyi is routinely compared to Viagra, though the two drugs act differently on the body.) Addyi also seems to have far fewer side effects than Ozempic or other weight loss drugs.

The real problem, Eckert stresses, was that a sexist standard was being applied to Addyi, compounded by long-standing male attitudes toward female sexuality. Eventually, after the two FDA rejections and the collapse of a firm that offered $1 billion to purchase the right to market it, the pink pill was cleared for use by premenopausal women. The key to the drug’s success was getting the word out among women who wanted to have a problem solved and who vote. Watching Eckert match wits with the mansplainers on the bumpy way there makes this doc an unlikely comedy. If she gets out of the pharmaceutical business, Eckert could have a great talk show – or maybe that’s how her “Pink Pill” campaign operated all along.

Building The Pink Pill around Eckert makes sense, and the film’s brazen Barbie-ized color motif sets it apart from the grey solemnity of documentaries. Also, let’s not forget  Joy, David O. Russell’s 2015 comic saga about a young entrepreneur selling mops who triumphs over adversity and creates a multi-million dollar business in the process. Jennifer Lawrence in the lead got an Oscar nomination. In the right hands, a Pink Pill scripted feature could be a motivational hit. And a comic one as well, given Eckert’s flair for one-liners.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.