By Peter Keough

The cinematic shindig’s lineup features unconventional takes on familiar subjects.

Those who regard documentaries as merely a system to deliver information and opinion might look askance at any inventive deviation from that norm. But, as one of the earliest cinema genres, the documentary has undergone various transformations over the years. The downside is that, once a filmmaker leaves the familiar territory of talking heads, editorial explication, and other devices, viewers will most likely have to work harder to appreciate the result. That extra effort is rewarded with these films at the Camden International Film Festival (September 12-15 at various venues in Camden and Rockland ME, and September 16-30 online).

A scene from Rising Up at Night. Photo: Visions du Reel

Nelson Makengo’s Rising up at Night (screens September 14 at 5:30 p.m. at Journey’s End and online September 16-30) is an immersive look at the struggles of poor people during a flood in Kinshasa – a city of 17 million and the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo – and the indifference of local authorities to their plight. It is not unlike other observational, cinema verite style films — except this one is shot almost entirely at night and in darkness.

In dank cellars sporadically lit by flashlights, families go about their lives knee-deep in dirty water, preparing food, eating, sleeping. Outside, preachers exhort their congregations to have faith in the blood of Jesus, telling them that when He comes it will bring joy, as when a power cut ends and the electricity is restored. More practical leaders solicit members of the community to contribute to a fund to buy a new cable to connect to a generator after the old one has been stolen. Maybe if they raise enough they can restore the light by Christmas.

Meanwhile, people travel by boat in the darkness to flooded destinations. A young man left homeless by the deluge lifts weights by candlelight in a makeshift gym. Intermittent news broadcasts relate the checkered progress of a giant hydroelectric dam being backed by big money brokers in Spain and China. Perhaps that will be the solution to the lack of light and power. But life goes on, people complain, and there seems no will for political action. This is their lot in life and they seem to accept it.

The film’s insistence on remaining in the dark transforms this obvious metaphor into a palpable reality, one that is both suffocating and possessed of an uncanny beauty. It also disrupts the normal perception of time. A malaise of despair gives way to a spirit of perseverance, illuminated occasionally by an illusory gospel of false hope.

A scene from A Fidai Film. Photo: Visions du Reel

During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon Israeli forces seized files from the P.L.O. headquarters in Beirut. Many years later, Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari managed to gain possession of some of the footage that had been taken and edited it together into A Fidai Film (screens September 15 at 10 a.m. at the Strand Theatre and online September 16-30). It is a chaotic-appearing collage that lacks chronology or context. But the experience is enhanced by an intense, evocative soundtrack, strobe-like effects, the writings of Ghassan Kanafani, and blood red daubs blotting out faces, words, and other images.

The footage ranges from bucolic-looking scenes from the era of the British Protectorate, to brutal combat during the Israeli War of Independence and the Six Day War, to newsreels of massacres and a car bombing in Beirut during the invasion. The effect is confusion, shock, and a loss of bearings that evokes the trauma of those uprooted and dispersed by disasters. The word “fida’i” in the title is an Arabic word meaning to offer service to another. It is the root of “Fidayyin,” the name given Palestinian freedom fighters of the ’60s and ’70s. Like his fellow Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi in his film Recovery (2021), which uses archival footage in a similar way, Aljafari has taken on the role of freedom fighter as artist, reclaiming lost history through the artifice of film.

We here in New England were spared the apocalyptic emergence of the American Great Eastern Brood X cicadas in the spring of 2021 when billions of the hefty, red-eyed bugs burst onto the scene after a 17 year hibernation. They swarmed the mid-Atlantic and eastern Midwest regions, indulged in cacophonous song (100 decibels at times), mated, and died. But might it be that, instead of being spared unpleasantness, we were deprived of a rare opportunity to bond with the essential forces of nature?

A scene from Eastern Anthems. Photo: Points North

Matthew Wolkow would think the latter – he had spent five years doing research and undergoing preparations in hopes of making a movie about the cicadas. But the Covid pandemic saw him locked down in Montreal. So he sent all his research and contacts and an unreliable camera to his friend Jean-Jacques Martinod, who was then visiting the prime Cicada stomping ground of Maryland for a wedding. The long distance collaboration between the two resulted in Eastern Anthems (screens September 14 at 2:30 p.m. at Journey’s End).

Understandably, given its origins, the result is a slapdash but sometimes inspired effort combining the two co-directors’ online communications, lots of shots of bugs, clips from news reports, buzzy optical effects, and interviews with other cicada enthusiasts, all backed with a jazzy soundtrack and the primal drone of the swarm at various volumes. There are the expected reflections on the rhythms of nature and the human failure to adapt, as well as speculations on what our fate will be 17 years from now and commentary on the event’s ecstatic conjunction of sex, reproduction, and death.  It is reminiscent of  another recent documentary, Daniel McCabe’s Grasshopper Republic (2023), which takes on a similar phenomenon, though on a more limited scale. But that film foregoes the New Agey meditations for a more hard-nosed look at the bug infestation from the perspective of class, power, economics, and politics.

One observation that’s almost lost in the exuberant inventiveness – a child mentions finding a cicada with its butt missing, a reference perhaps to the zombie fungus that had infected many of the insects, reducing them to a sexual frenzy that served to further spread the killer parasite. There’s a lesson to be learned there I suppose, but I’m not about to figure it out.

Edmund Stenson and Daniel Rohe’s Blink (screens September 15 at 1 p.m. at the Camden Opera House) does not shy from conventional documentary devices, but then its subject is tragically unique. A poignant and inspiring story told with exemplary restraint and skill, it begins with a montage of a comfortable middle class Montreal couple, the Pelletiers, who are generally content — though overwhelmed a bit — by the rambunctiousness of their four children. All that changes however when three out of the four kids are diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive and incurable disease that leads to total blindness.

An expert tells the despondent parents that they should offer their children as much visual stimuli as possible while they can still see so they will have it stored in their memory. But rather than employ books and the media as was suggested, they decide to go directly to the source and experience the world firsthand. The Pelletiers had always wanted to travel but having the kids got in the way. Now the kids were the reason to do so.

The family compiled a bucket list of things to do along with destinations. They sold the cars, rented the house, cashed in a serendipitous windfall, and set off on a roughing it world tour that ranged from riding ponies in Mongolia to ziplining in Zimbabwe. Only rarely did the impending darkness loom, as when they were trapped for over nine hours in a gondola over a rain forest and their panic grew as night fell, a plight that seemed to foreshadow the blindness to come. But, in the end, the trip strengthened the family’s ability to feel empathy for others, to embrace new experiences, and to adjust to circumstances, lessons that we who are still fortunate enough to see can learn from.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).