Tragedy and Triumph At Pacific Rim Film Festival

Watching the parade of gorgeous images in Santa Cruz native Sasha Friedlander’s directorial debut, one is haunted by the feeling that something is not right.

Such remarkable displays of beauty normally stimulate a certain kind of delight in that part of our brain that craves visual excitement. But in Where Heaven Meets Hell, they have the power to disturb.

That’s because underneath their elegant surface, there is cruelty. The Kawah Ijen volcano that inspires awe as an Indonesian national park—for which tourists are charged entry based on the size of their cameras—is also home to a sulfur mine manned by workers whose health and safety is constantly in jeopardy. It is a place of poverty and struggle, as potentially deadly as it is beautiful.

Director Sasha Friedlander makes no apologies for framing the story of these miners and their families with the kind of cinematography that makes the landscape, or even a yellow cloud of sulfur, look absolutely exquisite.

“That was actually what drew me to make the film in the first place, because I found that fascinating,” she says by phone from her current home in New York. “You get there, and it’s absolutely otherworldly, it’s spectacular. And then to see the miners’ work there, that contrast, it blew me away.”

The 27-year-old Friedlander found her way to East Java by a strange and winding route. Growing up in Santa Cruz as the daughter of local artist Sara Friedlander and her musician husband Cliff, she first visited Indonesia when she was seven, and vacationed regularly there with her family. She took up Balinese dancing, and as a teenager was voted the best young dancer in Bali. After graduating from UCLA with a focus in documentary film and dance in 2007, she moved to Indonesia and pursued journalism, helping to launch the International Bali Post. She traveled to Kawah Ijen after some friends showed her pictures from a bike trip and, after learning of the mine, began developing the idea of a film about the workers there.

But it took her two years to get back, and even then she almost didn’t, thanks to the incredible difficulty of getting a permit to shoot from the Indonesian government.

“It was a nightmare,” she says. “It was me calling the embassy for eight months before they gave it to me. I received the permit two days before I flew out.”

An early Kickstarter campaign—which many supporters in Santa Cruz contributed to—helped her raise the money for the film, and for two two-month stretches she and her small crew pretty much lived with the miners.

“Everyone had us at their home at one point or another,” she says of the mining community. “They trusted me, and they let me in from day one.”

The resulting film recalls the visual poetics of Ron Fricke’s films like Baraka, mixed with hard documentary realism. But she says her biggest inspiration was Yung Chang’s 2007 documentary Up the Yangtze, especially in the relationship between filmmaker and subject.

“The intimacy that the director was able to achieve, it seemed unreal,” she says.

She was able to capture some unreal moments herself, as when an impromptu interview with the owner of the mine led to him ordering one of his subordinates to eat sulfur on camera to show it was not toxic.

“It was so bizarre, it was hard to keep a straight face,” she admits. “It was like, ‘What is happening? This is insane.’”

“I was very drawn to the ideas of breath and breathing,” Marc Smolowitz says of the underlying rhythms in his documentary The Power of Two, which follows Anabel and Isabel Stenzel, half-Japanese identical twins living in Redwood City. Their lifelong fight with cystic fibrosis made them the faces of the battle against appalling organ donor laws in Japan, and was the basis for their memoir of the same name. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder which clogs the body organs, especially the lungs, restricting breathing in those who suffer from it. Since there is no treatment for the disease, organ transplant is the only cure.

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“I wanted people to be aware of their breath when they were watching the film,” says Smolowitz. “I wanted to remind people who are healthy that we go through our days effortlessly.”

A graduate of UCSC now teaching in the university’s film department, Smolowitz has made a name for himself as a producer over the last decade, on films like Trembling Before G-d, a documentary about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews, and the Academy Award-nominated retro-radical study, The Weather Underground.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that his first feature-length documentary came to be because of his professional connections—but not at all like you’d expect.

In the spring of 2009, Smolowitz got an email from an acquaintance, Silicon Valley lawyer and political player Andrew Byrnes.

“He’s a community leader,” says Smolowitz of Byrnes, who will appear with him at a Q&A at the film festival. “I always had tons of respect for the guy, but I never knew anything about his personal life.”

Byrnes revealed that he is married to Isabel, gave him a quick rundown of her story, and asked him if he knew any filmmakers that might be interested in traveling with them to Japan to film their appearances speaking out about the organ donor laws.

Smolowitz was immediately fascinated by the twins’ story and told Byrnes he himself wanted to go. Soon after came his first experience with the power of the twins, as their tour of Japan took the country by storm.

“It was amazing in Japan, because people there don’t talk about illness,” he says. “They were speaking the kind of truth that isn’t spoken.”

He then spent several months in 2010 filming the part of the documentary set in the U.S. , and by then was completely drawn into their world.

“Ana and Isa are fantastic,” he says. “When you’re a documentary filmmaker, and you’re collaborating with very strong characters like they are, it’s this process of building trust. We really grew to love each other.”

The various twists and turns he was able to document in the film, especially the enormity of seeing how transplants changed lives, had a huge effect on him personally—to the point of making him question, basically, his entire view of the universe.

“I’m not a spiritual person,” he admits. “But one thing I saw time and again as I made this movie were these transcendent, miraculous things. It reminded me that we all have a spiritual basis to our lives. There is something bigger than us happening.”

Keith Muscutt has a confession to make about the filming of Playing With Fire in the remote community of Celendin, in the Peruvian Andes, on which he assisted director Gustavo Vazquez.

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“We didn’t tell our respective wives and girlfriends all the details,” he says.

That’s because they would have had to be uncomfortably specific about the hazards of documenting the story of the fireworks makers there who craft their explosives from gunpowder the way the Chinese did in the 15th century.

Not to give away too much from the film itself, but such hazards do include things blowing up in terrifying ways. There was the time Vazquez was blown completely off the camera by a blast, and Muscutt tried to escape the pyrotechnics by running into another room—which he then realized was itself filled with more fireworks.

Anecdotes like this make Muscutt’s description of the filming all the more unexpected: “We had the time of our lives,” he says. “We laughed ourselves to sleep every night.”

“We joked a lot,” confirms Vazquez. “It was a fantastic collaboration.”

Muscutt is a former assistant Dean of the Arts at UCSC, whose love affair with Peru has lasted decades. He has traveled there on countless anthropological and archeological expeditions. His discovery of an unlooted tomb from the ancient Chachapoya culture was the subject of the History Channel’s Cliff Mummies of the Andes special. He was acquainted with a few of the families in Celendin, and upon learning of their huge, fireworks-laden annual tribute to their patron saint, he thought he’d document it himself.

“But when I started looking at the footage I shot,” he says, “it looked much more like a Fellini film than a documentary.”

He took it back to Vazquez, whom he knew casually as an associate professor in the UCSC film department. They brought a shared love of irony, surrealism and magical realism to the film, which not only accounts for its wild imagery, but also its complete lack of an agenda in laying out Celendin’s traditions—it doesn’t ask the audience to judge them in any particular way.

“We brought two different pairs of eyes that were in sync, in harmony,” says Muscutt. “I think our intention was for it to be a poetic rather than prosaic film. It kind of morphed into ‘magical documentary.’”

Vazquez has another term for it: “involuntary surrealism.”

“I was inspired in that approach by Latin American writers,” he says. “It’s that blend between magic and empirical science and belief systems. This is not a passive film—we’re not telling the audience how to see this, just unfolding the storyline with a visual experience.”

It’s an experience that seems heavily influenced by surrealist director Luis Buñuel, especially his early documentary Land Without Bread. But the process of making the film was entirely documentary, with the two-man crew staying with the main characters in the film for weeks, and getting very close to them.

“That kind of intimacy allows you to work in that community in a different way,” says Vazquez.