The 36th Annual Northwest Film and Video Festival: The North Portland filmmakers Part II
The Final Inch- Trailer Above
Imaging Home- Photo Teaser

Imagining Home – Directed by Sue Arbuthnot and Richard Wilhelm

This is an endearingly made if occasionally digressive documentary that conveys a clear sense of a Portland neighborhood, which most people would otherwise completely skip over. I’ve only twice taken the bus through the New Columbia community, formerly Columbia Villa, Portland’s affordable housing, low-income project. But one's vantage point from a bus reveals nothing ostensibly scary or crime-ridden about the area, and community members I’ve talked to speak very highly of it. If you’re unclear about even where Portland’s oldest housing project area sits, take a No. 4 Bus from the Interstate and Lombard intersection of North Portland toward St. Johns. It’ll stand out, because New Columbia doesn’t resemble in the slightest the miles upon miles of modest one-story houses that comprise NoPo. It looks modern, all recently laid concrete sidewalks and aluminum-siding condos. From simply looking the neighborhood over you wouldn’t guess all of the history that filmmakers Sue Arbuthnot and Richard Wilhelm dutifully uncover in their feature-length documentary, Imagining Home.

Arbuthnot and Wilhelm trace the neighborhood project from its WWII inception, as a quick place for the influx of Navy-commissioned shipbuilders to lay their heads, through its unwanted reputation in the 1970s and ’80s as a Portland slum, a gang-infested drug zone that made weekly headlines in the Oregonian for its crime, finally to its federally funded revamp in the middle aughts, which brought it to its current  state. Hundreds of low-income residents – five or six of them captured candidly by Arbuthnot and Wilhelm – were swept along during the last phase of this process, moved out of the Villa in 2003 and back to New Columbia a few years later.

It is mostly fascinating to know the personal stories of the handful of residents who agreed to be interviewed, but this is where the digressions affect the message. No single group of residents is given as much back history as the neighborhood itself. Many of those interviewed are allowed to talk at length about their families or their nostalgia for the former Villa, but without seeing anyone through the entire process of displacement and relocation, it's difficult to feel for the journey we’re told they’ve taken. Imagining Home is thoroughly dedicated to the plight of New Columbia as a whole, but leaves you wanting more of the people who live there.

Imagining Home should be seen by North Portlanders wherever they get the chance (like this weekend at the Film Center), particularly if those residents haven’t been here long (myself included) and may assume that our section of the city is only as diverse as the people we see within our everyday routes and routines.

Imagining Home screens at the Northwest Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave., Saturday, Nov 14 at 4 pm.

The Final Inch - Directed by Irene Taylor-Brodsky

According to a quote at the end of The Final Inch,  polio eradication has become the largest non-military campaign in history. That’s quite a staggering fact, and after witnessing the 38 minutes spent here on the disease as it affects modern India, it begs the question: where is the rest of this superb documentary?

Director Irene Taylor-Brodsky clearly knows what she is doing, both visually, behind the camera, and investigatively, as she constructs the story of India’s polio problem for us in the editing room. The Final Inch is crisp, concise, momentous, convincing, lively, informative and even stirring – it succinctly illustrates its case, leaving no gaps, at least not within its truncated structure. Most of its too-brief running time is taken up with the door-to-door crusade of a Muslim UNICEF worker as she doggedly surmounts the fears that an orthodox religious community harbors over the polio vaccine. Her struggle is seen as appropriately workaday, yet her clear understanding of the Muslim community's mistrust of government-funded medicine makes her dedication all the more affecting.

My only question is, if polio is so serious (in India at least), and therefore the documentary is urgent, why leave it at 38 minutes? I could easily watch 120 of in-depth analysis and human interest – for example, the history of the virus, how it has spread, how the vaccine was developed, etc. The Final Inch is superb all but for the fact that its ending, not forty minutes in, leaves it feeling like a long public-service announcement, when polio, India and the vibrant imagery unambiguously call for a feature.

The Final Inch played last Tuesday, November 10, at the Northwest Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium as part of the 36th Annual Northwest Film and Video Fest’s Shorts II program.

I regret not writing about it before, but you could do a lot worse than buying the DVD here: http://www.amazon.com/Final-Inch-Irene-Taylor-Brodsky/dp/B002HMDQ3C

Or checking out the site of Vermilion Pictures, which produced it:
http://www.vermilionpictures.com/