For my final dispatch from this year’s True/False Film Festival, I’m highlight three movies that had their world premieres at Sundance at the start of the year. They are also all, coincidentally, highly emotional works, accomplishing everything from memorializing a life to examining what makes people happy to highlighting the need for systemic change in America’s prison system. Read my reviews of Daughters, Agent of Happiness, and Ibelin below.
DAUGHTERS
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more shattering documentary this year than Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s Daughters. The filmmakers follow four young girls whose fathers are incarcerated in Virginia over the course of several years: Aubrey (five years old at the start of filming), Santana (age 10), Ja’Ana (age 11), and Raziah (age 15). But the centerpiece of the film is a daddy-daughter dance at the prison; Patton is the founder of Girls for a Change, the nonprofit organization aimed at empowering Black girls that initiated the Date with Dad program. The program provides a rare opportunity for these fathers and daughters that those of us unfamiliar with the intricacies of the prison system likely have not considered before; these prisoners are not allowed touch visits (interactions with their families have to be conducted with plexiglas dividing them), so when the little girls arrive to their dance in their sparkly dresses and coiffed hair and approach their fathers, sitting in their tuxes in a nervous row like a group of teenage boys at homecoming, those tearful hugs are the first embraces they’ve experienced in a long time.
Daughters is a well-balanced film, one that focuses on the people, not the crimes they committed (apparently, the unknown factor of the severity of the crimes these men were imprisoned for is a sticking point for some people; Daughters pushes those viewers to see the humans beyond their actions). We see the fathers in prison attending courses with a life coach (a 10-week program in responsible fatherhood that is a requirement for participating in the dance), where they reminisce on their past and current hardships (Santana’s father Mark comments on how young he and her mother were when they had her) and, jolted to some realizations in the wake of the dance, promise to try to improve in the future. We also spend time with their daughters at home; Aubrey discusses the number of years her father will be imprisoned with the same matter-of-factness that she recites her times tables. The older girls, meanwhile, are able to articulate much more firmly the hurt they feel at being robbed of a relationship with their fathers (Raziah chokes back sobs as she discusses the milestones her father Alonzo has missed). And while they aren’t the centerpiece of the movie, Rae and Patton don’t erase the mothers either. They’re a constant presence in their daughters’ lives, also seen transporting them to and from prison visits, and occasionally speaking to detrimental effects having an incarcerated father has had on their existence (Aubrey’s mother, LaShawn, remembers the night the police invaded their apartment to arrest her father Keith, as Aubrey slept in another room).
Daughters is also rife with artful intercutting and thoughtful framing; when a shot centers around one of the girls, the camera gets down to their level. The drabness of the prison interiors contrasts with the almost poetic manner in which the girls are shot— dreamy, but with a melancholic undercurrent. And it avoids succumbing to easy sentiment, despite being a bona fide tearjerker. Because it was shot over the course of several years, the film allows us to witness the arc of how these father/daughter relationships shift and change over time. Some of them improve; Raziah and Alonzo begin to open up to each other, while Mark, who states that for most of his life he never spent more than 60 days out of prison, had been out for four years after his release following the dance and a promise he made to his daughter (a revelation that prompted spontaneous mid-film applause from the audience at my screening). More heart-rending, however, is seeing the light fade from Aubrey’s eyes as the time spent growing up without seeing her father (whose sentence is upped from seven to ten years) takes its toll. Denying visits to prisoners benefits nobody; seeing these girls and their stories is a more effective clarion call for change than anything else.
Daughters screened at the 2024 True/False Film Festival. It will be released by Netflix later this year. Runtime: 102 minutes.
AGENT OF HAPPINESS
Bhutan— the South Asian country nestled in the Himalayas between China and India— has a reputation for being the happiest place on the planet; 93.6 percent of Bhutanese citizens report that they feel happy, to be precise. But can happiness really be reduced to a number? That’s something that Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó’s playful and sweet documentary Agent of Happiness seeks to uncover.
The film follows Amber, one of many government workers hired to travel around the country administering surveys to Bhutanese citizens, the questions designed to measure Bhutan’s gross national happiness, a concept introduced by the country’s prime minister in 1998 and reevaluated every five years. As Amber and his partner drive across the country, blasting their music— there are so many gorgeous, meditative shots of the surrounding forests and mountains— they meet people who slot neatly into the index (the film’s first subject is an elderly farmer who can barely hear, but he seems quite content based on the number of cows he owns), and others who don’t. Part of the film’s amusing form is the statistics it highlights, trading-card style, on screen following each interview, the happiness scale from 1-10 reflected both by objective questions (like the number of tractors one owns) and subjective ones (like loneliness and sense of karma). This charming touch avoids the risk of becoming too cutesy because some of the results are genuinely sad. It’s those anomalies that the film chooses to focus a little longer on, like Dechen, a transgender dancer, or the three wives of a self-satisfied man who take comfort in each other (the interview with this foursome, in which the husband does all the talking for the wives, says it all).
The shift to and from these various characters over the course of the film is a little uneven (perhaps a more linear approach would have been more effective), especially as Agent of Happiness also becomes equally centered around the agent. Amber, at 40 years old, desperately wants to get married and start a family (he spends his downtime at work swiping on dating apps). Being of Nepali descent, he is also unable to secure the proper papers that would allow him to travel outside the country (Bhutan’s horrible treatment of the Nepalese people throughout history is something the film lightly acknowledges but doesn’t dive in to the nitty gritty of). Tender scenes of him caring for his mother who lives with him or spending time getting to know a younger woman who isn’t as ready to get married illustrate his caring personality, his job prompting him to turn some of those questions he asks other in on himself. Neither the GDH nor this film provide concrete answers to what makes people happy, but it doesn’t need to. Rather, it provides a peek into the many factors that go in to how people measure their own contentedness, whether that be material possessions, good relationships with family and neighbors, or a feeling of belonging at work and at home. Even in the happiest country on Earth, perfect happiness is an object lingering just out of reach.
Agent of Happiness screened at the 2024 True/False Film Festival. Runtime: 94 minutes.
IBELIN
By the time Mats Steen was a couple of years old, his parents noticed that he was developing a little differently from his older sister. Diagnosed with a muscular degenerative disease, Mats’ gradually lost control of his body as he got older, eventually bound to a wheelchair and only able to move his fingers. In his parents’ view, Mats retreated into himself, spending hours inside playing World of Warcraft on his computer. He passed away peacefully his sleep at the age of 25.
What other films may have spent their entire runtime covering— the progression of Mats’ disease, how it affected his personality, the sense of unfathomable pain and loss his family experienced— Ibelin condenses into its opening minutes. Mats left his family his password, which they use to log in to his blog and post a letter about his passing. Not truly believing that anything will come of it, they are shocked when the emails start pouring in, many of them lengthy letters offering more than condolences, but memories of specific conversations with Mats and incidents that left a lasting, at times life-changing impression. Director Benjamin Ree (of The Painter and the Thief fame; his personal connection to the family, who he knew from childhood, led him to story) shoots Mats’ family as they read the messages as reflections in the computer screen, uniting them with the life they never knew Mats had.
What’s really interesting, however, is that all of Mats’ in-game conversations and actions he had within World of Warcraft were saved in an online archive. Ibelin (so named for Mats’ strong and stoic WoC character, Ibelin Redwood) is then able to use animation to recreate these online experiences (an approximation of Mats’ real speaking voice also gives voice to his blog, where he wrote in depth about his life and struggles). Through his online avatar, we get to witness Mats as he lived: a bit of an adventurer and a womanizer, but also someone who cared deeply about helping others. This immersive animation is sharply and seamlessly cut between talking-head style interviews with Mats’ online friends in the real world, like a mother and her autistic teenage son, previously estranged and now able to relate to and enjoy each other’s company thanks to Mats. There’s also a young woman around Mats’ own age, who he claims was his first crush; the maybes and could’ve beens are written all over her face.
That Ibelin works at all is some sort of magic trick. It’s a loving tribute to one special person, but also to all the relationships we form online; there are still people out there who like to scoff at the reality of such friendships, but many of us are closest to people we’ve never met in person before. It’s also a moving exploration of how online spaces transcend the limitations of the physical world to grant people the opportunity to be whoever they want to be. It has been some time since Mats passed away, but emotions throughout Ibelin run raw; anyone with half a heart won’t escape with any less than some sniffles. My main feeling walking out of Ibelin, however, wasn’t sadness, but warmth. This life-affirming film just confirms that anyone can deeply touch another person’s life, without even knowing it.
Ibelin screened at the 2024 True/False Film Festival. It will be released by Netflix later this year. Runtime: 103 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 