Dystopian Visions

From Mumbai's deadly public transit to Italy's celebrity fixation, Denmark's biggest doc fest offers disturbing visions of the future.

Urban planning isn’t exactly the most naturally compelling backbone for a film, but the dramatic urgency of Mumbai’s problem is underlined early on, belying the doc’s overall light tone, when the filmmakers follow one of their characters in his morning commute. You immediately see to what extent simply taking the train to work is a desperate contact sport, with men forcing themselves into too-crowded cars or clambering onto rooftops — over a dozen people die, on average, every day, which should make most of us reconsider our complaints about our local bus line running late.

For those fortunate enough to be able to afford automobiles, there’s incredible gridlock traffic to deal with, and a planned bridge that was meant to alleviate some of the congestion stalled out due to funding issues.

“Mumbai Disconnected,” like “Cairo Garbage” and “Shanghai Space,” follows a handful of characters with differing perspectives on and relationships to their city’s quandary — a middle class family who long to buy their first car, a woman protesting the building of an overpass in her historic neighborhood, the construction manager struggling to meet World Bank requirements.

But what makes “Mumbai” work in a way that “Cairo” (which deals with the collapse and outsourcing of its city’s waste management) and “Shanghai” (which looks at the housing shortage) don’t quite is that it reaches wider in its implications. The urgency and immensity of the problem it studies are matched in the film only by the growing sense that any sustainable long-term solutions are not only going to be almost insurmountably difficult, they’re bound to be defeated by conflicting political interests. What lingers is a sense of impotent dread.

Outside of the screening rooms, the festival offered directors talks and master classes, with fiction/avant-garde filmmakers like Philippe Grandrieux (whose work had its own sidebar) mixing in with nonfiction ones like Nicolas Philibert of “To Be and To Have,” the latter quick to note that he doesn’t like the term “documentarian”: “It’s too closed, and I consider the links between fiction and documentaries to be really strong.”

But the best, craziest challenge to the stodgy side of nonfiction film came at the YouTube Battle, which went big and vaguely “Rollerball” with something most of us have done over IM with friends. On a giant screen at the end of a packed concert venue, contestants were given one minute to play a selection of videos culled from YouTube, while the rowdy audience cheered or howled its displeasure. A typical combination: Kennedy assassination, clip from “Pumping Iron,” something labeled “GAY DANCE.” Danish doc filmmaker Michael Noer (“The Wild Hearts”) hosted. For the record, when someone pulled up hometown boy Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” fox for the requisite “Chaos reigns,” it was met with resounding boos.

At this point, you might be wondering what any of that has to do with documentaries. It was a debate we had again and again over the course of CPH:DOX — is that on-the-fly curation of found footage nonfiction? How about Pedro Costa’s “Ne Change Rien”? How about the artistic, X-rated contents of the P:O:R:N:O program? Existing in the Venn diagram intersection between docs and experimental cinema, the festival absolutely pushes you to consider why a film’s default standing, unless proven otherwise, is fiction, particularly when that film is without any obviously created characters or storyline.

That question was never more evident than with Harmony Korine’s category-defying “Trash Humpers,” a startling inclusion in the main competition that, even more startlingly, ended up winning the top prize. In its 78-minute, VHS-shot length, Korine and friends, dressed in masks and looking like they crawled out of some suburban primordial soup of broken-down houses, shabby hotel rooms and garbage-strewn back alleys, raise unscripted hell. They steal babies, smash things, eat pancakes with dishwashing liquid, tap dance and deliver on the title.

It’s performance, sure, but it is also artifice? When Korine gave his acceptance speech, recorded earlier that day in Nashville and played on the big screen during the award ceremony, he seemed to be doing his damndest to assure everyone that the film was 100% real. Swathed in bandages, propped up on a crutch with a flashlight in his pocket, he was in full enfant terrible persona, rambling, waving a bottle of booze in the air and threatening to come to Denmark next year to hang out with everyone.

The crowd ate it up. Which makes sense — wherever you fall on the fiction/nonfiction nature of Korine’s latest, it does fit right in to CPH:DOX’s motif of the ominous encroaching future. “Trash Humpers” is America’s own dystopian fever dream, of religion and violence, of empty streets abandoned to redneck mutant outcasts (with own authenticity concerns of their own — “Make it, make it! Don’t fake it!” they screech), frightening and plaintive, but always, of course, free.

[Photos: Lele Mora, Fabrizio Corona in "Videocracy," Zentropa Entertainments, 2009; Chris Crocker gets play during the YouTube battle; Harmony Korine accepts his award]

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