Tuesday was a travel day, after a final, sleepless night in Las Vegas (a note on that: if you love cinema but happen to be in proverbial Sin City when CineVegas is *not* in session, you must go to karaoke at Ellis Island. This is surely not intended as a slight on the programmers or filmmakers involved in the festival, but the karaoke video that accompanies “Bohemian Rapsody” in that casino bar is as least as good as the majority of short films to which my fellow jurors and I gave prizes. Lest you wonder if I’m joking, I can only say that there’s something about spending four straight days in a casino that makes distinctions between irony and sincerity seem meaningless.)
Anyway. The trip from The Palms to my hotel in Silver Spring, Maryland was exactly 12 hours door to door. I intended to watch a screener of Andrew Jacobs’ Four Seasons Lodge after checking in, but ended up spending two hours looking at Cyd Charisse clips on YouTube, and by the time I put the screener on I had to turn it off almost immediately in order to crash. I only mention this because I went back to it Wednesday morning before a screening of Seaside, and it seems worth noting that it was a total accident that I spent my first day at SilverDocs watching two consecutive films about the refugees of international atrocities struggling to form a community within resorts that have seen better days.
In Four Seasons Lodge, Jacobs spends a summer in the namesake resort in the Catskills, where every year a group of Holocaust survivors move into adjoining bungalows to party, reminisce, and revel in the binds of communal triumph over historical tragedy. These vacationeers began coming together because they commonly cheated death six and a half decades back, but by the time Jacobs gets there, the pain of the past is matched in potency by anxiety over a shortened future. The proprietor of the resort tells us that in the old days, this group would go through nearly a dozen bottles of liquor in a couple of hours, and home movie footage of the Lodge’s glory days bears out the notion of halcyonic midcentury revelry. But as the guests have aged (the youngest visitors are in their late 70s, because, as one woman tells us, “only teenagers made it…kids were sent to the ovens right away”), life at the Four Seasons has become more sedate. Wanting to retire himself, the owner announces that he’s planning to sell the Lodge at the end of One Last Summer.
You’d have to be a real asshole (or maybe just deeply anti-Semitic; they amount to the same) to not find some poignancy here: displaced from their nations by attempted genocide, most of them the oldest surviving members of their families, the yearly visitors of the Four Seasons are now looking dead on at, obviously, death, but first the destruction of their beloved community. If there are many great stories but few absolute gut-punchers in the film, it would be hard to argue against this being an essential document, both a tribute to the pain of bearing witness and an embodiment of it. It’s impossible to watch it and not be acutely aware that there are only so many years left to get first-hand accounts of Holocaust horrors on film.
Seaview does have those occasional gut-punchers (there’s an amazing scene where a subject, who refuses to appear on camera, describes his harrowing boat trip to Ireland from Africa while we look at eerily abstract reflections on water), but it’s not as thoroughly engaging as Four Seasons, maybe because the refugees who congregate at its central location have no emotional attachment to one another. It’s a portrait of a mid-century Irish resort that shifted gears around the dawn of the millennium, and now houses international refugees seeking asylum in Ireland. The resort functions as a semi-permanent waiting room, where refugees kill time on a miniscule government stipend whilst awaiting news on their asylum applications. Only a small fraction of applicants will be allowed to stay and work in the country; others will be deported, and some will stay in Ireland illegally or move on to a third location. The resort becomes a non-place, an existential holding cell where these refugees have little to do but contemplate the past and worry about the future.
Interviewing individuals and families who have come to the resort from war-torn hotspots like Nigeria, Afghanistan and Ghana, directors Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley hop a little too quickly from one subject to another. We rarely see the refugees interacting naturally with one another, and only get a sense of what their lives are like in this limbo from their direct, to-the-camera testimony. The rare scenes where Gogan and Rowley simply let lives unfold in front of their cameras are the most effective; I’m thinking primarily of a scene where kids and teenagers of apparently wildly different backgrounds gather to watch two former residents of the resort freestyle rap. When one closes his verse with the threat, “Mess with me and I’ll send you back to your country,” the crowd explodes. It’s a rare moment of organic levity in an otherwise extremely somber movie. Seaview is beautifully made, but its tightly-packed exposition can be tedious.
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