Vengeance is Mine Each year, the Play-Doc International Film Festival brings a modest but well-curated selection of classic and contemporary films to Tui, Galicia, a historic border town that sits on the banks of the Miño River separating Spain and Portugal. As its name implies, Play-Doc is ostensibly dedicated to nonfiction cinema, though like other festivals with a similar remit (True/False, Visions du Réel, etc), it takes a liberal approach to what constitutes a documentary. The festival’s 21st edition, which ran from May 7 to 11, went further in this regard than ever before. Alongside two competitive programs, one for new and recent international films, and a second focused on Galician productions, there was a trio of retrospectives dedicated to Elaine May, Monte Hellman, and Michael Roemer, directors who, with the exception of the latter, have few ties to the documentary tradition. At their best, however, what festivals like Play-Doc are able to do is re-contextualize a movie—or, indeed, an entire body of work—by surrounding it with titles that, through sometimes subtle juxtapositions, shed new light on a film’s aesthetic or narrative approach. Indeed, I had never much considered Elaine May’s movies in relation to documentary, but if one acknowledges that there’s something of a verité sensibility to the way she captures the energy and atmosphere of a particular city, then 1976’s Mikey & Nicky must be celebrated as much for its ethnographic depiction of suburban Philadelphia as its immersive scenes of scripted drama. Hellman, to an even greater extent, worked in genres that left little doubt as to their fictional provenance, but what is Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) if not a crucial document of both ’70s street racing culture and the existential fears of Vietnam-era America?
Like my previous visit to Play-Doc in 2022, when I discovered the little-known film work of celebrated photographer Danny Lyon (The Bikeriders, 1968; Conversations with the Dead, 1971; et al.), I devoted much of this year’s edition to an artist I hadn’t previously encountered—and whose accomplishments I’d have a dispiriting time reconciling in light of their death just days after the festival. Having been rediscovered in recent years due to the restoration efforts of the Film Desk, Michael Roemer experienced a late-in-life revival all but unmatched in contemporary cinema. One after another it seemed that each restoration was being unveiled to critical hosannahs, and before long Roemer’s reputation was restored to that of a forgotten master. Still, I hadn’t made the effort to seek out the restorations as they periodically crossed my path—a bit of procrastination on my part that, while ultimately paying off with regards to Play-Doc’s retrospective, only made Roemer’s passing at the age of 97 that much more difficult to square. How were my feelings about these idiosyncratic and frequently daring films heightened by the knowledge that the man who made them was still alive to explain the strange circumstances of their conception—not to mention bask in the glow on his belated recognition? It’s hard to say. The first one I watched was 1980’s Pilgrim, Farewell, a narrative about a woman (Elizabeth Huddle Nyberg) with terminal cancer that, merits notwithstanding, I took to be something of an outlier in the director’s catalogue, based on nothing more than what I had read about his more well known work. Come to find out, it’s as representative as anything else—one, because Roemer never made the same film twice, and, two, because of its shadow relationship with documentary cinema.
Born to Jewish parents in 1928 Berlin, Roemer was sent to England as a child when the Nazis came to power, and later immigrated to the U.S. to study at Harvard, where in 1949 he made A Touch of the Times, a film that’s been touted as possibly the first feature ever made at an American University. Over the next decade he made over 100 educational films, accounting for both his interest in and periodic return to the documentary form, as well as the ways in which his narrative films utilize elements of nonfiction. A good example of this range can be seen early on: between two short made-for-TV documentaries—Cortile Cascino (1962), an engrossing look at an ancient Sicilian slum, and Faces of Israel (1967), an observational portrait of the Middle Eastern country just before the Six-Day War, both co-created with his Harvard classmate and longest-running collaborator Robert M. Young—Roemer made his first independently produced feature, Nothing But a Man (1964), a low-budget fiction about an African American railroad worker (Ivan Dixon) in Jim Crow-era Alabama whose plan to marry a local preacher’s daughter (Abbey Lincoln) is met with discrimination from blacks and whites alike. Seen in close proximity to the shorts, Nothing But a Man’s documentary dimension becomes all the more obvious: shot by Young (who also co-produced) in a knockabout style reminiscent of the era’s direct cinema productions, the film immerses the viewer in a palpably humid and believably hardscrabble environment that doubles as a record of a less tolerant—or maybe just more openly intolerant—time.
Despite Roemer’s reputation, it’s worth remembering that Nothing But a Man was an underground favorite. Writing recently on Bluesky regarding the standing of both that film and its followup, the Jewish crime-comedy The Plot Against Harry, which was made in 1969 but not properly distributed until 1990, J. Hoberman made a point of calling Roemer “a not entirely unsung hero of American independent film.” That said, Roemer’s post-’60s output was legitimately obscure until his recent resurgence. His final three features, the terminal illness documentary Dying (1976), its aforesaid fictional counterpart Pilgrim, Farewell, and the tumultuous interpersonal drama Vengeance Is Mine (1984), were all made for TV, with only the latter playing in any sort of festival context. As far as films about real people dealing with fatal diseases, Dying, a matter-of-fact account of three individuals coming to terms with death, should be considered one of the best films of its kind, a work equal in both intimacy and impact to Frederick Wiseman’s Near Death (1989) and Allan King’s Dying at Grace (2003), the previous high-water marks in this particular field. If Roemer could arguably only hope to reconfigure these same themes with Pilgrim, Farewell, it does little to dilute the power of this sparsely staged domestic drama, which shifts Dying’s largely resigned emotional register to the level of a powder keg. Similarly volatile, Vengeance Is Mine centers on an abused woman (Brooke Adams) who gets dangerously involved in the life of a family while visiting her adoptive mother in her New England hometown. Like its predecessor, it’s an unforgiving watch, but it’s also the greatest example of Roemer’s formal and narrative ingenuity, belying its origins as a television production as it unfolds with a mysterious logic more akin to written forms of psychological fiction.
With so many enticing repertory offerings it’s easy to overlook Play-Doc’s lineup of contemporary films. For me, festivals like Play-Doc are a good way to catch up with films I’ve missed on the circuit, so I was pleased that three titles I hadn’t previously seen won prizes, including the Galician competition winner Gods of Stone, a sophisticated work of rural portraiture by Iván Castiñeiras that, appropriately enough, surveys the cultural history of a small town on the border of Spain and Portugal, and A Hundred-Headed Dragon, by Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado, which received a Special Mention for its evocative exploration of a myth about a beast in West Africa that guards a life-sustaining fruit. Best of all was The Room of Shadows, a surreal new featurette by Columbia’s Camilo Restrepo, which picked up a Special Mention in the International Competition (Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré’s well-traveled 7 Walks With Mark Brown won the top prize.)
In this Brechtian reflection on war and the representation of violence, Restrepo casts Élodie Vincent as a nameless woman sheltering in her apartment as bombs and gunfire echo outside her window. Over the course of an hour, she cites and considers the value and implications of various artworks dealing with the history and iconography of war: texts by Pliny the Elder (Natural History, AD 77–79) and Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1979); a 1921 collage by Swiss expressionist Paul Klee (Ravaged Land); a 1979 photograph by American photojournalist Susan Meiselas (Street Fighter, Managua); and films by Travis and Erin Wilkerson (Nuclear Family, 2021), Paul Grimault (The King and the Mockingbird, 1980), and John Smith (The Girl Chewing Gum, 1976), among others. While aesthetically the film is modeled (per the credits) on Martha Rosler’s photomontage series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967-72), its eye-popping use of artifice and visual angularity will more likely strike cinephiles as a postmodern spin on the spatiotemporal experiments of Ernie Gehr or the theatrical gamesmanship of Alain Resnais. It’s this taxonomy of direct and indirect references that most clearly connects The Room of Shadows to the realm of documentary. Like a lot of the work that Play-Doc champions, it unfolds like a living record a very specific constellation of art-historical concerns, uniting home and the world through means that can’t be relegated to any one genre or tradition.