If you’ve seen the recent documentaries Must Read After My Death and The Order Of Myths, then you’ll know what I mean when I say Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s October Country falls right into step with them.
All three films examine dysfunctional American families from the inside out, offering piercing, unblinking insight into their tangled family dynamics, revealing dark secrets, unexpected lightness and strange moments of grace.
But in the case of October Country, which screens at the Bloor Wednesday night as this month’s Doc Soup title, the focus is even more intimate. Must Read After My Death re-created the distant decades of its subjects through photographs, home movies and audio recordings The Order Of Myths used its genealogy as one element in a larger look at the cultural legacy of the South.
October Country, on the other hand, is very much about the here and now. Shot over the course of a year, from one Halloween to the next, it drifts alongside four generations of the Mosher family of Herkimer, New York – Vietnam veteran Don and his wife Dottie their adult daughter Donna her daughters Danael and Desi, and Danael’s toddler Ruby. Don and Dottie are also fostering troubled teenager Chris, and on the periphery of their lives is Don’s estranged sister Denise, whose obsession with black magic is just one of the reasons she and her brother no longer speak.
As the Moshers discuss their lives, airing old grudges and revealing personal traumas, the movie creates an almost lyrical atmosphere out of economic despair. Neither the Moshers nor the filmmakers are ground down by the spectres of failing health, abusive mates, looming court battles, visits from police and social workers, and trips to Wal-Mart they’re simply realities to be negotiated on the way to the next thing.
Rather than a wallow in misery porn of hand-to-mouth living, October Country – named for Ray Bradbury’s atmosphere of perpetual autumn – instead focuses on moments of epiphany, when people realize the roots of their self-destructive cycles of behaviour and do their best to stop themselves from passing it along to the next generation. (In an odd way, October Country plays like the flip side of Paul Saltzman’s Prom Night In Mississippi, where a generation struggles to reject its parents’ attitudes. Maybe it’s a north-south thing.)
There’s a piece missing from this story, however it’s Don and Dottie’s other son, Donal, the movie’s co-director. Donal’s photographs and essays provided the creative spark for the documentary, but he stays silent and invisible in the film it’s an aesthetic choice that works well enough, but also leaves you wondering exactly what role he plays in his family.
Of course, that’s the great thing about Doc Soup you can ask him all about it at the screening.
October Country screens at the Bloor Cinema Wednesday, November 18 at 6:30 and 9:15 pm. Advance tickets for both shows can be purchased here. [rssbreak]
