Doc Fortnight 2022
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Interdisciplinary artist Jenny Perlin tells Sophie Cavoulacos, an associate curator in the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, that she’s always been curious about what remains of the structures built during the Cold War. “Growing up in the Midwest I learned, later than I should have, that the Christmas tree farm we regularly visited overlooked a uranium processing plant disguised as a working dairy farm, and that the dry cleaner near my high school had been some kind of secret 1950s lab,” she says. “I was always aware of the thousands of nuclear weapons buried in the landscape of my part of the country, and became interested in what might have happened to them.”
So in the summer of 2018, she began interviewing men—always, she discovered, white, straight, middle-aged men—who have converted these underground spaces into private living quarters. “I shot the last section of Bunker ten days before Joe Biden was elected president,” she tells Lauren Wissot at Filmmaker. “The pandemic was raging but the people I was filming were unfazed. Their worldview encompasses threat scenarios many of us can’t imagine. I didn’t reassess the footage at all. In many ways the film’s editing became easier, because I knew that what might have been unusual at the outset was now going to be uncannily relatable to more people.”
Bunker and Perlin’s four-minute hand-drawn animation Each thing its place will open the twenty-first edition of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight this evening. Twenty-nine nonfiction and hybrid films will screen at the museum through March 10, and many will be available virtually to members. Tomorrow, MoMA will present a film with no men in it at all, Peter Kerekes’s 107 Mothers, which won the Orizzonti award for best screenplay in Venice last fall.
Maryna Klimova, the only professional actress in 107 Mothers, plays Lesya, a woman serving out a seven-year sentence at a correctional facility in Odessa for killing her husband. Like the other mothers in the film, all of them playing versions of themselves, she’s allowed to care for her baby until the child turns three. “107 Mothers unfolds as a pas de deux between Lesya and Iryna (Iryna Kiryazeva), a real-life warden who wears many hats: public official, confidant, guard, friend, and surrogate mother herself,” writes Leonardo Goi in the Notebook. “Lesya’s struggle to raise her child—a fight that grows more and more harrowing as her term’s end approaches—may well give the film its dramatic arc, but it’s out of Iryna’s ambiguities that Kerekes wrings some of the most perturbing, thought-provoking material.”
