Still courtesy of HAE Pictures
SLIFF named its November 13 collection of documentary shorts with one word: “Animals.”
The real theme is “People Who Prefer Animals to People.”
In “Rare Chicken Rescue,” zany graphics, wild camera angles and lively, almost Benny Hill music alternate with the weighted candor of Mark Tully, an Aussie whose chickens saved him from massive depression. He’s not altogether well yet—you can tell by the clench of his jaw as he drives cross-country looking for rare breeds facing extinction, and by the monosyllabic bluntness with which he describes his life. But when he’s stroking a newborn chick or pulling aside a Spanish rooster’s wattle, you can feel his sadness lift, the way the air lightens after a thunderstorm. “You’ve heard of storm chasers?” Tully asks as he accelerates across the outback. “Well, we’re the chicken chasers! We go wherever the chickens are.”
"We" is really just him; his concerned parents pack his suitcase and worry fondly for him. But he has his chickens, and his new friends who love chickens, and you somehow know he’ll be OK in their company.
You’re less sanguine about “The Poodle Trainer,” circus performer Irina Markova, who’s frankly crazy. A pack of poodles, large and small, does her bidding gladly. She swears angels help her train them, and emotion cracks her thick make-up as she admits dreading the day she can no longer work.
Markova’s a charged personality, electric on stage, in full communication with her dogs, difficult for other humans to fathom. She makes an interesting foil for gentle Soraida Salwala, founder of Friends of the Asian Elephant and the focus of the longest doc, “The Last Elephants in Thailand.” A jeweler by trade, Salwala has given over her entire life to a hospital for elephants. She speaks quietly about her choice, even when she describes what she’s sure have been elephant traders’ attempts to kill her, start fires outside the sanctuary, or let loose a king cobra on the grounds.
There’s no need for melodrama; the documentary gathers its own momentum, taking on the suspense of a thriller and the inevitability of a tearjerker as you wait for 7-month-old, three-legged Mosha to get a prosthesis. The film reveals the cruelty of trainers secretly inflicting pain to force the elephants to paint for the tourists. The misery of elephants, their feet hypersensitive to natural vibrations in the ground, forced to plod through traffic in Bangkok. The trust of a blind elephant as she lifts a man with her trunk so he can sweep the dust from her wrinkled back.
The film cuts back to Salwala, whose mix of solitary resolve and melancholy are almost as moving as her elephants’ plight. And then we see baby Mosha, shyly tucking his trunk up in what looks like a grin as the prosthesis is fitted, and he takes his first tentative steps.
“The Last Elephants in Thailand” was named best documentary short in the San Antonio Film Festival, best conservation film in the Venice Green Screen Film Festival, and an Official Selection of the San Luis Obispo International festival. “The Poodle Trainer” was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival. They’ll be part of a quintet of shorts, totaling 91 minutes. For more information on this year's Saint Louis International Film Festival, visit cinemastlouis.org.
