OREGON FILM
CATHEDRAL PARK
2007
Vincent Caldoni, Director
Blueprint Films
Info: ck@mondaynightgig.com
Review by Matthew Korfhage
When Oregon director Vincent Caldoni makes a fake documentary, he pulls out all the stops. Not only is this documentary faux, but so are the country and the language of its refugee subjects. Cathedral Park (2007) isn't a Spinal-Tap-style mockumentary, though, no comedic romp through other people's flaccid pretentions. The film treats its subjects seriously, creating a compelling portrait of a family trapped between the past and the present, between old home and new.
The idea is this: a teenage girl, Vai (Tara Walker) finds a box of film in her attic. The films show her parents' lives in the made-up country of Otisia as it lurches suddenly into a civil war that drives them from their home country to the North Portland neighborhood of Cathedral Park. Otisia, though an island, seems to carry a bit of the Balkans, a bit of the various -stans: poor places with danceable folk music, ethnically schismed, where the women wear scarves over their hair. Also half of them hate the other half, and express it with guns and bombs.
Vai's discovery of her family's past, in the form of Super-8 home movies and reels from an unedited German documentary, is eagerly filmed by her school friend Katie (Cassidy Slaughter-Mason), an aspiring filmmaker who sees a chance to bring recent history to light. This opens up painful events, however, that Vai's refugee father Basti (Caldoni) would rather let remain secret, and stirs up longstanding resentments between father and daughter, who pass their days together in uncomfortable silence. This is true especially because Vai's mother has died and Vai longs for a connection to a past that includes both her parents. Secrets, of course, out themselves in time, and violence sometimes follows you to your new home.
According to the director in interviews, the whole notion behind making up a whole country and culture instead of, say, using some very existent Serbs or Croats, was so that everyone would be able to relate to the story, rather than pin the experience on one group or another. This makes sense, when one tries to imagine a Serb empathizing sincerely with the plight of a Croat family, when they themselves had been pushed from their homes by Croats, later on. The uncomfortable politics might have clouded what is at heart a story about a father and a daughter, not about a war.
Each of the films within the film has its own look, and this lends an air of authenticity to the film, as if the films really were found footage. The home movies are fuzzy and hypersaturated, the German movie washed out by the natural light in the Otisian skies. Cleverly, the German documentary leaves the outtakes in the reels, so you can see the documentarian stuttering through her delivery as war unexpectedly erupts. These extra touches were highly effective, apparently. Some audience members at the NW Film Festival were fooled into believing that Cathedral Park was an actual documentary, and that Otisia was a real place.
Cathedral Park has done well on the festival circuit, netting a Best Film award at the Magnolia Film Festival last year, a Northwest Emerging Artists Award, and an Honorable Mention at the Interrobang Festival. This leads one to believe that Caldoni might himself not long remain a secret.
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