Postcards from the Rogue Valley

“What is it like growing up in front of a video camera?” an audience member at the Ashland Independent Film Festival (AIFF) asked 12-year-old Jonas Brodsky. His mother’s documentary about his being deaf, Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements, had just filled the big screen at AIFF’s opening night, after debuting at Sundance in February. The film shadows Jonas from his hearing loss diagnosis at 14 months to his performing the Moonlight Sonata at age 11.

Jonas stood on the Ashland stage with his award-winning filmmaking mother, Irene Brodsky, his father and two siblings, and his grandparents, both of whom are deaf. It is an AIFF tradition for filmmakers to take a bow and answer questions after their film ends. In this case, it was a family affair.

Jonas paused to think about the question from the audience—and what it’s been like to see his life unfold in dark theaters the past few months. “At last, I get me,” he said.

The next morning, in a much smaller venue, a gem of a movie—the kind that depends on independent film festivals for oxygen—filled the screen. For the Birds follows a “loner” named Kathy who lives with 200 pet chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys. What starts as a story seemingly about Kathy’s battle with local animal advocacy groups slowly transforms into an intimate drama about her relationship with her husband Gary, the toll the birds take on their marriage and her well-being, and her ultimate resurrection—all filmed over five years.

“How did you decide when to stop filming,” the first questioner asked, “not knowing what would come next.”  

Every time they thought the story was “done,” the film’s young director said, a new twist emerged. “We decided, maybe midway, that Kathy deserved the fullest telling of her story we could manage,” he explained.

In its 18^thyear, the AIFF has steadily moved up the ranks of independent film festivals nationwide. For five days in April, over 7,000 film lovers gather in downtown Ashland to watch over 100 documentary, feature, and short films. The Washington Post has called it “a dream you’ll never want to leave.” 

Last year’s AIFF, which opened three weeks after we arrived from Brooklyn with our four suitcases and two cats, was my first independent film festival. In New York and Providence, there had always been too much else competing for my attention, and I simply didn’t know what I was missing. 

This year, I signed up for nine films over three days. The choices were copious, from a story of a blind man balancing fear in the chaos of kayaking whitewater rapids to a guitar-maker in Greenwich Village who builds handcrafted guitars out of reclaimed wood, favored by the likes of Bob Dylan and Patti Smith.

My picks included The American Factory, about a Chinese billionaire opening a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant in Ohio; If the Dancer Dances, about a leading New York dance troupe breathing new life into an iconic work by the legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham; and Clean Hands, about one family’s survival against the backdrop of Central America’s largest garbage dump, La Chureca in Nicaragua. 

Still, Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements and For the Birds were the films that grabbed me most. They still pull at me.

When Irene Brodsky told the powerful story of her deaf parents and the consequences of their complex decision, at age 65, to have cochlear implants (in the movie Hear and Now), she never imagined that she would have a son who was deaf and that the saga would continue. The deafness gene, it turns out, skipped a generation.

In Moonlight Sonata she connects three stories. There is Jonas, who had his first cochlear implant when he was four. Brodsky told the audience at AIFF that she had started filming Jonas when he began losing his hearing at 14 months, but she turned the filming over to others for several years as the pain of his situation engulfed her. She picked up her camera again when Jonas determinedly took up the piano at age six and filmed his piano lessons and practice sessions at age 11 when he decided to master the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. His teacher was kind but merciless. “How did that sound on a scale of one to five?” she asks him after his first full run-through. He replies “four” and she counters with “two.”

One day, Jonas tries playing without his cochlear implants and discovers that he can still hear the music in his head and that his playing is perfect. Taking off his implants—and embracing his deafness—becomes his superpower.

There is Brodsky’s deaf father, who is growing older and, as the film ends, is dealing with the onset of dementia. When the father tells Brodsky about his struggles accessing his bank account, he asks her to stop filming. She persists. “To make a personal film,” she told the Los Angeles Times, “you’ve really got to want to tell the story; in a way, you have to be ruthless.”

And then there is the wild-card presence of Ludwig van Beethoven and the marvelous piece of music he wrote just as he began to realize he was going deaf.

“Someone said to me once that I wasn’t born with the ‘that’s good enough’ gene,” Brodsky says. “If you don’t get the tough moments, if you’re not willing to bring out the camera when no one wants the camera on, you’re not going to have a story that’s honest.”

Richard Miron began For the Birds as a senior project when he was an undergraduate at Yale. He wanted to make a film about animal rescue. The day he called the nearby Woodstock Farm Sanctuary to make contact, the person who answered mentioned that she was about to investigate a report of a woman who was allegedly hoarding birds. Miron grabbed his equipment and joined her.

Ten years earlier, Kathy Murphy had found a duckling in her yard and had decided to raise it. Now, her yard and home are overrun with hundreds of chickens, ducks, geese and two formidable turkeys. Kathy regards the fowl as her close family, cuddling and caring for them, watching television together and giving them the run of her home. “I would die for them,” she declares. 

Her agitated manner, bedraggled hair, and jerky, staccato head movements suggest that she has even started to resemble one of her birds. She seems crazy. 

Eventually, Kathy is labelled and shamed as an “animal hoarder” on national news, goes to court, and tearfully surrenders her birds. 

Miron could have ended the film here. Instead, he follows Kathy and her husband Gary as they forge a new friendship after their divorce—to the day Kathy allows neighbors to chuck her feces-infested trailer and replace it with a new modular home (and a humane chicken coop). The film ends with a housewarming party where Kathy, less a loner, welcomes neighbors.

“This seemed, at last, the right place to put down our cameras,” Miron said.

Miron and his team spent another two years editing the film. Their first cuts, they decided, didn’t do justice to Kathy’s way of seeing, knowing, or caring. The final cut, Miron hoped, “honors the multiplicity that makes Kathy—and all of us—unique.”

I wondered how Miron had secured Kathy’s trust when she seemed so determined to keep the human world at arm’s length. “I didn’t pass judgement and I acknowledged her passion,” he said.

What pulled me into these two films so quickly and deeply was their honesty and humanity. Moonlight Sonata and For the Birds pulse with vulnerability, from the filmmakers themselves to the people they film. “So, I’m an error,” Brodsky’s mother says when she learns her deafness results from a typo in her genetic code.

The absence of judgement is just as remarkable. Certain and definite, black and white, good and bad have no place in these films. Respect and dignity do. From start to finish, the animal sanctuary staff treat Kathy’s bird hoarding with compassion. It would have been so easy to shame.

I grew up in a family that kept emotions under wrap and measured a person’s value by whether they had a Ph.D. Learning how to be more vulnerable and less judgmental have been street fights for me. The prizes, I know, are substantial: love, belonging, trust, contentment.

Coming to the Rogue Valley has made me reflect on what happens when we give up pretense. What I savored most about the Ashland Independent Film Festival were its small gems, far from the skyscrapers lining New York’s Madison Avenue and New England’s ivy-covered universities.

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