Film review: The American Sector tracks down pieces of the Berlin Wall across the U.S.
Documentary directors travel to roadsides, gated homes, restaurants, and other unexpected spots to gather perspectives on past and present
The Cinematheque screens The American Sector in-theatre July 20 at 8:40 pm
THERE’S only one more chance to catch an in-person screening of Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s fascinating, deadpan hunt for the pieces of the Berlin Wall that sit in public and private hands across the U.S.
A gated Hollywood Hills lawn, the back of a Hard Rock Cafe at Universal Studios, the side of an Interstate, in front of a lowkey Georgia restaurant, in the halls of various museums, and even under lock and key at the CIA headquarters: those are just some of the often incongruous suprise locales where these graffiti’d hunks of cement stand. And that would be enough to build an offbeat, intriguing little film. But the filmmakers go further.
As well as shooting more than 40 sites with a mostly static 16-millimetre camera, they also invite owners, tour guides, and observers to stand and comment on what the wall means to them.
At first, the documentary, shot over the three years after Trump came to power, takes a wry and ironic tone. We get different viewpoints, some faulty, about who was responsible for the wall coming down (George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and others are credited). But the directors also hear from a range of Americans who find more profound meaning in these mementoes of a decades-old Cold War. They evoke negative feelings in a Latin American woman who’s all too aware of a wall being built on the southern border that may cut her and others off from family. But a Black man draws strength from the fragment that sits by Cincinatti’s Mason Dixon line, connecting the wall to the escape of slaves and the fight for freedoms: “We weren’t alone in being oppressed, nor were we alone in resisting.”
Stephens and Velez are careful never to force meaning on the subject--carefully observing, listening, and questioning, and gathering an impressive, complex read on the state of society and personal politics in America in the process. There are allusions to the divide that ruptures the U.S., and intimations that the oppressive politics that built the wall in 1961 are still at play in the world. But nothing is ever that simple in The American Sector. It's a remarkable essay, as engaging on a human level as it is on a formal one.
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