The Real World

The Dallas Video Festival shows all the news not fit for print

Comments (0) By Robert Wilonsky Thursday, Jul 8 2004

The festival's lineup, of course, does not consist entirely of despairing offerings; there are the fun documentaries about those obsessed with the video game Dance Dance Revolution (Dance Dance Documentary) and Japanese animation (Invasion: Anime), as well as a poignant film in which sons talk about their fathers (Old Man). There's a new Na-Na and Lil' Puss Puss cartoon from the locals at DNA, as well as a tribute to local advertising filmmaker Norry Nivens and another to Spalding Gray. Al Maysles, among the greatest documentarians ever to wield a camera, will once again return to hand out the award for which he's named.

And there's the fiery and rousing tale of Shirley Chisholm, who ran for president in 1972 despite being a black woman who couldn't even get blacks and women to support her bid. Shola Lynch's Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossedis as inspirational as it is infuriating: Chisholm might have been a Don Quixote tilting at, among others, McGovern and Wallace, but she put herself at great physical risk to destroy an establishment that had turned her own neighborhoods in Brooklyn into destitute wastelands. Blacks didn't support her because she was a woman; women, even Gloria Steinam, didn't support her because she was unelectable. But she fought nonetheless--to get on the ballot, to join debates and to change a country that looked more like her than the men she was running against.