MOVIE REVIEWS : Documentary Nominees Are Engrossing Bunch

Starting Saturday, the Monica 4-Plex will begin screening the five documentaries in this year’s Oscar race, all of them engrossing and political in nature.

Judith Montell’s “Forever Activists: Stories from the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” and Robert Hillmann and Eugene Corr’s “Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey” screen at 10:30 a.m. in Theater 1. Mark Mori and Susan Robinson’s “Building Bombs’ and Steven Okazaki’s “Days of Waiting” screen at 11 a.m. in Theater 3. Meanwhile, the previously reviewed “Berkeley in the Sixties” continues in its fifth month in Theater 2 at noon on weekends only.

Each documentary represents a formidable amount of research on the part of the filmmakers, who juxtapose fresh and remarkable archival footage with contemporary interviews.

Montell uses as a linchpin the 50th reunion in Madrid in 1986 of the survivors of the 3,000 American men and women who fought on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and acquaints us with an irresistibly vibrant group of men and women.

Forged by the Depression and alarmed by Hitler’s rise to power, they felt compelled to go to Spain to attempt to help defeat fascism. Montell’s interviewees have never given up the fight and continue to lead lives as activists, having survived World War II and McCarthyism to protest the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons and even to send 19 ambulances to Nicaragua in the name of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

“You either make history or history will pass you by,” remarks one man, old in years but young in spirit.

A 1956 clip of Khrushchev denouncing Stalin, revealing the atrocities of his brutal regime, appears both in “Forever Activists” and in “Waldo Salt,” signaling the final disillusionment with communism for many American leftists. At an early age, Salt, who compared his family to the tormented Tyrones of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” became a top Hollywood screenwriter but was subsequently blacklisted for 11 years.

Salt began his comeback in the early ‘60s with hack work that threw him into a deep depression from which he emerged promising to never compromise again. And indeed he didn’t, as his Oscars for “Midnight Cowboy” and “Coming Home” attest.

The shrewdly low-key “Building Bombs” may be the scariest movie you will ever see, an “Enemy of the People” to the max. It is a relentless, step-by-step history of the innocuously named Savannah River Plant, a 40-year-old South Carolina nuclear-bomb production facility that continues to make weapons-grade radioactive metals while yielding nuclear wastes that in many instances have been disposed of with shocking casualness.

The filmmakers suggest with total persuasiveness that nuclear stockpiles, dangerously aging reactors and storage facilities and emerging evidence of widening pollution and radiation illnesses on the part of plant workers, constitute a threat to human life and the environment beyond comprehension.

“Days of Waiting” is a brief, stunning and understated account of the life and art of Estelle Peck Ishigo, who joined her Japanese-American husband in a World War II concentration camp and recorded her experience in sketches, watercolors and writings. Her story cries out to be dramatized in a feature film.