Both flicks were freakin’ awesome!

Hit the AFI SilverDocs website for a full list of winners in all categories.

A Son’s Sacrifice

Don’t let this flick’s austere title scare you. It’s got all the right elements — humor, love, blood — and documents the rift between first-generation immigrant Americans and their US-born kids.

In the film, a hard-ass immigrant father tries to teach his punk-ass, college-educated son the family business: slaughtering livestock according to Muslim dietary law. Intergenerational head butting ensues.

But beyond the minor squabbles on bookkeeping and deliveries, the son must deal with how he is perceived in the mostly immigrant community. Customers chide his western demeanor and sometimes question his faith without provocation.

Director Yoni Brook has this family covered, from the slaughterhouse to the mosque to the kitchen table. His seemingly light touch makes this half-hour film great. No fancy camera work, no heavy take-home message. Just straight-up documentation of this lively, funny and loving family dynamic.

My Name is Ahmed Ahmed

This nine-minute quickie profiles Ahmed Ahmed, an Egyptian-born, SoCal-raised standup comedian. Director Matthew Testa just lets Ahmed do his thing, joking about being a Muslim American in a post-9/11 world. It’s a nice (and funny) look into one man’s experience.

The Days and the Hours

In contrast with the two flicks above, this nine-minute shorty doesn’t document. Instead it illustrates the fate of homeless men and women, who take shelter each night inside a San Francisco church.

Unfortunately, the strolling images of people sleeping on church pews quickly gets monotonous, and too few of the movie’s subjects explain how they came to be homeless. Ultimately, the film is an exercise in cinematography.

Paradise Drift

This is a strange flick. The infrared camera kicks in to capture throngs of people on a nighttime hike. Young and old, they struggle over rocks, battle swarming bugs and wait anxiously for … The mother ship? The second coming? Who the fuck knows.

The pilgrims’ emotional transformation — from devastation to elation — is powerful. However, the slow visual storytelling really wears on the viewer’s interest. At nine minutes, the flick is eight minutes too long.

God Provides (above) and Orishas Are Our Saints

Don’t bother.

Images courtesy of AFI.

While waiting outside on the standby line, another moviegoer and I began to chat about the flicks we’d seen. Her fave: “Enemies of Happiness,” a feature on the first woman elected to Afghanistan’s parliament. She also dug the feature “A Walk Into the Sea,” about a dude from Andy Warhol’s inner circle and his unsolved disappearance.

After half an hour, the standby line was allowed into the theater vestibule. As I reached into my pocket for pennies and nickels, my fellow moviegoer handed me a piece of paper the size of a baseball card.

“Would you like this voucher? It’ll get you in for free,” she offered.

Are you sure you don’t need it? I said.

“It’s okay, I’ve got more,” she insisted.

So this post, and the upcoming review of the shorts, are courtesy of the kind woman who handed me the voucher.

Thanks, lady, whoever you are!

So I’m guessing this is how “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” went down:

• Young sang “Old Man” and possibly “Long May You Run.”
• Director Jonathan Demme gave the viewer that on-stage intimacy only he can deliver.
• One could almost feel the plaid.

If anyone attended the free screening and would like to share their impressions, holler back.

He told me that the family originally objected to the film project. After all, the flick does examine (quite intimately) Laurel’s declining health. It shows her losing clumps of hair, and confessing in a low growl to her hospice nurse that she was obsessed with predicting when death would come.

Watching Laurel, a lifelong police detective, deteriorate on screen was not easy for the audience. Knowing that his sister’s suffering would be relived with each screening must have tore Charles’ guts out.

However, Charles said the project — and Laurel’s fight to secure her police pension for her life partner — ultimately gave purpose to her illness. And in his mind, that purpose eased his fear that Laurel’s struggles would be exploited for political gain.

Laurel’s home state of New Jersey legalized civil unions for same-sex partners in February.

Image courtesy of AFI.

Monsieur Borges and I

Here’s the straight dope: I missed the first 10 minutes of this 23-minute film. My loss, because the remainder was strangely hypnotic.

An older French man (I’ll call him Buddy) talks about his friendship with the late author Jorge Luis Borges. Their artistic collaborations were passionate and sensual, and they shared a very deep friendship.

But were they gay?

Buddy says Borges wasn’t into women, despite being married. And when Buddy performs a piano composition, he plays with profound grief for his dead friend. Still, Buddy keeps the cards close to his chest.

What makes the film hypnotic is director Jasmin Gordon’s photography. She used wide-angle lenses for closeups, distorting things beyond normal proportion. The distortion would suggest that Buddy’s feelings for Borges were unrequited.

Definitely an intriguing film (at least the last half of it was).

Freeheld

Laurel Hester was a lifelong cop diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. When she bequeathed her pension to her life partner, county freeholders said no freakin’ way. What ensued was Hester’s death-bed struggle for equality.

Admittedly, the film is one sided. None of the freeholders agreed to participate in the film, and no one offers an objective interpretation of why Hester’s request was denied.

However, the 38-minute film handles Hester’s illness and her relationship with Stacie Andree with brilliant dignity. Behind their battle against the freeholders, Hester and Andree cope with the daily struggles of cancer: mounting medical bills, physical symptoms, and the fear of death and loss.

It’s in those emotionally intimate moments that director Cynthia Wade shines. Wade manages to erase the women’s sexual orientation, instead revealing a tender and loving relationship.
Powerful and ultimately uplifting, the film rates nine out of ten hankies.

Photos courtesy of AFI.

Q. Did you catch the movie? If so, how was it?

A. Great!

Q. Did you attend the after-party? If so, what did you wear? (Formal wear, business suit, casual attire, etc.)

A. Business.

Q. How was the food? What was served?

A. An assortment of finger foods, and very good.

Q. How were the drinks?

A. Just had sparkling water.

Q. Was there music? If so, how was it?

A. No.

Q. Were there any famous faces at either the screening or after-party?

A. Tom Paxton played and sang, and Odetta sang. Former county executive Doug Duncan and Catherine Leggett.

Thanks for the coverage, Susan! The Penguin newsroom could always use an entertainment reporter, so when you’re ready to make the move to online journalism, holler!

And tonight, another free outdoor screening drops on Ellsworth Drive: Jonathan Demme’s “Neil Young: Heart of Gold.” Bring your own plaid workshirts.

The oversized gray suits. The bad-ass rhythm section. These mofos combined punk attitude, phat beats, and Warhol weirdness to become one of the few truly original things to come out of the 1980s. (Not to take anything away from A-Ha.)

So of course I jumped at the opportunity to catch a free screening of their concert film, “Stop Making Sense,” on Ellsworth Drive. Talking Heads? Free? Perfect.

About 600 people showed to see lead singer David Byrne convulse violently on screen, all while effortlessly belting out the band’s best songs. Sick! Sick! So deliciously sick!

A few audience members did some convulsing of their own. A cluster of khaki-clad yuppies hopped giddily to the music. Another guy gesticulated wildly as his date discretely inched away from him. A crowd of emos busted out the moves and galloped around the screen for “Life During Wartime.”

Director Jonathan Demme is the master of creating a participatory experience. His straight-on storytelling makes you, the viewer, the sole recipient of his ideas. The intimacy can be unnerving (“Silence of the Lambs”) and powerfully gut-wrenching (“Philadelphia”).

But in the case of “Stop Making Sense,” the intrusively close angles and absence of audience footage drops the viewer on stage with the band. The Talking Heads aren’t playing for you, they’re playing with you. So freakin’ awesome.

Tonight’s free screening is another Demme concert, “Neil Young: Heart of Gold.” Somehow, sitting onstage with the godfather of grunge isn’t as appealing as a flagpole of a man waving an oversized gray suit. We’ll see.

Photo courtesy of AFI.

War Torn: Stories of Separation

An interesting yet predictable flick, this 20-minute British joint is a slide show (literally) of families whose sons or husbands have fought in Iraq. Anxious mothers provide narrative voiceovers that stitch together banal photos of home.

While the women’s stories are compelling, the sullen photos and their PowerPoint presentation ultimately dull the impact. Bullet points that conclude each woman’s narrative are superfluous. (Like I really need post script to tell me that a soldier committed suicide, when his wife’s voiceover just said he gassed himself in the garage. Duh!)

Iraqi Kurdistan

This 12-minute flick is more music video than movie, but it’s dazzling to watch. A series of photos scroll in a stop-motion stream, and everyday life in the northern Iraqi province provides choreography.

It’s a stimulating slice of the “other” Iraq, the one that has a social life. People throw parties and shop at department stores. They’re still subject to vehicle searches but none of the sectarian violence. Interesting flick!

Bullet Proof Vest

Two young kids talk about gun violence in their California neighborhood, while black-and-white footage shows a gritty landscape. Cut to their mom, who’s cooking dinner over a camp stove. She too talks about gun violence.

Six pointless minutes later, a post script explains that the family was living in a “tent city” to protest area crime. Whatever. The only interesting thing about this joint is the maturity (read: hardened cynicism) of the children’s words. Otherwise, it’s a no-go.

Lot 63, Grave C

I like this flick, but it’s footage that the director didn’t shoot that makes it so memorable. And by memorable, I mean traumatizing.

In 1969, a member of the Hell’s Angels whacked Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert. The hippie free-love era died with Hunter, and 40 years later, his remains lie in an unmarked grave.

Director Sam Green pulls together color concert footage, a black-and-white tour of the cemetery, and newspaper clippings on microfilm to illustrate Hunter’s inexplicable death. It’s a compelling and fascinating way to serve straight facts.

Now back to that traumatizing footage.

The Altamont concert was being filmed as a feature flick. While the Rolling Stones did their thang, a commotion erupted at the foot of the stage. The Hell’s Angels, who were hired to work security, closed in.

Hunter, wearing a loud green jacket, moved away from the action. Suddenly, a Hell’s Angel swung at Hunter from behind and stabbed him with a very long knife. (From the look of things, I’d say Hunter took one to the shoulder or the neck.) The assailant took at least one more swing at Hunter.

Later on, paramedics wheeled out a gurney, the blood-stained sleeve of a bright green jacket peeking out from beneath a wool blanket.

Try going back to the office after lunch with that image in your head.

Photos courtesy of AFI.