The ninth annual San Francisco Documentary Festival, the “educational” offshoot of the taboo-taunting, date-crowd-pleasing San Francisco Independent Film Festival, has a soft spot for quirky snapshots of strange subcultures. Thirsting for maximum weirdness, I grabbed a handful of Bay Area-related titles, only to find myself pulled onto higher ground. Friends, enlightenment isn’t for sissies.
“Eat the Sun”
Peter Sorcher’s Eat the Sun (which premiered at last year’s Mill Valley Film Festival) opts for neither blind adoration nor wide-eyed skepticism in surveying the growing population of everyday folks who stare into the sun for up to 44 minutes each day. Some sungazers, including the youthful Mason Dwinell, a Vermont native living in San Francisco whom we accompany on a curious cross-country journey, believe that the practice leads to enhanced personal energy and the complete loss of appetite for solid food. (That’s considered a plus by these folks.) The filmmaker generally encourages us to respect, rather than laugh at, the various searchers Dwinell encounters, while contemplating the risks and price of philosophical and spiritual commitment.
Who can resist the allure of a spiritual, sexual shaman? Certainly not the women who trek to Sedona for a healing session or two with Baba Dez, the lithe, long-haired, fiftyish therapist profiled in Sex Magic. He’s on the level, I say with some confidence based on the evidence here, but he’s also a narcissist and a skilled manipulator. Filmmakers Jonathan Schell and Eric Liebman do a bit of manipulation themselves, shaping the doc around the polyamorous Dez’s on-again, off-again relationship with his “beloved,” Maya. Recommended for viewers with a high tolerance for jargon.