Denver International Film Festival

Colorado Documentaries to Screen at DIFF

By Jenny Shank, 11-13-06

The program "Colorado Filmmakers: Documentary" at the Denver International Film Festival will feature a screening of four short films by Colorado filmmakers tonight and Sunday. I viewed three of them this weekend--two touching chronicles of the lives of singular Coloradoans, and one more experimental piece, The House of Wisdom, a meditation on the burning of the national library of Sarajevo.

Grandma Goth, directed by Deborah Hiestand, explores the world of Suelynn Gustafson, a woman entirely deserving of a starring role in a documentary. Gustafson is the proprietor of Flossie McGrews, a used clothing and costume shop on Broadway in Denver, who has always been fascinated with morbid things. She purchased an old church on South Sherman Street to live in and house her collection of death-related items--coffins, Victorian tear catchers, photos of dead, tombstones, and an old hearse. The purple-haired Gustafson says that she laughs when she sees the young people who call themselves goths these days. "You know, I was grandma goth. I did this forty years ago, but I did it for a different reason."

Far from being creepy herself, however, Gustafson is a charming, positive woman. The film eventually reveals the rather sad and lonely story of her personal life. She grew up in Denver in a family in the leather goods business. She eventually married as a young woman, but the marriage only lasted a few years, and she has been on her own since then, her only "boyfriend" a tall, thin skeleton doll. Gustafson's work life has been more successful--her thrift store, in which she sells "ugly" clothes, has prospered over the decades. In Grandma Goth, Hiestand has captured a distinctive Denver personality, a purple-haired elderly woman wearing skeleton clothes that anyone who visited Flossie McGrew's must have wondered about.

In Shaken, director Deborah Fryer lets the viewer into the private struggle of Denver's Paul Schroder, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the age of 33. As his condition grew worse, the cocktail of 21 pills he was taking was no longer able to control his symptoms, and he was unable to fish in the high alpine lakes that he so loved, participate in sports, or even manage daily tasks. At 43, Schroder decides to undergo brain surgery in the hopes that it will alleviate his symptoms.

Schroder is an endearing figure who cracks jokes even while in surgery--when he's affixed with a metal halo around his head, he asks, "Can you pick up radio stations with that contraption?" Schroder allows the viewer to see his vulnerability and his desire to live a normal life. He's able to go bowling and fly-fishing again after the surgery, but he knows that the surgery has only improved his symptoms--it hasn't cured him.

The "Colorado Filmmakers: Documentary" program, screening at the Denver International Film Festival this week, (Monday, November 13, 6:30 p.m.,
Sunday, November 19, 4 p.m.) offers a chance to see several worthy projects by a group of up-and-coming directors.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.