On facing difference and identity in Tallgrass Film Festival documentary screenings

A Kansas barber by day, Brihanna Jayde discusses show biz work and life in Kris Bailey’s “I Am … Brihanna Jayde,” a Kansas film short screened at the Tallgrass Film Festival.

Maybe it’s inevitable that differences—the variations that make us human—were on the minds of filmmakers whose work screened Saturday at the Tallgrass Film Festival in Wichita. Perhaps that’s because at this moment, ideas about what is “normal” are caught up in political culture wars about what is “right.” Film storytelling helps us look at ourselves, as shorts and features about our differences did this weekend.

These films included the shorts “I Am Brihanna Jayde” by Kris Bailey, a sensitive profile of a Kansas barber by day and showgirl by night, and local favorite “My Name is Annabel,” a charming collaboration with and about Annabel Hernandez, a Wichita actor with Down syndrome, made by Ida Joglar.

Venezuelan director Melisa Liebenthal’s “El Rostro de la Medusa” (“The Face of the Jellyfish”), however, takes a metaphorical approach. With its combination of scripted narrative and documentary, the subject instead becomes I versus I (and eye versus eye). The film won the Woman Filmmaker Spotlight Award at Saturday evening’s Tallgrass award ceremony.

“Jellyfish” is a philosophical, poetic, and even light-hearted experiment in how an individual inhabits her appearance. Liebenthal only half wants to solve the mystery of Marina (Rocio Stellato), a young woman whose face has changed dramatically. She presents no doppelgangers or doubles, but tests the predicament with the use of “scientific” observation and imaging.

Marina (Rocio Stelatto) collects photographs of her former face in a scene from “El Rostro de la Medusa” (“The Face of the Jellyfish”), winner of the Woman Filmmaker Spotlight Award at the Tallgrass Film Festival.

The vast biological variation in animals—from horned bulls to a small, lone cannonball jellyfish presented in a shallow pan of water where zoo visitors are allowed to poke and prod—spills its documentary footage into Marina’s story again and again. Who is looking and who is being observed, the film asks as the camera lingers on the glittery eyes of creatures.

Facial mapping animations often fill the screen with blue dots and lines that trace the geometric and asymmetrical contours of human and animal faces. Faces are projected, taken apart, and reshuffled. The line of a lizard’s profile might end up on the face of Marina as she combs through photo albums, computer files, and family resemblances, visits doctors and alternative practitioners. She’s looking for the origins of her new features, an explanation and perhaps a cure for her dramatic transformation.

In the end, it’s not only tigers and hippos who are behind glass as distanced objects of the restless human gaze that the zoo footage reveals as shallow and novelty seeking. Marina is left in an empty apartment, startled by a bird who defecates against the window she stands behind, no reflection and nowhere else to look.