Michael Shapiro
For The Press Democrat
March 19, 2025
After taking a break last year, the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival returns with a full slate of films that have the power to change minds and open hearts.
Held at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, the Rialto Theatre and other downtown venues, the festival begins on Thursday, March 27.
It opens with the riveting “The White House Effect” which reveals how global warming, as it was then known, went from a bipartisan concern to a highly charged political issue during George H. W. Bush’s presidency in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
The four-day festival closes Sunday, March 30, at Sebastopol’s HopMonk Abbey with “I Can’t Be Anyone But Me” about larger-than-life blues singer Big Mama Thornton, known for the original “Hound Dog,” before Elvis Presley recorded it.
The festival’s lead programmer, Jean McGlothlin, said that after a hiatus to “regroup and refresh … we’ve really put together an amazing program.”
She’s thrilled to celebrate “two remarkable Bay Area filmmakers whose work has been a catalyst for critical thought.”
The husband-and-wife team of Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, of San Francisco-based Actual Films, will be honored with a pre-festival reception on Wednesday night and at the opening night screening on Thursday.
Cohen called the Sebastopol festival, “a real jewel of the Bay Area film experience” and said she’s “honored to have this recognition from our local film community.”
Cohen and Shenk have two films in the festival, “The White House Effect” and “In Waves and War” about using psychedelic drugs to treat veterans with PTSD.
“The White House Effect” opens in 1988 with Bush’s campaign for president when there was nascent concern about climate change due to a severe heat wave and drought.
The “moment when the climate was not a political football and became one was really important to us because younger people don’t know that there’s ever been a time when the country was open to the possibility of solving climate crisis,” Cohen said. “We were all on the same page.”
Invisible wounds of war
Showing Friday, “In Waves and War” is a heart-rending film that traces the struggles of three Navy SEALs came home from Afghanistan psychologically shattered.
It’s documentary filmmaking at its finest.
The film focuses on Marcus Capone, who returns from the seemingly never-ending war in Afghanistan with treatment-defiant PTSD, traumatic brain injuries and severe depression.
“I remember the day when Marcus walked into our office. It was like watching Superman come in,” Cohen recalled. Yet as strong as he appeared, his story is “such an emotional and complex and sad tale of what happens to our military veterans.”
The feature-length film spends about 40 minutes showing what Navy SEALs go through, from the brutal training regimen (of 175 who started in one group, only 23 graduated) to fearing for one’s life during combat and seeing fellow SEALs die in a helicopter crash.
“We’re just passionate about getting this story out because if there’s something that can help mend their minds and get them back into their lives and provide an alternative to taking their life, that’s what films are for,” she said.
“In Waves and War” is structured to “create an emotional experience for the viewer that then leads you to think about the world in a different way.”
Animation, haunting and impressionistic, is used the illustrate war scenes and to re-create the soldiers’ psychedelic journeys.
Separation anxiety
In the film Capone says that “when you separate from the tribe, you look for anything you can to fill that void.” He drinks hard, takes antidepressants, throw mugs through windows.
“I thought Amber and the kids would be a thousand times better if I wasn’t here,” Capone says in the film. “They’d live a much better life if I wasn’t on this Earth.”
On the verge of losing hope, Amber Capone hears about psychedelic therapy. But having grown up in a conservative Christian home, she wonders, “Is this voodoo witchcraft? Is this opening up portals of darkness?”
Though she found the idea “terrifying,” she asks her husband to consider going to Mexico to undergo therapy with two naturally occurring psychedelics, ibogaine and DMT.
After the treatment, Marcus Capone says, “I was able to realize that none of this was my fault.” He felt the weight of his grief and anger lifting off his shoulders.
“All the walls you put up, all the body armor you put on, that all goes away,” he says. “The ego goes away, and you’re just a pure version of an individual that just loves everything. I felt like it was a new day.”
A healing mission
The Capones make it their mission to bring this healing to other military families.
“They don’t leave anyone on the battlefield,” Cohen said. “That’s even true in the treatment.”
A fellow SEAL doubts he would have considered “this crazy, hippie-ass s—t,” if the idea hadn’t come from Capone and other soldiers, but says: “If it helped them, then maybe I should do it.”
As he prepared for the treatment, Capone tells his longtime brother-in-arms: “You deserve to be happy, to have a good life.”
As he’s coming down from the treatment, the soldier says to Capone through tears, “Thank you so much; my kids thank you.”
“In Waves and War” (the title comes from Homer’s “The Odyssey”) doesn’t present psychedelics as a cure-all but rather as a pathway to healing.
“It’s not one and done, not one pill and you’re all better,” Marcus Capone says. “It cracks you open and gives you a new white canvas to paint whatever you want.”
An indigenous view
Another notable film, “Ellavut Cimirtuq” (“Our World is Changing”) co-directed by Sonoma County filmmaker Mischa Hedges, focuses on climate change.
Begun before the COVID pandemic, the film visits a coastal Alaskan village under siege due to thawing permafrost, rising sea levels, and erosion.
The melting landscape reveals an important archeological site — the local Indigenous people in the village of Quinhagak race to recover artifacts before they’re washed away.
Hedges worked with Finland-born filmmaker Sonia Luokkala who’d moved to Sonoma County. On location they met a local Yupik woman, Jacqueline Cleveland, who joined them in making the film.
“We came into it wanting to make a story about climate change that showed some hopeful aspect,” Hedges said. “The archeological site really seemed to do that. Once we got Jackie on board, she started filming on her own.”
Initially, “we decided that I would film her interviewing the elders … it really became clear that this is Jackie’s story to tell about her people,” Hedges said.
Having Cleveland take the lead “made this film something it could never have been if it was just me, white blonde guy with a camera, showing up in a native village,” he said.
“It’s about hope in the face of climate change, reconnecting with where you’re from, and what it means to be a part of your community.”
The 30-minute film shows with “Between Earth and Sky” as part of the Stewards of the Earth program Saturday afternoon at the Rialto. Cleveland plans to come down from Alaska for the screening.
A cancer journey
When 38-year-old Oregon commercial filmmaker Matthew Ross learned he had cancer two years ago, he turned the lens on himself.
Shot on 16-millimeter film, “Into the Unknown: My Cancer Story” opens with Ross saying a simple but devastating sentence: “My name is Matthew Ross, and I was just diagnosed with cancer.”
“It was weird,” Ross, now 40, said in a phone interview from his Portland home in early March. “Getting diagnosed is an out-of-body experience, and confessing it to a camera in your own backyard is another layer of surrealism.”
Despite the diagnosis, which soon becomes Stage 4, the film is hopeful and upbeat, and includes video footage from Ross’ childhood.
Making the film gave him something to “look forward to … something to do.” Ross said. It was also “therapy” and helped him “make sense of life.”
Which is what the best documentaries do for us all.
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/entertainment/sebastopol-documentary-film-festival-3/