Betty Feeds The Animals
2020 · 10m · USA
Directed by James P. Gannon
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
An older woman ladles out thirty bowls of food daily for the skunks, raccoons, and possums most people would shoo off the porch. Shot on Super 8mm, the doc lingers on her unfussy devotion to creatures the world has written off.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Super 8mm ode to feeding possums is exactly the kind of unsexy obsession that wins me over while the prestige doc circuit yawns. Quiet, weird, and refusing to make Betty a sob story.
Gannon's Super 8mm portrait sits comfortably in the Les-Blank-meets-Varda tradition of eccentric devotion, and a woman ladling thirty bowls for the wildlife everyone else shoos away is the kind of subject who carries a doc almost by herself. Tender without being twee, by the sound of it.
Super 8mm portrait of an older woman with no sense of smell feeding thirty bowls a day to skunks and possums — the format-meets-subject pairing is the whole thesis, and the no-smell detail is the kind of biographical key you can't make up. Quietly perfect doc material.
Reviews
oddly charming glimpses into unorthodox lives