Bombay Beach

Located 50 miles south of Palm Springs, the Salton Sea is an accidental inland salt lake in the Southern California desert formed after an engineering accident in 1905 sent the Colorado River spilling out of the canal and into the Salton Basin, a dry lake bed over 200 feet below sea level. Salt deposits leeched into the water, giving it a salinity greater than that of the Pacific. In the 1950s and 1960s, developers tried to turn the vast inland lake, the biggest in California at 350 square miles, into a vacation spot. But fed only by a trickle of fresh water and irrigation runoff from farms, it became an ecological disaster and the developments were abandoned. Today it looks like a wasteland out of post-apocalyptic movie with its abandoned, crumbling buildings and carpet of dead fish and rotting birds washing up on its shore. Bombay Beach (2011), the debut feature from Israeli-born filmmaker and music video director Alma Har'el, surveys the inhabitants in and around the sparsely-populated town on the eastern shore of the lake. The Los Angeles-based director discovered the community while scouting locations for a music video for the band Beirut, which was playing at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival a few hours north of the Bombay Beach. "I was very much drawn to something that I know from being an Israeli, from my own past," she explained in an interview for "POV's Documentary Blog." "I can relate to a place on the outskirts of society where there was once a promise and turned out very violent and disappointing to many people." Har'el met Benny and Mike Parish on the beach, who agreed to be in a music video that she improvised on the spot, and then met their parents. "They started telling me their story and everything that had happened and I just immediately wanted to come back and do a whole film there after that whole experience." Benny, a bi-polar kid who lives in fear of being taken from loving but oblivious parents (they already served prison time for child neglect and for possession of illegal weapons and explosives), became one of the central characters in her portrait of this community of eccentrics, drop-outs and "the misfits of the world," in the words of Dorran "Red" Forgy, the resident old coot who sells loose cigarettes and provides colorful, often profane commentary. "I love his voice and I love his story," recalled Har'el in an interview with the magazine Filmmaker. "He just seemed to always have something poetic or interesting to say about life or about the place." She met CeeJay Thompson after she had begun filming. Thompson is an African-American teen who fled Los Angeles to Salton Sea with his father after the shooting death of his cousin, and pins his future on high school football,. Har'el spent a year following these people, who she calls collaborators rather than subjects, eight months editing and overcame her fear of California freeways to drive out from Los Angeles every few weeks. Bombay Beach is not a traditional documentary. It is pieced together from fragmentary portraits while staged, choreographed scenes play out the inner lives and yearnings of its subjects in fantasy scenes and dance numbers. It's more like an impressionist sketch than a realist portrait, a non-fiction film through the lens of magic realism with surreal, dreamy interludes. As she explained to Filmmaker: "I wanted to tell their story and the story of their imagination and my imagination and how we feel when we are there together and how I feel when I see them there. It's not just a document of facts I hope. It's also a mood and an internal feeling when you step into Bombay Beach that I was trying to capture and a side of America that I feel I've never seen." The film made its world premiere at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, and won the International Documentary Competition on its American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that it "looks and feels like a fever dream about an alternate universe. Suffused with a sense of wonder, it hovers, dancing inside its own ethereal bubble." Sources: "A Conversation with Alma Har'el," Pamela Cohm. Hammer to Nail, October 12, 2011. "Alma Har'el, Bombay Beach," Brandon Harris. Filmmaker, October 2011. "Bombay Beach Director Alma Har'el," Adam Schartoff. POV's Documentary Blog, October 13, 2014. NOTES Director interviews: Filmmaker, Brandon Harris http://filmmakermagazine.com/32326-alma-harel-bombay-beach/#.V_RNeCgrIdU Hammer to Nail, Pamela Cohn http://www.hammertonail.com/interviews/a-conversation-with-alma-harel/ POV's Documentary Blog, Adam Schartoff http://www.pbs.org/pov/blog/news/2011/10/bombay_beach_documentary_alma_harel_interview http://www.viewlondon.co.uk/cinemas/bombay-beach-film-interview-feature-interview-4366.html By Sean Axmaker