Matthew
VanDyke’s only formal military training came while he was an embedded reporter
with the American military in Iraq. There were those in the Libyan rebel army
who had far less, but they were not a sheltered twenty-seven year-old living
with a conspicuous case of OCD. Relying on travel and combat footage shot by
VanDyke himself, Marshall Curry documents his journey from a homebody who had
never even done his own laundry to a POW of Gaddafi’s notorious Abu Salim
prison in Point and Shoot (trailer here), which won the
Best Documentary Feature Award at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.
Partly
at the prodding of his girlfriend Lauren Fischer, the underachieving VanDyke
set out to remake himself into a sort of gonzo travel journalist motorcycling
through the Middle East. It worked to some extent. By virtue of proximity, he
was able to cover Iraq for a local Maryland paper. Not surprisingly, he got
along famously with the troops he followed, most of whom he still considers
friends. The instruction they gave him on the shooting range would also serve
him well.
Through
his travels, VanDyke also made fast friends with hippie Libyan tourist Nuri Funas,
whose home he illegally visited before the war erupted. When the Arab Spring
reached Libya, VanDyke also returned, determined fight for and alongside his
new friends. Unfortunately, he was captured during an ambush shortly
thereafter, but that would hardly be the last word on his warfighting
experiences.
Hipper
readers might recognize VanDyke as the director of the short but intense
documentary, Not Anymore, which dramatically
captures the boots-on-the-ground reality in Syria (now available on-line). It
is safe to say recent years have been eventful for the filmmaker, considering
Curry only takes viewers through VanDyke’s Libyan period.
He
tells the story well, framing VanDyke’s footage with a confessional interview—he
is almost like the Twenty-First Century equivalent of a Joseph Conrad narrator,
except he has the video to verify his narrative. For obvious reasons, VanDyke
has no footage from his time held in solitary confinement, but Curry compensate
with Joe Posner’s stark 3D animation sequences, modeled from the very walls of
VanDyke’s former cell.
