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Last Season Shows a New West by Doniphan Blair
A Cambodian immigrant, Kouy, searching for mushrooms in Sara Dosa's new doc 'The Last Season'. photo: courtesy S. Dosa
"Just a bunch of rednecks and meth heads," is how my Manhattan friends might regard the denizens of backwoods Oregon until they got off their designer derrieres and caught "The Last Season", a telling documentary about the mushroom gatherers who convene there every fall.
The film just debuted at the SF International Film Festival to great acclaim, after which its director, Sara Dosa, jetted off to Toronto's Hot Docs, where programmer Michael Lerman selected it as a top pick.
Directed and written by Dosa, whose slight figure and youthful demeanor belies years of film experience and travels, "Last Season" hunts down and captures the essence of the modern documentary, slowly and surreptitiously seducing you into the ever-enlarging story languishing beneath the surface.
Things couldn't start more modest than the truck-trampled main drag of the tiny Oregon town, on which Dosa lets her camera linger, almost as lovingly as the stunning surrounding woods or her two main characters, whom her cinematographer seemed to always catch with backlight.
The North-West woods can look pretty lonely as fall approaches unless you get out of your car and get to know the people, like the two war veterans of 'The Last Season'. photo: courtesy S. Dosa
We soon realize that we are in the "new west," at a camp of mushroom collectors, not of the psychedelic variety (although they may be down the road), but South Asians, with a smattering of locals and hippies, hunting the magnificent matsutake. A delicacy in Japan, it sells there for as much as $500 a pound. (Pickers here get between $20 and $50, still pretty good if you can find up to 20 pounds-a-day.)
Soon we're digging into those woods, with two top 'shroom sleuths, Kouy and Roger, who struggle with their long sticks to extract their quarry from the fecund earth despite their physical disabilities. Kouy lost a foot to a landmine and Roger suffers from emphysema.
More significantly, both are haunted by war flashbacks: the Cambodian killing fields for Kouy and Roger's sniper work for the army in the early years of the Vietnam War. Although both are a bit tight-lipped, they open up for Dosa, also encouraged by the maternal prodings of Roger's wife.
Berkeley-raised, Dosa studied anthropology at Wesleyan University and then popped over to the London School of Economics for grad school but soon switched to cinema. After spending a few years developing a doc about a small city in Brazil, where everyone immigrates to the US, including learning the language and shooting some footage, she was inspired by an anthropology professor, Anna Tsing, to tackle the mushroom hunters.
Director Sara Dosa (rt) with Brooke Zimmerman, long time mentor and friend. photo: D. Blair
A resident of Oakland, Dosa has been working in the industry for over a decade, including writing about film and producing shorts and commercials for Rock the Vote, UC Berkeley and MoveOn.org, among others, and associate producing on "Inequality for All" by Jake Kornbluth, a documentary about Robert Reich.
As much as I love Brazil, Dosa made an excellent choice finding a stage, far from Broadway's bright lights, where the modern America unfurls and flourishes. Indeed, Kouy became such good friends with Roger and his wife they adopted him and he calls them mom and dad.
The SF International showing was a triumphant return for Dosa who worked for the festival and helped run their legendary Film House, an incubator where a lot of great docs got started. At the end of the showing, she invited up to the podium many from her large crew of local talent, who provided excellent music, editing and grant writing, a massive amount of which was needed to complete the project.
Sara Dosa and 'The Last Season' crew who turned out in strength for her showing at the Pacific Film Archives—the 'Thank You' at the end of the film was one of the longest I have ever seen. photo: D. Blair
In a style some call "verite impressionism," "The Last Seaon" slowly peals back the onion layers of what would be, for many people, just a piss stop town in flyover country, revealing the deep thoughts and beating heart of a new America.
Of course the West has always been a bit more liberal socially then, say, Appalachia, but it is incredible to see how the pickers, majority of whom are Vietnamese and Cambodian, are accepted by the so-called "rednecks and meth heads" and how they relax at their Oregon-encampments: singing karaoke, cooking their fantastic cuisine and gambling far into the night.
Starting with its very title, "The Last Season" has a mournful air, which only increases as we delve into the lives of two wounded warriors and winters arrives. But Dosa doesn't dive into the sepulchral ending we know must come and the men's homespun philosophy and egalitarianism keep them standing and staring into the light—an excellent testament to the benefits of believing in the New West.