Searching for Lions, Finding Stones: 'Apple Cider Vinegar' | Green Film Festival of San Francisco 2024
A kindly meditation on how everything that was and will be is essentially written in our environment.
Dear Moviegoers,
There’s something that reminds me of cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger’s work in the awfully friendly docu-essay Apple Cider Vinegar, and I believe that it rests in Grizzly Man. Much like that film, about Timothy Treadwell’s yearly journeys in researching and grandstanding with bears, Apple Cider Vinegar grasps its subject by the distance that it maintains throughout. When Zeitlinger filmed the forensic pathologist who had examined Treadwell’s mauled body, some feet away and centered in the frame, before pushing in as if to walk closer into his conversation space, he produced a confrontational sensation of being in the moment and locked in. However, we know this isn’t the literal case, as we are seated well after the fact.
When Apple Cider Vinegar’s director of photography, Jonathan Wannyn, shoots the footage, he does almost exactly Grizzly Man’s up-front but disconnected-by-time approach. Almost, as writer/director Sofie Benoot has added the most intriguing dimension that could be conceived.
With voice-over performed by our main character and very real/famous nature documentary narrator Sian Phillips, Benoot’s film is an accomplishment in perspective and attitude. In Apple Cider Vinegar, her thesis on stones from around the world and within our bodies as they relate to our relationship with the planet, Benoot gives a breath of air, like a whistling tune, to a calm and almost ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response)-like story. As the film wanders from volcano villages to roadside rock explorations to quarry workers in Palestine, Sian Phillips provides thoughts and observations pulled from her years of experience with pop-nature footage. Phillips never meanders, though she has the point-of-view of someone watching the same film that we’re seeing from the comfort of a computer desk at home.
That is exactly what is happening, actually. And it’s beautiful.
Almost in real-time with the running duration of the film, Phillips reacts to the looks and gazes of the people being shown, who then react to her as she coughs and moves around in her chair. It’s adorable. When the understanding that Phillips is not so much the all-knowing narrator but rather the traveling main vision and audience conduit kicks in, the engagement with geologists, civilians, and day laborers on screen becomes more tangible, and thus so do their own observations and feelings. It’s all about stones, and how these seemingly still objects are constantly in motion, and always telling where they’ve come from, where we’ve come from, and where things may be heading. Being able to touch and grasp that is a sensation unlike most.
There are no lectures, no classroom anecdotes, and no talking heads. Just conversations with others, just visitations with regular people, and just admiration for living things. Often, Apple Cider Vinegar will shift from its own footage to volunteer-piloted nature webcams from time to time, almost as Sian Phillips becomes momentarily inspired and expresses frustration and sadness on not being able to witness the animals and the environment that once dominated her career. Even tiny spiders being wiped off a camera lens will bring a tear to her eye.
Probably the cutest and most inventive festival-released documentary of this year, and likely an award contender. Likely. Probably. 4/5
Apple Cider Vinegar screens both theatrically and virtually at the 2024 Green Film Festival of San Francisco.