Ashley Brandon’s entertaining short “Panther Pat” recounts the forgotten strange but true story of the first woman to play on a professional American football field in 1970.
Her name was Patricia Palinkas, a school teacher and a wife. More relevantly here, she had been a football nerd since childhood. But as young Pat lived in mid-20th century America, the idea of her actually participating as a professional football player was the stuff of comedy and/or recreational pharmaceutical use.
Pat’s husband Big Steve Palinkas helped make his wife a professional football player. The couple regularly practiced place kicking together as a team. Readers familiar with the old “Peanuts” comic strip can imagine a variation of the football kick running gag where Lucy actually lets Charlie Brown’s foot connect with the ball. When Steve and Pat decided to try out for the Orlando Panthers as a team, they were both hired (with Pat being paid twice what Steve was getting).
Given the period’s casual sexism, the school teacher’s hire wasn’t greeted with welcoming arms. One football player expressed their animosity in a particularly brutal way given that he likely outweighed Pat by at least 60 pounds. But sports stories aren’t only about celebrating victories, it’s about seeing how an athlete bounces back from defeat. Brandon’s subject managed to do precisely that.
Palinkas herself generally narrates the story of her professional football career, which is something expected. What makes Brandon’s film special is how the director ingeniously overcame the problem of chronicling her subject’s story in the face of a paucity of period footage. As explained in the post-screening Q&A, much of the 1970s video and film footage of Palinkas got wiped or destroyed for storage reasons.
The director’s solution, which highly elevates her film’s merits, involved a wonderful bit of irony. As a child, young Pat was often told to abandon her football playing dreams and amuse herself by playing with dolls. “Panther Pat” skillfully uses dolls to tell this football story, including sequences that would never have been recorded on 1970 video anyway.
Pat’s football career would eventually be curtailed, but the causes of her doing so would not be the product of someone attempting to force her out of the game. The bittersweet nature of that curtailment, though, would be balanced by Palinkas living long enough to see women return to American professional football fields.
***
Jayme Coveliers’ dramatic short “Unlimited, Forever And Ever, No Matter What” deals with the problem of denying the gap between the life one had before and the life being lived now.
Maggie is a middle-aged PE teacher. In her younger days, she thought nothing of taking on such athletic challenges as (what appears to be) free solo rock climbing. The title of Coveliers’ short could even be described as young Maggie’s life philosophy. Now, though, the former athlete lives every day with chronic pain…yet she’s still too proud to admit she really needs to change her “still physically active” mindset. That denial has put an increasing strain on her relationship with her daughter Jessie. When that pain accidentally flares up one day, Maggie must now decide how much longer she can act as if will power suffices to keep her condition under control.
Coveliers takes pains to make his central character more than her chronic disease. The young Maggie flashbacks make clear this former athlete lived boldly by taking on and conquering new physical challenges. This attitude was probably something a younger Jessie once admired. Yet living the best life possible despite a chronic condition is not something that can be solved solely through stubbornness or will power.
Jesse Schroeder’s cinematography eloquently uses imagery to capture Maggie’s states of mind without the need for long speeches. A wordless sequence where the film’s pain-wracked protagonist regards the prospect of ascending several sets of stairs suggests her feelings regarding her fall from her physical prime.
Maggie’s daughter clearly has no problem helping her mother if she needs assistance. But Jessie’s boundaries regarding such aid concerns her mother treating such help as a reason to rationalize denying the seriousness of her chronic pain. Feeding her mother’s ego is definitely not part of her job description.
It doesn’t matter that Coveliers’ film doesn’t go into background detail on how Maggie got to her current state or indulge in inspiration porn. What ultimately matters is when the film’s protagonist will bring to her current situation the same clear-eyed assessment that once aided her in scaling mountains.
***
Leigh Iacobucci’s documentary portrait “A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan” will surprise viewers who thought its film subject would be of only niche interest. The woman at the center of Iacobucci’s film is both a banging songwriter and a riveting performer. Because her songs attack her country’s heinous status quo regarding women’s rights (e.g. kidnapping young women to become involuntary brides, authority figures turning a blind eye to domestic violence incidents), she’s vilified as a radical Western troublemaker and a fake Muslim. Not bad for someone who’s in her early 20s
Iacobucci’s subject, Zere Asylbek, writes songs rebelling against her country’s sexist traditions. In Asylbek’s music, women are celebrated for being far taller than grass and far louder than water. She’s definitely not apologetic for her stands despite the open hostility of many men. Her aim is to better life in Kyrgyzstan by inspiring her country’s women and supportive men to stand up for women’s equality.
Asylbek’s songs couldn’t be called musical equivalents of Lizzie Borden films. Yet they have succeeded in getting female listeners to acknowledge feelings about particular sexist situations in Kyrgyzstan. But to the men who either personally benefit from or support Kyrgyzstan society’s current sexist status quo, Asylbek represents a disruptive threat.
Ironically, the men currently feeling threatened by the messages in Asylbek’s music would have welcomed the younger version of the film’s subject. Just a few years earlier, her desire to socially conform led her to adopt homophobic and other socially conservative positions. The long-term influence of Asylbek’s schoolteacher father Zhoodonbekov helped the singer become who she is today. Giving his daughter the space to make her own mistakes and learn from them was part of his encouraging her to pursue whatever goals she wanted in life. It also helps that he doesn’t act as if doing “women’s work” was beneath him.
Asylbek’s creative output is particularly impressive once the viewer learns she’s a self-taught songwriter. The pro-women’s freedom messages she wanted to send in her music was clear from the start. But it took a lot of Internet studying of how songs were put together plus a lot of experimentation until she was sufficiently satisfied to release her work on social media. The figurative nerve her songs struck among both women and men surprised her, but she’s very happy to find people who can relate to her message.
Transforming Asylbek’s message into political action by the country’s authority figures turns out to be a far more difficult lift. A march for women’s rights Asylbek is involved with dissolves from non-violence into a melee where the feminist protesters get arrested while the male provocateurs walk away unscathed. Equally damningly, a woman who had been raped by several government officials can’t get any sort of prosecution of the guilty officials even eight years after the incident. Asylbek’s foes may claim her insisting on laws and the court system allegedly demonstrate she’s a Western troublemaker. Yet the tradition that they support has in practice fallen far short of securing justice for wronged women…unless that’s a status quo these hostile men are happy to live with.
It’s not surprising the viciousness of Kyrgyzstan males’ hostility has stressed out Asylbek. But the song from which the film’s title originates explains why she continues to fight: to support her sisters who seek to exercise their independent voices.
***
Blake Knecht’s experimental short “Now That We Are Sending You To The End” muses through imagery on the facets of present generations’ crime of despoiling nature. The central black and white images of a barefoot little girl wandering through a desert landscape get visually interrupted by color sequences of vivid blue or dark brown. These color sequences, the product of the filmmaker’s deliberately damaging her film stock with such things as water and heat, symbolize the ways in which once thriving terrain could be reduced to wasteland by catastrophic disasters.
Yet as the unnamed little girl wanders through this desert which could have been created by disastrous flooding or out of control forest fires, she does not act as if she’s a survivor of or witness to the loss of some formerly magnificent terrain. If anything, her wanderings suggest she treats this devastated landscape as baseline normality for her world, which is not what a child heard in voiceover wants when she’s old enough to have children. Who could blame this unseen child? The girl seen onscreen remains unaware that the greed of her figurative ancestors has bequeathed her an inheritance of ashes.
***
Members of an indigenous tribe encounter an injured stranger who arrives in their village. They nurse him back to health and he even falls in love with one of the tribespeople. When he discovers the villagers know of gold in the area, events are set in motion which eventually result in the stranger betraying and even destroying the people who once saved him.
The bones of this story of pre-colonial discovery and conquest has been lived and told hundreds if not thousands of times before. David Maler’s “Zumeca” gives this familiar tale a tragic edge by foregrounding the indigenous people’s viewpoint.
The film’s title is the name of the young woman (played by Angela Cano) who leads her small Taino village as its cacique. Her nature-based faith allows her to feel the heartbeat of her village’s great tree and treat a cave with an underground lake as her village’s meditation space. She may be the village seer, but her seeing images of a mysterious stranger with white skin as well as images of violence and fire befalling her people frightens her into silence. When the wounded Spaniard Miguel arrives in Zumeca’s village, the cacique’s unwillingness to acknowledge the future danger Miguel represents helps create what will be the first family of the Americas.
It could be argued Zumeca’s refusal to treat Miguel as a threat came out of compassion. This is not the colonizer’s romantic compassion of “indigenous woman swept away by white man’s inherent charms (e.g. Pocahontas and John Smith).” Rather, it’s Zumeca’s empathic desire to help heal Miguel’s soul from whatever in his past killed his fire of life. In this interpretation, Miguel’s actions after he meets a wandering Catholic missionary could be seen as his attempts at atonement and redemption. The trouble is, these acts wind up destroying Zumeca and the other Taino in her village.
A refreshing aspect of “Zumeca” is its demonstrating repeatedly that actions once romanticized among the Europeans as “bringing the benefits of civilization to a backwards people” translates in practice as “imposing their beliefs and power on a people lacking the freedom to say no.” The tool-making imbalance between the Tainos’ Stone Age-level technology of wooden bows and stone knives versus the Spaniards’ ability to shape metal into armor and guns speaks for itself. But it’s the social imbalance represented by the Spaniards’ refusal to acknowledge Zumeca’s authority or agency that particularly galls given the time the film previously spends with the title character and her people. Miguel starts damning himself again the instant he introduces Zumeca as “Catalina” without bothering to ask for her consent. His later assumption that she’d be happy living with him in Spain and even meeting the king of Spain (and probably treated as a primitive freak) is not a belief she shares.
Christian proselytizing gets a well-deserved drubbing throughout “Zumeca.” It’s a Catholic priest’s counsel that plays a role in causing Miguel to start othering the Tainos. A river baptism for Zumeca is not so much an act of spiritual rebirth, but what seems to her like a deliberate near-drowning. But this writer’s favorite moment would have to be the scene where a Christian convert gets rightly called out for believing that adopting the Spaniards’ religion will make him the whites’ social equal.
What the Spaniards would dismiss as an animal-like existence is an existence that works for the Taino. Their essential needs of food, shelter, and safety (before the Spaniards came along) are met. Loincloths make reasonable sense as the only clothing needed for their tropical environment. What the viewer might mistake for a blouse on Zumeca’s skin is actually dark body paint. The Tainos’ indifference to attaching value to whatever gold nuggets they find is one major and ultimately fatal difference between the two groups.
Maler’s film presents this story as a series of chapters. The visual tone shifts over the film’s running time from pastoral to near-hallucinatory chaos. A particularly bravura moment is a dialogue-free montage showing the deterioration of Zumeca and Miguel’s relationship as well as the Spaniards’ increasingly onerous bootheel on the residents of Zumeca’s village.
Zumeca and Miguel’s union may have helped birth a new nation. But the death, greed, and betrayal that served as midwives at that birth makes a viewer mourn what Zumeca and her people ultimately lose.
***
As extractive capitalism in operation resembles economic warfare against those relegated to the labor fodder role in this exploitative system, it feels somehow appropriate to describe Natalia Koniarz’ observational documentary “Silver” as a cinematic butcher’s bill regarding the human cost of this particular system’s operation.
The film’s setting is Bolivia’s Potosi region. Since 1545, the mines of the Cerro Rico mountain have yielded sixty million tons of silver. Current signs indicate the mountain’s silver deposits have started getting scarce. Yet there are 12,000 families living in and around the Cerro Rico’s mines whose continued existence depends on the miners still unearthing silver.
Koniarz’ film takes viewers into the lives of the miners whose labor and sometimes lives help extract these riches. The lives of miners’ families could be described as “they live for the mine, they die for the mine.” But there’s nothing voluntary or even romantic about this system the miners work in. The mining companies essentially treat these workers as independent contractors to be paid depending on the value of what they unearth. Miners can consider themselves fortunate if they even live to reach age 40. But if cave-ins don’t kill them, regularly working without protective equipment in an insanely noisy and dust-filled work environment might do so, but at a slower pace.
Judging by the miners’ living conditions, they can hardly be said to have prospered from their labor. The interiors of the miners’ homes appear to be fairly cramped with families and possessions. Their communities lack any civic amenities such as paved roads.
Even miners’ children lack leeway to escape getting sucked into mining companies’ proverbial gears. In grade school, girls are warned of how thieves hoping to steal their parents’ silver strikes are quite willing to threaten to rape the children to force the surrender of the discovered riches. A boy gets “volunteered” to take his older brother’s place in the mine after receiving one year of schooling. Children’s recreational activities in the mining village can include treating a slope of mining tailings like a snow slide or hunting a mine tunnel for certain kinds of quartz to sell to strangers.
The claustrophobic viewer should probably shut their eyes whenever the film goes into the mines. Aside from the visual closeness of the tunnel walls, the sight of the less than pristine condition of some tunnel support pillars will raise viewer anxieties regarding cave-ins. How the director and/or her camera crew got the tunnel footage they did without endangering life or limb is not a train of thought for the nervous at heart.
The passage of centuries has changed the industrialized world’s relationship to silver. It has gone from being just a coveted precious metal to a key element in everything from mirrors to AI equipment. As of this writing, the industrialized world’s demand for silver has ballooned. The likes of Sam Altman and Jensen Huang will care little for the details of how silver is mined for their companies’ use. Koniarz’ film by contrast makes viewers care about the human cost of satisfying our computerized world’s demand for this metal.
(“Panther Pat” won the Slamdance Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short.
(“Zumeca” took Slamdance’s Breakouts Feature Grand Jury Prize. Angela Cano, who played Zumeca, took the Slamdance Acting Award.
(“Silver” won Slamdance’s Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize.
(Several of the films reviewed here are still available for streaming on the Slamdance Channel. To order a virtual pass good through March 6, 2026, go here.)
