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Vapor Trail (Clark) is a documentary essay exploring circumstances of toxic contamination around the former US military bases in the Philippines as the locus for a meditation on historical amnesia, colonial privilege, and the consequences of unchecked militarism. Interweaving both cinéma-vérité and interview footage of Filipino victims and their families, environmental spokespersons, and community activists, along with early photographic material pertaining to the Philippine-American War, partisan songs, historical texts, and landscape photography, Vapor Trail (Clark) is an attempt to construct a work capable of rendering some measure of this human and environmental tragedy and the complexities of its remedy.
Official Selection, Rotterdam International Film Festival (January 2010), Lubjlana Documentary Film Festival (March 2010), Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema (April 2010), Jeonju International Film Festival (May 2010), Migrating Forms Festival/New York (May 2010), Distrital Film Festival/Mexico City (May 2010), Maine International Film Festival (July 2010), Vancouver International Film Festival (September/October 2010), London Film Festival (October 2010), DocLisboa, Portugal (October 2010), Viennale Film Festival, Austria (October/November 2010), BFI London Film Festival, UK (October 2010), Sheffield Doc/Fest (November 2010), Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival (February 2011)
Crew:
Direction/Photography/Sound/Editing: John Gianvito
Assistant Editing: Eric P. Gulliver
Translation: Genara Banzon
Voice: Howard Zinn, Travis Wilkerson
Music: George Aperghis, Giovanna Marini and Francesco de Gregori, Lav Diaz
Principal Participants:
Myrla Baldonado
Teofilo "Boojie" Juatco
Alan Abdon Along
Dina Valencia
Juan Miguel "Red" Fuentes
Jocelyn And Joel Cardenas
Estrelita And Jayson Barnuevo
Rosenella And Guiller Carreon
Ruben Naguit
Nimfa Yumang
Benjamin Morales
Eduardo David Gutierrez
Elena Neverida
Annvil Rose And Rosalina Rabelas
"The length of Gianvito's film (four and a half hours, nearly) enables him to characterise the Clark disaster as a direct consequence, and an inseparable part, of the history of US imperialism—without reducing it to a mere example (since the film explores, very fully, the personal tragedies of the victims and the passion and the dedication of the activists fighting for the clean-up of the Clark site) . . .
"To explore the disaster at such length and in such detail is to overcome two typical effects of documentaries on the sufferings of the powerless: on the one hand, a wallowing-in-misery syndrome that arouses predictable feelings without leading to any insight; on the other, a quickly dissipated rush of outrage that serves as quick gratification for the politically liberal viewer. The film is filled with examples of the calmly decentered soberness that Gianvito has established as his signature through The Mad Songs of Fernando Hussein (2001) and Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007): a very lyrical and violent scene of a boy playing in a street in heavy rain that cuts directly to monochrome photographs of Filipino corpses; a long series of shots of tombstones, mostly of infants; the insistent silence accompanying the stark white-on-black intertitles (including one, about the nom de guerre of revolutionary leader Andres Bonifacio, that significantly and sympathetically interrupts the singing of a song of lament and hope). For all its length, the film never gives the feeling that it is saying everything, or trying to, or that it even thinks for a moment that saying everything is possible. One comes out of the film wanting to know more about the subject, about the history."
— Chris Fujiwara, Senses of Cinema, Issue 55
"International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010 wasn't big enough for any attentive visitor to miss the impact and discussion generated by Vapor Trail (Clark), John Gianvito's intimate epic study (soon to be accompanied by his Vapor Trail (Subic) of the environmental and health impacts created by American military bases in the Philippines). A stark departure from both The Mad Songs of Fernando Hussein (2001) and Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2008) (though the latter's concern for tombstones returns, with Gianvito's camera periodically trained on the tombstones of babies killed by the bases' toxic chemicals), Gianvito's film overlaps a chain of sympathetic conversations with victims of US base pollution and relatives of those killed with an unusually detailed review of the sources of the Spanish-American war and the subsequent war between US occupiers and the forces of Filipino independence, which Raya Martin dramatizes as a movie memory in Independencia, on view alongside Vapor Trail (Clark) in Möller's "After Victory" program. Gianvito, a supremely political artist, shares with Gasland the intention of framing an environmentalist clarion call as a work of art, but—as reinforced by the opening narration by the late historian Howard Zinn—with the greater context of history, and an understanding of pollution as another act of war, and the direct consequence of the imperialist impulse, universal throughout history, to reduce the conquered "other" to less than human."
— Robert Koehler, Cinema Scope, Issue 42
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For rights inquiries please contact Mike Bowes at mike@centralproductions.org, or 617-842-6372 
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