In the Dog House

I was in the dog house again on Sunday afternoon. At least that’s where I thought I was until I found that I was in the Bertha DocHouse. And who you may ask is Bertha?

When Tony Tabatznik founded the Bertha Foundation in 2009, he felt strongly that if you could connect storytellers, lawyers and activists, you have a formidable team for fighting for social change. After attending the Sundance Film Festival for several years, Tabatznik embraced the nonfiction media landscape as a major means to effect that change. In its brief life, the Bertha Foundation—through the Bertha Film Fund, the Bertha BRITDOC Connect Fund, the Bertha BRITDOC Documentary Journalism Fund and the IDFA Bertha Fund—has helped countless documentaries from around the world get made, get seen and get people thinking about the issues they ought to do something about.

The first two documentaries I saw were about Headfort and Sergei Polunin. On Sunday it was about another flawed performer, John Curry, The Ice King. His life has the quality of Shakespearean tragedy. He struggled, against paternal opposition, to become a world class ice skater his career culminating in a gold medal at the 1976 Winter Olympics. After that he went professional, established his own commercial dance company, went broke and died of AIDS aged forty-four in 1994. The film has captivating shots of him on ice dancing sublimely to wonderful music, and interviews with him, his mother, skating colleagues and friends. It is hard not to be moved by his tragic life.

So as not to end on a down-beat note it is worth mentioning that he liked to perform in front of a live orchestra. The conductor had to know exactly how the dance routines were choreographed so was permanently on the payroll. It reminds me of the profligate Lord Lonsdale, known as the Yellow Earl, who had two yachts at Cowes and employed full-time bands to play on both. He only ever went to Cowes in August and, of course, could only be on one yacht at a time.