Reflections

Rats

16mm, 75 min., 1999 (RP)

For every person in Washington, DC, there are 14 rats, claims one on-camera source in James M. Felter's occasionally unsettling, often funny, and always smart and empathetic documentary. While that human-to-rodent ratio may be grossly exaggerated, the film makes abundantly clear that our nation's capital is teeming with rats -- not all of them the four-legged breed. Felter takes his camera to an alley behind Willard Street (a witty choice of locale), recording the rats' midnight forays into dumpsters and their human neighbors' feelings about the animals (and each other). From there, he ventures to laboratories, landfills, and DC City Hall to learn more about the resourceful creatures' physical and behavioral traits and the human behavior and political circumstances that encourage rats to flourish in the District of Columbia. Felter's extreme close-ups of his rodent subjects and footage of stressed-out lab rats resorting to murder and cannibalism may make some viewers squirm, but they should be no more discomforting than the images of the Willard Street resident picking off rats with a pellet gun or Marion Barry smarmily ducking questions about the city's abandoned recycling program. To paraphrase a famous possum: We have met the rats, and they is us. Thu, Mar 16, midnight, Alamo Drafthouse