In the couple of weeks following the maelstrom of President-Elect Oback Barama's historic inauguration, the Center for Social Media at American University in Washington, DC will host established and aspiring filmmakers, nonprofit communications leaders, funding entities and students at their 5th annual two-day MYMM conference. I attended last year and finally got to meet the wonderful Pat Aufderheide and all the folks that created the center to explore and nurture cutting-edge practices for creating meaningful media.
I hope to attend again this year; the program and special guests they have on tap are top-notch: to open the conference, George Stoney will speak on ethics in social-issue film, and Kartemquin Films' Gordon Quinn will then deliver a keynote on ethics in cinema vérité. The next day's activities include three panels (and much time for networking and schmoozing) made up of folks working on the cutting edge of funding, grant-giving, festivals, outreach, digital connection, art, ethics and mission. Click here for more details on the participants and for registration information. For a conference of this calibre, it's quite inexpensive to attend ($100) and IDA members get an additional $25 off; students can attend for $50 (ID required at check-in).
Also coming up soon on SIM: Next week while everyone will be freezing their asses off, seeing movies and partying into the wee hours in Park City, Utah, yours truly will be doing the same in Helsinki, Finland at the 2009 DocPoint Festival (January 20 - 25). The 8th iteration of the fest, helmed by new festival director, Erkko Lyytinen, will honor special guest, Nick Broomfield. Broomfield will bring a retrospective of his work and teach the Master Class, a festival tradition that has brought the shining lights of international documentary film to enthusiastic Finnish audiences. Past guests and honorees have included Alexandr Sokurov, DA Pennebaker, Pirjo Honkasalo, and Albert Maysles. This year, in addition to Broomfield's presence, Richard Leacock's decades-long oeuvre will be celebrated and honored, as it has been at several international festivals this past year including HotDocs in his native Canada, and at the nascent Cinema Vérité International Documentary Festival in Tehran. Each year, in addition to showcasing new Finnish works, the festival travels to
far-off lands to celebrate the nonfiction fare being made all over the world; this year's spotlights will be on Italy and India. For more info, go to the fest's web site and stay tuned for reviews, interviews and more.
Also coming up, interviews with filmmakers Lucia Small and Ed Pincus (their deeply personal Katrina tale, The Axe in the Attic, will be screening at Thom Powers' Stranger Than Fiction series on the 10th of February) and Rachel Grady of Loki Films (she and her partner, Heidi Ewing, are currently working on three, count 'em, three films). I'll also have a conversation in late January with SILVERDOCS' Director of Programming, Sky Sitney (also appearing as a panelist at the above-mentioned conference on February 13).
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