Mashing It Up at AFI SILVERDOCS

I arrived via Amtrak from Penn Station to the Baltimore Airport station mid-afternoon on Tuesday.  It was a smooth relaxing ride—between reading a bit and gazing out the window listening to my iPod, I pondered my busy schedule for the next few days and was excited at the prospect of seeing new films and attending some of the seminars in the incredibly packed International Documentary Conference program expertly produced by Diana Ingraham.

I also found out yesterday that I’ve been invited to attend this summer’s Sundance Producers’ Conference with one of my documentary projects and my mind was whirling with preparation plans for this incredible opportunity—more on that later.

I didn’t manage to get into the sold out opening night film, Jim Brown’s Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, but instead after doing my festival check-in, toodled around the town of Silver Spring, home of Discovery Communications, to check out the local scene. It was fairly quiet, but the kind of quiet that precedes a much-anticipated event.  I discovered a wonderful coffee house called Mayorga near my hotel with strong, aromatic coffee, plenty of comfortable seating and free wireless—my festival “office.”  I also sat in the lobby of the Hilton for a while and watched as people arrived, everyone, to a person, on some electronic device, pushing buttons to text, checking email, eyes riveted to whatever small screen they carried in their hands as they maneuvered through check-in, barely glancing at anyone to whom they were “speaking.”  I find this ubiquitous behavior bloody annoying and rude as hell.

I took myself to McGinty’s Pub for dinner and sat outside drinking my wine and eating my food safely under the cover of the outdoor patio as a pissing-down rainstorm raged through town for about 20 minutes, thunder crashing, lightning crackling, soaking everyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the downpour.  This would be a regular occurrence throughout the fest.  I guess it’s monsoon season in Maryland.

The next morning, I woke early and was at the Silver Theater by 9:00 to grab some coffee and get settled for the opening session of the conference, The Future of Real 2.0—From Music to Mayhem Plus Fair Use and Copy Right/Copy Left.  Moderated by Diana Ingraham, panelists included David Garber, President/CEO, Lantern Lane Entertainment, Brett Gaylor, Filmmaker, Open Source Cinema/EyeSteelFilm, George Rush, Attorney, Max Segal, HBO Archives/Co-President of ACSIL: The Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors and David Sheehan, ABCNEWS Video Source/Co-President of ACSIL with Max Segal and Larry Mills of Pump Audio.  The discussion included the legal implications of Internet film and music distribution, rights clearance issues and the costs of that, both monetarily and legally.  As filmmakers, financiers and distributors struggle with defining the terms and dealing with the implications of digital rights, a new way of thinking about content creation is creating a paradigm shift in how films are made, marketed, bought and sold.  Is creativity being damaged due to this new remix culture?  The issues of intellectual property are murky to begin with.  Garber of Open Source Cinema has created an entity where he literally gives away everything he shoots to let other people use it to remix scenes, submit their own material and to become a co-creator of new media.

One doesn’t need to use traditional distribution models to move one’s product over the Internet.  You can self-distribute both theatrically and over the net and different residual models can be created depending on the download model—download to rent, download to buy, download to watch for free.  The terms of licensing need to be redefined to bridge the gap between “old” and “new” media.  Most of the panelists agreed that those terms themselves don’t really mean much anymore, thus the term “mashing it up.”

David Sheehan said in relation to re-licensing content, “You [filmmakers/producers] should make sure that you get all the rights you need and have all the clearances you need to get—guilds, artists, music clearances, etc. and to know in advance (as part of your initial treatment) how your film will be distributed.  One needs to define carefully and accurately how your content is going to be used.  Be very clear about your material’s context to avoid getting hit by walloping expenses you didn’t anticipate and/or delays in distributing your project.”  Licensing content is only the first step—there are a lot of underlying rights issues for which one needs to be cognizant.  This can greatly (and negatively) impact your Errors and Omissions Insurance (E&O) and delay the release of your film.

Mills talked about what’s gone on in the music industry as a cautionary tale—the record companies erred greatly, in his opinion, by giving product away for free.  He felt strongly that this de-values any art/media being created and strongly advised against it.

With ACSIL, Segal and Sheehan are working hard to find a middle ground with fair use issues and everyone continues to make it a top priority to keep defining and refining terms of usage to benefit the creators of content and those that will use that content in the future for their own projects.

Filmmakers, particularly those working independently, need to educate themselves and keep abreast of these issues at every phase of the process.  Or at least have a good producer who’s paying attention to these things during production.

After the session, I hung around the lobby of the Silver Theater to chat a bit with staff and volunteers about the upcoming days.  I ran into filmmaker, Pernille Rose Gronkjaer, who screens her debut feature The Monastery here.  (You can read my April interview with this enormously talented storyteller on this blog.)  I’m looking forward to meeting with her again when Film Forum screens her film in New York this August.  She also wrote a wonderful article about her days as a film student at the National Film School of Denmark in the July/August issue of documentary available to IDA members and also on newsstands.

I caught an afternoon screening of Weaam Williams’ Hip-Hop Revolution, from South Africa, the film’s North American premiere.  I made a film on the same subject matter in Cuba in 2003 and so was curious to learn about the street art scene there—spoken word, graffiti and the hope and uplift music and art provide to a youth culture without much else at their disposal except a life of crime, drugs, marginalization and poverty.  Williams is a partner in Shamanic Organic, a company with a mission to merge multi-media and healing.

I quickly zipped by local wine emporium, Adega, for a special wine tasting party they were holding for the festival before catching another screening.  Losers and Winners, is an entry in the Sterling Award Feature Film Competition.  German directors Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken have made a wonderful film about one of the strangest culture clashes I’ve seen. 400 Chinese workers break down the Kaiserstuhl coke factory in the German Ruhr Valley into manageable parts and ship them back to their homeland.  As they break down the plant piece by piece for reassembly in the Far East, the relationships between these Chinese laborers, (away from their loved ones for over a year) and the German men who are being “retired” from a place they’ve worked their whole lives, create a community of displaced people who do the best they can to bridge abounding misunderstandings, often to great comic effect, and just as often with very moving moments of loneliness, isolation and loss of identity.  The Chinese supervisor is one of the weirdest characters I’ve encountered in film—a boorish man who speaks in silly Haiku-style and goes into raptures of ecstasy over his new Mercedes Benz, while his workers struggle to support their families back home in China. 

I ended the day having a nice Indian meal with local filmmaker and blogger extraordinaire Sujewa Ekanayake.  After dinner, we wandered into the Cinema Lounge where the Conference Kick-Off party was in full swing.  I was so pleased to finally meet and say hello to filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern.  I saw their multi-award winning, stunning film on the Darfur genocide, The Devil Came on Horseback, at Full Frame in April--it's also playing here to typically packed houses.  I'm thrilled to report that they've agreed to be my next interview subjects in my continuing series on female nonfiction filmmakers.  I'll be meeting with them in New York in the next week or so.    

I ended the evening with a great conversation about world-changing film with local designer, Brian Liu, one of the three Music Documentary Competition jury members (along with Joe Berlinger and Rosanna Arquette).  Brian is a designer and photojournalist who has published in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, among others.  His documentary work includes an award-winning feature about the global landmine problem, and he is currently editing down a decade of footage and photography for a Thievery Corporation DVD.  He is also the founder and creative director of ToolboxDC.

So now it's 2 a.m. and tomorrow will bring another full day of conference seminars, screenings and parties.

Comments

[Silver Spring Penguin]

Very nice coverage of SilverDocs. Unfortunately, not all bloggers have had the same access.
I look forward to reading more of your impressions.

-- Jennifer Deseo
The Silver Spring Penguin
http://penguinstate.wordpress.com/

[Sujewa Ekanayake]

That's a lot of well recollected experiences Pamela, I believe YOU are a blogger extraordinaire :) See ya later at SilverDocs.

- Sujewa