Still in Motion

End of Summer

From the September 3 & 10 issue of The New Yorker:

Just an uncommon lull in the traffic
so you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up,
with his brusque sweep brusque sweep of the sidewalk,
and the slap shut of a too thin rental van,
and I told him no a gust has snatched from a conversation
and brought to you, loud.
                                                        It would be so different
if any of these were missing is the feeling
you always have on the first day of autumn,
no, the first day you think of autumn, when somehow

the sun singling out high windows,
a waiter settling a billow of white cloth
with glasses and silver, and the sparrows
shattering to nowhere are the Summer
waving that here is where it turns
and will no longer be walking with you,

traveller, who now leave all of this behind,
carrying only what it has made of you.
Already the crowds seem darker and more hurried
and the slang grows stranger and stranger,
and you do not understand what you love,
yet here, rounding a corner in mild sunset,
is the world again, wide-eyed as a child
holding up a toy even you can fix.
                                                                        How light your step
down the narrowing avenue to the cross streets,
October, small November, barely legible December.

                                                                                  --James Richardson

The State of the Independent Union

Posted on Re:Sources today: more on Sundance and a chat with Doug Block.

"The Poverty Jet Set" Celebrates "Mumblecore"

Last Thursday night at the Apple Store in Soho, a panel of directors and filmmakers spoke to a small, but attentive, audience of fans and film bloggers (most, one and the same).  Moderated by Eugene Hernandez of indieWIRE (my "daily paper" of choice) and hosted by Matt Dentler, producer of South by Southwest (where all of these directors got their first taste of acceptance and praise for their work), Joe Swanberg, Greta Gerwig (who, refreshingly admitted how much fun she was having with her new-found "fame"), Aaron Katz and Aaron Hillis talked to the audience about DIY everything--creating, writing, producing, directing, acting, editing, and distributing.  At once inspirational and reassuring, this talented group takes collaboration to new heights in how they work--working with crews from two to five people, all of whom they know intimately; editing footage pretty much daily to help them write the script as they go; bringing a non-artificial freshness to performing in front of the camera as the actors graphically show, both physically and emotionally, how we all hunger for the same things.  If only we could figure out what the fuck those are.

Shown clips from everyone's films, the audience also got to ask questions of the panelists, and two lucky winners of the "sweepstakes" got two free passes each to next year's SXSW fest in Austin--nice prize from the generous Matt Dentler, who said that when he started as a programmer at SXSW almost 10 years ago, he was intent on avoiding programming "Sundance's leftovers," and assiduously looked for and found some cinematic voices out there that were doing something truly transcendent and gave them exposure and press at his fest.  And beyond.

Playing currently at the IFC Center is The New Talkies: Generation DIY--a series of films that includes Hannah Takes the Stairs, Kissing on the Mouth (which I'm seeing this evening), Quiet City (based on one of the clips they showed at the panel event made me want to see this film), Funny Ha Ha, Young American Bodies (an episodic web series of Swanberg's), The Puffy Chair, Dance Party, USA, LOL, and more, from August 22 through September 4--a summer's end treat of films that, according to a lot of peers, speak to a generation that hasn't quite seen itself this accurately portrayed in movies until watching these.

Afterwards, a lot of film bloggers that write for indieWIRE and various other filmmakers and fans gathered at a local pub to talk some more about what gets us excited about film.

Agnes Varnum and I hung out with Tom Hall for a bit--what a lovely guy!  He gave us a synopsis of his crazy, but amazing career, as film programmer, producer, and writer (one of my faves), and personally invited me to the Sarasota Film Festival party being held at the Toronto International Film Fest in a couple of weeks.  And there was an invitation in my email box the next morning, amazingly enough.  I would be there in a heartbeat except that I'll be deep into the upcoming IFP Market and blogging for Filmmaker Magazine's web site blog on the Documentary Spotlight programming and events happening from the market and conference.  Can't wait.  A bit of irony in attending this as press since a project I submitted to the market was turned down for the second year in a row.  Bitter?  Um, a little.  Being invited to Sundance with said project salved the wound a bit, as you can imagine.

Also, met and chatted with Michael Tully, Mark Rabinowitz (who ranted all evening about "The Gawker"), Doug Block, Eugene Hernandez, Brian Brooks, Stu VanAirsdale, Karina Longworth (who appeared for a nanosecond--really, I just barely got a glimpse of a small brunette with cats-eye spectacles lurking against the wall and hoping not to be noticed, even though there were several of us who were looking forward to seeing the ever-elusive Spout-mistress), and various other indie film writers and supporters.  It was nice to meet, in person, all of these people whom I've read regularly over the years, written for, or have just been admiring from afar.  We were, oddly enough, a bit shy with one another and everyone felt a bit weird--we are talking about writers, after all.  (I guess it was kind of like meeting someone you've met on an online dating service--lots of charisma in cyberspace, but then, uh oh, real life.  Beer and other alcoholic beverages helped greatly).

The evening (for me, at least) ended with listening to one hell of a conversation between filmmakers, Doug Block and Arin Crumley, as they shared war stories about making movies.  Old guard and new had a lot to say  and said, more than once, that each admired the other's work greatly.  More about my thoughts about Swanberg and co. and, specifically, Kissing in a bit.

Another Festival Fave Hits NYC

On the 14th of September, a beautiful documentary out of South Africa comes to the Village East Cinema.  Louise Hogarth's Angels in the Dust tells the story of Marion Cloete, one of the most magnetic and inspiring characters I've seen in documentary (and that's saying a lot).  Along with her husband, Con, and their twin daughters, she builds and sustains a home for children orphaned by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, some of whom are also infected with the virus.

This is an intimate and moving look at one family in South Africa who sacrificed their comfortable upper middle-class life to help a larger community in dire need--need of care, of education, of counseling, of medical intervention, and most of all, of intense love and opportunity to trust again that makes all the difference to children who have experienced physical, emotional and psychic abuses that would be impossible to overcome otherwise.

I met and befriended Louise in Los Angeles right before she signed a deal with Participant Productions to finish and release the film.  This is not a filmmaker who shies away from controversy; she is relentless in her search for truth and beauty in the most harrowing of circumstances.  I saw the finished film at Full Frame in April where it debuted, and all in attendance were stunned and overwhelmed with emotion.

Louise will be at the opening night screening for a Q&A session.

181 2nd Avenue at 12th  www.city-cinemas.com

"The Monastery" Is Opening in New York!!

You lucky New York City dwellers get a chance to see one of the most beautiful, artful films I've seen in years and is in my top 5 favorite movies of '06-'07. 

The talented first-time feature director, Pernille Rose Gronkjaer, writes that "It has been quite a journey and, to me, opening in NYC is really a dream come true."  After traveling the world and screening in over 40 festivals and winning 11 awards, Mr. Vig and Mother Amvrosija, are making their US theatrical debut.

To learn more about Pernille and the film, please read my interview with her from May when we met for a nice, long chat about her incredible seven year journey making this  gorgeous pic.

The Monastery opens at Film Forum next Wednesday, the 29th.  You really want to see this on a big screen.

New Season at the Burns

There's an exciting new season of first-run films, monthly series, special events, family films and classes (a spanking new education center is currently being built in the village of Pleasantville) at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Westchester.  A reverse-communte draw, it brings people from all over the county and a good number up from the city, as well.  On tap for the fall season:

On the 29th of this month, special guest, Mark Urman, head of THINKFilm's U.S. Theatrical Division will talk to the New York Times' Janet Maslin at a screening of the new documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, directed by David Sington.  You can read a Q&A with the director here as part of the IDA's Docuweek program happening now in Los Angeles.

Thom Powers will be back in the fall to continue his docs-in-progress series that began this summer with a film now titled "Obscene," that will make its debut at the upcoming TIFF.  There'll be a film series of baseball films that includes Field of Dreams, Rookie of the Year, and Kenneth Eng and Joseph Wallace's documentary, Kokoyakyu: High School Baseball.  Another film series entitled "The View from a United Germany: Films Since 1990," includes The Nasty Girl, Run, Lola, Run (one of my all-time faves) and Volker Schlondorff's 2004 film, The Ninth Day.

You still have a chance to catch the tail end of a series of late-night screenings of the films of Takashi Miike.  Saturday night, I saw his Zebraman at the Two Boots Pioneer in Manhattan--genius genre-bending hijinks.

Vicente Rodriguez Ortega will teach "The Language of Film" in a series of classes for adults covering mise-en-scene, cinematography and editing.

And there are the four monthly series: celebrating women filmmakers (a subject near and dear to my heart) with a special outreach program for high school girls; art animation (the beautiful Paprika will screen the 25th of September); and Jonathan Demme, member of the BOD at the Burns, and this year's recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship at June's Silverdocs festival, presents "Rarely Seen Cinema," films  the prolific director has been looking to re-encounter on the big screen.  A discussion led by Demme will follow each screening.

Lots o' fun stuff!  Today it's a dark and rainy day smack in the middle of the dog days so it will probably be a looooong winter--go hide out in the movie theatre.

Today's Brightest Blog

There are a lot of great film bloggers out there whose writing I admire greatly.

But the Bright Lights After Dark blog has got to be one of the most humorous, insightful, and brilliant of them all.

For example, this post from yesterday.

I'm a huge fan.

Yes, But Is Anyone Really Watching?

In today's indieWIRE "On the Web" section, where various bloggers weigh in on what's on their radar at the moment, SpringBoardMedia spouts off on "potential" versus "real" numbers of viewers who will purchase, download or watch a film.  I recently wrote a couple of in-depth posts on Re:Sources regarding what was talked about at Sundance about online distribution and how it's all supposed to create decent revenue for filmmakers and allow audiences hungry for specific content to have easier access to those films through various sites and retailers.

The tracking of real-time statistical data of where a film sells and how many times it's downloaded, who's watching and for how long, etc., is not accurately reported right now in any comprehensive way.  Companies like Mediastile are working on ways to reflect these metrics in a useful way, but it's not quite there yet.  So what we have right now is potential.  Which is great.  But I think online distributors need to adjust the language in their claims about audience--who's subscribed to the service and who's actually purchasing/watching the product.

I subscribe to lots of services and listservs and other online groups, however, I don't really use all those services the way they're meant to be used.  Like most people, I just like to see what's out there.  Unless I'm specifically looking for something or doing research, the chances of me buying or renting something online, at this point, are rare, although I have been renting DVDs from Netflix ever since the service began.

Here's Access to 40 Million--Is it an audience?

Online Shootout, Part Deux, Digital Rights Management

For more discussion and information on selling your film and music content online from the companies spearheading the business models that are working on methods to make marketing and distribution on the web feasible and potentially profitable, click here. 

Online Shootout at Sundance

What I learned at camp this summer:

http://resources.renewmedia.org/2007/08/14/online-shootout-at-sundance/

"La Fabri_K: The Cuban Hip Hop Factory" Now Available on jaman

I met director, Lisandro Perez Rey, at the 2003 Los Angeles Film Festival.  His documentary Beyond the Sea (Mas Alla Del Mar) was playing there and I had just traveled to Cuba a few months before for the International Latin American Film Festival and could think of doing nothing but going back as soon as I could.  At the L.A. fest, I was greeting filmmakers as they arrived and met Li when he came to check in at the Cinema Lounge.  We chatted a bit and he told me that he was in the midst of another production in Havana and would be going back there that summer to shoot.  We continued a correspondence for several weeks after the festival and I ended up going with him to help produce and shoot the story of La Fabri_K, a group made up of two popular hip hop duos, Obsession and Doble Filo.  These poets and musicians came together to make the first self-produced hip hop record ever done in Cuba and the Miami-based arts foundation, Miami Light Project, was helping them to acquire visas to come and do a mini-tour in the States and to be a part of a show at the legendary Apollo Theatre in Harlem where they would share a stage with acts like The Roots, and get to meet some of their heroes like Harry Belafonte and Afrika Bambaataa.

The film explores the local hip hop scene in Havana and has intimate access to the artists, their families and their daily lives in Cuba.  It's also about when politics hamper artists' dreams and what happens when they get caught up (unwillingly) in the morass  and bureaucracy of American/Cuban relations (don't get me started).  Through their music, they explore and share their feelings about their homeland and its relations with the "enemy" that resides within sighting distance from its shores.

Before I moved to New York, I had contacted Vanessa Arteaga when she was at Wellspring Media about the film and about another project on which I was working in the South Pacific.  Unfortunately, around this time, this art house distributor with an incredible film catalog, was going through hard times and would close down shortly thereafter, much to the dismay of the independent film community.  You can read the story here.  (The South Pacific doc bit the dust, too, but no one cared as much about that, except me.)

When I contacted Vanessa again a little over a year later when I was getting ready to move to New York, she had surfaced at jaman and was tasked with curating films from Latin America.  We started talking about La Fabri_K being marketed and distributed on the site.  I checked it out, joined the community and Vanessa sent me the boiler-plate jaman/filmmaker agreement to look over before I spoke to Lisandro about the possibility of distributing the film online. 

We had negotiated and signed contracts with two different distributors who were very hungry for the film and wanted to market, sell and find distribution for it as it was just coming off playing a slot at the International AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2005.  Thanks to programmer, and all-around awesome human being,  Shaz Bennett, who fell in love with this little "homemade" film, it was one of the selections in the Latin Cinema Series that year.  I won't go into the gory details of what happened with these other folks, who basically reneged on the agreements we had and ended up doing exactly zilch for us and the film.  So we were feeling a bit burned.  No money had exchanged hands, it wasn't a financial mess, but the time and effort we spent lining up contracts and sending materials all over the planet was self-funded and we were disappointed, to say the least, when these people just completely bagged--seriously, not even returning emails or phone calls.

When I spoke to Li about jaman and other online distribution sites that were cropping up, he was a bit dubious but decided to look over the agreement.  After speaking with Vanessa, he became convinced that his films might find the perfect home there, and so we signed on with the service.

So here's the link where you can find the films and learn more about this emerging site, which is truly international in scope and is creating an incredible community of filmmakers from around the globe.  And as of a couple of days ago, Mas Alla Del Mar is in the top three most highly-rated and most downloaded films on this online distribution site.

I am working with some folks who will be taking a group down to Havana for the film festival this year in early December.  Stay tuned for more information on how to get to Cuba safely and legally.

The Oscar Qualifying Race in Full Swing for Documentary

August 31 is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' deadline for a documentary film to be eligible for award consideration for the 2007 awards year.  Whether a feature (more than 40 minutes in running time) or a short subject (films 40 minutes, or less, in running time, including all credits), films must have completed their seven day qualifying theatrical exhibition by the last day of this month.  Go here to learn more about "Rule Twelve: Special Rules for the Documentary Awards," one of the hot-button issues in nonfiction filmmaking circles, for the most part because of the byzantine nature of these rules, and the fact that they seem to shift and change with steady regularity.

A nod from the Academy is still the pinnacle prize for a filmmaker and a winner (or even a nominee) can feast on the status of this for years, creating for him/herself opportunities that we all hope for at some point in our careers.

In his post today on All These Wonderful Things, director AJ Schnack covers the news, quite comprehensively, on some of the qualifying films and the competitive landscape they're navigating.  This past year saw a slew of remarkable nonfiction pieces of cinema.  If you live in any of the cities where these films are playing this month, take yourself to the movies and see some extraordinary stuff--the majority of which is by first-time feature directors like Jennifer Venditti and Paul Taylor.  You'll be inspired, moved, enlightened and thrilled by the beautiful stories and calibre of work.

Pinch Hitting at The Reeler

I posted my first postmortem missive from the Sundance Producers Conference today on The Reeler Blog and will have photos and write on more specific issues and personalities here in the next couple of weeks.

Also, coming up on SIM, a new interview with filmmaker and POV Series Producer, Yance Ford.

Cute Name, Nice Site

Still reeling (har, har) from my long weekend at Sundance (even though it's Tuesday already) and am taking my time to digest, for a change, before I post something about that--in fact, other things by me about the Conference will be published sooner on other sites, probably, than on here.  Too many new things have been whizzing past me, I'm a bit on overload these days.

So instead of writing and finishing various articles, writing assignments and postmortems, follow-ups, etc., etc., etc., I was just aimlessly site surfing and came upon Gimundo (I think it's supposed to be said like the Australians say "gidday," meaning Good World.)  Like in Patti Smith's song, "Cartwheels."  Anyway, saw it advertised on The Daily Reel site.  (And that's awesome that Patti Smith has a myspace page.)

So wanted to share--go there, read, contribute, spread it around.

Or maybe just the California sunshine's got me loopy.  I could use some loopy.  Like someone said shortly before the Conference this past weekend was over:  "I could use some Dumb and Dumber."  No aspersions cast, I assure you.

Sundance Producers Conference

I'm currently attending the Producers Conference at the gorgeous Sundance Resort in Utah.  Look for panel discussions and other reports soon both here and at Renew.

I feel very privileged to be here with my doc project, among so many talented narrative and nonfiction filmmakers and all the panelists the program has gathered here this weekend--the very top echelon of producers and executives from the independent film world.

Led by the energetic and intellectually rigorous mind of Geoff Gilmore, Director of the Sundance Film Festival, we participants in the 22nd year of this event get to gather information and make contacts in the key areas of producing:  financing, production and distribution.  Last year, they introduced a focus on documentary production that has been expanded this year into a separate track, allowing nonfiction filmmakers to pursue a more concentrated focus.

The other main focus is on issues regarding creative production (oh yeah, we're artists, too) which will enable both participants and panelists alike, in Gilmore's words, "to come away with an expanded sense of the possible."  I like that.

Anyway, huge joy to be here in this beautiful environment with others, both neophyte and long-time pro, who are tasking themselves with not only making incredible pieces of cinema, but who are taking this opportunity to envision all the issues confronting the independent producer, staying inspired and on top of their game.

More soon.