I just returned from my second Full Frame Documentary Festival, once again inspired and awed by the fine work nonfiction filmmakers are creating worldwide. It was a great program this year, as it always is, but it wasn't without its scheduling glitches, its annoyingly pokey shuttle loop and a few horrendously uncomfortable and unwieldy venues that have just got to go, people, seriously.
But there was local hospitality guru Giorgio's food (and plenty of it--you don't go hungry in Durham), fantastic and interesting films of which I will share my thoughts and feelings in the coming days, wonderful company, and lots of swell parties and after-hours drinking. In other words, the usual mayhem when fiercely creative minds converge on a small town with nary a McDonald's in sight. Had plenty of interesting debates and conversations, saw lots of friends and made some new ones and, generally, had a ball. Some of these debates were about the jurying that goes on at domestic festivals and about how, disturbingly, insular that system is becoming. It really is step-outside-the-box time in this regard if this community will want to continue to be taken seriously in the larger context of the international nonfiction scene. We're moving down not so smart paths and it's starting to show in the work that's being produced in the name of getting docs to play theatrically as viable box office entities.
The title of this short post is from something that Ariel Dorfman said in his tribute speech to departing festival head, Nancy Buirski, who was there throughout to give this festival she's lovingly grown for the past decade of her life her own send-off with a curated program and quiet support. This was opening night right before they screened Trumbo, another defiant gardener. I expect this festival to change greatly in the next five years or so; time will tell what kinds of changes those will be. Should be exciting. Or not.
So back to the defiant gardens speech: Dorfman was expressing the idea that these "gardens" grow from filmmakers giving audiences a voice and a forum for deep thought and provocation, and audiences, in turn, giving filmmakers the same, creating a dialogue rich in support, encouragement, critique and, sometimes, a hue and cry, together creating potential for growing a community into something both nutritionally sound and beautiful. Of course, Dorfman was a hell of a lot more articulate than I am here at midnight on Sunday, hung over and sweating in my overheated room writing a bit after emerging from four straight days of film-gazing inside darkened theaters. Truth be told, I'm a bit dizzy with all the mulching going on in my head and heart. More in the next couple of days about Full Frame.
In the meantime, please read AJ Schnack's current great piece on two Katrina films that played the fest, one in competition, one not: Ed Pincus' and Lucia Small's Axe in the Attic (of which I've written favorably a few times since I saw its debut at the New York Film Festival in the fall and, full disclosure, have become close friends with one of its directors) and Tia Lessin's and Carl Deal's and Kimberly Rivers Roberts' Trouble the Water, a film that troubled me a bit for exactly the same reasons it does AJ (and Yance Ford, with whom I had a passionate conversation about this film). If you click on the link of the film's name, maybe you can figure out what's missing on their, oddly blank, imdb page (forget a credit, how about a name). I don't know; I smell a law suit if things aren't addressed properly now in the credit department. The film's winning a lot of big festival prizes (it won three at the awards ceremony that took place this afternoon including the Anne Dellinger Grand Jury Award) and might have a chance of making some money at the box office--after all, the mighty Moore is attached. The made-for-TV touch of the two protagonists having their baby while at the Sundance festival this year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day has already made this an epic story in more ways than one.
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