Still in Motion

DocPoint Wrap-Up

On my last full day in Helsinki, I toodled around the city center one more time and then spent the rest of the afternoon in the cinemas.  It was bloody cold that day so a good one to be inside.  By this time, I was actually getting a bit maudlin about the idea of leaving so to cheer myself up, before my first screening at the Maxim, I dipped into the Fazer café (and cake factory) to have a cappuccino, with complimentary caramel, and took in the Saturday crowds gorging themselves on sweets.  I watched in envy as a newborn dove face first, mouth wide open, into a giant creme puff the size of his head.

The Maxim cinema complex is on a lovely, quiet pedestrian street.  (Photo of the theater in the Maxim courtesy of miemo's photostream on flickr.)  I went to see Petteri Saario and Juha Taskinen's, Sergei Verenseisauttaja (Sergei the Healer).  They were showing the 103-minute cut of the film, the second in a trilogy, for the festival but they had made a 120-minute version of this story of a Viena Karelian folklore village.  These tiny villages were silenced during the Soviet era in Finland's history until some of the exiled villagers returned in the early 1990s.  These villages are now home to one of Europe's only surviving indigenous cultures and their survival is, indeed, quite fragile since a lot of the young men will enlist in the Russian army.  Some of the boys from a neighboring village had been sent directly to Chechnya or other war-torn places at 18, Sergei's age at the end of the film.

Saario and Taskinen's film, five years in the making, depicts one of these villages, focusing on the Lesonen family, and their self-sufficient, independent life in Venehjärvi.  One steps back in time to join three generations linked together by a fragile legacy.  Sulo (pictured right) is the oldest inhabitant in the village and is a locally renowned boat carver.  This charismatic elder passes on the folklore, heritage and craft to the younger generations.  Together, he and Sergei build the last boat he will make, a parting gift for the boy.  Sulo's very last masterpiece will be his own coffin as he readies himself to die with humor and intense satisfaction of a life lived on his own terms.  The swooning love affair he has with his second wife, Valentina (he lost his first wife and two of his sons) sent me into paroxysms of joy, especially when he sang love songs to her while they worked side by side cleaning fish, weaving baskets, shearing sheep, making wool.  A fairy tale come to life.

The Sergei of the title is a beautiful, quiet boy; at the film's beginning, he is fourteen, growing up in the middle of the lush, primeval forests of Northern Europe.  He learns the skills needed for survival from his father, Santeri, as well as from the old man, barely uttering a word, yet emanating a tranquility and self-possession that is uncanny, a boy at peace with his world, well-loved by his family.  His father tells us a story of Sergei as a little boy cutting his hand while carving a piece of wood.  He put his other hand over the wound and started quietly uttering an incantation, speaking ancient words he could only know intuitively, a subliminal connection to his ancestral past.  The bleeding stopped and the wound was healed.  The boy picked up his knife and continued to carve. 

I was utterly transported by this film, shot in the most lush and intimate way.  While the subjects themselves tell us about their lives and share their world with us, the filmmakers tell us their story visually and joyfully, gorgeously shot, season by season, year by year.  It's utterly mesmerizing in its pace, soothing and deeply moving.  It is not an easy world to leave--there was a painful, almost bereft sense of longing for a life that I, myself, have never experienced, nor probably ever will.  And yet I was envious of these people, their commitment, their independence, their simple joy at being able to carry on their traditions and way of life.  When the film ends, Sergei is of age and we watch him leave this world to go to a dark and depressing city to work as a welder.  It's never explained why he leaves (if he's employed, is he exempt from army service?), but one wonders whether he will ever return.  His mother and father are the only ones left in the village, guarding the icon and the sanctuary they've dedicated back to the place of their birth.  I long to watch this again, to be transported back to young Sergei's world.

I did, however, leave this world quite abruptly when I entered the ugly world of René, the next film I went to see back at the Bio Rex.  This is an absolutely extraordinary film and will probably be programmed into most domestic festivals I'll attend this year, I'll wager.  The reasons why are many and varied.  It's always a riveting movie-going experience when you fall in love with a film with a protagonist that you loathe.  (My experience of watching Necrobusiness, the film I saw after René, was of a movie I loathed that also had hateful protagonists, including the "journalist" /filmmaker, so I won't bother to write about it here.  Current Affair, anyone?  Let's call it fictional nonfiction.  Great title, though.)

The European Film Academy bestowed its Prix ARTE to the Czech Republic's Helena Trestíková (Marcela) in Berlin last October and presented the award during the 21st European Film Awards Ceremony in Copenhagen, Denmark early last month.  I think what impressed me the most, considering how long Trestíková had been filming this man (20 years from age 17 to 37) is that she's crafted an incredibly economical 90-minute film.  This is a director who comes from a mini-series tradition and to craft a long-form documentary into such a pristine piece of cinema is really a stellar accomplishment.  René is captivating, as well, for its intelligence, both on the part of the filmmaker, but more so on the part of her subject, who realizes and speaks candidly about the mutual relationship he and Trestíková have formed over the years.  Matti Ripatti, the freelance journalist who wrote the DocPoint catalog essay for the strand "Tell Me the Truth," puts it best when he says that, "The line between dramaturgical reshuffling of the truth and distortion is anything but clear."  He goes on to say that, "The particular beauty of this method [shooting one story or subject over a long continuum of time] is that the maker does not need to claim anything verbally, yet still, the reality develops into a metaphor as if by itself; like fiction, it comes to mean something more than apparent at first sight."

When the subject is a storyteller, too, then things become really interesting, for he is just as responsible, complicit in telling his own autobiography, if you will, blithely and candidly exploiting his most stable link to the outside world, a world that in those two decades goes through seismic changes as our world is wont to do.  And yet René Plasil is almost frozen in amber, even as we watch him age.  There were six different DPs shooting this over the years, but the film's strong directorial stamp has a flawlessness and consistency to it that is truly remarkable. 

Cartoons, Curves and the Finnish Sauna

On Friday last I attended one of DocPoint's seminars called AnimaDoc where truth and reality were explored in animated documentary.  It was held in the theater at the exquisite Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma.  A special strand of seven films was programmed for the festival including Ari Folman's brilliant and searing (and Academy Award-nominted) Waltz with Bashir, Jonas Odell's Never Like the First Time! (which we saw at the seminar; a still from the film pictured), Odell's Lies (which just won a Special Jury Prize for Best International Short Film at this year's Sundance), Louise Wilde's My Friend Marjorie, Chris Landreth's Ryan, Zhenchen Liu's Under Construction and Dennis Tupicoff's His Mother's Voice.

Each of these animated nonfiction films deals with some pretty harsh realities (a son's murder, eviction from one's long-time home, the demons of the mind and spirit, and haunting memories) and this was the crux of the seminar.  With Marjut Rimminen, Jonas Odell, Ville Rousu and Sami Laitinen, we explored the possibilities that using animation can open for documentary storytelling, especially with difficult, painful subjects, and what practical, as well as, artistic aspects can be explored, especially with today's technology and sophisticated software.  At the closing, producer/director Sami Laitinen, the CEO of Stereoscape showed the first-ever Finnish S3D documentary.  The borders between techniques and genres have become transparent enough to discover new and innovative ways to reflect "reality."  In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud says, "When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see a face of another; but when you enter the world of cartoon, you see yourself." 

The sun poked its weak head out for about 15 minutes that afternoon so I rushed outside to get a dose on my way back to the Ateneum for a screening of Naisenkaari / Gracious Curves by Kiti Luostarinen from 1997.  This film was part of a program to celebrate this year's Apollo Award winner, Epidem, an independent production company originally founded by film students in 1968 that for almost four decades has helped realize so much of what Finnish documentary is today, backing director-driven nonfiction films since the company's inception.  Epidem was also the first Finnish production house to understand the demands of international funding, producing over 130 films, including those by directors Chris Marker, Iikka Vehkalahti (now commissioning editor for YLE and superstar producer), Pirjo Honkasalo and John Webster.  The DocPoint Apollo award recognizes its  amazing contribution and was bestowed at the opening ceremonies on Tuesday.  Says Timo Korhonen in his catalog essay, "Epidem takes us back to the times when documentaries were less polished, when post-production sound work did not take weeks, and graphics were not unique works of art.  When communication and the defense of the oppressed were key." 

Luostarinen's film is, indeed, timeless in that the life cycle of a woman from infant to little girl, young womanhood to motherhood and on into old age is explored insightfully and boldly, never flinching away from the violence we do ourselves, both psychologically and physically, as we all collude to keep the myth of the perfect woman alive and well.  (That still from the film, by the way, is a special effects trick and very convincing acting, but it is still incredibly shocking to watch).  Surrounded by beautiful nature scenes, real women of all ages, shapes and sizes stand before us naked, ready to try and break the stringent chains of a culture that admires and celebrates only the young and beautiful, where, for many women, our aging faces and bodies have become the enemy we want to eradicate through denigration, invisibility and self-mutilation.  Lusostarinen asks, "Why is everyone talking about how to stay young, and not about how to grow old?"  Because no one wants to talk about it; that's why.  It was nice to see a very diverse audience for this (packed house here, as was almost every screening I attended).  There were equal amounts of men and women, ranging in age from early twenties to late sixties.  But then again, the men were probably only there to look at some naked babes.  Kidding.

That evening, the festival's guests were really in for a treat--we got to experience the authentic Finnish sauna, complete with running naked (albeit, towel-wrapped) in the snow to take dips into the freezing sea.  I walked with a friend from the city center, a lovely 20 minute stroll through some of the gorgeous neighborhoods of this tiny burg, to the island of Uunisaari.  (This incredible photo of the place is courtesy of guillaume's photo stream on flickr.)  A wonderful dinner with flowing beer and wine was served and I got to sit and chat with Finnish filmmaker, Petteri Saario, whose new film, Sergei Verenseisauttaja (Sergei the Healer) I was to see the next day--more about that in my DocPoint wrap up post coming next.

After dinner, the women got the first turn to go get naked and sweaty in the sauna behind the restaurant, our guide into the world of Finnish sauna-ing courtesy of Finnish Film Foundation Managing Director, Irina Krohn.  (The Finns do the saunas co-ed style since their hang-ups being unclothed in front of one another are nil and the sauna is so entwined in the culture, but they politely made concessions for the foreigners.  Many Finns build saunas into the structure of their homes and some have more than one!)  As for my own hang-ups, well, when in Finland. . . .  I also let myself be flaggelated with a bundle of birch leaves (vihta) while lying prone on my stomach by Russian filmmaker, Alexandra Westheimer, director of the stunning Alone in Four Walls.  I, myself, did not partake of running out into the snow to swim in the water.  The sauna and whipping were enough stimulation for me.  It was great fun watching the guys run across the big picture windows of the restaurant on their way to the water a bit later, though.  Needless to say, I slept like a baby that night.

TÄYNNÄ TARMOA / BASKET CASE: A Sports Comedy

One of the most popular films at this year's DocPoint festival was made by a young filmmaker named Oskari Pastila.  Not only has it garnered many rave reviews and a lot of press coverage in his native Finland, but it's got its own attendant lawsuit brewing.  One of the main subject's fathers is threatening to sue for defamation of character.  Pastila just wrote to me and told me it's also  destined for a theatrical release very soon. 

Quite a head-spinning experience for any artist, let alone one who has only done one other film project and had to prep this one in only two weeks' time--the project came sliding onto his radar very quickly a couple of years ago and he took the opportunity and scored big.  No one in Basket Case--Finnish, American, African, or otherwise--comes out looking very good, but that's not the fault of the filmmaker.  The subjects do a grand job of acting like jerks all on their own.  The film merely documents the universal propensity for the mayhem and bad behavior that accompanies unmitigated greed.  One could say it's the anti-Hoop Dreams. 

Basket Case is not a story about fair play, team spirit or the inspiration of young men training to become great athletes.  In the small town of Porvoon Tarmo, the basketball team's new management decides to renovate the entire team during the summer and fall of 2006.  Due to an enticement of a potentially hefty budget (which turns out to be non-existent), they bring twelve non-domestic players to try out for the team, seven of them staying on the roster until the final playoff game of the season.  Things devolve quickly and irrevocably as cultures clash, racism runs rampant, egos collide and promises of fancy apartments, cars, and a persistently elusive washing machine, dematerialize.  With a sharp eye for off-the-wall vérité and a directorial presence that, obviously, garners great trust, Pastila observes these grown men at their absolute worst.  The events of the Korisleague's '06/'07 season have led to a situation in which Finnish basketball finds itself losing whole teams due to having to renegotiate player contracts because of mismanagement.  A morality tale, to be sure.  This one happens to be Monty-Pythonesque in nature--absurd, tragic and very, very funny.  You can watch the trailer and other teasers here.

Post-screening, the director greeted a theater-full of friends, fans and well-wishers and one could tell it was a very proud moment, indeed.  I joined Pastila and his friends and other Finnish filmmakers at a celebratory after party at a local club where Shigeki Tamura's band played into the wee hours.  Tamura did the groovy, jazzy music score for the film.  Kudos also to Jukka Nykänen for sharp and expertly paced editing and lithe and stealthy shooting by Jarno Tahvainen and Janke Öhman.

DocPoint--Helsinki, Finland, Part 2

My first full day in Helsinki started off with a free morning to do some business, visit the Videotheque to screen films and to wander around the city a bit and sight-see by the light of the snow.  Actually, all screenings started in the late afternoon in the theaters so more locals could attend.  This left a lot of breathing room in my schedule which was fab, to say the least, not to mention the extra sleep.

I had a long, lovely lunch meeting with Festival Director, Erkko Lyytinen and Canadian filmmaker, journalist and teacher, Peter Wintonick (who co-directed his latest documentary project, PilgrIMAGE, with his daughter Mira), to discuss bringing a North American program of some sort to DocPoint next year and to talk about the overall landscape of media making and what international festivals can continue to offer in this fast-changing world of ours.

After spending the rest of the afternoon floating through the Finnish Museum of Natural History which was directly across from my hotel (yet another gorgeous building), I joined fellow international guests for dinner for some more conversation at the official festival "klubi."  After dinner, I went back to Bio Rex for another DocPoint tradition, a screening of a silent movie concert.  This year's offering was a British film from 1916, Battle of the Somme, a famous battle captured on celluloid from WWI.  The film was accompanied by live music performed by DJ and re-mix master, Jori Hulkkonen.  The 35mm film (I was close enough to the booth to hear the whir of the projector, a sound one doesn't hear too often anymore) was made by Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell to boost British support for the war and to keep those enlisted men coming.  It's a piece of supreme, and quite effective, propaganda crafted to feed the hungry war machine.  The few fighting scenes that are shown are totally staged and the huge number of fatalities is never mentioned in any of the cards that narrate the piece, nor is the incompetence and negligence of the high military command ever mentioned.  Plus ça change.  For contemporary audiences, however, it garnered very strong reactions and is, in fact, in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.  Hulkkonen's haunting, multi-layered and  sensitive original score, all performed quite economically on small synthesizers and MacbookPros, helped transport the, mostly young, audience back to a place and time where war and death on this scale had never been imagined.

The festival's other special screenings were just as engaging and included Suomi Post Mortem, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jan Harlan's Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Yung Chang's multiple-award winner, Up the Yangtze, and Mohammad Shirvani's 7 Blind Women Filmmakers.

The next day, a small group of us were invited to visit the Finnish Film Foundation (pictured right), a state-of-the-art facility and the major funder and producer of documentaries and feature films, responsible for exporting Finnish film works out into the larger world.  It was a truly international gang which included programmers, festival directors and commissioning editors from Estonia, Poland, Romania, Syria, Sheffield (UK), Sunny Side of the Doc (France), Turkey and Norway.  And a lone Yank, yours truly.  I'm doing something right, apparently, to find myself in this company.

Irina Krohn, the Managing Director, welcomed us and gave us a tour of the beautiful black box SES Auditorium located within the complex which can be rented out to anyone and can screen just about any format you can throw at the projectionist.  The Foundation is an independent entity supervised by the Department for Cultural Policy and all personnel are nominated for their posts.  There are three main channels of financing for film projects in Finland:  the Foundation, the television broadcasters and something called AVEK, a fund where artists donate some or all of the money they earn through copyrights of their work.  This is gathered into a collective pot and goes towards education and filmmaking support--individual earnings go into a fund that can be shared.  Maybe once US filmmakers can earn some money from their artistic projects (and put food on the table), something like that can be started here.  One can dream.

After this, I went into high gear and scooted from one screening to another, not only to check out all the beautiful venues, but to share the cinema experience with local audiences.  I headed to the Ateneum Art Museum (bookstore pictured).  Each building in this town is more beautiful than the last, a true aesthete's delight.  I caught the last part of the student films that were being shown from the Finnish film schools.  It's exciting to see works from young filmmakers still forming their visions of the world and honing their storytelling chops.  All were quite good, exceedingly proficient, and artfully produced.  Standouts for me were Antti Tuomikoski's Quite Expensive Shit and Liinu Grönlund's Souvenir.  Jani Peltonen found a superb subject in Tauno Keto for her fine piece, The Great Mill, and Elina Talvensaari tells her touching story of indigent people at a drop-in center by focusing on The Invisible Hand. 

Next I hit the Bristol, another incredibly beautiful cinema for a short piece called Meaning of Life by Finnish filmmaker, Visa Koiso-Kanttila, only to find myself in the borough of Queens!  Koiso-Kanttila is one of Finland's most prolific filmmakers but works close to the bone in creating quite intimate portraits.  He made Meaning of Life, a poetic 11-minute film shot on S16mm black and white, HDCAM and Digibeta with Dolby Digital stereo sound (!!) about people's ideas on how they seek happiness and what the "good life" represents to these inhabitants of Queens, New York, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants with very little to show in the way of material success or any outer vestiges of the "American Dream."  Visa studied at the New School in 2000-2001, and this short, which sat in a drawer for many years, is his tribute to that experience.

Quiet City

I'm currently reading Alex Ross' incredible book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.  On the plane ride home from spending the week in Helsinki, Finland as an invited guest of the 2009 DocPoint Documentary Film Festival, I was (serendipitously) reading his chapter on "The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius," the most famous composer Finland ever produced and a man who played both a symbolic and active role in the drive toward Finnish independence, which was finally achieved in 1917, less than a hundred years ago.  In this chapter, Ross cites a 1993 essay of novelist Milan Kundera's in his collection Testaments Betrayed, where he anatomizes the more "peripheral" of the European cultures.  In talking about his native Czechoslovakia, Kundera could also be speaking about Finland when he says, "The small nations form 'another Europe.'  An observer can be fascinated by the often astonishing intensity of their cultural life.  This is the advantage of smallness: the wealth in cultural events is on a 'human scale;' everyone can encompass that wealth."  The country's government invests quite substantive sums of funding in its orchestras, opera houses, film programs and national arts schools.  The annual Finnish expenditure on the arts is roughly two hundred times per capita what the US government spends on our own national "endowment" for the arts. 

Like Sibelius, today's Finnish filmmakers and artists forge vital relationships with their native land while simultaneously creating and discovering their individual voices and expressing them in new forms.  There is an imposing body of work that comes out of this small country (and the region, in general) that is integral to the overall oeuvre of nonfiction filmmaking, in some sense (and thus, my growing obsession with nascent film festivals in other tiny places, but more on that later). 

There is a general feeling of disquiet and disconsolation, of something irrevocably lost that this culture yearns for, something that's vanished or, perhaps, never really existed.  There is a sort of malaise couched in a bizarre sense of humor and their way with non-verbal, visually rich storytelling is completely captivating to this viewer from a brash, noisy, show-off culture that talks incessantly until we aren't saying much of anything of interest at all.  The Finns also have this weird way of reflexively denigrating themselves while simultaneously expressing great pride.  People would always look surprised when I complimented their city, their sensibility, their style, as if flattery were a bit unseemly, but pleasing nonetheless.  And as for the time of year in which the festival is held, the darkest, coldest, longest season, well, it makes perfect sense when you realize that a festival of domestic and international cinema brings a true respite from almost constant night (this did, admittedly, take its toll after only one week, so I can't imagine months and months of having no sunshine).  The cinemas were full of locals escaping into worlds upon worlds, a lot of them pretty dark, as well.  But as was seen in the most popular films, there was much laughter and delight, especially when they got to laugh at themselves.  The warm, cozy, pretty cinemas provided the perfect refuge for drifting into the luminous world of film.

The opening night ceremonies were the wackiest I've ever seen.  They started early at 6:00 p.m. which was helpful for my jet lag.  The Bio Rex theater complex was the main festival headquarters and the largest cinema where most premieres were held.  To open the festivities, the 8-minute Now and Now directed by Pekka Uotila was screened, a beautiful collage using the oldest surviving film clips shot in Helsinki interspersed with new images shot by the cinematographer in the same locations, paying homage to both the moving image and the traditional movie camera.  After welcoming words from Executive Director, Jari Matala, the opening speech was delivered by new Festival Director, Erkko Lyytinen, where he spoke about his excitement about what our filmmakers (he's one himself) can tell us about the world, and more importantly, with what motive.  By inviting filmmaker, Nick Broomfield, to come and teach the Master Class and show a retrospective of his films (a DocPoint tradition), and calling this program "Tell Me the Truth," Lyytinen's objective is to invite audiences to question the "honesty" of both subject(s) and filmmaker in presenting their collaborative true stories. 

Then came the wacky part:  because the "Opening Ceremony was spiced by Rock the Pole," all the themes of the festival were presented by lithe, young women pole-dancing, interspersed with bouts of sitting on a couch and eating pizza and watching the telly.  We went to Italy, India and back home to native Finland all via the pole dance.  Impressive.  And, um, quite new.

The opening night film was a world premiere called The Living Room of the Nation by Jukka Kärkkäinen which captures the lives of Finns in captivity--the four walls of their homes.  They philosophize incessantly, inviting us into their interiors, both structural and emotional.  According to the catalog's description, the film combines all the "traditional Finnish virtues: forced silence, enacted humility and artificial modesty."  It's hilarious and very, very moving and by the audience's reaction, it touched deep reserves of how they see themselves as a people.  An homage to Swedish filmmaker, Roy Andersson, the film, like Andersson's (fictional) Songs from the Second Floor, is a series of scenes portraying a sort of universal decay or social breakdown through the trials and tribulations of the central protagonists (all male).  Kärkkäinen uses the same static camera, recording essentially one framed shot per scene, each scene quite long, very stylized and beautifully filmed.  In their deadpan detachment, they become quite comical sketches of existential angst and searing loneliness.  So lonely, in fact, that one is not quite sure if the director, himself, hasn't stepped away from the rolling camera once in a while and gone for a cup of coffee.  But with only the camera's eye silently watching, his subjects allow themselves to give intensely intimate performances.  The director actually has known these people for a long time and befriended them over the years he's been shooting; so, in fact, it is a collaborative endeavor and speaks deeper truths than strict vérité ever could.  Like using animation to tell sensitive or unspeakable stories, this stylized way of storytelling can be just as deeply truthful, allowing revelations of how we are when we feel we're not being observed by another human being, safe behind the barricades of our most private spaces.  I hope to screen this here in New York soon--just looking for a space. 

More thoughts and impressions on more films in a bit. . . .   Sorry, gotta sleep.

artdaily.org Has the Skinny on MoMA's 2nd Annual Doc Month

Just flew in from Helsinki, Finland a few hours ago.  I had an absolutely amazing time--what a beautiful place.  I will be blogging over the next few days about my experiences there and review the many wonderful films I saw at the '09 Docpoint festival.  I'll also share what might be on tap for next year's iteration. 

So, I'm horribly jet lagged and trying to calm down so I can go to sleep since it's now about five in the morning for me (argh!), but wanted to link my site to artdaily.org's article about the upcoming Doc Fortnight doings at MoMA for their 2nd Annual Doc Month (Feb.).  Click here to read their comprehensive article and to link through to the MoMA site for more info on the schedule and ticket purchasing.

Also, just a quick mention before I nod off since the week promises to begin with a bang:  this Wednesday, the 28th, I will be moderating this month's DocuClub run by Arts Engine.  We'll be showing a work-in-progress on a really wonderful project, Augusta Palmer's The Hand of Fatima.  Click here to view all the details.  I hope you can come out and view the film and participate in the post-screening confab with the director at The Tank at 7:00.

A big kiitos to all my Docpoint friends!

The News from Durham

Festival passes are now on sale for the 2009 edition of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (April 2 - 5) in Durham, North Carolina.  With the departure of its leader, Nancy Buirski, last year, this regional festival will be going through a lot of changes, but for documentary makers and fans, it is four days of substantive nonfiction programming, lively Q&As, bar stool networking and low-key and intimate parties with great food and great live music from local musicians.  The festival has a particularly special place in my heart since that's where this blog was born almost two years ago.  I come away from this film event hugely inspired.

This year, the festival's Career Award will be given posthumously to filmmaker St. Clair Bourne, who died suddenly in December of '07 at the age of 64.  Over the course of several decades, Bourne produced and directed more than forty  films.  Sam Pollard will curate a selection of Bourne's work for the festival and says that, "Saint was a mentor to many of us young producers who were trying to establish our careers, . . . always there with fresh insights into how we could make our work better." 

Filmmaker, Steve James, director of the seminal Hoop Dreams, will curate a series of sports films for the festival's '09 thematic program, This Sporting Life.  "When Full Frame approached me about curating a series on sports films, it took me two seconds to say yes," James says.  "I've been a fan of how Full Frame selects a topic each year to do a series of films around.  It challenges the viewer to engage with documentaries both thematically and historically, something that doesn't happen enough in the festival world."  James and Peter Gilbert received the 2008 Full Frame Inspiration Award for their film At the Death House Door. 

Through February 6, the festival is accepting applications for the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant created by Ian Olds in memory of filmmaker and friend, Garrett Scott, another one taken too  soon.  The grant funds first-time documentary makers for travel to and accommodation at the fest and recipients (usually two or three are chosen) are given an all-access pass and an opportunity to participate in master classes and be mentored by experienced filmmakers.  One of last year's recipients, Rebecca Richman Cohen (War Don Don), says that the grant "offered a valuable, early endorsement, and it helped increase my social networks.  For a first time filmmaker, that sort of encouragement means a great deal." 

Visit the festival's site (the re-design looks great!) to learn more.

TV Mole

On Shooting People's bulletin yesterday, member Nicola Lees introduced her new web-based venture.  I think it's great, something I've been specifically looking for, and so wanted to call attention to it here, as well, since my international co-production education is in full swing.  This seems like an exceedingly useful site to bookmark.  Here's her message:

"I have just launched TV Mole, which is designed to help you get your factual programmes commissioned [documentary programming/reality TV, to us Yanks], whatever your level of experience.  There are three parts:

Inspiration - articles, links, videos, interesting events, trends, multi-platform content, new books and quirky happenings from around the world.  The archives can be searched under arts, science, history, lifestyle, documentary and religion (click on the genre headings on the right side of the page).

Information - links to useful US and UK industry resources, audience figures, commissions, commissioning moves, channel briefs and upcoming conferences. There will also be interviews with commissioners and industry insiders, and case studies of successful pitches. Let me know if there is anyone specific you'd like to hear from or if you have a story you'd like to share.

How To - a series of articles on how to generate ideas, find talent, write a proposal, pitch and find the right commissioning editor.  Read them all as a masterclass, or dip in and out for a refresher. Find them archived under Development Tips and Commissioning Tips.

There is lots to explore already and I am adding new stuff everyday.  If there is something specific you need but don't see, please ask.

I hope you find it interesting, if you do, please bookmark it, subscribe (click on the orange RSS button at the bottom of the page), and pass it on to anyone else who might find it useful."

ROUGH AUNTIES at Sundance

I wanted to give a personal congratulations to filmmaker, Kim Longinotto, who will be US- debuting her latest film at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition.  Two of the film's subjects, traveling all the way from South Africa, will be joining Longinotto at the festival.  (Pictured: Longinotto, second from left, with her subjects, her crew and, standing front row right, Women Make Movies' Debra Zimmerman, the filmmaker's North American distributor, at the Rough Aunties world premiere at the IDFA this past November.  Photo courtesy of indieWIRE.) 

I had the great privilege of sitting down with Longinotto in London this past summer at the post-house where she was putting the final touches on the film and preparing to unleash her latest nonfiction gem on the world.  Rough Aunties is the story of how five extraordinary women (two white, three black) band together to help heal the children of post-apartheid South Africa.  Through their organization, they protect and care for the abused, neglected and forgotten children of Durban.  Rough Aunties was recently acquired for broadcast by HBO Documentary Films, and was produced by Rise Films' Teddy Leifer and Paul Taylor, the team behind the extraordinary award-winning We Are Together. 

Read my conversation with this prolific storyteller and exceedingly generous and spirited woman here.

The Making Your Media Matter Conference '09. And More.

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).

STOP SMILING's Year in Movies

Ever since reading Jack Shafer's article on Slate about his "favorite magazine" Stop Smiling in 2006, I've been a fan, too.  It's informed the way I conduct my own in-depth interviews and concentrates on much that is near and dear to my heart because of the many reasons Shafer states in his love letter to this Chicago-based arts and culture magazine. 

Shafer:  ". . . Stop Smiling is smart.  It's idiosyncratic.  It's a little like Dave Eggers' old magazine Might in that it's beautiful to look at, only it's irony-free.  And it brims with the romanticism for magazines that Harold Hayes applied to Esquire, Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter squeezed into Spy, and Louis Rosetto drenched Wired with.  . . .  And the miracle of the magazine is that it does most of its magic with interviews!"

Their web site is equally as engaging and just downright classy.  As we're on the cusp of the big doings in Park City, Utah and festival and awards season picks up full-swing, I wanted to call attention to their unique look back at film in '08.  They've compiled all of their online film coverage over the course of the past year into one column and let their writers speak for themselves about what, in cinema, excited, engaged, intrigued and made them sit up and take notice.  To take a look at this  non-traditional "best of" list, click here. 

Hopefully, this year they'll cover more of what's happening in nonfiction film to add to their stellar canon.  Ehem.

Reaching Out and Hooking Up in '09

I'm being approached more and more to consult and help produce nascent documentary projects using new media technologies and alternate platforms for sharing media virally through crowdsourcing (aka, open sourcing).  It's an interesting and challenging variation on the usual pre-pro discussions.  The fact that these discussions are happening pre-pro is an important indicator, in and of itself, I think.

This may be the year when we see the ideas and strategies that gurus like Lance Weiler, Scott Kirsner and Woody Benson have been implementing and sharing in their respective "labs" and projects for the past several years being utilized by more and more filmmakers, now more desperate than ever to realize viable revenue streams for their artistic endeavors.  In fact, the three had a lively convo this past Monday about the year in tech and entertainment and share their thoughts on what's ahead in '09.  You can listen to their conference call off the podcast Weiler has posted on The Workbook Project in his TCIBR series.  (Illustration courtesy of The Institute for the Future of the Book.  I'm writing one now; there better be a future for them.)

The folks over at the wonderful Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) have their deadline coming up (Jan. 30) for their 2009 Producers Initiative for New Media Technologies, the third year they have been given funding to bring eight creative teams to San Francisco to participate in a residency that connects "independent producers and their socially relevant content to emerging models of storytelling and distribution," based on developing and prototyping a multi-platform project inspired by, or based on, a significant documentary project.  For some samples of the kinds of projects they take on and for a good dose of just pure-D(oc) inspiration, you can click here to watch videos of last year's projects.  Great stuff.

I've been working with artists for decades now, producing content in all forms of media from coffee-table art books to funky fashion photo shoots/installations with lots of taxidermy (don't ask), and everything in between, and one thing that hasn't changed is the desire to retain artistic integrity in what's presented to the world in your name.  Despite, or maybe because of, all the razzle-dazzle and excitement over these new media opportunities, the impetus to stay true to that artistic vision is more important than ever.  This week's report from Worldchanging highlights an article on The Canary Project, and while it's more an off-the-grid/Internet project, meaning more physically than digitally representational, I think it speaks beautifully to this artistic/social relevancy issue that crops up for many media makers that are struggling with how their work can fit into all these various scenarios right now and still maintain artistic integrity and creative heft.

I'm very interested in using this space this year to highlight and celebrate any creative out there working in nonfiction storytelling striving to implement something along these lines, so drop a line and share what you're working on.  I have a small queue of stories I'll be posting about, but there's a lot of movement out there and I'd like to know all about it.  Share, share.

Watch FULL BATTLE RATTLE on NatGeo

At 9:00 p.m. on Monday, January 12, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber will have their TV broadcast debut on the National Geographic Channel with their award-winning nonfiction film Full Battle Rattle.  FBR is a doc about life inside the US Army's "Iraq Simulation" in California's Mojave Desert.  The film tells the story of a very real war, but before soldiers go overseas to that war, they go through a rotation in a virtual Iraqi town that the US Army has spent a billion dollars building for the purpose of feeling what it's really like over there.  This fictional place is populated with hundreds of Iraqi role-players hired to live there and in three week rotations, they encounter groups of enlisted men and women before they deploy to the real McCoy.  Moss and Gerber follow one of these battalions through a complete rotation and it's a wild ride.

David Edelstein of New York Magazine calls it, "An indelible vision of modern war.  Altmanesque tragicomedy," a very fine and brilliantly concise take on what these filmmakers meant to do.   Also this from Richard Woodward from the Wall Street Journal:  "No documentary I have seen better portrays the mutual suspicions and resentments of Americans and Iraqis.  I still don't know whether to laugh or cry."  I actually laughed a lot--the film is hilarious in the most surreal way.  As well, I shed a tear watching young soldiers board a plane, leaving frightened families behind as they go off to battle.  It's an artfully done film in every way.

Moss and Gerber had their festival debut last February at the Berlin International Film Festival, won the Special Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin last March and released theatrically at New York's Film Forum in July.  Their latest festival appearances have been in Amsterdam at the IDFA, at Sheffield in the UK and at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano in Havana, Cuba last month.  Quite a year, guys, wow. 

Check back on their web site for more festival screenings and news of an impending DVD release some time this year.  Read my in-depth interview with the filmmakers on the Shooting People site by clicking here.  And be sure to tune in to NatGeo on Monday!

INSIDE THE CIRCLE and PLANET B-BOY Screen on MTV

For my first post of the new year, I'm thrilled to report that two red-hot dance docs--Marcy Garriott's Inside the Circle and Benson Lee's Planet B-Boy--will have their broadcast debuts on MTV this Sunday, January 11.  Both films will be playing on the channel throughout the week.

Here's the sched (all times are both PST/EST):

Sunday, January 11, Inside the Circle plays at 9:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.; Planet B-Boy plays at 11:00 a.m. and midnight.  On Monday, the 12th, Inside the Circle plays at 1:00 p.m.  Wednesday, the 14th, Inside the Circle plays at 10:00 a.m.; Planet B-Boy plays at 1:30 a.m. and 8:00 a.m.  And on Thursday, the 15th, Inside the Circle plays at 8:00 p.m. 

Both of these exciting and vibrant films have compelling stories and characters and the directors (both of whom also shot their films) do an amazing job of capturing the wild b-boy rites and rituals that take place in clubs and streets around the world, interweaving tender and sensitive stories of being a young man in search of identity in this challenging world of ours.  These young men make a stand--with a vengeance--through dance.

Got to also give a shout-out to Force Theory for the massive wall of sound design they did for B-Boy.  And to learn more about Garriott's long, life-changing journey making her incredible rite-of-passage film, you can read my interview with her from last year by clicking here. 

Watch Lee's trailer here and Garriott's here.  Happy new year.  Here's to lots of dancing in the streets in '09.