Still in Motion

Middle East Focus at Sheffield 2010

In the current issue of DOX Magazine, just released and currently available at the EFM lounge at the Berlinale marketplace, I have three articles published which I will "reprint" here on this blog.  Even though these festivals happened in the autumn of 2010, I think the themes are still pertinent enough to share now.  I hope you agree:

As part of Sheffield Doc/Fest’s extensive and impressive program this year, there was a strand that focused on the Middle East, a place rife with underground work.  While some of these films are certainly getting a bit of play at some of the larger Middle East fests, making and exhibiting independent documentary in the Arab world is a challenge in several distinct ways.  Even with new film funds developing and alternative avenues emerging for exhibition, oftentimes, there is severe political and social censorship with which filmmakers from the region have to contend. How successful the outcome of certain projects is up for debate, for quite a few pieces are unpolished, filled with the kind of “gaffes” of which most Western filmmakers (and audiences) are highly critical.  We must also remember, however, that a lot of these important and timely stories never get the appropriate professional support to help enhance their "market-readiness."  Nonetheless, it is important that these films get some play outside their own region at high-profile festivals, and in this case it was thanks to expansive programmers like Hussain Currimbhoy that they played at Sheffield.

The Middle East Focus strand at Doc/Fest 2010 showcased ten films from Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Iran and Tunisia.  There were two feature-length films that were particularly striking, but for entirely different reasons.  While Zeina Daccache’s 12 Angry Lebanese: The Documentary is exceedingly well produced and executed, Mohammad Ali Atassi’s Waiting for Abu Zayd  is not.  In fact, at its conclusion, Atassi’s film devolves into a philosophical argument between the journalist and his subject, Atassi’s a frustrated off-camera voice expressing bewilderment to Zayd about the intellectual’s refusal to return to his native Egypt after 13 years of exile.  It’s an unintentionally morbid conclusion to what amounts to the only extensive documentation of Zayd’s life.

The two films have some palpable reverberations with one another since both say a lot about the constant struggle with creating contemporary meaning out of ancient Qur’anic traditions of Islam, and the complex social morés (and severe social restrictions) of being a good and faithful Muslim today.  In both cases, the films concentrate on these principles through interaction with state “criminals,” or exiles, in Zayd's case.

Fierce and fesity theatre director, Zeina Daccache, sets up Lebanon’s first prison-based drama project in Roumieh Prison, one of the most overcrowded penitentiaries.  The facility, built for 1,500 inmates, holds almost 4,000.  Over the course of a year and half, she molds a group of 45 actors plucked from the prison population and stages an adaptation of Reginald Rose’s teleplay from 1957, 12 Angry Men.  The story takes place in the confines of a deliberation room with 12 jurors deciding the case of a boy who is being charged for murdering his father. There is one man who decides to buck the unanimous vote of “guilty” which leads to a passionate interplay between notions of innocence and guilt.  As the prisoners themselves analyze all of the motivations of their individual characters, they start to work out deeply embedded personal, familial and social issues, all guided by Daccache in a magnificent performance of her own.  She stubbornly stays with her charges through all of their injurious self-doubts, through intense resistance to commit to the rigors of rehearsal, and the intimidating exposure of performance.  We learn immediately about the crimes these men committed, but the reasons why they find themselves behind bars (some for life) always surprise.  Yes, some blame their upbringing, their parents, their surroundings, but most reveal that the foibles of their own personalities are the “culprits” that led them to lose their way, resulting in  giving each of them much agency in their attempts at self-understanding.

The film documents Daccache’s work inside the prison, spending most of its time in the rehearsal / therapy process.  Monologues and song and dance routines that detail the prisoners’ life experiences are created and added to the spine of Rose's original play. Seen by many influential people in Lebanese government, the play (and the film) helped put into action a law from 2000 that was never enforced, which offers reduced sentences for good behavior. Two months after the staging of the play in which the characters talk about the need for the law's actual implementation, Lebanon’s Justice Ministry began approving reduced sentences.  Certainly, the existing structure of the original play, the play within the play, and the structure of Daccache’s CATHARSIS program (essentially therapy through enacting drama), has enhanced the dramaturgical work of this exhilarating documentary.  But the heart of the matter resides in the ways in which the inmates interact with the camera lens, with superb shooting by Jocelyne Abi Gebrayel, and sensitive and graceful editing by Michele Tyan. It is a focused and satisfyingly contextualized effort.

Syrian journalist and human rights activist, Mohammed Ali Atassi, who followed his protagonist for six years, is not as narratively successful in his film portrait of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd in Waiting for Abu Zayd.  A brilliant and outspoken liberal theologian and intellectual, Zayd wrote several books challenging institutionalized interpretations of the Qur’an and Islam. Zayd was the victim of a ludicrous court battle that labeled him an apostate, resulting in his exile from his native Egypt. Atassi follows Zayd as he tours, lectures and comes face to face with a tightly controlled Middle Eastern press. One television station at which he is interviewed is owned by Saudi Arabians; any criticism of Wahhabism (the country’s dominant faith, and an austere form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of Qur’an) is a serious breach, and Zayd is told this several times before he appears on air.  But clearly at that point in his life, he was a man with nothing more to lose.  In 1995, he had been banned from his native country, an enemy of the powers that control traditional Islamic practices and laws, and Egypt’s religious authorities forcibly divorced him from his beloved wife, Cairo University professor, Ibtihal Younes.

Subsequently, Zayd spent his time in exile writing books and raging eloquently in public debates, calling for a more humanist, modern approach to being a faithful Muslim. For the last several years of his life (he died in July of 2010, two months after the film was completed), he resided in Leyden in the Netherlands, where he continued to give conferences and public debates about his positions, which hardly appear to be so radical in any other place outside of the fundamentalist regime in which he resided.

The film is enhanced by fiery testimonials from Younes (pictured left with Zayd), and Zayd’s friend, Mohammad Hakem, a leftist political activist and student leader (who has also passed away since the film was made). But films about thinkers and intellectuals, particularly one as straightforward as this (and feature-length at that), pose enormous challenges to both the maker and the audience.  In essence, it fails as a cohesive film, broken awkwardly into aspects of a TV journalism profile, personal diary, and poetic ode to an indomitable spirit.  Atassi’s homage to Zayd captures the man’s humor and humanity but the forays into song, strange montage, and other filmic “effects” throughout the piece ultimately create distance from the subject, instead of providing valuable context.  More importantly, a greater understanding and contextualization of Zayd’s surreal journey into exile is sacrificed. 

Near the end of the film, knowing full well the propensity of the media (and, perhaps, Atassi) to lionize him in some grossly inaccurate way, Zayd states, “I need to be modest so that our leaders can learn modesty.  The intellectual who claims ownership of the Truth is the other leg of the dictator.  When an intellectual claims to own the Truth, he becomes the dictator’s servant.”

 

For more information on the Sheffield festival and market, and to keep up to date on deadlines for this year’s fest, which moves from autumn to summer (8 – 12 June 2011), visit the web site at http://sheffdocfest.com/.

 

THE GREEN WAVE: Tweets From a Revolution

This review was written for Hammer to Nail and will be posted there very soon, technical difficulties.  The store manager is a bit busy right now since he has a film in Park City, too.  However, in the interests of time since it's playing at Sundance now, here is my review of The Green Wave:

 

“Iranians, it was once said, are afflicted by a unique strain of melancholy: Those who live in Iran dream of leaving, while those who were exiled dream of going back.  . . . A country like Iran that has repeatedly been subjected to public heartbreak over the last few decades -- most notably the loss of over 200,000 native sons in the ruinous eight-year war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- naturally confronts the self-inflicted death of a child of privilege with mixed feelings.” 

-- On the suicide of Alireza Pahlavi, the youngest son of the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.  From “Persia’s Little Prince” by Karim Sadjadpour, published in the 7 January 2011 edition of Foreign Policy.

 

It’s all well and good for us to complain about the privacy issues we’re all risking as we compulsively, and publicly, update the mundanity of our lives.  That doesn’t seem to stop a lot of us from jamming the ionosphere with the latest posts and tweets about what we had for breakfast, how we’re feeling that day, or the latest triumphant monetary goal on Kickstarter.  But what if these tools—our blogs, tweets and posts—were the only ways in which we could communicate when we were in real trouble?  When no one from “the outside world” had any idea that the leaders whom we live under, in whom we place all of our faith and hope that our individual lives matter, had turned against us, were silencing us by cutting off our phone lines, our SMS feeds, our internet connections?  And were brutalizing and killing us in the streets.

In its last presidential elections, the citizenry of Iran experienced a profound deception.  Thus, the beginning of 2009 saw a revolution from mostly young Iranians who were placing all their hopes for change on the upcoming elections that June.  A peaceful, non-violent movement called the Green Wave was fueled by the modern modes of communication.  Journalists, lawyers, activists and students started blogs that challenged the status quo, calling for every citizen of Iran to personally participate in much-needed change by getting themselves to polling stations and casting their vote.  The groundswell of excitement was abetted by the fact that there was every indication that Mir Hossein Mousavi would garner a sure-fire victory over the incumbent, ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, on June 12, 2009, Ahmadinejad, who has the full and public support of Iran’s spiritual leader, Ali Khameni, declared victory with a majority vote.

Ali Samadi Ahadi’s fourth film, The Green Wave, competing for the World Cinema Documentary jury prize at Sundance this year, begins as a calmly narrated, fairly traditional documentary.  The story is meticulously set up for the viewer, the omniscient narrator speaking in unaccented English in a clearly modulated voice. Through talking head interviews and slickly produced, precisely narrated animated scenes, the story of this second stolen election is revealed. The careful detail, the reliance of first-person accounts, the tone and mood of the country and the people at the time is explicitly recounted.  Which makes the onslaught of the most horrid human rights violations that follow all the more shocking and devastating, whether it’s directly from live footage or from recreated animations, and gives this documentary its urgency as a powerful testimony to a revolution solely documented by the victims of a vicious crackdown by the state militia, one fully sanctioned by Iran’s governmental and religious leaders.

As we circle back again and again to our storytellers, particularly the journalist, Mitra Khalatbari, human rights lawyer, Shadi Sadr, and blogger and journalist, Mehdi Mohseni, we realize that we are listening to Iranians in exile.  These young professionals and activists were swept up in the violence, and in (mostly) stoic fashion tell us what they experienced—from capture and imprisonment, to enforced informing, rape and torture—every human rights violation one can imagine.

Iranian authorities have often accused their own human rights lawyers and journalists of colluding with foreign governments to undermine the country’s Islamic government. Just this month, in the 10 January edition of the New York Times, William Yong reports on the Tehran sentencing of Nasrin Sotoudeh to eleven years in jail for “activities against national security” and “propaganda against the regime.” Five years of that sentence are for accusations that she was a founding member of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, an association of lawyers led by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who left Iran in the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential election and subsequent crackdown on opposition figures. Ebadi, who is featured prominently in Ahadi’s film, points out, quite a few times, that human rights violations in Iran continue to be ignored by Europe and the rest of the world.  Silence is one thing, but countries like Germany (where the film’s director is based), France and the UK still sign contracts and business treaties with Iran, keeping it financially powerful on the world stage despite now very public knowledge that human rights violations continue unabated.

The Green Wave is an important addition to the growing archive of this vital documentation.  The first-hand accounts of arrests, torture, brutality, kidnappings and murders are there, irrevocable, undeniable.  They live on twitter feeds, on Facebook, on YouTube, and now in this film, messages and footage of citizens paying the price for raising their voices, by asking what happened to their votes, for ignoring the directives of their leaders to keep silent.

Towards the end of the film, former UN prosecutor, Dr. Payam Akhavan, talks about the “seismic shift, the democratic tidal wave” that occurred in Iran in 2009.  He goes on to say, “It’s very hard to imagine that this systematic, wide spread violence against thousands and thousands of protestors, this use of rape and torture against thousands and thousands of victims, is done without the acquiescence, if not the express instructions of those in positions of authority.  . . . Today, it may not be possible to bring these people to justice.  But we know from history, that those who are in power today may not be in power tomorrow.  And the leaders of Iran today have to think about the consequences of their actions.  They have to understand that their crimes are being documented, are being recorded, and a day will come when they have to answer.”

 

 

DAVID WANTS TO FLY: Enlightenment Comes with a Hefty Pricetag

It is said that you should never meet your heroes.  It's bound to be a disappointing encounter when all is said and done, your naive hopes pinned on the fantasy you've created in your mind about the outcome: an instant rapport, a mutual recognition that you are kindred spirits, the admiration and respect no longer just flowing one way, anymore--perhaps, even life-long friendship will transpire.

Young David Sieveking has just graduated from film school, another broke budding filmmaker looking for inspiration, when we first meet him in his apartment in Berlin.  His personality and demeanor are instantly appealing--sweet-faced, charming and a bit of a bumbler, he states in voice over, "I wanted to make dark films like my idol, David Lynch.  But I was lacking the darkness."  Yet the journey he takes to meet his idol in this wonderful début feature leads the wide-eyed searcher into some very dark places, indeed.

David Wants to Fly, which premiered at the 2010 Berlinale, showcases a new presence, a new voice in documentary that deserves much attention, for Sieveking has made a highly-entertaining, very funny, thought-provoking, disturbing and penetrating investigation into the inner workings of a very wealthy and powerful organization--don't let the sweet-faced, charming, bumbler fool you.  (Think Mr. M. Moore circa Roger & Me.)  I meant to write about this film after seeing it at the Doc Planete Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland in the spring where our jury gave it an honorable mention, all of us recognizing the profound accomplishment in storytelling artistry this piece contains, the artificial and, sometimes, awkward, contrivances, a constant wink and nod to his audience to stay the course with him.  And we're happy to.  It is a wild journey, slyly paying homage to Lynch while what he represents is simultaneously being stripped down to size.  (It recently played, out of competition, at Dokufest in Kosova, where I had a chance to watch it again.)

It is currently booked for wide national theatrical distribution here in Germany through the end of the year.  But since it's been on the circuit starting the early part of this year, there hasn't been much of a response from festivals in the States.  In some instances, there was great interest; yet, ultimately, it hasn't been programmed anywhere.  I can only attribute that to the fact that there is fear of a Lynch backlash (meaning: lawsuit) and festivals have just shied away from any of that madness.  I hope there's someone hardy enough to show it anyway, for it is an expertly structured, beautifully shot film that also happens to be a mighty powerful exposé into a rarely-glimpsed world.  Also, there are few docs that are as highly entertaining as this one, and methinks the genre could definitely use a lot more of that there E-word.  Please.

When David finds out from the Internet that Lynch will be in Fairfield, Iowa, to speak about the  source of his creative inspiration, he promptly scoots himself over the Atlantic, rents a car and drives himself into the American heartland.  Why Iowa?  Fairfield is where the palatial campus for the Maharishi University is located and, for the first time, Lynch will speak publicly about transcendental meditation (TM), something he's been practicing for decades.  The auditorium is packed with young people, a lot of them, we assume, budding filmmakers, there to eagerly receive pearls of wisdom from one of today's master filmmakers.  The Maharishi, old and infirm and residing in India, sends a video message to the audience:  "Go by the advice that you have received from the artist, Dr. Lynch."  Lynch extols the virtues of the Maharishi's teachings, describing it as "money in the bank."  Yes, but whose money?  And whose bank?

David is mesmerized, inspired, electrified with excitement.  He even lands a private audience with Lynch when his live-in girlfriend miraculously gets assigned an interview from a German magazine with the director.  Marie, an eccentric, whip-smart, no-bullshit girl with a distinct fashion flair, sits quietly as David takes over, grilling Lynch on TM, asking him to explain its magic.  Ignoring the dubious stance of Marie (some of the most delightful scenes in the film feature the two of them in combat), David dives right in.  Once back in Germany, he gets himself an appointment at the German TM headquarters in Hanover for his initiation into the practice; there, he will receive his own personal mantra so he can go about transforming himself from the inside out.  He is told to bring six fresh flowers, sweet fruits, a white handkerchief.  And 2,380 euros.  In cash.  But never mind that, he is swept away and becomes a valiant acolyte, meditating every day, a novice believer--the most vulnerable kind. Yet, the more he learns about the movement and its inner workings, the more puzzled and disturbed he becomes, hero worship notwithstanding.  It is great fun to watch him use his innate earnestness, his suit and tie, his spectacles and suspenders and jaunty hat, to gain the most incredible access over and over again.

On February 6, 2008, the Maharishi passes away and David takes himself to India for the funeral, camera equipment in tow.  He sees Lynch there, a VIP in the proceedings, and Lynch greets him warmly, shakes his hand, asks him how the film project is going.  This is the last time the two will share such a friendly exchange.  Based on what he's shot so far, David receives backing and funding for the project from some German producers, and it's full steam ahead--the filmmaking becoming more and more grand (gorgeous cinematography by Adrian Stähli), the rabbit hole going deeper and deeper.  In a whirlwind world tour, Sieveking's blind faith clears into razor-sharp vision, his "nice little documentary on the TM movement" becoming a hard-hitting, in-depth investigation into something really insidious.  It becomes dangerous territory, both for the filmmaker and his subjects.  As he delves deeper, his life and well-being devolve into an existential nightmare.  This is where this young man shows what he's made of; overcoming his fear and trepidation, he kicks things into high gear, pulling out all the stops, continuing to gain open access by being effervescent, polite, friendly, nodding enthusiastically, encouraging his subjects with a wide open smile to skewer themselves in front of his camera. 

The film took Sieveking five long years to make and we can visibly see him age--his hair gets peppered with gray, some wrinkles start to radiate from the corners of his clear, blue eyes, an exhausted pall pulls his boyish features down a bit as he carries on.  The surreality of the worlds he encounters have to be seen to be believed.  I, for one, am a believer in this new filmmaker's talent.

Dokufest Balkan Documentary Competition Winners, Part 1

Jurij Meden, the Slovenian director of 1717 Kilometrov Poletja 2009 (1717 Kilometers of Summer 2009) and Bilijana Garvanlieva, the Macedonian director of Tabakmädchen (Tobacco Girl) shared the Best Newcomer Award at this year's edition of Dokufest.  Tobacco Girl also garnered a special mention for the Human Rights Award, its jury saying that Garvanlieva's film takes the form of a "poetic confrontation of established social norms and multi-layered inequalities."

These filmmakers aren't exactly newcomers in terms of making films, but the Balkan Documentary Competition jurors (Emel Celebi from Turkey, who won the Best Balkan Documentary Award last year for her Sisters of Lilith; Michael Palmieri from the US; and Sissi Korhonen from Finland) decided that they wanted to recognize the fine work these directors presented, particularly since they work so independently, or without direct support from their own countries.  In fact, in her acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, Garvanlieva noted that she's made her films, including this one, "no thanks to my country" of Macedonia.  Recognition and support have come mainly from Germany.

Both half-hour films, in their own unique way, artfully show the traditional versus modern dilemmas and contradictions of their regions, each beautifully illustrating the speed at which life can move when one is determined to rocket through time and space.  In Meden's case, it is a physical journey by car of almost 2000 kilometers through six countries; in the young girl, Mümine's case, she traverses centuries of tradition in an attempt to land squarely in the midst of modern times.  The growing pains are intensely palpable, both for her, and for her family.

Tobacco Girl opens with a haunting song telling of the 600-year-old history of the people that inhabit the high mountain regions of Macedonia, part of the Turkish minority that resides on the land.  As a family unit--mother, father, two daughters and two sons--they do backbreaking work in the tobacco fields, the crop their only source of income.  As the tobacco is meant to be sold for survival, so are the children who work the fields, for they are just as precious a commodity to their parents as the substance they sell at market.  In her direction Garvanlieva shows, to wonderful effect, the claustrophobia of their lives, and I cannot praise highly enough cinematographer Susanne Schüle's camera work, which is absolutely exquisite.  The vibrant, multicolored traditional costumes the women wear stand out in bas-relief, not only from the dun-colored background of the village's dirt and wood, but also against the Western wear the men sport--leather jackets, T-shirts, jeans, all shades of brown, black and gray.

What is so appealing about this story is that instead of presenting some boring ethnographic treatise on these mountain people, the director tells the story from the 14-year-old girl's point of view, gossiping with her girlfriends, flirting with boys, talking incessantly about their crushes and obsessions, their dreams for the future.  But Mümine wants more.  She describes sorting tobacco with her family as pure "agony," and is determined to educate herself enough so that she can marry the person she wants to marry, so that she can move to the capital city of Skopje to go to school and do well enough to become a teacher, in the process, totally breaking "the laws of nature" her people have followed since anyone can remember.  The intimate scenes with the family are painful in their complexity--no raised voices or overly dramatic scenes, but plenty of fierce looks and reprimands, particularly from the matriarch who threatens the girl with permanent expulsion from the family if she runs away to the city. 

Yet the whole family is moving into modern times, using their earnings to buy a new house--but still compelled to sacrifice a goat in honor of their new dwelling; shopping for new appliances--but still discussing marrying off their children for the highest financial advantage, first the eldest son, then the eldest daughter, and then Mümine.  It is determined the youngest girl will fetch the highest price because she is so pretty.  However, the boy she loves is poor, and this angers her mother no end.  The camera consistently captures Mümine's universal beauty throughout the film, yet, oddly, when we do see her in modern dress at the end visiting the school in Skopje decked out in jeans, tennis shoes, hoodie, hair tied back in a ponytail, she appears to be just an ordinary, average, modern teenager.  Yet this is exactly who she wishes to be.

Jurij Meden is a freelance film writer and curator, his catalog bio consisting of this meager information:  "born in Ljubljana in 1977, film worker."  In his glorious experimental piece, 1717 Kilometers, we journey through his native Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Herzogovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo.  The film is a super 8mm record of summer, filmed by Meden and Vlado Skafar, "filled with idiotic excursions, false goals, prodigal waste, disappointed loves, galling personal insufficiencies, and half-witted associations."  It is a thrilling road movie on speed.  As visually stunning as the piece is, the sound design and score must be noted, as well.  Created by Paulo Raposo, a sound and media artist based in Lisbon, Portugal, the music and ambient recordings add a totally appropriate psychological element, capturing the essence of the hallucinogenic quality of a long road trip, the world flying by, hour after hour, day after day, from the confines of an automobile. 

The film's physicality reflects how much ground gets covered, geographically, emotionally and otherwise.  The road becomes an alternate universe, road weariness creating its own dreamscape, the monotony and hypnotic cast of it all, life passing by as if it's one extended mirage, image after image floating out of the emptiness that surrounds the strip of road one follows until it turns into total and utter abstraction, one image blending into another, coming in and out of focus, one moment the colors overly-saturated, then everything blurry and opaque.  The distinct world of the constant traveler is one of feeling, somehow, captured, even though the journey is through one's own auspices, the "freedom of the open road" a siren call for many, a rite of passage.  But there is a feeling of isolation that is contradictory to the freedom of movement, a feeling that there is no one else in the world that knows where you are since your physical location changes every moment, you're always somewhere different than you were just a second before.  Lost, you have the effortless freedom of a ghost and feel as if you could float on the wind and blow through solid obstacles without touching them.  It is a fantastic journey, one simply signed at its close, as if it's an art piece (which it is), JM 2010.

Two Items of Note in NYC

I've just come to accept the fact that whenever I'm at a major film festival (or even a not-so-major one), I experience virulent sensory overload in just about every way.  This year at Hot Docs, I've been a participant in the first CFC Media Lab's "Leave the Walls at the Door" workshop they've done in collaboration with the festival, which was intense and wonderful.  More on this in a bit since it was just this afternoon--man, the world's wide open for some real substantive and innovative media, gaming, social change stuff--exciting. It's something I will have to process a bit before I write on it all, but honestly, I was quite honored to be in such an illustrious group of media producers and filmmakers.  Suffice to say, it was an energetic group that cooked up an afternoon's worth of puzzling and innovative ideas for interactivity in documentary projects.  The possibilities are endless.  I also attended lots of micro-meetings with Canadian broadcasters to get the low-down on co-pros and such, and tomorrow I have a full day of moderating a panel in the morning and then diving into an afternoon of pitching.  So I ain't just a blogger, got it?  However, to take a moment to blog in the midst of all this about some things of note happening in NYC is a bit of a respite.  And they are things I care about deeply.

Yance Ford, series producer of PBS' P.O.V. series sent word today that the top-notch series, our country's premiere broadcast showcase for independent documentaries (take a look at this season's offerings here), has launched its annual call for entries for the 2011 season.  Ford is always available to talk to filmmakers with questions about the application process and can be reached at [email protected].  All subjects, approaches, and lengths are welcome to submit; this includes short-form work.  Completion funding is also available; read the complete guidelines on the website here.  Every applicant must fill out the online submission form; the deadline is Wednesday, June 30.

Laura Poitras' The Oath opens this Friday, May 7, at the IFC Center.  On opening night, Karen Greenberg will moderate a discussion with Carol Rosenberg and Abdul Ghani.  Rosenberg will have just returned from Guantánamo where she is covering the Omar Khadar military commission.  Poitras, cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson, and co-producer and editor, Jonathan Oppenheim, will also be there in person.  Do not miss a rare opportunity to see this award-winning, incredibly artful and important film by one of the most talented directors working today--in any genre--on the big screen.  Read my recent interview with Kirsten Johnson here.  The Oath will also air on P.O.V. this season; check the series' site for its air date later this year.

The Glass House

Educational and non-theatrical DVDs of this moving and intimate documentary by Hamid Rahmanian are now available in a limited release to coincide with No-Rooz, the celebration of the Persian new year.

The Glass House tells the story of Omid-e-Mehr, a center for girls in the heart of Tehran.  The Omid-e-Mehr Foundation was founded in Iran in 2004, in London in 2006, and in the US in 2008, by the formidable Marjaneh Halati, an Iranian-born, London-based social psychologist and psychotherapist.  Under her guidance, the workers at the center are tasked with providing a holistic (and loving) approach to helping the young women that come there in realizing self-awareness, self-determination and self-sufficiency in modern Iranian society.  These young women come from abusive homes, are motherless, have drug addictions, or just do not have the supportive resources at hand for growing up as healthy and happy members of a still quite repressive society for women.

Director Rahmanian gains deep trust and intimate access to Halati and some of her charges.  The film was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, opened the IRI-Continental Film Festival in South Africa, won the Human Rights Award at Dokufest in Kosovo, and was also a selection of the IDFA last year.  There are a series of community screenings set for this year that various individuals are hosting around the world.  The newly-released DVD includes scenes not included in the final cut of the film, an extended interview with Halati, and a short film called Saman.  Visit the film's website to learn more about the film and its makers, and to order the DVD.

First Run Features Releases Six New Documentaries in Theaters

New York-based distributor, First Run Features, is set to theatrically début six new American-made documentaries this winter. 

Opening Friday, January 8 at the Cinema Village is Waiting for Armageddon, directed by award-winning filmmakers, Kate Davis, David Heilbroner and Franco Sacchi.  This 2009 release, which premiered at the New York Film Festival, is about America's 50-million strong Evangelical community.  This population, which spans most of the country, is convinced that the world's future is foretold in Biblical prophecy.  The filmmakers explore, among other things, the politically powerful alliance between Evangelical Christians and the State of Israel and how Armageddon theology has had profound consequences both politically, and between various faiths, in the US and Israel.  Armageddon, the film, is handled with a determinedly, non-judgmental approach; there is no narration, nor do the filmmakers seek to demonize anyone, allowing the subjects to speak for themselves.  This is an extremely important document for dialogue and, in fact, the night before the film premieres at Cinema Village, an interfaith roundtable will be presented, in conjunction with New York University, at the Puck Building on the 7th of January.  There will be influential community leaders, religious leaders and other interfaith-based organizations coming together for discussion.  Clips from the film will be used as a catalyst for conversation.  (Keep checking this site and the film's Facebook page for upcoming info.)  The event will be open and free to the public; seating is limited to 120, including press.  Filmmakers and other special guests will also be on hand at most theater screenings in New York throughout the week.  The film will then head to Boston and Providence, RI, later in January.  Also, co-director, David Heilbroner has a first-person guest blog post on the Huffington Post today about the film.  Check it out here.  Thus far, there are over 200 comments attached to that post!  The film is supported, in part, by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, with outreach support from the Fledgling Fund.

On January 29th, Nicole Opper's Off and Running will premiere at the IFC Center, with special guest hosts almost every night and the filmmaker present at the theater for Q&As.  Set in Brooklyn, Opper's feature début is a collaboration with her main subject, Avery Klein-Cloud (pictured above); the partnership garnered them the Writers Guild of America Documentary Screenplay Award at this year's SILVERDOCS and the film also received jury prizes for Outstanding Doc at Outfest and Philadelphia's Q Fest.  The film premiered at the '09 Tribeca Film Festival (where it was a top-ten audience fave) and will have its national broadcast début on PBS' P.O.V. 2010 series, airing next November.  There is already quite a groundswell of excitement and support for this film in many different communities throughout the nation, particularly here in New York City, and many of independent film's most prestigious and important organizations have been behind it from the start--Tribeca All Access, ITVS, P.O.V., the IFP, DocuClub and New York Women in Film and Television, among others.  Opper was also named one of FILMMAKER Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film this year.  Off and Running tells the story of the Klein-Cloud family, a white female couple who are raising three children in a loving Jewish household.  Before meeting, they had each adopted a child, Tova adopting Rafi, a mixed-race boy, Travis adopting Avery, an African-American girl; after many years together, they also adopted, Zay-Zay, a Korean boy.  As Avery nears the end of her high school career and is getting ready for college, she starts to have an urgent need to contact her birth mother, curious about the African-American roots she's never explored.  This begins somewhat of a rocky journey, one familiar to us all, as she searches for her true north and tries to gather together all the disparate elements of her identity--African American, Jew, transracial adoptee, athlete, sister, daughter.  Click here to see the trailer and read more.  Also check back on this site for other up-and-coming extracurricular activities associated with the film.  Also coming soon, an extended interview with Opper to add to my arsenal of chats with kick-ass female directors.  (There is a book coming, I promise.)

Opening across the country beginning February 5 is Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith's The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.  This doc is the co-winner of this year's Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review and was one of their picks for five best docs of the year.  It also won a special jury prize at the IDFA and is a contender for this year's best doc Oscar prize.  Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist leaked 7,000 pages of top secret documents to the New York Times in 1971 when he concluded that the war was based on decades of lies and falsehoods perpetrated by the US government.  This was a watershed moment in history that led directly to the Watergate scandal, Nixon's resignation from the presidency, and the end of the Vietnam War.  It was then-Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America."

Opening in New York on February 26 at the Cinema Village and then in San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, Washington, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver and Atlanta beginning on March 5, Prodigal Sons will launch its nationwide theatrical run.  This film, since its festival opening in Telluride in September 08, has had a really magical festival run, and the film's director, Kimberly Reed, has had a chance to see first-hand how audiences respond to her riveting and open-hearted personal documentary story.  The film breaks fresh ground in almost every way.  Like Opper's family story, this one is so distinct and individual, dealing with issues most of us might feel we're very far away from, but in fact, transcends its boundaries of circumstance to leave us feeling like we've met another family we can admire and love, a family closer to our own than we would have first thought.  Journalists and juries and audiences have adored this film from all corners of the globe.  There's a full press archive on the site here if you want to link and read some items (or all of them).  Reed, a transgender woman, returns to the small town in Montana where she grew up.  She initially took a camera in tow with DP and co-producer, John Keitel, because the trip home was to go to her high school reunion--the first time her classmates would meet her as Kim, instead of the young Paul McKerrow who graduated with them, star athlete, honor student and all-around stud.  But the story goes to the heart of the matter very quickly when she comes back together with her estranged brother, Marc, a man who's gone through many changes in as many profound ways as Kim has, and whom she hasn't seen in almost 10 years.  Look for Reed and the film to be featured in an article in the February issue of Details Magazine with an essay written by Rick Moody.  There will be several press and media events surrounding this film leading up to its run with social engagement and outreach partners, including a Film Talk interview with Reed in mid-February.  (Carol McKerrow, Marc McKerrow, Kimberly Reed, pictured.)

Opening in New York on March 12 will be Tales from the Script, Peter Hanson's from-the-horse's-mouth ode to screenwriting, with encounters and anecdotes from Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), John Carpenter (Halloween), Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), and others.  Sharing never-before-told behind the scenes stories, the writers describe their collaborations (or lack thereof) with the likes of Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.  There will be a companion book published by IT Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, that will be in stores in late January.

Lastly, opening on the 26th of March in New York and, then, nationwide in April is Dancing Across Borders, a new feature doc which chronicles the story of Sokvannara Sar, a dancer discovered by arts patron, Anne Bass, on a trip to Angkor Wat, Cambodia in 2000 and brought to the ballet stage here in America.  The film explores Sy's relationship with his new milieu, the world of American ballet, and his new culture.  The film was directed by Bass and was photographed by Bob Elstrom, Anthony Forma and Tom Hurwitz.

Wunnerful, wunnerful that all these independent docs are getting a crack at getting their name on a movie marquee.  Good start to the new year.

FOUR SEASONS LODGE Opens at the IFC Center Today!

For a limited engagement, this beautiful documentary will play at the IFC Center here in New York for one week only starting tonight and going through Tuesday the 17th.  Visit the IFC's site for showtimes and ticket information.  Read Ella Taylor's laudatory review published today in the New York Times.  Also, read the great interview director, Andrew Jacobs, did for the Tribeca Film blog.

Because the 8:00 p.m. screening tonight is reserved for the Lodgers and their families and friends, it is sold out; however, there are many other screenings today and throughout the week and weekend.  Director, Andrew Jacobs and other special guests will be on hand all week for post-screening Q&As and discussion.  Throughout the week, we will have special co-hosts for the 8:00 p.m. screenings--Thursday, Reboot, Friday, Shooting People, Saturday afternoon at the 1:00 p.m. show will bring in the folks from UnionDocs and Saturday evening, composer Eric Lewis will be in the house, Sunday afternoon The Catskills Institute will host two screenings along with special panel discussions at a local eatery, and Sunday evening will be hosted by Felix Endara of DocuClub.  On Tuesday night, from 5:30 to 8:30, there will be a party and fundraiser thrown by Jackie Leitzes, granddaughter of Lodger, Genya Boyman, at The Dove Parlor on Thompson Street.

For those in Los Angeles and Boston, FSL opens on the 11th of December at the Coolidge Corner Theatre (there is an advance members-only free screening, Sunday, December 6 at 11:00 a.m.), and at the Laemmle Music Hall 3 in Beverly Hills and the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino.  More cities might be added soon.  The film is being distributed by First Run Features; visit the FRF website for more information, to request a screening of Four Seasons Lodge in your town, and to order an advance copy of the DVD.

THE HORSE BOY Opens in New York

Today, September 30, a truly wonderful and uplifting film opens at the IFC Center.  Originally called Over the Hills and Far Away, The Horse Boy, directed by Austin-based Michel Orion Scott and released by Zeitgeist Films, is a thrilling piece of cinema, and should definitely be seen on the big screen. 

Read my review on the Hammer to Nail site here.  Be sure to go see it--it's gorgeous.

142 Iranian Filmmakers Boycott the Cinéma Vérité Festival in Tehran

Shortly before its third iteration, one of Iran's most talented and prolific filmmakers, Mehrdad Oskouei, writes from Iran about a boycott of 142 documentary filmmakers against the Cinéma Vérité International Documentary Film Festival that has taken place in Tehran for the last two years.  This follows closely upon the heels of International Festival Director Massoud Bahkshi's resignation from the nascent festival. 

The Cinéma Vérité festival is the only film event devoted exclusively to documentaries in Iran, its third edition due to be held this October.  In the last two years, the festival has been able to establish itself in the world with the help of both the Iranian and international documentary communities.  I was privileged to be a guest at last year's fest, an impressive event that screened close to 300 films.  The 142 artists (listed below) are asking members of the international community to join and support their boycott.  Here, verbatim, is the letter that Oskouei sent:

Documentary filmmakers in Iran have recorded valuable traces of realities about the contemporary Iranian society in the last century.

This cinema has been able to overcome many obstacles throughout the years. During the times of the revolutions, wars and conflicts and also in the last two decades, Iranian documentaries gave us treasures of social and historical documentations of life in Iran.

Cinéma Vérité is an important festival and has managed in its previous 2 years, to invoke an atmosphere of debate and reflection, which is essential to documentary filmmaking.

Unfortunately, extreme restrictions that have recently been placed on documentary filmmakers, in capturing what is occurring in our turbulent society, are unprecedented.

We can see so many films that potentially could have been made these days, but we are not allowed to make them.  Therefore, due to our commitment and respect for the truth and the reality, we have come to the decision to not take part in the forthcoming festival, either as documentary filmmakers, critics or viewers.

Signatures (142):

Mohsen Abdolvahab - Sepideh Abtahi - Farhang Adamiyat - Mahnaz Afzali – Amir Aghababaiean - Abbas Amini - Hiva Aminnezhad - Mohsen Amiryousfi - Mansoureh Arbabi - Mehdi Asadi - Mehrnaz Asadi - Ehsan Asgharzadeh - Majid Asheghi - Ashkan Ashkani - Houshang Azadivar - Bahram Azimpour - Mostafa Azizi - Milad Bahar - Amir Bahari - Mehdi Bagheri - Reza Bahraminezhad - Hasan Bahramzadeh - Rakhshan Banietemad - Misagh Banimahd – Habib Bavi Sajed - Ali Dadras - Reza Dorostkar - Esmaeil Emami - Homayoun Emami - Farshad Fadaieyan - Farshid Faraji - Mohammad Reza Fartosi - Kourosh Farzanegan - Bayram Fazli - Farshad Fereshteh Hekmat - Mehdi Ganji - Amin Ghadami - Mohsen Ghaderi - Rokhsare Ghaem Maghami - Alireza Ghasemkhan - Mehdi Ghorbanpour - Reza Haeri - Maryam Haghpanah - Khatreh Hanachi - Sirous Hesari - Amirhosein Hojat - Mahboubeh Honarian - Elham Hosinzadeh - jila Ipakchi - Hamid Jafari - Mehdi Jafari - Mohammad Jafari – Parviz Jahed - Farnaz Jamshidi moghadam - Ali Kalantari - Pirooz Kalantari - Mitra Karagah - Mehdi Karampour - Behfar Karimi - Mahmoud Karimi - Mahmoud Kazemi - Mina Keshavarz – Loghman Khaledi - Majid Khaleghi Soroush - Mostafa Kherghepoush - Banafshe Khoshnoudi – Firouzeh Khosravani - Keyvan Kiani - Bahman Kiarostami - Parviz Kimiavi - Mehdi Koohiyan - Ramtin Lavafipour - Ali Loghmani - Arastoo Madahi Givi - Mitra Mansouri - Anoushirvan Masoudi - Azar Mehrabi - Farhad Mehranfar - Makan Mehrpouya - Ahmad Mirehsan  - Mojtaba Mirtahmasb - Lida Moeini - Mahnaz Mohammadi - Ala Mohseni - Soudabeh Mojaveri - Ebrahim Mokhtari - Esmaeil Monsef - Mohammad Reza Moghadasian - Mahmoud Moghadas Jafari  - Majid Movaseghi - Soudabeh Moradian  - Soudabeh Mortazaie - Saeed Naderi - Nasim Najafi - Javad Najmedin - Mohammad Nami - Parivash Nazariyeh  - Majed Neysi - Mehrdad Oskoui - Mohsen Ostadali Makhmalbaf - Mehdi Parizad - Vahid Parsa - Maani Petgar - Morteza Poursamadi - Arash Raeisian - Mahmoud Rahmani - Mohamad Rasoulof - Shadmehr Rastin - Mohammad Razdasht - Nahid Rezaie - Panahbarkhoda Rezaie - Fariba Rostami - Ebrahim Saeedi - Naser Safarian - Babak Salek - Saman Salour - Amirhosein Sanaie - Ahmadreza Sedghi Vaziri - Katayoun Shahabi - Pouyan Shahrokhi -  Vahid Sheiykhlar - Mahvash Sheiykholeslami - Kamran Shirdel - Mohammad Shirvani – Ahmad Soleymani – Behrouz Soleymani - Abdolkhalegh Taheri - Ahmad Talebinezhad - Saeed Tarazi - Javad Tavana - Shahrouz Tavakol - Reza Teymori - Farzad Tohidi - Yasaman Tourang - Farhad Varahram - Ahmad Zahedi - Mehrdad Zahedian - Orod Zand - Mona Zandi - Hamid Zargarnezhad - Mohsen Zarifipour - Mehran Zinatbakhsh.

 

Into the Archives

I know this blog is only two years old, but once in a while, I like to go through my scrap book and reminisce.  Just to see where I was a year ago, I looked over my interview with Iranian filmmaker and festival director, Massoud Bakhshi whom I met at Hot Docs in '08, and really enjoyed reading it again.  So I thought you might too (want to read it, that is) if you're not watching crap TV or flat-ironing your hair (be careful!).  It actually did my heart a bit of good since I just watched a really awful film and felt a bit depressed.  I hate bad films, especially bad films that cost a lot of money---gggrrrr.

Click here to read our conversation.  Merci, bonne nuit.

Voices of Women at DOX BOX 09

Just last Saturday, CNN.com reported that two Saudi male authors were arrested for seeking a female writer's autograph at a book fair in Riyadh.  The novelists ultimately weren't charged with any crime and are now demanding an apology from the Muslim kingdom's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (hello, George Orwell).  This religious police force monitors, among other things, enforcement of dress codes, mandatory observance of prayer times and segregation of the sexes.  Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism and punishes unrelated men and women who are caught "mingling" in public.

And so just as much as we read the disgusting statistics of the abuse of women perpetrated by men (the majority of whom are their husbands, fathers, brothers) not only in these kinds of societies, but all over the world, including the "enlightened" West, both sexes suffer from this lack of freedom, these strictured ways of how we fulfill our roles and interact with one another.  Saudi Arabian writer Badreyeh al Bashir eloquently wrote, "I used to think that men are freer than we women, but I realized that men are just as dazed and confused, but in another sphere.  I held conversations with my male cousins.  I found out that they only enjoy the freedom of place, but their lives are obscene without the partnership of sisters, wives, mothers, [female] colleagues or [female] acquaintances.  We are both captured in a world of a single gender, with only one difference: women get the houses, while men get the cold streets and restaurants.  What can this isolation and solitude lead up to regardless of the difference?"  (Film still above from Eva Mulvad's prize-winning, critically-acclaimed, Enemies of Happiness, 2006.)

At the DOX BOX festival, women's voices, women's presences, women's points of view were quite prominent.  The seven films shown in the sidebar program called Women's Voices included beautiful and cinematically stunning pieces of work from all over the world, all helmed by women except for French-Moroccan, Brahim Fritah's The Woman Alone (2004), an example that not all women's stories need be told by females.  In his luminous film, we hear Akosse Legba narrate her story of enslavement in France as Fritah films the luxurious Parisian apartment where she works.  It's a beautiful and chilling piece.

Today, more than ever before, Arab artists, fillmmakers and writers, both male and female, struggle greatly to search for an identity, figuring out ways and means to tell riveting and bold--and very risky--stories.  As in Haifaa Al-Mansour's case, when she shot her film in Saudi Arabia, she was forced to use a very small camera, pretend her subject matter was something other than what it was, and have the presence of her husband or another male accompanying her during her interviews with her female subjects.  She is struggling greatly right now to launch a fiction project that she wants to shoot part of in Saudi, even though the project has received a lot of international exposure in places like Rotterdam, Berlin and Dubai.  Many Arab filmmakers create their cinema outside of their own countries because of so many restrictions, but as Syrian filmmaker, Meyar Al Roumi, director of Six Ordinary Stories, who works in both Syria and France, says, "I only find myself in the arms of Damascus; my relation with France is strictly professional."

March 8, the 5th day of the festival, was International Women's Day and DOX BOX celebrated with a seminar moderated by Rasha Salti about documentary cinema and female directors.  (A subject very close to my heart and the main reason I started this blog.)  Festival director, Diana El-Jeiroudi who programmed the sidebar (and is a filmmaker herself) said that the idea of allocating a good portion of the fest to women was not "a feminist activity," so much as a tool to establish a base for women filmmakers in the Arab world.  While many women's organizations focus on rights and honor crimes and other societal issues, El-Jeiroudi wanted to specifically focus on women's presence in film and art.  "Just as we're working very hard here to ensure that cinema won't disappear, we are working equally as hard to make sure that the disappearance of women's voices and talents in cinema shouldn't be allowed."  In talking about the Gender and Cinema Journalism Workshop, Salti thinks it's vital not only to create a space for women's issues in the festival, but to also hear and read the female perspective in film criticism and cultural analysis.  (Film still above from Turkish filmmaker Pelin Esmer's The Play, 2005.)

Published in both English and Arabic,  the daily bulletin, "Point of View," was the physical manifestation of the workshop's curriculum, led by Ulla Jacobsen, Chief Editor of DOX Magazine (based in Copenhagen) and Nanna Frank Rasmussen, a Danish film critic.  They were also joined by KVINFO representative, Louise Voller.  The European women worked with female journalists from Morocco, Syria and Jordan, their practicum that of covering the festival and special events, conducting artist interviews and doing daily film reviews.  I often saw them huddled over a laptop in the lobby of the festival hotel working away to create a throughline of themes and important topics, from their particular point of view.  From what I could gather from the participants I spoke with, it was a very rich and rewarding experience.

I leave you, for now, with some statements from the great Latifa al-Zayyat, an Egyptian critic, writer and intellectual activist who lived from 1923 to 1996:  "When I start writing, I omit the censor, keep it away from my creative action, as if I am someone else.  That is why I cannot escape the sense of fear when I read what I write.  I keep telling myself when I write, that freedom and lying are opposites and they cannot be combined.  That is why I try to free the world by capturing its reality no matter how obnoxious and irritating.

" . . . Freedom is a collective war against lying and deception and against the mechanical distractions of rotten slogans.  Freedom is a human revolution against institutional, fabricated revolutions that treat creativity as a form of re-writing, while I climb that ladder that leads to the upper spacious heavens where no father, husband or any of those bound by authority lies nor where daily pretentiousness can reach me."

"Truth as Casualty": This is Getting Old

After just seeing Anders Østergaard's Burma VJ, Reporting from a Closed Country at True/False, I've been trolling around the Internet reading other reviews as I'm wont to do when a film impresses the hell out of me.  Not only impresses, but moves me deeply--as this fine piece of work certainly did.  I'm far from the only one with praise for this prize-winning film, but I came across Andrew Marshall's review at Time.com and, frankly, it pissed me off. 

Marshall, a reporter who covered Burma's tragic pro-democracy uprising for TIME magazine in 2007 (the central event of the film), recalls the stunning imagery that we see in Østergaard's film, monks holding their upside-down alms bowls high above their heads to indicate that they will not accept offerings from the military; the citizens marching in the streets beside them, many of them recording what was happening on cell phones and cameras.  Some of those armed with cameras were undercover video journalists (VJs), working for the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma.  These images were transmitted out of the country via the Internet and across the globe through all the major media outlets, at great personal risk to the reporters and their families.

Østergaard reconstructs a meticulous aural dimension to the story to reflect the line of communication that helped coordinate this clandestine effort.  The phone conversations are orchestrated between Joshua and the reporters on the ground during the  uprising.  Joshua is a 27-year-old journalist who has been fired from the Burmese government newspaper, and goes to work for the DVB from a safe house in Thailand.  He is our narrator and our connection to these brave men and women who risk their lives to capture these images.  He still resides in exile.

The footage of the crowded streets and packed rooftops and balconies where people chant "our cause, our cause!" over and over with raised fists is thrilling.  Led by the monks in country-wide protests, ordinary citizens put themselves in the line of fire, all of them prepared to die, if necessary, for the freedom of their homeland.

With this phone communication used as the spine of the film, the filmmaker can also protect his subjects and make a "virtue out of necessity," as he puts it.  For the protection of these people is utmost on his agenda and he spent a very, very long time trying to figure out how to tell this story and still protect them.  He even expressed mixed emotions about the film's success, afraid that he would be exposing and calling attention to people who are still in hiding, and would be in a world of trouble if found.  In his research, he used Google Earth to help construct the hundreds and hundreds of hours of unmarked, unidentified footage he had to sift through to simulate an accurate time line of this communication.  Once he started to put that time line together, he says the film began "to speak" about the collective experience of what it must have looked and felt and sounded like.  The soundtrack by Swedish composer, Conny C-A Malmqvist and sound design by Martin Hennel also help to establish a "here and now" immediacy and gives it a haunting lyricism that adds much to the experience.  Through this rigorous process, the director has crafted a piece of cinema that transcends beyond this particular story, and speaks to the universal aspects of revolution from within.  To my mind, the film is flawless in its execution.

Which begs the question, how the hell else would he have been able to do this without this reconstruction, this craft, this cinematic imperative to make the story come alive?

Yet Marshall is stuck on the d-word and the inherent "purity" of what he feels documentary should present.  He wants to call it a "docudrama" which is a term I, personally, loathe since it smacks of those god-awful stilted recreations that I see all the time in stories of the "Wild West," or what have you.  Some of the most highly regarded nonfiction films of this past year--Man on Wire, Waltz with Bashir, My Winnipeg, Up the Yangzte--are brilliant reconstructions of true stories.  (My Winnipeg calls itself a docu-fantasia, for goodness' sakes.)  Marshall feels that these dramatic reconstructions in Burma VJ are a "handicap, undermining the film's credibility and dishonoring the very profession its subjects risk their lives to pursue."  This kind of statement makes me froth at the mouth, seriously.  He then goes on to say that he soon began "to anxiously question the authenticity of every scene."  Really?  I thought you were there, dude. 

But he is hung up on the semantics of what to label the film and that, my friends, is becoming mighty tiresome.  "It is still hard to simply re-categorize Burma VJ as a well-made docudrama and leave it at that--not as long as its makers insist that it is a documentary [who's insisting anything?], or that it is composed largely of the work of undercover reporters, when at least half of it seems re-enacted [not seems, it is re-enacted, that's the whole damn point; no one's denying or hiding that].  The cause of Burma's democrats is ill-served by hyperbole [!] and the reconstruction of events to fit a version of the truth."  So whose "version" should the filmmaker have told?  Someone else's?  I'm confused.  Are we supposed to watch Joshua shrouded in shadow, sitting in a chair in a darkened room with his voice robotized talking directly to the director and telling us what happened?  Would that fit a better "version of the truth"?

As our friend, Werner, has said, "Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and showing them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years.  All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are."  Or how about this one: "For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory."  Østergaard's Burma VJ serves as a conduit to our universal memory.  This is the magic of great cinema, no matter how it's constructed, no matter how it's labeled.  Come join our advanced civilization, everyone!

Burma VJ is the recipient of True/False's True Life Fund.  In 2009, the Fund hopes to raise $10,000 in aid of the DVB for equipment and other needs.  Fund raising got started before the festival with local events in Columbia with the director making appearances at high schools and other local places to discuss the film with the community there.  To learn more about the True Life Fund, click here. 

And with that diatribe, I leave you to go on yet another journey to other far-away lands.  I did see other films I'd like to talk about at T/F but that will have to wait for a later date.  Tomorrow, I depart for Damascus, Syria (with a quick stop in Rome), where the second iteration of DOX BOX is taking place, as we speak.  I will join them for their Open Day with industry professionals to share what's happening over here in terms of funds and festivals and to work with young filmmakers there in one-on-one consultancies where they will share treatments and pitches of their nonfiction projects. The festival is in Damascus from the 4th to the 11th and then will travel to Tartous and Homs.  I will also be attending the festivities in Thessaloniki and I'm very excited about that, too.  Look for my coverage on the IDA web site, here on SIM, and wherever else I can yak about docs.  Or reconstructed realities.

Let the Spirit Move You: Two Beauties to Go See in Theaters

Starting this month, there are two films playing in theaters in NYC that I'd like to recommend:  Bari Pearlman's Daughters of Wisdom is screening every Wednesday from July 23 to the last Wednesday in August at the beautiful Rubin Museum of Art.  The filmmakers entered the Buddhist Monastery called Kala Rongo in Nangchen on the northeastern plateau in Tibet.  An order of nuns lives in this remote, exclusively female, retreat.  It's an extraordinary look into a hidden culture and the amazing women who live there.  The film won the Audience Award at the Brooklyn International Film Festival last year, and also played at Mill Valley and Full Frame.  Click here for more info. 

Because I was up at Hot Docs back in April, I missed a lot of the Tribeca fest this year, but one thing I was sure to catch was a special screening of Lou Reed's Berlin by Julian Schnabel.  The movie is exquisite, and the other treat that night was getting to listen to Reed and Schnabel talk about the genesis and evolution of this cinematic dream.  (The moderator, Vanity Fair's music critic, Lisa Robinson, was apparently on the rag and was rather bitchy to audience members, but Schnabel made up for it in his warm and friendly way.)  The back story is that in 1973 when Reed released his haunting and poetic album, Berlin, it was critically panned and disregarded--a commercial flop, in other words.  Consequently, it had never been performed for live audiences in the thirty-three years since its release.  Then, in December of 2006, at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, the entire album was staged for five consecutive nights in front of sold-out (and pretty damned lucky) audiences.  

Musicians Fernando Saunders and Steve Hunter are some of the musicians who played on the original album and they, among others, join Reed on stage at St. Ann's with such unmitigated joy, it's really beautiful.  And it looks gorgeous, as well, thanks to Ellen Kuras' lush and intimate cinematography.  The Brooklyn Youth Chorus adds angelic backup singing and you can see that most of these kids (born decades after the original release of the album) have the same passion for this music and these songs as Reed and Schnabel do, even though the subject matter is dark, sexual, depressing, some might say, perverse; despite their youth, or maybe because of it, they convey all the pain and the transcendence inherent in these stories.  Add to this, a cinematic backdrop of fragile, slow-shutter black and white films directed by Schabel's daughter, Lola, with the stunning and highly emotive, Emmanuelle Seigner (one of the actors in Schnabel's recent work of genius, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) portraying Berlin's protagonist, Caroline.  Thanks to Schnabel's long-time producer, Jon Kilik, and producers Tom Sarag, Stanley Buchthal and Maya Hoffman, Schnabel and Reed resurrect Caroline and her lovers, and they live on in a joyous and celebratory film.  You cannot walk away from this without falling in love with Lou Reed.  And if you've always loved him, you'll love him even more.  Reed has plans to tour Europe this summer with the stage show as the film, released by Fortissimo, opens worldwide.

Defiant Gardens

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.