Still in Motion

"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.

The Cold Calculus of Journalism and the Perils of Bearing Witness

The True/False Film Festival is not an overtly "themed" festival in any way, but one topic that did emerge in quite a strong way, at least for me, in this year's program, reflected in both the workshops and films, was that of journalists bearing witness to world events through the camera lens, and the moral issues inherent in that activity.

Friday afternoon, I joined filmmaker Ian Olds (Occupation Dreamland), video journalist and filmmaker Richard Parry, and his documentary subject, photojournalist Robert King in a discussion called "The Frontline Club: Lessons on Shooting and Being Shot At."  (Unfortunately, Vaughn Smith, the slated panel moderator and founder of the Frontline Club in London, didn't make it on time.)  All three men have been in combat zones armed only with a camera.  Parry and King have been doing it for decades and have documented many of those journeys in an incredible film called Blood Trail, which was exhibited at the fest.  Why a theatrical distributor (or any other kind, for that matter) hasn't grabbed this piece is beyond me, for it is a viscerally potent document of what it is to be a witness to war, knee-deep in blood and body parts and dodging mortar fire, trying to capture on film the atrocities happening in every corner of the world.  Are these men who go willingly into battle zones to get the story incredibly brave or incredibly foolhardy?  King, a sensitive and profoundly introspective man, says that, "You never come away untouched."  He also says, simply, "This is what I do."  (Photo above courtesy of Robert King.)

Photojournalists are our safeguard against historical revisionism.  Once the shutter is snapped, the film (most of the time clandestinely) shuttled to an editor and the images printed in the paper, it is irrevocable, events branded upon the collective consciousness in a way that dozens of stories written by Nicholas Kristof could never convey (more about this in a moment).  Yet Olds expressed quite strongly that he would probably never put himself in that situation ever again, his moral confusion and "profound unease" as that kind of witness forever irreconcilable with his desire to document an important story, no matter how compelling.  Parry's film explores this harrowing issue through King's narrative, the constant grappling and coming to terms with the strange kind of passivity inherent in the job, the weighty decision of whether to continue to document or to put down the camera and do something always hanging in the balance.  What we learn is that in most cases that would be foolhardy, at best, deadly for all involved, at worst.  King explains that after doing this for so many years, his world becomes finely honed to what he has framed in his lens; the only other thing he listens for is a shell or bullet headed his way--everything else goes away, the screaming, the smell of burning flesh, the carnage he steps over.  It's only until he's somewhere safe that those senses come alive in his memory.

The audience was made up of mostly local people, many of them young journalism students (the event was held in the gorgeous Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia).  What is top of mind for them is how journalism needs to be reinvented, or more accurately, how journalistic ethics must change to meet the challenges of the 21st century. While it is infinitely easier to get digital files sent out of a war zone versus rolls of film, the issues about working in a war zone only seem to thicken and congeal into ever-expanding quandaries, for now we know too much about what goes on.  Or do we?

This is one of the questions Eric Metzgar's new film Reporter grapples with, the irrefutable fact that journalism, as we've come to know it, has profoundly changed.  Newspapers and other printed sources are shrinking, foreign bureaus scaling way back or closing altogether.  With the loss of objective and in-depth reporting rampant in our news organizations, the fear is that there will be a huge loss of the kind of comprehensive knowledge and understanding we've come to rely upon from our most intrepid journalists.  Reporter focuses on the work of New York Times' columnist, Nicholas Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who almost single-handedly put the crisis in Darfur on the world's radar.

Metzgar, who directed, shot and edited the film, accompanies Kristof to Congo.  As he does in all of his films, he shares his own story and his own insights about his experience accompanying someone on a complex journey through his sensitive, but forthright, narration, although this time he experiences a kind of fear he's never encountered before, for he visits a place that instinctively scares everyone, including the man who has led him there.  For over a decade, a brutal war has been waged in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Over 5 million people have died as a result and despite interventions of floods of money and peacekeeping missions by the international community, including the UN, the fighting that is taking place there now is the most destructive since 2005.

But the long, bloody and intricate history of the place and the staggering statistics reported from there are, let's face it, a surefire way to completely deaden any interest.  There is a wall of pain and suffering too tall and wide and deep to penetrate with any kind of compassion, and feeling not just helpless, but numbed in the face of all this, we turn away to other things that are much easier to digest over a bowl of cornflakes.  Kristof knows this and so he's learned that the unwieldy story needs to be writ very small, the larger narrative told through a singular one.  The two stories he chooses to tell (and Metzgar documents) are of Yohanita (pictured above), a 41-year-old, 60-pound woman dying of infection, displaced from her village by the warring lords of the region; and the story of one of those warlords, Laurent Nkunda, "sent by God" to protect the people, sporting a "Rebels for Chirst" button.  What Kristof and Metzgar know about him, as well, is that he spends most of his time overseeing a great number of troops that are busy raping and killing hundreds of innocent villagers.  After explaining this heady "mission" of his, he invites them to stay for dinner.  It is a surreal nightmare along the lines of Coppola's Apocalypse Now.  But this is very real and very strange, really no place for white men with cameras and laptops to try and document and understand the terrain.  It is a brash and reckless and heady task.  But no one else is doing it, now are they?

In my next post, I'll talk about Burma VJ, Reporting From a Closed Country, another extraordinary film I got to see at T/F in which a filmmaker decides to use the artifice of cinema to protect his subjects and ends up creating a collective experience beyond politics, beyond belief.  As Ari Folman did with his animated masterpiece, Waltz with Bashir, Anders Østergaard has created a magnificent nonfiction thriller and a true testament to the courage of journalists.

The Truth Is the Truth!

So states Marc McKerrow, emphatically, unequivocally, to his brother, filmmaker Kimberly Reed, towards the end of her intimate family-portrait film, Prodigal Sons. 

Did I just mess up my pronouns?  No.

For this is a story of two brothers still working out the psychic traumas each has experienced individually, and have also unwittingly inflicted upon one another throughout their childhoods, adolescences, and on into adulthood.  These traumas persist, in part, because Kim transitioned from male to female as a young adult and still hasn't really dealt with the abandoned identity she's left behind; and, in part, because Marc has sustained a severe head injury and concomitant mental illness due to a car crash he was in as a young adult that resulted in having part of his brain removed. 

But the story goes back long before these seminal events in each of their lives occurred, and Reed, in this deeply moving investigation of her family legacy, intrepidly sets out to uncover and reveal, layer by layer, the dark heart of sibling rivalry.  The film received an emotional standing ovation for several minutes at the morning screening I attended at True/False, so it speaks in a mighty profound way, obviously, to all the ways in which every single one of us "covers up" from those closest to us and, especially, from ourselves.

Let's get the short synopsis out of the way so we can get to the essence of what this film means to say, because the story's a doozy and would have any novelist or screenwriter drooling with envy:   "Prodigal Sons follows three siblings — a trans-gender woman [Reed], a gay man [little brother, Todd], and their adopted brother [Marc] who also discovers he’s the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth (!) — back to their Montana hometown, where a powerful story of an entire family’s transformation unfolds."  (Marc's grandma and grandpa, pictured above, starring together in The Lady from Shanghai, 1947.)  Only from the bosom of Middle America. . .

This film mirrors Reed's uncertainty when she realizes that her own story of transition will have to be an essential ingredient in the story she wants to tell about Marc's legacy.  Because of Marc's unresolved issues, Kim cannot help but be pulled into the vortex of his anger and resentment which has much to do with her.  (The recurring image she uses of herself as a young high school athlete on the basketball court covering his face when he notices the camera on him is resonant and deeply affecting, speaking to her own experience of discomfort and dissonance throughout her life, even though to the outside world, she was a superstar in every way.) 

Because of Marc's  seizures and constant struggle to stay on his meds, his rage erupts so explosively that the family soon comes to realize that intervention is the only solution to make sure that something irreversibly tragic doesn't occur.  Reed captures a man both transformed through music (the mystery of his prodigious musical talent is solved during the course of the film, for he doesn't read a note of music but has always been able to play the piano beautifully), and a man so filled with rage, his tantrums are truly frightening, as he threatens physical harm on Kim and on himself.  His self-hatred is so virulent and deadly that in one episode at a family Christmas dinner, things tip over the edge for everyone as they all realize that if they don't do something to help him, he will end his own life, possibly taking someone with him.

Several members of the audience praised Reed for her bravery in wading into the deep and painful terrain of this Cain and Abel story but she gives most of the kudos to their mother, a quiet but steely widow who handles her children with plenty of acceptance and love but with hard and fast boundaries about what she expects them to outgrow at this juncture, all but demanding that old, useless rivalries be left behind for good.  For she knows that what needs to be dealt with is Marc's illness; she wants so much to help him find himself at last, for that is the only way the rest of them can find peace individually, and as a family.

I love the way the film floats back and forth between the nostalgic, innocent world of childhood, the way we remember ourselves in home movies, everyone looking happy and acting goofy, and the raw footage of capturing the emotionally painful and violent moments of dealing with an adult child's rage and illness that will bring everything he holds dear down with him.  The final shot of Marc staring out into the middle distance, deep in thought, makes us hopeful that he can finally find solace within himself and within the family who loves him, a family that stubbornly pushes away their own fears and confusion to stay by him.  Interestingly, Reed gives Marc top billing with a music credit, followed by her own name.  A name she is thinking about changing back to McKerrow. 

Still without any traditional distribution deal, there are so many different audiences that this film can speak to outside of festival ones.  (Prodigal Sons will next appear at the 11th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in Greece this month).  Like most independent filmmakers, Reed is now strategizing on how to reach those various audiences with a film that shows a family in the throes of leaving behind all the coerced conformity they've lived with all their lives.  It's a beauty of a film.

Also see:  Brooke Sebold's, Benita Sills' and Todd Sills' deeply moving Red Without Blue and Lisa Leeman's ground-breaking Metamorphosis: Man into Woman.

 

Journeys to the Center of Our Hearts--True/False Film Fest 09

This post would have happened a day sooner, but on Monday, I found myself stuck in St. Louis, MO unexpectedly, having only made it halfway home (the drive from  Columbia to the airport is as long as the flight from St. Louis to New York).  So as winter snowstorms continued to wallop the eastern seaboard, I sat with other stranded friends enjoying the Manager's Happy Hour at the Embassy Suites near the airport, drinking margaritas, munching on little goldfish crackers and flirting with military men who were there for a conference on whatever it is military men do these days.  One guy told me that his job was to tell the generals what to do; all righty then. 

(Awesome photo of freshly-landed alien from the March March parade, courtesy of Ingrid Kopp.)

A fittingly weird end to four days of finding myself in one unexpected place after another, albeit while sitting in jam-packed cinemas watching stellar nonfiction films.  I also think I can better articulate something I noticed about this festival last year and it is this:  something incredible happens in this small college town between the visiting filmmakers and the denizens of Columbia, both populations walking away the richer for the experience in ways that help propel this particular art form (telling cinematic true stories) into the local collective consciousness, then resonating out into the larger world. 

That may sound a bit precious or crunchy (or both), but hear me out:  one of the top-of-mind issues that we festival junkies talk about a lot is the relevancy of said festivals, especially our domestic ones.  (Addictions to karaoke, taking self-portraits while partying like a rock star and other inexplicable symptoms may also occur.)  What one notices quite quickly is that there is a very tight circle of influential, highly passionate and active industry members who stay abreast of business developments and shifting landscapes in marketing and distribution, precisely in order to advise filmmakers (especially novices) about strategies that make sense for that particular filmmaker and his or her particular film.  The dedication that these distributors, festival directors, producers, filmmakers and programmers bring to this exchange cannot be overestimated.  They are our modern-day talent scouts.  This is, to my mind, what is so key right now since marketing and distribution plans absolutely need to be tailor-made in order for a project to successfully run the gauntlet and get seen and appreciated by the audience for which it was made.  Sometimes that will extend beyond the festival circuit for certain films; sometimes it will not.

The current trends of audience sourcing and doing precise and tactical market research and outreach is vital to a film's success, and it appears as if festivals, especially the intimate ones or the ones that exhibit nonfiction and more experimental work exclusively, like True/False, provide a fertile atmosphere for this kind of collaboration in a casual atmosphere--real conversations that push aside the "business speak" and get down to brass tacks about how a film can be crafted to be the best product it can be before being showcased to the world.  We really must turn to the festivals to find this kind of tender loving care for challenging work.  And this is what True/False provides like nothing else I've seen (except for Britdoc, and they were there, too, this year) and what festivals like Sundance have lost and festivals like Tribeca still haven't figured out. 

Time and valuable talent isn't wasted staging panels where talking heads spout the same script over and over and over again, some blatantly using the platform for shameless self-promotion, followed by stale (and, frankly, lame) Q&As.  And you only have stale and lame Q&As when whatever's preceded it is deadly boring, and no one's really listening in the first place.  Here instead, you have brilliant, highly crafted sessions called workshops (free and open to the public) with composers (Instant Soundtrack), reporters and journalists making nonfiction cinema (Frontline Club), a conversation between a filmmaker and her editor, in this case, True Vision Honoree, Kim Longinotto and Ollie Huddleston (The Kim and Ollie Show).  This year, there was a roundtable of filmmakers and industry folk parsing out the trajectory of a made-up project (Hypothetical Hit: Building a Better Doc), where a film project by a first-time director is explored from idea to distribution.  Click here to read more descriptions of debates and workshops.  (Film still, above, from festival fave, Havana Marking's Afghan Star, courtesy of the filmmaker.)

Another way in which this festival shines is in its commitment to its community, the one in which both festival directors, Paul Sturtz and David Wilson, reside.  They are well-loved native sons and have taken this tremendous opportunity to create a specific sort of civic pride and a real concrete investment, both financially and socially, in their community, hosting a festival in which the whole town has a stake--individuals, businesses, churches, etc.  When the audience is invested in wanting to see great nonfiction cinema and learns to be critical in a meaningful and generous way (which these folks have, obviously, learned how to do), then the exchange between audience and filmmaker can really help generate excitement to which even the most glamorous premieres cannot begin to compare.  It is not surprising then that this is becoming an absolute-must destination for both filmmakers and industry, a place ripe for the kind of substantive relationship building both of these populations seek.  I may have to eat these words, but it appears as if T/F may be a Sundance-of-the-doc-world in the making, perhaps even expanding beyond documentary, at some point.  As Redford does now, Sturtz and Wilson might be scratching their heads in several years' time wondering what happened to their tiny, little indie festival in the middle of nowhere where they showed sneak previews and secret screenings and small-scale, but riveting, work to a captivated audience. 

In my next couple of posts, I'll share thoughts and impressions on some of the films I saw, posting here on SIM and at Hammer to Nail.  More soon. 

"Oz Never Did Give Nothing to the Tin Man. . .

 . . . that he didn't, didn't already have." 

Watching David Redmon and Ashley Sabin's new documentary, Invisible Girlfriend, a film they just exhibited at the 12th Annual Magnolia Film Festival in Starkville, Mississippi where it won the Ron Tibbett Award for Excellence, I kept thinking about Dorothy's surreal journey to Oz--even before the introduction of life down on the farm, witches and tin men, and, of course the discovery of the great, but nonexistent, Oz himself, here embodied by virgin martyr, Joan of Arc, the incorporeal sweetheart of the title (her golden statue, pictured left, in New Orleans' Place de France).

I happen to also be a mad fan of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, and this film is rife with the stuff--specifically, the supernatural, mental disease and the grotesque--a trio of subjects that in some filmmakers' hands could be downright disastrous, particularly when it's clear that your subject is showing and teaching you way more than you were ever prepared for and, in fact, you might be a little scared of where this journey will lead you.

Yet, the intrepid Sabin and Redmon, as I've noted before, unmitigatedly open themselves up to the rich, loamy textures of human life and drama that make most of us run in the other direction or, at the very least, flat out ignore.  Their company is called Carnivalesque, after all, where they make  and distribute films that tell stories "united by a raw, startling sensibility of disruption and celebration, where excess and transgression percolate in everyday life."  So, I guess it's no accident they keep finding story after story, character after character, out of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Their protagonist, Charles' heart and soul yearns for some kind of meaningful connection with his past, present and future.  They met Charles while making their film Kamp Katrina a few years back and re-visit him in his home in rural Monroe, Louisiana, several hundred miles from the Big Easy, where he resides, not altogether comfortably, with his bewildered parents and two of his kids (the young boy is a heart breaker, in every possible way).  Charles is medicated and under the watchful eyes of physicians who find in him an interesting specimen, guinea-pigging him to see what happens when they mix this medication with that, this one with that one, and on and on and on.  His thoughts on his diagnosed illness and attendant treatment alone are worth the price of admission, excerpts of which should be printed on every bottle of psychotropic meds that get put out on the market.  (Don't get me started on the medical establishment-pharma companies' relationship, please.  Moore just scratched the surface.)

Sabin and Redmon (pictured) accompany Charles, riding hell-for-leather on his Romper Room-red bicycle, all the way to New Orleans, again, a journey of several hundred miles.  And like Dorothy, our hero meets unbelievable, but very real, characters along the way, all with some wisdom to impart, stories to share and their own kind of encouragement when they recognize a kindred spirit of this fire-and-brimstone lifestyle--the kindness of strangers, indeed, arises in the most unexpected of places.  And Charles, too, is wise in the ways of children, "damaged" adults and idiots savants, and never, ever flinches away from blood, guts, disfigurement, and most importantly, death.  He can even tell a proselytizing born-again to fuck off in the most gracious and polite way.  Very Southern.

The footage represents an accompanying visual palette that is startling in its intensity and violent beauty, an optical trope that offsets the desperate love that Charles sets off on his journey to find.  Their cinematic eye excels in the subtle art of visual exposition knowing that God is, always, in the details.  And the ending, oh man, the ending.  You would probably roll your eyes if you saw this in a fiction film because it's just way too woeful and wretched and fateful for words.  But it is there before us and we know viscerally when the news is delivered that it is all too harrowingly real.

This is also the first time I've seen the delightful end credit of "Ideas unabashedly taken and inspired by."  More filmmakers should fess up.  Sabin and Redmon's list includes Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Medicine for Melancholy, Me and My Brother, Low and Behold (which Carnivalesque distributes), Billy the Kid and Easy Rider.  I'm sure you already know this, but you're way too smart for Hollywood, kids. 

I'm off soon for my own surreal adventure in the hinterlands of Missouri.  See you on the other side of True/False, ya'll.

True/False '09 Program is Up!

If you click here, you'll be able to see the wonderful program David Wilson, Paul Sturtz and team have on tap for this year's iteration of the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, MO. 

Shortly after Sundance every year, Wilson and Sturtz unveil their film program and other special events filled with the most interesting and compelling films, folks and issues they run across on their travels throughout the year, culling the best of the best from the circuit, but also delving a bit deeper to find hidden gems and finagling secret screenings of "works-in-progress" before their debuts at other festivals.

Because I normally don't partake of the Sundance experience, it's an opportunity for me to see a slew of great films that have just played there, as I did last year, in a quiet, friendly, low-key place that's more about the film-going community rather than the industry that descends on Park City every year.  However, more and more VIPs do descend on Columbia each year due to the festival's stellar reputation.

By taking a gander at the new program, this year's festival will surely not disappoint.  What's particularly exciting is that filmmaker, Kim Longinotto, will be this year's True Vision Award recipient.  Fresh from her triumphant win of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for her latest nonfiction piece, Rough Aunties, Longinotto will be fêted for "creatively advancing the art of nonfiction filmmaking and building a body of work that reveals new truths about our world within each frame."  Yes, she does, and has been doing for decades.  I'm very excited to meet with her again.  While she was finishing up Rough Aunties for its IDFA debut this past summer in London, I got a chance to sit with her for a wonderful and very personal chat.  You can read more here about T/F's True Vision Award and its recipients from past years, and you can read my conversation with Longinotto here.