True/False 2011: Truth Harder

This ain't Twilight. It's a friggin' documentary.

2011 was my third year in a row at the True/False Film Festival, and I can't imagine why I wouldn't go back again next year.

It's hard to describe just how great the vibe in the town is - thousands milling around and lining up around the blocks to watch documentaries.  When I miss a film at the festival - and it's impossible to see them all - and watch them months later at home, I regret not seeing them in the Missouri Theater with 1,000 others.  I missed WasteLand at last year's festival, and as the accolades and Oscar nomination have piled up, I haven't stopped kicking myself.

Probably my favorite film this year was Life in a Day - the doc culled from a day's worth of videos uploaded to YouTube.  Given that pedigree, I had some reservations, as director Kevin MacDonald said he did.  I'm a pretty hardcore cynic, but you'd have to be even more cynical than me to not be moved by the film MacDonald and crew put together.  Life in a Day has elements of narrative, but it's more a symphony of tone, framing the highs and lows of human experience.

Sure, you could call it a gimmick.  But it is a technical achievement that wouldn't even have been possible a few years ago.  If someone offers to show you what is going on around the entire world on a single day, how could you say no?

The quality of the curation goes even deeper.  The shorts program Landmarks & Monoliths featured five shorts which all revolved around the relationship between people and the environments they've built around them.  Minka, directed by Davina Pardo, very delicately explored the lives of two longtime male companions around the story of how they rebuilt an ancient Japanese farm house as their home.

Let's be honest, shorts programs always center around a theme.  But they rarely come together into much more than "here's a few films which kind of relate to each other."

To quote the Portlandia theme song, the spirit of the 90s is alive in (Columbia).  I finally got a chance to eat an truly amazing breakfast at Cafe Berlin.  Booches still dishes out the best hamburgers I've ever been served on wax paper.

I realize I come on like the Convention & Visitors Bureau, but such is my love for this festival and the people who put it on.  If you Googled your way to this post and have read this far, you owe it to yourself to check out True/False for yourself.

Troll Hunter, The Arbor and blurring lines

Troll!!!

Troll Hunter and The Arbor may only have two things in common.  Both screened at this year's True/False Film Festival, and both blur the lines between documentary and narrative fiction.  I liked The Arbor better.

I was looking forward to Troll Hunter as a fan of comedy, bizarro subject matter and Norwegians.  I knew going in that the film was largely invented, with CGI trolls and all.  I guess I thought the filmmakers extrapolated from some kernel of truth - perhaps playing out some crazy guy's stories.  But the film is 100% invention, much in the vein of Blair Witch or Cloverfield.

There are some genuinely funny moments, and the filmmakers get a lot of mileage from just a little bit of troll footage.  Unlike many mockumentaries, they stay completely true to documentary style found footage.  But once it's clear the film is all invention, I wanted the pacing and beats of a narrative arc.  If you don't have the storytelling of narrative and you don't have the "reality" of documentary, what do you have?

Worth shooting with actors just for a bitchin' shot like this.

Whereas Troll Hunter is a fiction narrative trying to look like a documentary, The Arbor is a documentary made to look like fiction.  The film consists of audio interviews with its subjects, with actors on screen lip-synching to their words.

It's the story of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, whose teenage accounts of life in The Estate (the projects) brought her some prominence in the 80s.  Dunbar's hard drinking and hard living led to three children from three fathers and her death at just 29.  Her children, especially the oldest, struggled to get on without falling down the same path as their mother.

The lip-synching technique is a bit jarring at first, but often you forget it's even there.  But Director Clio Barnard wants the audience to remain aware that there is a level of manipulation and storytelling in what they are watching.  (I asked her.)  What really made the technique connect is that, in the same way Andrea's plays were a dramatic recreation of her life's events, the documentary is a sort-of recreation based on the stories the people in her life have told.

Coming on the heels of a year when Catfish and Exit Through the Gift Shop sparked a lot of debate about the blending of truth and fiction in docs, The Arbor and Troll Hunter illustrate that the blending of styles hinges on which elements you hold onto.

Page One: Journalism vs. Technology

A key moment in Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times comes subtly, in footage from one of many panels on "the death of newspapers."  Someone from the news aggregator Newser makes the blanket claim that media companies are in the technology business.

It's hardly new to kick newspapers around for being slow or inept at embracing new technologies.  But Page One makes a much needed counterargument - these technology companies are also in the journalism business.  Or at least they should be.

Times Reporter David Carr - the real star of the film - responds by showing the Newser front page with every piece of content gathered from a traditional news agency cut-out, leaving just a page full of holes.  In another clip, David Simon points out he's never seen a reporter from the Huffington Post at a Baltimore Zoning Board meeting.

But the real argument for the relevance of the journalist comes from watching the entire machine of the New York Times.  Editors stay long into the night debating the relevance of a story, is the angle right, is it even a story at all?  These are conversations I recognize from my days in newspaper, but it's a side of the job not often seen.

Contrasting this is the office of aggregator Gawker, where writers gather around the "big board" - a screen which constantly updates with the top ten stories readers are viewing.  The implication is to serve the audience by scrambling to give them what they want, to grab clicks with headlines that play into common search terms, etc.

In a Q&A after the screening at True/False, David Carr said that the Times is becoming more like Gawker, and Gawker is becoming more like the Times.  Perhaps modern news reporting is one part journalism and one part technology.  But the technology side has taken a lot of credit in recent years, and reveled in kicking the journalists while they're down.  Score this one for the journalists.

Black Maria 2010

This weekend the Black Maria Film Festival rolled through town, and I made my annual trek to catch one of its two programs.

I enjoy the grab bag nature of shorts programs, and Black Maria always feels like it contains even more variety.  So many shorts feel like an audition for a feature - be they narrative, documentary, animation.  Black Maria always features some work that lies outside those parameters.

A notable example in the program I caught was Neil Needleman's film Corporate Art Policy, which was essentially a video essay.  I've heard work like this derided at festivals as better suited to a blog or You Tube.  But despite it's low technical aspirations, it tells a story, it's got a point-of-view.  Plenty of more glossy films don't manage to do that.

On the high end of the production scale was the PBS-ready documentary Worlds of Sound: Ballad of Folkways, telling the story of Folkways founder Moe Asch, and narrated by Pete Seeger.  If this hasn't been picked-up for broadcast, I'm sure it will be.  It's a solid, informative doc.

Pickles for Nickels was a unique, hand-crafted piece of animation.  It was so well-done, I wasn't surprised to see CalArts scroll across the credits.  There was a bit of narrative to the film, but also plenty of non-linear elements more associated with art film.  The filmmaker, Danielle Ash's voice comes through very strong and makes the film something more than an audition for Pixar, as animated shorts so often are.

Sebastian's Voodoo by Joaquin Baldwin is more Pixar-like in its computer animation and its storytelling - but in a good way.  The simple story of individual sacrifice elicited an audible gasp when it ended.

As always, this Black Maria program delivered a variety that made it well worth making time for.

Final Thoughts on True/False 10

I was more prepared for the rhythms of True/False in my second year, but no less impressed by event and its films.

I enjoyed every film I saw, which makes it harder to distinguish between them.  Restrepo has stayed with me the most, but given its life-and-death nature, perhaps that's to be expected.  But I largely devoted my time to my favorite kind of doc - focused on a single, eccentric personality.

Smash His Camera and The Invention of Dr. Nakamats both fit well into this niche,  and took distinctly different approaches.  Smash His Camera broadens its perspective on Paparazzo Ron Galella to include wildly differing critical views of him and his work.  Nakamats never steps back from the portrait the subject paints of himself.  It creates a more unified POV, but made me long for the context of Smash His Camera.

One of the richest experiences when attending a festival is drawing connections between the films - something you simply can't or wouldn't do when watching them separately.  My buddy Travis pointed out as we left Waking Sleeping Beauty that the events it chronicles ended 14 years ago, exactly as had the life of the comedian we saw documented in one of the Secret Screenings the night before.  Is 14 years some kind of magical gestation age for a certain historical perspective?  Maybe, but I never would have wondered if I hadn't seen the two films within hours of each other.

If there was one disappointment from the films I saw, it was that they didn't open up to me more.  The experience I most enjoy when watching a doc is that moment the film goes beyond that quirky hook of its subject and becomes "about" something different.  Smash His Camera had moments of this - questions of the nature of art and celebrity.  Probably more than any other film I saw, Restrepo left much to be discovered between the images and the rationalizations of the soldiers involved.

One day after leaving the festival, I wonder about the films I didn't see.  Two of this year's Best Picture nominees screened at last year's fest - but I only saw one of them.  Critic Karina Longworth Tweeted several films she was impressed with last night.  I had seen none of them.

It's a credit to the festival that it can't be fully digested, even spread over four days.  I spoke to filmmakers and attendees alike whose reaction was the same as mine last year - "how did I not know about this?"

Four Film Saturday at True/False

We planned to see It Felt Like a Kiss first thing in the morning, but some schedule confusion led us into the queue for Waking Sleeping Beauty instead.

The doc follows a renaissance in Disney animation and the overhaul in management that took place between 1984 and 1994.  It feels hard not to damn the film with faint praise.  It is essentially a history, and for anyone interested in Disney or the business of Hollywood, and I count myself as one, it's an interesting history.  One interesting choice, noted before the screening by producer and former Disney Exec. Peter Schneider - the filmmakers chose to only use footage from the era itself.  In Schneider's words, there are no "shots of old men talking."  It's a subtle choice, but keeps the film grounded in the moments it documents.

Disney luminaries like Eisner and Katzenberg appear more or less as expected, but I was surprised and even moved by the creative contributions of lyricist Howard Ashman to the production of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

After a couple beers and a couple sliders at Booches, we began our afternoon at the Blue Note venue with The Red Chapel.  The film follows a Danish filmmaker and two Danish/Korean performers he recruits to travel into North Korea under the guise of a cross-cultural performance.  The ruse of the filmmaker's crew is manipulative and even crass, but it pales in comparison to the group performance of the entire population of Pyongyang.

Every action the crew encounters is choreographed to display an image of perfect unity and loyalty to the Great Leader(s).  The crew plays along, even as their North Korean handlers edit their performance entirely into something more appropriate for North Korean audiences.  But the strain on the faces of the people are clear.  Filmmaker Mads Brugger attributes their every action to fear, and it would be hard to disagree with his assessment.

Some of Brugger's actions set my ethical spider-sense tingling, but the film is worthwhile even if just as a window into this hidden society.  It's an often hilarious piece of absurdism, but the fear and tragedy of North Korea lend weight to the humor.

The Invention of Dr. Nakamats brings humor with much less baggage, as it documents the Japanese inventor with the most registered patents in history.  The Doctor's inventions include legitimate technological breakthroughs such as the floppy disk, but it appears from the film far more oddities, including an underwater pencil/notebook and products to stimulate female arousal.

As the title suggests, Nakamats is also meticulous about sculpting his image and orchestrating the events around him, down to a moment he orders his children to redo a presentation of a birthday gift to him.  It's a funny film about a truly eccentric character, but by the end I wished it could have taken me to some deeper level of understanding of Nakamats.

Restrepo was our final film in the standing-room only Blue Note.  The winner of the Grand Jury Doc prize at Sundance did not disappoint.  It's being sold as a true story version of The Hurt Locker, and that's not an inaccurate description - especially in the opening moments when the camera is inside a vehicle as it is exploded by a land mine.

The bulk of the film follows a team of soldiers as they man the most remote outpost in Afghanistan, under near-constant attack from the remnants of the Taliban.  

I heard several people dismiss the film as "good, but nothing I haven't seen before."  Sure, the war doc isn't a new thing - but I don't remember feeling as much a feeling of actually being there as I did watching Restrepo.  The camera is there with the soldiers as they are taking fire, and in the most harrowing sequence, with them on patrol as fellow soldiers are being killed just a few yards away.

Interviews with the surviving soldiers frame and add poignancy to the footage.  It feels like the filmmakers have been true to the words and intentions of those soldiers as they tell their story, but the end result left me feeling that all their sacrifice was done in tragic futility.

We ended our night, as we did last year, with pizza and pitchers of beer at Shakespeare's Pizza - a classic college town pizza parlor, filled with a vibrant young crowd that makes me feel every one of my 31 years.

Friday Night at True/False

Last night kicked off the 10th True/False Film Festival (at least for us).  It's my second year at what I'm already planning to make an annual event.

After gathering our passes and applying some social lubricant, we got into the packed Missouri Theater to see Smash His Camera - a doc which premiered at Sundance and was just picked up by HBO this week for distribution.

The film documents the life's work of Ron Galella, a lifelong paparazzo who was sued by Jackie O. and punched in the face by Marlon Brando.  Galella and a cadre of supporters and detractors narrate the story, from his first work in the late '60s up to today.

Director Leon Gast also directed the stellar When We Were Kings.  While Galella doesn't have the charisma of a figure like Ali (and then again who does?), both films focus on a singular personality whose actions ultimately, and perhaps surprisingly, resonate into the culture at large.

Beyond just the character story of the eccentric photographer, the film raises interesting questions about what constitutes art - particularly in photography.  Galella's work has recently been exhibited at museums, and it's hard to argue that he hasn't taken some beautiful photographs.  His shots are snapshots, often with a prominent flash bulb glare, but the candid, vulnerable moments he captures can be fascinating.  His critics argue that anyone who takes that many shots is bound to wind up with a few good shots, and also point out that it's always the subject that makes the photo interesting.

Galella comes across warmly, though seeing he has applied his techniques to subjects including children can be stomach-churning.  I was particularly struck by his string of photos of Angelina Jolie, going back to when she appeared to be only eight or nine years old.  He argues in several archival interviews that his intention is to show celebrities at their most human.

That argument felt rather thin to me, but there is a fascinating moment late in the film when a young girl, probably in her teens, wanders through an exhibition of Galella's work.  She tries to identify the subjects of the photos - the likes of Onasis, Steve McQueen, Bridget Bardot, etc.  She recognizes almost none of them.  It's subtle but striking evidence of the fleeting nature of fame, and perhaps lends credence to Galella's claim that in the end, he's just capturing images of humanity.

After Smash His Camera, we caught and enjoyed the Secret Screening Black.  But by the request of the programmers, I'll leave my thoughts on that a secret.

Jewish Eye for the Gentile Guy

Fatherland will be touching another international base when it plays in Israel as part of the Jewish Eye World Jewish Film Festival.

Romance in Durango

Just when you (and I) thought Fatherland was done on the festival circuit, I've learned it may have a few screenings left. One will be in March at the Durango Film Festival in Colorado. I believe this is the 22nd festival to screen the film.

For those who haven't been able to attend a festival screening, we will hopefully have some other distribution channels open soon. Whether it be DVD, downloads, whatever - I will post details here.

And seriously, "Romance in Durango" as the title for this post? Put a lot of thought into that one, didn't I? If I were still working at a newspaper, I'd slap myself for that.

Audience Approval

While Fatherland has likely wrapped its festival run, we learned this week that it was the third-highest rated film by the audience at the Port Townsend Film Festival in September.

Audience awards are notorious for Chicago Machine style ballot stuffing, so this is especially encouraging as nobody affiliated with Fatherland was able to attend this festival. They liked us. They really, really, etc.

There has also been a major development on the distribution front, which I hope to post sometime this weekend.

Macedonia, Hollywood and nearly Greece

Fatherland will be screening at the International Cinematographers Film Festival in Macedonia at the end of Sept., as well as the International Student Film Festival Hollywood in November.

The film was also selected for the Short Film Festival in Drama in Greece, but won't be screening due to some logistical issues. But hey, it's always nice to be invited.

Newport Beach, Palm Beach, Cedar Rapids, Oxford...

It's been a good week for Fatherland, which I've just learned will be screening at several more festivals in the coming months, including Newport Beach and Palm Beach. The schedules aren't available yet, but Fatherland will be screening at:

Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival: April 4-5
Palm Beach International Film Festival: April 10-17
Oxford International Film Festival: April 11-13
Newport Beach Film Festival: April 24-May 1

As of right now, I plan to attend the Cedar Rapids festival and hope to make it to Newport Beach as well. Hope to see you there.

Fatherland in Miami

Fatherland screened this past week at the Miami International Film Festival in Shorts Program 1: Human Behavior. Also among the seven films in the program were Academy Award Nominee Madame Tutli-Putli, and Soft, winner of an International Jury Prize at this year's Sundance festival. It's gratifying to see my work screened alongside such acclaimed films.

I've also just gotten wind of a couple more festival screenings; I'll be posting the details as soon as I can.

Wild Rose Film Festival

My short film Personal will be making its world premiere (outside of Chapman University) at the 2006 Wild Rose Film Festival in Des Moines. Personal stars TV's Alex Fernandez as a lonely man who places personal ads, but then must take action when a woman literally appears on his doorstep.

I've also been nominated for Best Director of a Mini-Pic for Personal. The festival defines "Mini-Pic" as any film less than 10 minutes in length.

But wait ... there's more. My short film The Persecution of Al Kida will also be screening at the festival. Having previously screened at the Cedar Rapids Film Festival and on TV as part of the Iowa Independent Filmmaker Showcase, this should cement the film's star, TV's Dan Cole, as a household name in the state of Iowa.

The festival runs Wednesday, Oct. 18 through Sunday, Oct. 22. Both Personal and Al Kida will screen during a series of short films on Friday, Oct. 20, beginning at 5:15pm. Tickets are available for individual screenings or for the entire festival, with more info at: http://www.ariesworks.com/schedule.html All screenings take place at The Fleur Cinema & Cafe.

New York Short Short Film Festival

The Persecution of Al Kida is an Official Selection for the New York Short Short Film Festival. It will screen at 3:45pm at the Anthology Film Archive Theater in Manhattan.

The festival showcases films of less than five minutes in length. Categories include Music Video, Documentary and Animation. My film will be competing in the Narrative category.

So, if you're in the Lower East Side of Manhattan this Saturday, May 20, why not check it out? Then afterwards, you can mill around the lobby and talk loudly about how great my film was.

Iowa Independent Filmmaker Showcase

My short film The Persecution of Al Kida is screening on television throughout Iowa as part of the Iowa Independent Filmmaker Showcase. It is featured in Episode 1 of the series, which is airing on the Mediacom Connections channel. The series premeired in January and continues to air in February. Dates and times vary by market, so I suggest checking your local listings.

I also reccomend checking out 'Round Midnight, a short documentary by my friend and fellow filmmaker Andy Brodie, which is featured in the same episode.

Indie Film - Cedar Rapids Style

To my devoted readers (Mom, Dad), I apologize for the long lapse since my last post. It's been a hectic few weeks here on the Left Coast. So what do I have to show for it?

I'm proud to announce that my short film The Persecution of Al Kida will be screened April 2 at the 5th annual Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend myself. But I'm grateful to anyone in the area who takes the time to check it out. Also be sure to check out 'Round Midnight, a documentary short by my pal Andy Brodie.