2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival program by Michelle Benham

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival April 12â&#x20AC;&#x201C;15, 2012

Durham, North Carolina

new d o cs

Welcome from Deirdre Haj

full frame documentary film festival

Welcome from Tom Rankin

Staff & Boards

Programming & Selection Committees

Volunteers & Team Staff

sponsors

Full Frame is extremely grateful to the following partners for their generous support.

Presenting Duke University Leadership American Tobacco Campus/ Capitol Broadcasting Company, Inc.

Supporting

Theo Davis Printing Trailblazer Studios TROSA, Inc. Whole Foods Market

Associate The 2050 Group Alex Jergensen Alpha Cine Labs, Seattle

A&E IndieFilms

American Institute of Certified Public Accountants

The City of Durham

Bull City Mobile

Durham Convention Center

Burtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bees

Durham Marriott City Center

Carolina Vein Center

North Carolina Arts Council

Chuck Pell, CSO, Physcient, Inc.

Quince Imaging, Inc.

Daylight Magazine Dos Perros

Benefactor

Duke Tower Hotel and Condominiums

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Durham Arts Council

Carolina Theatre

Durham Central Park

Documentary Channel

Durham Parks and Recreation

Giorgios Hospitality Group

Fullsteam Brewery

National Endowment for the Arts

Horse & Buggy Press Indiewire

Partner Breakiron Animation & Design Counter Culture Coffee Figure 8 Films GlaxoSmithKline Hartley Film Foundation HBO Documentary Films The Independent Weekly Jennings & Co. Julian Price Family Foundation Mad Hatter Bakeshop & Cafe McNatton Technologies Merge Records MT Apps Myriad Media Nicholas School of the Environment Popâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Trattoria/Rue Cler Saladelia

Ink Printing & Design Kontek Systems North Carolina State University Old North Durham Inn ROMO*PR West End Wine Bar

Friend Asian/Pacific Studies at Duke University The Blotter Magazine Bull City Burger and Brewery Durham Area Transit Authority GoLiveWorkPlay.com Guglhupf Bakery Long Beverage Craft Morehead Manor Bed & Breakfast The Sign Shop of the Triangle SOLAY Wine Authorities Yelp

donors

Full Frame gives heartfelt thanks to the following individuals for their generous support.

f u ll fra m e donors Executive Producers

$20,000+

Wyndham Robertson

Directors

$10,000 – $19,999

Karen and Dan Berman Kathi and Steve Eason Mrs. Frank H. Kenan

Writers

Editors

$500 – $999

Gail and Phil Cooley Sophie and Henry Copeland Jodi Glucksman Deirdre and Joseph Haj Jill McCorkle and Tom Rankin

Production Managers $5,000 – $9,999

Clay Farland In loving memory of Melanie Taylor

Emily Kass and Charles Weinraub

Producers

$2,500 – $4,999

Lisa and Leon Capetanos Deborah Dean and Thomas Wenger Anne and Walter Dellinger Kerry Dietz and Eva Schocken Fenhagen family Cavett and Barker French Tom Kenan Marian and Dudley Lacy Nancy Lee and Marie Wilson Jennifer Parker and Peter Rosenberg Michele Pas and Barry Poss Alan Teasley and Andrew Wheeler

Cinematographers $1,000 – $2,499

Beverly and Robert Atwood Vandana Dake and John Warasila Jenny French and Bill Fick Laura and Gerard Hall K.J. Hunt Deborah Jakubs and James Roberts Nancy Kalow and Daniel Dektar Tracy Mancini and Norris Cotton Terri Monk and Craig Weldon Caroline and Arthur Rogers Barbra and Andrew Rothschild Bill Shore Trudy and Stuart Smith Mindy and Guy Solie David Sontag Laura Meyers Stabler and Brian Stabler Sharon Van Vechten Patti White and John Sander Lauren and James Whitehurst Krista and Michael Zarzar

$250 – $499

Hannah and Richard Andrews Nancy Buirski Mary Jane and Woodrow Burns Lynn Goodpasture and Alan Jacobs Shelly Green Hannah and Paul Kirschenfeld Renee Leverty Melanie and Howie Levinson Jean and Jim Rose Sandra Sully

Sound Designers

$100 – $249

Herbert Amey Nadia Anderson Kristen and Mike Astilla Susan and Dan Barco Ruth Bardon and Mike Casey Trish and Rick Bean Mary Bennett and Jon Poehlman Lisa Brachman and Robert Roubey Linda and Philip Carl Nancy and Tom Carstens Kathy Carter Diane and Chuck Catotti Center for New Revenue Ariel Dorfman Patricia and James Easterbrook Judy and Curtis Eshelman Pamela and Isaac Green Barbara Haight Ford and Richard Hibbits Kristin Hondros Peter and Sandra Jacobi Courtney James (Urban Durham Realty) In honor of Will and Jen Richey Megan and Chad Johnson Jana Johnson Hae-Young Kim Harriet and Kimball King Carol Klinger Bahar Leventoglu Tom Long Alison Mann Ann and Joseph Mann Sandy and Ned McClurg Alise and Don McNeill

Jay Mebane Sally Miller Lee Nersesian Mary and Patrick Oglesby Nancy Jo and H. Newland Oldham, Jr. Cheryl Peterson Gara Pollock and Robert Knebel Sharon Reuss and Berry McMurray John Ringland Frances and Edward Rollins Mary Ross Susan Sewell Chloë Seymore and Harrison Haynes Zuzana and David Smith Ellie and Chris Speh Maura Stokes Tim Struttmann Edward Terrenoire Elisabeth and John Wiener Michael Wiley Thomas Witelski

Assistant Directors

$1 – $99

Kendall Alford-Madden and Richard Madden Toby and Peter Beckman Karen Bronson Carol Cappelletti and Daniel Weinlandt Gretchen Cooley Mark Foskey Martha Idler Betty James Jan Krawitz Charles Kronberg Diane Lennox Eric Melzer Claire Millar Laura D. Miller Melanie and Scott Mitchell Florence Nash Mary Frances Peete Nathan Phillips Raquel Salvatella de Prada Alice Sharpe Elizabeth Shimkus Ron Sutton In memory of Tom White, editor, Documentary magazine Angela Vieth and Andrew Goodwin Jeanne Werner-Gunter Lynn Whitaker Leslie Williams

special thanks

F U L L F R A ME A D V O CATE AWARD With this year’s festival, Full Frame is inaugurating a new honor, the Full Frame Advocate Award. Wyndham Robertson has been a steadfast supporter of Full Frame since its earliest days and no one better embodies both the values and aspirations of the festival. If her name seems familiar to you, it is most likely because it appears onscreen before every film. She serves on our Executive Committee and has been an ardent and energetic steward of the festival. She has hosted parties in her home, suggested successful campaigns, and has introduced us to friends near and far. Wyndham is, quite simply, a force of nature. To wit, not long after Wyndham graduated from Hollins University, she was hired by Fortune magazine, where she worked for twenty-five years and was the first woman to be named assistant managing editor. She then returned to North Carolina to serve as the vice president of communications for the University of North Carolina’s sixteen-campus system, a position she held for ten years. Among the many contributions Wyndham Robertson has made to North Carolina is her service on the boards of the Kenan Institute for Ethics; the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts; the UNC Center for Public Television; Capital Cities/ABC, Inc.; and the Wachovia Corporation, among others. While she participates on numerous boards, her love for her alma mater, Hollins University, is unsurpassed. She served as a trustee at Hollins for thirty-one years and as its chair for three. The Hollins University library, the hub of all campus knowledge, appropriately bears her name. We are delighted to celebrate her talents and spirit, her tireless support of the film festival, with this first-ever Full Frame Advocate Award.

the m elanie taylor hospitality suite One of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s most devoted fans, Melanie Taylor, lost her battle with cancer in the spring of 2011. Melanie was a longtime attendee of the festival. For years, she was among the first audience members to arrive for screenings Thursday morning and the last to leave as seats cleared Sunday evening. Melanie’s enthusiasm and tenacity were remarkable; to see twenty films in a weekend was nothing. Her vigor helped inspire the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights, which she and her family founded in Melanie’s mother’s name in 2007. In recognition of her profound attachment to the festival, Melanie’s daughter Clay Farland has graciously funded Full Frame’s Hospitality Suite in her name. This tribute is especially fitting of Melanie, for as Clay says, “She preferred to record rather than be recorded, and she preferred to host rather than be hosted.” The Hospitality Suite is at the heart of the festival, a place where filmmakers and filmgoers relax between screenings to share food and fellowship before the next show. We are grateful for support of this space, and we are proud to honor Melanie’s tremendous love for film and dedication to Full Frame throughout the weekend.

new d o c s thanks Companies and Offices The 2050 Group: Adam J. Segal A&E IndieFilms: Molly Thompson, Robert DeBitetto Airblown Entertainment: Melanie Joy Alpha Cine Labs, Seattle: Jannat Gargi American Institute of Certified Public Accountants: Mary Simpson American Tobacco Campus: Michael Goodmon, Valerie Ward, Tex Law

9 Durham Police: David Addison, Jonathan Martin

North Carolina Arts Council: Jeff Pettus, Mary B. Regan

Durham Public Schools: Mary Casey, Allan Cross, Ken Barnes

North Carolina State University: Marsha Orgeron

Entertainment 720

Old North Durham Inn: Debbie Vickery

Enviro-Tote, Inc.: Marcia Laramy Extended Stay Hotels: Timothy Woodhead

Pop’s Trattoria/Rue Cler: Chris Stinnett, John Vandergrift

FedEx: Mike Williams, Marvin Holcomb

Physcient: Chuck Pell

Figure 8 Films: Bill Hayes, Max Perlmutt

Playmakers Repertory Company: Michael Rolleri, Joseph Haj, Connie Mahan, Stacy Payne

First Class Valet: Rozell Rogers

Asian/Pacific Studies at Duke University: Karla Loveall

Fullsteam Brewery: Emily Francis, Sean Lilly Wilson

The Blotter Magazine: Martin Smith

Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant Fund: Ian Olds, Thom Powers, Rachael Rakes

Breakiron Animation & Design: Lisa and Charlie Breakiron The Broad Street Café: John Hite Bull City Burger and Brewery: Seth Gross, Martha King, Luke Studer Bull City Mobile: Shawn Deena Burt’s Bees: Gabi Prohn Carolina Theatre: Aaron Bare, Jim Carl, Bob Nocek, Jamin Skipper, Carl Wetter Carolina Vein Center: Lindy McHutchison Cassilhaus: Ellen Cassilly, Frank Konhaus Center Sound Records: Craig Brandwynne, Akia Cone City of Durham: Peter Coyle, Sharon DeShazo, Kevin Dick, Micheal Lynch, Jina Propst, Joel Reitzer The Cookery and Crews: Becky Cascio, Rochelle Johnson, Chirba Chirba, The Parlour, Pie Pushers

Gaudio Ltd: Jo Monger Geer Street Garden: Andrew Magowan Giorgios Hospitality Group: Giorgio Bakatsias, Igor Gacina, Jennifer McGowan GlaxoSmithKline: Bill Shore, Mary Linda Andrews, Elaine Rothbauer Global Spectrum: Bosh Bajrakta, Jennifer Noble Gmish Grand Rental Station and Capital Events: James Porter Great Lakes Brewing Co. Guglhupf Bakery: Claudia Cooper Hampton Inn & Suites: Rosalyn Williams, Tara Tucker Hartley Film Foundation: Sarah Masters HBO: Deborah Rudolph

Counter Culture Coffee: Mark Overbay, Brian Ludviksen

Homewood Suites by Hilton: Leanne Tripp

DaisyCakes: Tanya Catolos, Konrad Catolos

IMDb: Christian Gaines

Daylight Magazine: Taj Forer

Independent Weekly: Lee Coggins, Nathan Golub, Steve Schewel, Grace Wakeman, Sioux Watson

Documentary Channel: James Ackerman, Caroline Graham, Jay Kelley, Kate Pearson, Barry Rubinow Dos Perros: Charlie Deal, Diana Deal Duke Tower: Valerie Blettner, Tracey Dissel Duke University: Michael Schoenfeld, James Roberts, Peter Lange, Chuck Catotti, John Morris, Christa Poe, Chris Roby, Barbara Collins, Kylie Snyder, Kirston Johnson, Tanya Lee Duke University Box Office: Tim Barco, Marcy Edenfield, Kristi Horvath Durham Area Transit Authority: Nola Johnson Durham Arts Council: Margaret DeMott, Sherry DeVries, Jim Kershaw Durham Central Park: Ann Alexander, Ben Weber Durham City Council: Mayor William Bell, Mayor Pro Tempore Cora Cole-McFadden, City Manager Tom Bonfield, Farad Ali, Eugene A. Brown, Diane Catotti, Howard Clement III, J. Michael Woodard Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau: Chelsey Morrison, Shelly Green Durham Fire Department: Kenneth Crews Durham Marriott City Center: Christy Lovette, Wendy Jeffries Durham Parks & Recreation: Rich Hahn, Bill Hume, Gina Morais, Laura Nickel, Rhonda Parker, Annette Smith, Breanna Warren

Horse & Buggy Press: Dave Wofford

Quince Imaging: Ryan Crossley, Scott Williams Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority: Patricia Rossi, Terry Blevins RMB Audio: Cooper Cannady, Robert Weddings Saladelia/Mad Hatter: Fida and Robert Ghanem, Julie Appel, Carmello Cruz, Emily Reed Scratch Bakery: Phoebe Lawless SOLAY: Dr. Kamala L. Uzzell Southern Exhibition Services: Aimee Uhrig The Sign Shop of the Triangle: Nicole Rowe Theo Davis Printing: Mike Davis Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts: Lynda Lotich Thrills from the Grill: Belo Shelton Through This Lens: Roylee Duvall Toast: Kelli and Bill Cotter Total Production Services: Rick Bryda Total Wine: Matt Monroe Trailblazer Studios: Tom Waring, Leah Welsh Triangle Rent A Car: Mike Erexson TROSA: Michael Balsamo, Kevin McDonald University Ford: Charles Kunz UPS: Jimmy Lunsford

Indiewire: Jason Gonzalez, James Israel

USPS: Joyce Brown

Ink Printing and Design: Jared Lambert, Margaret McNealy

Vernon Computer Source: Conway Rice

Jennings & Company: Joe Florence, Dan Dunlop

Whole Foods Market: Amy Eller

The King’s Daughters Inn: Colin and Deanna Crossman

Wine Authorities: Craig Heffley

Kontek Systems: Frank Konhaus Long Beverage, Craft.: Betsy Huljev McNatton Technologies: Steve McNatton, John Turner Measurement, Inc.: Donald Timberlake Mellow Mushroom: Daniel DeBrecht, Casey Fox Merge Records: Mac McCaughan, Spott Philpott Morehead Manor: Daniel and Monica R. Edwards Motorco: Chet Mancour Myriad Media: Ricardo Roberts Net Friends: Noah Fleming, Brian Morris, Ollin Landers Nicholas School of the Environment: Scottee Cantrell, Bill Chameides, Amy Chapman-Braun, Donna Sell

West End Wine Bar: Kevin Eastin Will and Pop’s: Carol Edenton WUNC: Connie Walker, Regina Yeager Yelp: Christina Gates

Individuals Phil Cook Barker French Barbara and Jim Goodmon Sally Hines and Ron Abramson Marc Jacobson, P.C. Alex Jergensen Mrs. Frank H. Kenan Tom Kenan Tica Lema D.G. Martin Stephen Nemeth Alexandra Nevid Jeff Polish Joel Sheer Alan Teasley Kim Van Horn

full frame tribute

2012 ful l fr a me t r ibu t e

Stanley Nelson

Stanley Nelson has tackled a sweeping array of topics in his career as a filmmaker. The historic case of a young boy in Mississippi who was murdered for whistling at a white woman. The rise and fall of Jim Jones and the largest mass suicide in history. Brave, young civil rights pioneers who endured hatred, violent mobs, and prison to desegregate America. The thirty-fifth anniversary tour of a Grammy Award–winning a cappella group, and the women who make up its distinct sound. His own family’s roots in Martha’s Vineyard. As I reflect on Stanley Nelson’s films, it occurs to me that a film is sometimes more convincing, more evocative, when as a viewer you don’t notice the filmmaking—when you couldn’t possibly spare a moment of consciousness to reflect on the music or the editing or the cinematography, when you are simply so engrossed in a subject’s openness, the lives of the people portrayed, that a film is seamless. When you feel a sense of commitment to the ideas of a film, and care deeply about the people in a story, without perhaps even realizing you’ve been invited to invest your interest. These are films that Nelson constructs from the ground up, solid in their production value, unflinching in their respect for their subjects. There are no tricks, no cutting-edge yet potentially fleeting, techniques. The films are traditional—assembled from archival footage, interviews, even an occasional narrator—in the best sense of the word. These carefully choreographed documentaries are built for endurance, to withstand the test of time. They are rare films that look both the stories and the viewers directly in the eye. We have had the privilege to showcase many of Stanley Nelson’s films at Full Frame, most recently Wounded Knee in 2009 and Freedom Riders in 2010, and we look forward to screening the ones he has yet to make. We are extremely proud to honor Stanley Nelson’s work with our 2012 Full Frame Tribute. In the following interview, Stanley Nelson talks with Joel Mora, publishing intern at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and one of the editors of this year’s Full Frame program, about getting started as an independent filmmaker, how he goes about researching his films, and the importance of helping young producers of color get their films made. Sadie Tillery Director of Programming, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

stanle y nelson

Joel Mora

Did you always know you wanted to be a filmmaker? Stanley Nelson

When I was growing up in New York City, I had no idea that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I grew up in a time where filmmaking wasn’t really a career choice for African Americans at all. When I was in college— at City College in New York—this was in the early ’70s all of a sudden these Blaxploitation films came out, and there were black people behind the camera. The people in those films were very different from the people that I knew. A lot of films were about pimps

has disappeared—films about people of color are

and prostitutes and hustlers, and I didn’t know any-

usually made by white people. There was a time where

body like that. Also, I thought the films were by and

there was an outcry of objection to that, with people

large pretty bad and I could do just as good a job as

saying, wait a minute, we need to tell our own stories,

they were doing.

but even that’s disappeared because there’s no kind of movement or movement culture in the United States.

But you didn’t always want to do documentary work. . . .

One of the things that I’ve done, and a number of filmmakers of color have done for years, is work with

I had no interest in doing documentaries when I went

younger producers who are trying to get their first

to college, and part of that was because the documen-

or second films made. What we’ve tried to do with the

taries that I saw were very much these kind of boring

Firelight Media Producer’s Lab is to see if there is

documentaries with a boring narrator with a British

a way to institutionalize it. So far we’ve been incredibly

accent talking about something you didn’t want to

successful.

hear about. I didn’t know that there was a whole other

Most people come to us without finishing funds—

world of documentaries. When I got out of film school,

they need money—so we help them write a proposal.

I got a job with a guy named William Greaves, and he

We might consult with an editor like Sam Pollard, who

was making documentaries. I started out as an appren-

does a fair amount of work with us, to consult with

tice editor and then became a co-editor and then edited

them to get their reel in order. What we’re trying to do

some films for him. What I learned from working with

with the Producer’s Lab is help filmmakers who have

Bill—I actually lived with Bill for a year in upstate New

been acting as mentors get paid a little bit of money

York with his family—was that he was a black man who

to do this work. It’s been incredibly rewarding for me.

had his own independent film company and was able

There’s no feeling like when you get that first major

to support his family; he became a model of what was

grant for a film that you’ve been trying to work on for

possible. You do a lot of directing and producing, but with the creation of the Firelight Media Producer’s Lab you’re also working in the development of future documentaries. Did you create Firelight because you thought something was missing in the industry?

When I came up in filmmaking in the ’70s and ’80s, there were different programs for minority filmmakers that helped them get a start in the industry. All that

five years. We have fifteen projects now, and eleven of them have gotten fully funded. Most of that money has come because of their connection with the Producer’s Lab and all of the work we’ve done with them. We take applications—anybody can apply any time. We go to festivals. We take recommendations. If you know anybody, let me know. We go to foundations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other places to try to raise money. All of our filmmakers are of color, and they are all working on vastly

full frame tribute

“So I’m looking at a black newspaper in Chicago, let’s say in 1925, and this is a newspaper put out by an all African American staff—there are African American editors and writers and photographers, African American cartoonists and sports writers. And I thought, wait a minute, this is a very different picture of the African American community than I ever heard anything about. Who were these people?”

different projects. They range from historical to

When you look at Black Press, how do you think your

cinéma vérité to personal films to comedies.

style has changed? For instance, Black Press covers a

Tell me about your first independent film.

you’ve made since then seem to cover specific moments

long period—from the late 1820s to 1975—and the films

The first independent film that I made was Two Dollars and a Dream: The Story of Madame C. J. Walker

and movements. Is that something that happened consciously?

and A’lelia Walker. My grandfather, my mother’s

Maybe I just learned a lesson. Obviously it’s easier if

father, was Madam C. J. Walker’s attorney and business

your film is a story that’s already there. I really love

partner starting in 1906. I had always heard so much

Black Press because it’s a film that we had to make up.

about Madam Walker in the family and I thought, you

The Murder of Emmett Till or Jonestown: The Life and

know, this would make a great film. I started trying

Death of Peoples Temple are in some ways easier to

to pull that together. It took me seven years to raise

do, and I say that knowing that any film is really hard

the money and get the film made but I stuck with it.

to make. Emmett Till—he goes down to Mississippi,

So how did making The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords come about?

That’s funny because that film in some ways also came about through my mother, who was a librarian. She would always tell me that I should do a film about the black newspapers, and in making the film about Madam Walker, I found that I was looking at old black newspapers on microfilm. So I’m looking at a black newspaper in Chicago, let’s say in 1925, and this is a newspaper put out by an all African Amer-

he whistles at this woman, he gets murdered, they catch the guys, they have the trial, the guys are acquitted. There are certain benchmarks in that story that you have to hit. With a film like Black Press that encompasses so much time, there’s no real story; you’re taking this idea, this institution, and making it into one. In your films there is a rich use of archival footage. What is your approach to working with that footage? How hard is it, and how selective are you?

ican staff—there are African American editors and

I kind of look at archival footage as being another char-

writers and photographers, African American

acter in the film. I’ve learned over the years to start

cartoonists and sports writers. And I thought, wait

out looking for the footage from the very first day.

a minute, this is a very different picture of the African

If we take a film like Freedom Riders, obviously you’re

American community than I ever heard anything

looking for anything you can find on the Freedom Riders

about. Who were these people? I also found the papers

but you’re also going to need footage on the differ-

engaging in themselves because they weren’t trying

ent characters, the Kennedys, Governor Patterson of

to be objective; this was news with a point and a

Alabama. But what is the film about?—it’s about these

point of view.

people on a bus. You’re going to need footage of buses

stanle y nelson

from the late 1950s to early 1960s. You’re going to

of interviews with people who were crucial to the story

need any kind of footage that shows the way of life in

who had passed away.

Alabama and Mississippi. It’s about following every single lead and people I work with think I’m crazy,

Another thing that happened is that we found out that the FBI had held a hearing after the bus was

but I say you just have to look for it with an open mind

bombed, and they had talked to this one guy who lived

and a smile on your face. You never know what’s going

a mile down the road, and he said, “My son ran out with

to turn up. How do you cover the civil rights movement

his 8mm camera and filmed the bus burning but the

without showing the dogs barking at those people

FBI confiscated the film.” We asked the FBI for the film,

and those hoses being turned on people, the images

and they said they didn’t know what we were talking

that we’ve seen over and over again? How do you

about. We xeroxed the page of testimony and under-

find new images? There are no ends that we won’t go to for new footage. To give you an example, when we did Freedom Riders we found a guy who had started to make a film

lined where he talked about the film. The FBI said, “We’ll get back to you,” and eight months later they called and said, “We found the film. Do you want it?” Sometimes I’m wrong, like when we did the film

about the civil rights movement in the mid ’70s. He had

Marcus Garvey: Looking for Me in the Whirlwind.

shot all kinds of film and collected a bunch of archival

There’s one shot that’s about five seconds long of

material but he had never finished the film. We asked

Marcus Garvey. That’s all the film footage there is.

him if we could look at his footage, and he said, “Yeah,

There are a lot of stills, but the only film is from

if you’ll pay the freight, I’ll get it shipped to your office

a parade where Garvey is in a car and he kind of turns

from storage in New Jersey.” A week later this truck

his head toward the camera and that’s it. We discov-

pulls up and delivers thirty-five boxes of footage and

ered the same shot in maybe ten different archives

each box is maybe three feet high. There were a couple

but we never found any other footage.

full frame tribute

A lot of your films have been part of PBS and the American Experience history series. How did that start?

I’ve had a wonderful relationship with American Experience. We’ve done five or six films together. I think the first one we made was Marcus Garvey, and it just went on from there. It wasn’t that we had a five-picture deal, and I thought, I’m set for life. Every film is a separate piece, and I hope to do more work with them in the future. In most of your interviews, you seem interested in having the interviewee tell a story as he or she experienced it, rather than from a revisionist perspective. For instance, as Governor John Patterson is going

You seem to work with a core team on all your films,

through the events surrounding the Freedom Rides,

specifically Lewis Erskine and Tom Phillips. How does

he doesn’t talk much about how he feels about his

that consistency help you?

segregationist actions.

I think I’ve been very fortunate to work with Lewis I think it breaks the surface of the bubble if somebody

and Tom. It’s been lucky. I’m always looking to work

starts talking about how they feel now. There is a

with them because I really enjoy the experience and

part of his interview online where he talks about

I also enjoy what they bring to a film. With Lewis

being sorry—that he made a mistake and he should’ve

as an editor whom I work with day-to-day, it’s great

followed his heart more but he just wanted to get

because we both grew up in New York City, we’re

reelected. Even though it was a powerful statement

about the same age, we have the same cultural refer-

and I really liked it, I didn’t feel it fit within the

ences, and I can use shortcuts when we’re talking.

framework of the film. The film isn’t about what you thought five years later, ten years later, twenty

Out of all of your films, A Place of Our Own is very

years later. I am genuinely interested in what made

different because it’s so personal. I can tell that you

Governor Patterson do what he did—what was he

started out wanting it to be about African American

thinking when he said that, how could he not answer

resorts, but it seems like you just couldn’t ignore the

the president’s call?

way you grew up and your relationship with your father, your family.

Another interesting thing about watching one of your films, is that a person knows it’s a Stanley Nelson

We were going to make a film about black resorts, the

film by its direction and style but you take yourself

whole phenomena of why black people still self-segre-

out of it . . .

gate when they have a chance. These are middle-class

I have been lucky enough to tell these powerful sto-

where they want, and most of the resorts started out

ries. If I’m given the opportunity to tell the story of

during segregation. These are the kind of people that

the Freedom Riders it may be the only time that hap-

I knew, the kind of people that were my family, and the

pens for maybe the next forty years, who knows. Who

kind of people that we still don’t see on TV or in movies.

and upper-middle class black people who could go any-

cares what I think about it? I’m not trying to push you

We got some money to make the film and we

to think any one thing I hope: This is what happened.

decided to center it on Martha’s Vineyard because we

We bent over backward when we made Freedom

could go up there and stay for free, and it was a place

Riders to give some white southerners’ points of view

that I knew, and it started being something more

because that’s really fascinating. Why would someone

and more personal. This is what made the film work.

throw a bomb on a bus because a black person and a

It became a much richer film because it was about

white person are sitting together? What would make

my own experiences. As we went, I learned a lot.

somebody do that? Why would you do that? To me,

If you’re going to make a personal film it has to be

that’s much more interesting than getting mad.

really personal; I learned my lesson.

stanle y nelson

“I kind of look at archival footage as being another character in the film.”

Would you ever do a personal film like that again?

of understanding, the ability to understand other

It was really, really difficult for me to make for a lot

that we let that be part of who we are.

people and other ways of life, and it’s important of reasons. One, because it was so personal, and it was my family, and two, as a filmmaker it’s hard to judge. Does it work when I’m in front of the camera crying on the anniversary of my mother’s death? I couldn’t judge that. For years and years I said that I would never do it again, but time passes and who knows. People relate to personal films in a very different way. Last summer I was on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard; I was just standing there looking at the water and this kid about eleven said, “Hey you’re the guy who made that film right,” and I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “After watching your film it made me want to treat my sister better.” I thought that was so wild, you know. I’m never going to get that kind of reaction about Jonestown or Freedom Riders, so who knows what’s going to happen. In the film you mention that you attended a mostly white grade school, and that a new student entered your class who was from West Africa. The children were teasing her about her hair, what she looked like, and you joined in. She starts crying and looks at you. How has that moment affected your life, and your documentary work?

I think for me that moment always kind of symbolizes that you can’t lose track of who you are. It made me realize that I’ve got to be who I am in whatever situation that is. Sometimes, unfortunately, black people’s role in this society is to defend certain things. We have this kind of privileged position and we have to have empathy for everybody. That’s what it taught me. I can’t go along with what’s happening just because it’s happening; I’ve got to analyze it—what it means for me. One of the things that I try to believe in my life, and in my films, is that African Americans have been given a gift and we have to share that gift. A lot of times we talk about what we don’t have, but we also have certain gifts—a gift of empathy, a gift

What are you working on now?

We’re especially excited to have a new film, Jesse Owens, part of American Experience that I wrote and produced with Laurens Grant, screen on the opening night of the festival. It’s the first major film that Laurens has directed, though she has a film in the lab and was a co-producer on Freedom Riders. We’re also working on a film now that we just started on the Black Panther Party, and we’ve raised a little more than half the money on a film we want to make on the March on Washington. We also have a film in the works with American Experience on Freedom Summer. So what would you like your legacy to be? What would you want people to say about your films and your work?

He tried his best. I don’t know. I would be glad if they’re still seen. One thing you hope is that the films are honest and that you got it right. That’s what I hope. If the films are used down the line, that would be enough.

full frame tribute

The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

Since the first black newspaper, Freedom Journal, was founded in 1827, publications across the nation have given voice to the African American experience. Pioneering African Americans, men and women, paved the way for others to tell their stories, to describe experiences and current events from their own perspectives. Similar to religion and music, the publications helped instill a sense of community and collective awareness. Many credit the longstanding Chicago Defender, for example, with initiating the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North after the Civil War. Stanley Nelson’s film spotlights the history of a variety of significant papers, tracing owners and writers, like Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Robert S. Abbott. Through narration, archival footage, and unprecedented interviews with surviving publishers and writers, some of whom are now no longer living, The Black Press offers an essential document of the brave journalists whose impact has been long overlooked. ST

On November 18, 1978, over 900 people died at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana in the largest mass suicide in history. Jim Jones convinced his followers to collectively ingest a lethal dose of a cyanide-laced drink to escape a world that, by his estimation, could no longer serve them. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple traces the optimistic rise and devastating collapse of this utopian movement. How did such a compelling attempt at racial, political, and social harmony ultimately implode? With neverbefore-seen archival footage and wrenching accounts from survivors, Stanley Nelson carefully exposes the dichotomy of Jones’s haunting cult of personality. Shockingly, the architect of this shared dream was at once positively inspiring and horrifically deceitful. As evident here, there are many who will be forever marked by his vision. ST

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2007 / US / 87 minutes

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Director : Stanley Nelson

1999 / US / 86 minutes

Producer : Stanley Nelson Editor : Lewis Erskine

Director : Stanley Nelson

Cinematographer : Michael Chin

Producer : Stanley Nelson Editor : Lewis Erskine

W G B H Vanessa Ezersky

Cinematographers : Rick Butler, Robert Shepard

One Guest Street Boston, MA 02135 617.300.5953 vanessa_ezersky@wgbh.org

F irelight Media 324 Convent Avenue New York, NY 10031 212.234.1324 info@firelightmedia.org

Saturday, April 14 — 1:30 pm DAC / P SI T heater

Thursday, April 12 — 10:30 am Cinem a 3

new d oyc s stanle nelson

A Place of Our Own Since he was a child, Stanley Nelson’s family has vacationed in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. This small town became a popular destination for upper-middle-class black families in the 1950s and 1960s—a spot where, at least for a little while, it was possible to retreat from the judgments of racist America. In many ways, Nelson’s mother was the soul of this special place, and now that she has passed away, Nelson finds himself reflecting on his upbringing and imagining what will become of the home they shared for so many summers. As he navigates the desire to move forward through his grief, he finds that his ideas of what constitutes closure are different from his sister and father’s. Personal introspection, archival footage, and interviews with fellow Oak Bluffs residents, such as Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., round out this meditative portrait of a place and a family. ST

Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice

2004 / US / 60 minutes

Emerging from the strong tradition of Freedom Singers, Sweet Honey in the Rock is a group that’s as soulfully rich as it is provocative. Using song to stand in unison, five African American women sing solely a cappella, along with a sign language translator. Their music evokes stories from the past, encourages introspection in the present, and inspires progress for the future. Since it was founded in 1973, over twenty different women have contributed to the Grammy Award–winning group’s distinct sound, which embraces semblances of gospel, blues, and hip hop, all with a political tone. The film features a trove of concert and rehearsal footage as it follows the group on their thirtieth anniversary tour, which is also coincidently when founder Bernice Johnson Reagon announces she will retire. Through a variety of interviews with members, historians, and fellow artists, the film explores the roots of Sweet Honey in the Rock’s existence and influence. ST

Director : Stanley Nelson

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Producer : Stanley Nelson Editors : Sandra Christie, Helen Yum Cinematographers : Carol Bash, Stanley Nelson F irelight Media 324 Convent Avenue New York, NY 10031 212.234.1324 info@firelightmedia.org

2005 / US / 84 minutes Director : Stanley Nelson Producer : Stanley Nelson Editors : Jean Tsien, Helen Yum Cinematographer : Robert Shepard F irelight Media

Friday, April 13 — 4:30 pm

324 Convent Avenue New York, NY 10031 212.234.1324 info@firelightmedia.org

DAC / P SI T heater

Sunday, April 15 — 10:10 am Cinem a 4

thematic program

Family Affairs r o ss m c e lw e e

Documentary cameras have long courted danger. Recently, they’ve been hauled onto the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, slipped behind the fences of polluting oil companies in Ecuador, smuggled into sweatshop factories in China, disguised in order to film ecological disaster in Tanzania, sneaked into brothels to document child prostitution in India, and brandished in the streets during crackdowns by government troops in Iran. But perhaps the most challenging place to try to film is within the realm of your own family. The danger of doing so is, of course, not physical but emotional. The challenge is to present a portrait of your own family with honesty and sensitivity—honoring the people you grew up with, the people who raised you, or tried to—while also occasionally revealing details and character traits that may be depressing, unsavory, or just plain sad. Filmmakers have to achieve some measure of fairness in how they portray the people in their lives. The ten films in this program explore, in different ways, the delicate terrain along the fault line of family. There are, of course, countless documentaries about American families—the PBS series An American Family by Craig Gilbert and Alan and Susan Raymond and Capturing the Friedmans by Andrew Jarecki are two celebrated examples. Though these are films about families—families coming apart at the seams—they are not films about the families of the filmmakers. They are about other people’s families. The documentaries selected for this program are a kind of autobiographical subset of a larger documentary category, and thus exhibit a whole additional layer of emotional, psychological, and aesthetic complexity. The viewer of these films must not only consider what is happening before the camera but also how events portrayed in the film are connected to the person behind it—the filmmaker who also happens to be a daughter, a son, or a parent. To understate the matter, this complicates things considerably. I speak from personal experience.

family affairs

I believe one of the reasons I was asked to curate Full Frame’s thematic program on family films is that for over thirty years I have been making films that at least partially feature my own family. My films have ostensibly dealt with numerous social and political issues—nuclear weapons proliferation, racism, the U.S.-Soviet Cold War face-off in Berlin, the corrosive effects of television news programming, big tobacco, U.S. support of a South American dictatorship. But au fond, my films have been about family, my family. I have used my own life as a prism through which to view the complex world in which we live, and one of the things that stabilized me in finding my perspective

safety net, I was happy to get on a trapeze and reach for answers to those ultimately unanswerable questions of creation and purpose. But suddenly, I do not have a family. Or to be more precise, my family has been completely reconfigured. I was married for twenty-two years but am recently divorced. Suddenly, my son lives with me, and my daughter lives with my ex-wife. Not one family; two half-families. I am reeling. One of my films, Time Indefinite, devotes many scenes to the preparations leading up to my wedding and the ceremony itself. I have not been able to look at that film since my divorce, but what would it mean for me to view it now? For a viewer

was having a family. I loved being married, loved having children. In my documentaries Time Indefinite, Six O’Clock News, Bright Leaves, and In Paraguay, I felt compelled to film as a way to celebrate the whole wonderful,

who did not know that our wedding vows, uttered with such conviction in the film, have been annulled, the film would play exactly as it always has: funny in some places, occasionally annoying in others (when the filmmaker can’t put his camera down), and at its best,

messy enterprise of having and sustaining a family. Even my most recent film, Photographic Memory,

sometimes moving and poignant. But if I were to watch it now, it would be a completely

which concerns a spring I spent in France long before I married, is set in motion by my maddening relationship with my teenage son. Throughout my

different film—as different as if it had been reshot, reedited, and given a different voice-over narration. There is now no way that I can read the film the way

filmmaking, I have been acutely aware of the murky and miraculous continuity of familial generations—

I used to read it. Time Indefinite was made by another Ross living a different life. Like an anthropological film

great grandfathers, grandfathers, fathers, and sons; grandmothers, mothers, wives, and daughters. Using this web of generational relationships as my

made about a tribe that no longer exists, Time Indefinite, at least in terms of my marriage, is an ethnography of extinct emotions.

thematic program

“I have used my own life as a prism through which to view the complex world in which we live, and one of the things that stabilized me in finding my perspective was having a family.”

I chose the ten films in this program because they are good and courageous, often fascinating, efforts at probing the mystery of family. An eleventh film— Time Indefinite—plays invisibly alongside them, and I am still pondering what meaning it can have for me—or for anyone who sees it—now that its context has been utterly transmuted. But the films in this selection offer other directions, different road maps, alternate resolutions, and almost all of them redeem the importance of family. In the introduction to Time Indefinite, I quote my mother, who said to me more than once, “Everything begins and ends with family.” I guess I still believe that is true, and these wonderful films deliver that message in distinct and surprising ways.

Family Portrait Sittings & Time Exposure Two parents sit on a sofa in their living room and patiently answer their son’s questions as he films them, his camera locked down on a tripod. It’s an unassuming approach to making a subtle and complex

documentary film, one that tells the story of three generations of the filmmaker’s family. William Rothman, writing about Alfred Guzzetti’s Family Portrait Sittings in a 1977 issue of Quarterly Review of Film Studies, notes that it is one of the earliest examples of family documentary in which the filmmaker trains his camera and his talents on his own family. Rothman goes on to write about how Guzzetti confronts several important questions in his film: “How might this filmmaker, from his place within the family, create a film which speaks with authority on such issues as: What does it mean to be a member of a family? What does it mean to make a documentary film? Even: What does it mean to know a person?” These questions apply to all of the films selected for this program but especially to Family Portrait Sittings. The deep intelligence and technological rigor that guides the structuring of this film does not overshadow the extreme affection and respect the filmmaker feels for his parents, as well as the other members of his family who appear in the film. Yet Guzzetti avoids sentimentalizing his family—by simply allowing his parents to talk at their own pace, in long unedited shots, we sense not only his parents’ bond but also the tensions that exist between them. The length of the shots gives the viewer time to absorb the nuance of what is being said, and how body language signals so much about his mother and father’s regard for each other. One beautifully constructed passage begins with a slow pan of a front yard from the second-story window of the filmmaker’s former home in South Philadelphia—a modest row house. The shot is in black-and-white 16mm, and as the slow pan arrives at the front gate to the small yard, there is a sudden cut to Kodachrome footage of a shot taken from precisely the same angle, vantage point, and focal length. The color film (authored by Alfred’s father) captures a little girl, Alfred’s sister, opening the gate and entering the yard. Over these connected shots, we hear the voice recording of Alfred’s mother reflecting on turning sixty: “Something happened from age forty to where I am now. How did twenty years pass by? I never realized it. And suddenly I have a sixtieth birthday and realize it.”

family affairs

The pan continues in black and white and stops appropriately on a slightly out of focus shot of the siding of the neighbor’s house. Laced with straightforward complexities, Family Portrait Settings is as quietly affecting as any family documentary I have ever seen. Time Exposure is a delicately touching—even elegiac—coda to Family Portrait Sittings. It deconstructs a single photograph taken by the filmmaker’s father, Felix Guzzetti, an amateur photographer, some seven decades earlier. Perhaps elegiac is too lofty an adjective, given that the film is so beautifully situated in the fundamental everyday questions of human existence. Paul Gauguin posed these questions in titling one of his paintings: D’où Venons Nous, Que Sommes Nous, Où Allons Nous. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? These are the same questions that Time Exposure, in its precise and understated way, is asking. As Alfred Guzzetti says at the end of the film, he is “endlessly fascinated by the way film puts before us the passing of time.” The last shots of Time Exposure show us the frontispiece of a book entitled Elementary Photography, with its inscription, “To Felix, from Sue.” Those four words, inscribed seventy-six years ago, gently convey the ebb and flow, the to and from, of life, and the tenderness that it is sometimes possible to find therein.

Diaries The unassuming title of this documentary belies what is, I think, one of the most remarkable nonfiction films ever made. From 1971 through 1976, Ed Pincus recorded, on 16mm film, episodes of his life with his wife, Jane, their two young children, and the several women with whom Ed had love affairs. It’s also a portrait of a particular era—the early 1970s, or perhaps, more accurately, the post-1960s—a time in which a willingness to experiment in life, love, and political expression, was still present, but in the culture at large, was on the wane. The title is as unadorned and direct as the film itself. Appropriate, too, is the title’s inference that the film’s content would normally not be intended for the eyes of outsiders. However, what I experienced when I first saw Diaries was not a sense of voyeurism but of privileged intimacy. Ed films Jane lying on their bed, looking very unhappy. It’s a weird shot, a kind of horizontal monologue, in which her face fills the screen. She confesses to her husband, “I feel my privacy has been invaded. . . . I feel like I can’t be myself. I feel like I’m sacrificing myself for your film.” This is a painful indictment; it makes us squirm. We feel alienated from the filmmaker, who seems merciless in his determination to keep

thematic program

say as a filmmaker. (After more than twenty years, Ed came out of retirement to co-direct Axe in the Attic with Lucia Small, which was selected for Full Frame in 2008).

51 Birch Street “I never intended to make it as a film,” Block told Indiewire back in 2005 when 51 Birch Street was first

filming. Ed could easily have edited this scene out, but moments like this are part of the reason the film has such emotional complexity and integrity. In the long run (and the film is long), we become bonded to Ed and his vision, partially because of his willingness to show his dark side. This is not to say the film is dark. In fact, it’s luminous in its depiction of the intricate weave of everyday life. Meals are prepared, a child is taken to the doctor, a puppy is acquired, Jane’s father comes to visit, Ed attends a wedding, the puppy becomes a dog. The mundane becomes transcendent. This unending stream of activities with friends and family is the evanescent backdrop for Ed and Jane’s willingness to redefine what it means to be married, to create a family, and what it means to expose this chaotic, and lovely, experiment to a camera. I first saw rushes from Diaries when I was a graduate student in the late 1970s. Diaries was unlike anything I had ever seen. I found it iconoclastic and inspiring. Not yet married myself, I felt the film was a daring attempt to fuse art and real life. Fifteen years after I first saw Diaries, I saw it again in a Sundance retrospective. This time I, like the Ed in Diaries, was married and had two young children. I had firsthand experience of the snarls, confusions, and pleasures of marriage and family life. I sat there transfixed, watching a different film, one that was much more complicated than the film I had seen when I was single. And in the raw aftermath of my divorce, I will see the film again here at Full Frame, and I am sure it will resonate for me in an entirely new way. Ed has described his work as an attempt to reconcile the trivial with the deep and to probe the fragility and heroism of everyday life. Diaries continues to inspire a number of documentarians, including myself, to strive for those same reconciliations and revelations. After finishing it, he told me that Diaries would be his last film, that he had said everything he needed to

released. “My parents were married fifty-three years, then my mother died pretty unexpectedly, and about three months later I got a call from my father in Florida to announce that he’s living with his secretary from forty years ago.” That was the springboard Doug needed to begin constructing his remarkable, and remarkably candid, portrait of his parents’ marriage—the true dimensions of which were only revealed after Doug discovered three boxes containing his mother’s diaries. The film consists of excerpts from the diaries, home movies, and footage that Doug shoots of his father as he packs up the house to move to Florida. 51 Birch Street shares more than a few themes with another film in this program, Must Read After My Death—namely the discovery of caches of previously “secret” parental documents—but a primary difference is that in the latter, Morgan Dews is appalled and fascinated but silent as he reflects on his grandparents and the suburban hell they created for themselves in Connecticut. Doug Block, on the other hand, is very much a character in his film—even appearing on camera, in home movies and the present, as he conducts a postmortem assessment of his mother’s diaries and letters, and gently confronts a father who seems not to miss his deceased wife. Doug has often said of his film that perhaps when it comes to one’s own parents, ignorance is bliss. His life would certainly have been much simpler if he had not happened to come across his mother’s tragically stark and scathing journals, but Doug more than rises to the occasion as a documentary filmmaker; he attains an openness and honesty in his filmmaking that would have made his mother proud.

Must Read After My Death When his grandmother died in 2001, Morgan Dews stumbled upon a remarkable family archive in the basement of the house where his grandparents had lived. Charley and Allis Dews left behind 201 home movie reels and dozens of Dictaphone and audio recordings. With deft editing, the everydayness of the home movies is cruelly undercut by the content of audio letters that were exchanged between husband and wife during Charley’s extensive travels to Australia, where he worked for an insurance company.

family affairs

In this pre-Internet and cell phone era, the scratchy quality of both the film images and voice recordings have a haunting effect. Charley, an amateur cameraman, was determined to document a falsely cheerful version of his family’s life, while his wife explored the darker side of that life on tape. When juxtaposed, the effect is, in places, devastating. Charley spent four months of every year in Australia. In the audio recordings, sent home to his wife and kids, he seems detached, and it’s not just the geographical distance. “I love you kids. I haven’t been a very good father. I am sorry I get so angry so often, but you really do need to be neater in the ways you keep your bedrooms.” Father knows best, or perhaps not. Messy bedrooms are the least of the family’s problems. Charley is determined to have an open marriage—highly unusual for the 1950s—and Allis is constantly second-guessing her decision to stay with him. But with the ballast of four children to raise while her husband is off galavanting on the other side of the globe, she doesn’t have much of a choice. Her recordings are poignant in their refusal to accept her psychiatrist’s assessment that she “needs to conform” to her husband’s expectations: “I love my children and I want to be a good mother, but I’m not one to sit at home and paint and sew. I’m not a housewife, I’ve never been a housewife.” The film creates an undertone of impending cataclysm as the family prospers and moves to bigger and bigger houses in the Connecticut suburbs. “You’re doing a wonderful job of raising the kids,” intones Charley to his wife in one recording. But then he goes on to torture her a little about how much he loves dancing with the women of Australia, how charming they are. During one of these boastful moments, the film cuts to peacocks preening in footage that Charley filmed in a zoo—a little heavy-handed, perhaps, but it serves the purpose, inserted as it is among all the prosaic footage of cars and houses and parties in Connecticut. One by one, the kids get into trouble at school and Mom begins to become unhinged. When Charley does come home from his travels, he drinks too much and the parents argue bitterly. These arguments are somehow captured on the family tape recorder. Bad situations worsen, fueled by the ill-informed professional advice Allis receives from her therapist— and then, there are the children’s further misadventures, and a death.

on the part of the wife, rendered in her plaintive voice—washed over the audience in the darkness. Toward the end of the film there is a conversation in which Charley confides, “Someone warned me that my wife might try to poison me, and I replied that if she gave poison to me, I would gladly take it because it would be better than being married to her.”

In Search of Our Fathers Marco Williams didn’t know his father’s name until he was twenty-four. Shot over a period of seven years, In Search of Our Fathers explores what it means to be fatherless. As he tries to gather information about his dad, Marco interviews four generations of women in his family who raised families on their own. But none of the women—his mother, grandmother, various aunts, cousin, all of whom have raised or are raising kids alone—seem particularly angry or upset by the absence of husbands and fathers in their lives. They just seem to accept it as a natural way of life, which is one of the most startling things the film uncovers. Most of the film centers on Marco’s mom, Winnie, who is evasive throughout about who Marco’s father is. Marco finally persuades her to sit down in front of the camera and have a conversation with him about his dad, only to have the tape recorder malfunction, resulting in a talking head who is painfully silent. This tech snafu is completely emblematic of Marco’s dilemma; his voice-over comes in and paraphrases his mother’s monologue ex post facto in a scene that is both humorous and heartbreaking. There is a question that hangs over the film: Does Marco really want to find his father and have that long-postponed father-son rapprochement? One senses a double-negative force field at work here: The father doesn’t want to find the son, and the son

I remember when I first saw this film at the Rotterdam Film Festival. At a certain point, I just stopped

seems hesitant to go full throttle in search for his father. This push-pull is one of the most compelling aspects of the film. Having finally tracked down his father’s name and

taking notes and sat there as wave after wave of incredibly sad revelations—many of them unconscious

with his dad. They talk over the phone and make plans

phone number, Marco steps up his efforts to reunite

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to meet, but his father repeatedly breaks the appointments. Marco leaves phone messages, but his father doesn’t return his calls. The film is organized into chronological chapters roughly corresponding to the places Marco was living during the seven years the movie took to make: Cambridge, Harlem, Paris, and then back in Cambridge. This peripatetic, circular structure echoes Marco’s own circling as he tries to pin down not just who his father is, but his own identity and his feelings about having been without a father for so long.

Intimate Stranger & TRANSLATING EDWIN HONIG: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s The intimate stranger in question is Alan Berliner’s grandfather, Joseph Cassutto, an enigmatic figure who politely abandoned his wife and children in Brooklyn eleven months out of the year to live in postwar Japan, where he worked as an export consultant, and where he apparently felt more at home. Cassutto left behind hundreds of letters and photographs and even some film footage of himself in Japan and other distant locations, and Alan’s virtuosic use of these artifacts brings this story to kinetic life.

Berliner uses voice-overs from family members to comment on his grandfather’s life. Some of them are clearly hostile toward Cassutto and disparage him for shirking his duties to the family. Others are kinder in their assessment of his wanderings, but at the heart of the film there remains the implication that this was a family man who was in no way suited to have a family. Alan Berliner has said the film walks “a fine line between sorting the dirty family laundry and polishing the precious family jewel.” At one juncture in the film there is stock footage of microscopic sperm trying to find their way into an egg, indicating that Berliner is not uninterested in how his grandfather’s waywardness relates to his own existence. Alan is, after all, the offspring of this scion—but following up on this question is not the main intent of the film. The act of sorting and polishing is. The joyful and playful use of montage, coupled with the animated clack of a typewriter that punctuates the soundtrack (which alludes to the autobiography his grandfather was working on when he died), gives Intimate Stranger an energy and drive that is a pleasure to experience.

family affairs

“How does a man dedicate his entire life to ‘saving the world through architecture,’ yet miss some basics at home? How does one balance creative obsession with familial obligations?” Intimate Stranger is preceded by the short film TRANSLATING EDWIN HONIG: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s, a portrait of the esteemed poet and translator who taught at Brown University. Edwin Honig, both Cassutto’s nephew and Berliner’s cousin, died of complications from Alzheimer’s last June.

My Father, The Genius In My Father, The Genius, Lucia Small takes on the prickly subject of her talented and visionary but maddeningly narcissistic father, the architect Glen Small. Lucia reveals the damage wrought upon her two sisters, her mother, and herself by her father’s ambition, absence from family life, and dalliances with other women, yet the film was not made as an act of revenge. Glen Small “commissioned” his daughter to write his biography, but instead she made a documentary—this documentary. While there is anger in her filmmaking, of course, there is also a kind of hesitant love for her father, and a desire to understand him better, if not to reconcile with him. Lucia describes her film as an attempt to explore “the precarious framework on which a career and family are built. How does a man dedicate his entire life to ‘saving the world through architecture,’ yet miss some basics at home? How does one balance creative obsession with familial obligations? And how does a filmmaker daughter balance her father’s wishes with her own artistic vision?” In the film, Lucia deftly weaves together the ironies, passions, resentments, and muted love that are all

With the farm in danger, Jeanne returns home, and along with her siblings, does what she can to help her parents, Russell and Mary Jane. One scene in particular stands out in my memory. Steve and Jeanne film an auction in which everything—the farming equipment and household possessions—are sold to raise money to pay back some of the bank loan. It’s a very emotional scene, especially the moment when an old neighbor who knew Jeanne as a little girl steps out of the crowd to give her a long hug. The scene made me think, in an inverted way, of a scene in Happy Mother’s Day by Richard Leacock, which was filmed almost thirty years earlier in neighboring South Dakota. That documentary describes the effects of sudden fame on the Fischer family, which had been blessed with the birth of quintuplets. The story became a national event—covered relentlessly by the television networks—and the town fathers of Aberdeen, South Dakota, try shamelessly to capitalize on the presence of the quints in their community. There is a parade. There are speeches. And on a designated day, vast quantities of consumer items are donated to the Fischers, the goods spread out in Sardanapalian splendor on the front lawn of their house for the benefit of a Life magazine photographer. While watching the sad farm auction, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much America has changed since Happy Mother’s Day was filmed. The consistent postwar prosperity that America has experienced since the

TROUBLESOME CREEK: A Midwestern

1950s and ’60s on has given way to a persistent, seemingly endless, uncertainty about where the economy is going. The epidemic of farm foreclosures that swept the country in the mid-90s, when TROUBLESOME CREEK was released, has of course now been replaced

Most of the films in this program depict families beset by problems and crises from within—unfaithful

by rampant home foreclosures. The film seems a particularly sobering reminder that twenty years later

fathers, unhappy mothers, rebellious and angry children. What makes Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher’s

the economy is again wreaking havoc on lower- and middle-income people. Near the beginning of the film, there is a scene in

bound up in being her father’s daughter.

TROUBLESOME CREEK different is its tremendous affirmation of a family pulling together in the face of adversity—in this case, the threat of losing the family farm to foreclosure. Though Jeanne Jordan migrated east to Boston, where she met her husband Steven Ascher and established a career as a filmmaker, she always stayed closely connected to her family in Iowa.

which a cat gets stranded in a tree. Various attempts are made to rescue the animal, but suddenly it jumps, or perhaps falls, from the tree—and, being a cat, lands on its feet. TROUBLESOME CREEK is about a rescue that never really has a chance of succeeding—at least not in the way the Jordans’ would have preferred.

thematic program

“Perhaps unlike any other genre of nonfiction filmmaking, these odd and intimate, yet strangely important, autobiographical films have a rare ability to get at basic emotional truths, pose fundamental questions.”

But the film ends on a cautious note of hope as Jeanne’s brother, John, takes a stab at farming a portion of the homestead that has not been sold off. And in a way, one cannot help but feel that the Jordans, too, will be all right—that they will land on their feet. After thinking about the bittersweet affirmation of family as explored in TROUBLESOME CREEK, I can’t help but return for a moment to my own films. I have always felt that like Jeanne and Steve’s film, and for that matter most of the films in this program, my films have depended heavily on the viewer’s willingness to accept the profundity of generational continuity— what we owe to our parents and grandparents, and for those of us fortunate enough to have had children, what we owe to our progeny. As an autobiographical documentary filmmaker, I am struggling to accept that this continuity, which has always been so important to me, has been at least partially severed. In my worst moments, the family scenes in my films now seem like fictions, a kind of lying. Perhaps there never was any real truth behind the scenes, in the sentiments of my films. Perhaps I should add a message at the end of the credits: “Any resemblance between characters portrayed in this film and actual persons is purely coincidental.”

Time Indefinite. Even the title now seems ironic. My ex-wife and I were married on October 10, 1988, and were unmarried on August 25, 2011. There is no longer anything at all indefinite about the time frame. Even if I don’t screen Time Indefinite for myself anytime soon, I involuntarily carry a version of the film around in my head, as I suspect most filmmakers do with their films. At unpredictable moments during the day, or as I am trying to fall asleep at night, something jogs my interior film projector and a scene from the film runs fleetingly across the movie screen in my mind. The soon-to-be wife preparing for the wedding ceremony, putting flowers in her lovely hair, regarding herself in a mirror. The nervous groom placing a wedding ring on the wrong finger of her hand. These scenes now lacerate—shards of a beautiful stained glass window through which a brick has been thrown. The very ability to feel this powerful a response to images captured with a camera is a ratification of the potency of this kind of documentary. Perhaps unlike any other genre of nonfiction filmmaking, these odd and intimate, yet strangely important, autobiographical films have a rare ability to get at basic emotional truths, pose fundamental questions. Circling back to Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From, What Are We? Where Are We Going?—to varying extents, the same questions lie at the heart of all the films in this program. They inspire us to examine the ever-changing and mysterious merging of truth and fiction that informs our understanding of our lives. Perhaps for me, the continuity that I have so valued in my life, and in my filmmaking, has not been severed but is merely in need of reconfiguration. Perhaps, as my mother liked to remind me, everything still does begin and end with family. Special support for the 2012 Thematic Program is provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

family affairs

51 Birch Street

Diaries

Within a few months of his mother’s unexpected death, Doug Block is stunned to learn that his father, Mike, plans to move to Florida to live with Kitty, who was his secretary some forty years before. Perplexed and hurt by his father’s decision, Block realizes that there may be more to his parent’s fifty-four-year marriage than he imagined. In helping his father pack up the family home, Block uncovers his mother’s diaries, the contents of which propel him to embark, with camera in hand, on a journey to understand the parents he thought he knew. What results is an excavation at once literal and figurative, personal and universal, pieced together through faded snapshots, 8mm home movies, and two decades of vérité footage. Lies and deceit, love and misunderstanding, timeless themes of marriage and family, are signposts throughout Block’s affecting pursuit of closure. ST

Pioneering documentary filmmaker Ed Pincus (Black Natchez, Axe in the Attic) embodied the utopian hopes, fears, and neuroses of the Sixties generation when he set out to create an enlightened, unconventional life through his filmmaking. In this intensely personal memoir, Pincus introduces us to his wife, Jane (a member of the collective that wrote the pioneering feminist healthcare book Our Bodies, Ourselves), his two children, and assorted lovers and colleagues. As they struggle to find alternatives to cultural expectations regarding love, commitment, intimacy, and creative fulfillment, Pincus’s subjects (himself included) articulate—and sometimes act out—the mundane problems and profound emotional traumas that plague human relations. Pincus’s life and film career are suddenly and irrevocably altered in a disturbing series of events that culminates in a move to rural Vermont and a new life. MP

Filmmaker Q&A following screening, with guest Marjorie Silver 2006 / US / 88 minutes

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 1980 / US / 185 minutes

Director : Doug Block

Director : Ed Pincus

Producers : Doug Block, Lori Cheatle

Producer : Ed Pincus

Editor : Amy Seplin

Editors : Ed Pincus, Ann Schaetzel, Moe Shore

Cinematographer : Doug Block

Cinematographer : Ed Pincus

C opacetic Pictures

Pincus F ilms

10 Jay Street #902 Brooklyn, NY 11201

111 Pincus Road Roxbury, VT 05669

212.352.1519 info@51birchstreet.com

802.485.8428 smallangstfilms@gmail.com

Saturday, April 14 — 4:30 pm

Thursday, April 12 — 10:00 am

DAC / P SI Theater

Cinem a 1

thematic program

Family Portrait Sittings

In Search of Our Fathers

From 1972 to 1975, Alfred Guzzetti documented extensive interviews with generations of his extended family. Divided into three parts, Guzzetti presents these sessions, some sound recordings, others beautifully captured on film, to chart his relatives’ roots and life in the United States. Almost confessional, his family’s perceptions of the past unspool: first arriving from Italy, dating, becoming engaged, being married, having children, working, dreaming of the future, and sacrificing to make ends meet. The interviews are interspersed with home movie footage and imagery that cruises down U.S. city streets, wanders twisting alleyways, and coasts along Italian hillside highways, as if physically entering the maze of his ancestors’ memories. Perhaps most affecting is the interview with his parents, who casually, sometimes confrontationally, recount their history while sitting on the living room sofa. In the depiction of lives made up of treasured everyday moments, this unprecedented autobiographical film is refreshingly personal and universal. ST

In 1981 when Marco Williams is a senior in college, he places a call to his estranged father, hoping to arrange a first meeting. It’s quickly evident that Williams’s father is uninterested in meeting his son, or allowing his son to film their reconciliation. Over the coming years, Williams interviews members of his family and community. A common thread emerges— women, mothers and grandmothers, have kept their households going in the absence of their male counterparts. Specifically, Williams comes back time and again to his mother, who doesn’t seem interested in talking about his father, or the reasons he was absent from Williams’s upbringing. Gradually, feelings and recollections begin to come forward. Phone calls to his father continue throughout the film, and though a meeting eventually happens, it’s Williams’s interactions with the women in his life that shape this reflection on growing up in a single-parent home. ST

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 1992 / US / 70 minutes

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Director : Marco Williams

1975 / US / 103 minutes

Producer : Marco Williams Executive Producer : Nicholas Paleologos

Director : Alfred Guzzetti

Editor : Lisa Leeman

Producer : Alfred Guzzetti

Cinematographer : Marco Williams

Editor : Alfred Guzzetti Cinematographers : Alfred Guzzetti, Felix Guzzetti

F ilmmaker ’ s L ibrary Inc . 124 East 40th Street, Suite 901 New York, NY 10016

A lfred G uzzetti

212.808.4980

167 Babcock Street Brookline, MA 02446 617.731.9697 guzzetti@fas.harvard.edu

Saturday, April 14 — 7:30 pm Thursday, April 12 — 2:20 pm Cinem a 1

DAC / P SI T heater

new d oaffairs family cs

Intimate Stranger

Must Read After My Death

Stylish, affecting, and witty all in the same breath, this celebrated film portrays the life of Joseph Cassuto, Alan Berliner’s maternal grandfather, whose yearning for success and acclaim led him far away from home. Cassuto, a Palestinian Jew, and his family started out in Egypt, where he led a vibrant social life. He was, literally, at the center of every photograph. The bombing of Pearl Harbor split the family, and Cassuto’s wife and two youngest sons left for the United States. Though Cassuto eventually joined them, he could never adapt to New York life. His business concerns eventually led him to live in Japan for most of the year. Completed years after his grandfather’s death, Berliner uses found footage, family photographs and films, and interviews with relatives to construct a portrait of this elusive, polarizing figure. To his business colleagues, Cassuto is still a model of success. His family’s recollections are more complicated, to say the least. ST

Morgan Dews’s grandmother, Allis, passed away in 2001. She had never spoken about her marriage to his grandfather, Charley, while she was alive. After her death, Dews uncovered an anthology of family materials: 300 pages of transcripts, 50 hours of audio, and 201 home movies. Dews assembles the footage to present an eerily translucent portrait of his grandparent’s troubled marriage. Charley traveled for work, leaving Allis at home with the children, and the family recorded messages to one another via Dictaphone. What unfolds is a stark portrait of a crumbling marriage. As if let in on a secret, the wrenching audio recordings project a very different picture from the images presented of happy family life on screen. Scratches and pops adorn the footage, and some passages are more difficult to hear than others. Like the emotions of Dews’s grandparents, the words and pictures are scarred by time, but in this film they are carefully and loyally preserved. ST

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 1991 / US / 61 minutes Director : Alan Berliner

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2009 / US / 74 minutes

Producer : Alan Berliner

Director : Morgan Dews

Editor : Alan Berliner

Producers : Morgan Dews, Alison Palmer

Cinematographer : Alan Berliner

Editor : Morgan Dews Cinematographers : Allis, Charley

Kino L orber 333 West 39th Street, Suite 503 New York, NY 10018

M organ D ews

212.629.6880 contact@kinolorber.com

2629 6th Street Santa Monica, CA 90405 646.251.3257 morgandews@gmail.com

Saturday, April 14 — 10:30 am DAC / P SI Theater

Saturday, April 14 — 10:30 pm Cinem a 1

thematic program

My Father, The Genius

Time Exposure

In the process of writing his will, architect Glen Small requests that his estranged daughter, Lucia Small, write his biography. Despite the fact that Lucia’s father has always been closer to her older sister and her younger sister is a writer by trade, he asks her. Instead of a book, the pair embark on a documentary film with hopes of illuminating both his career and his role as a parent. He allows her camera inside his process of working with clients, shows her blueprints and models, and even revisits buildings of his past. Despite success and recognition early on in his career, he now struggles to pay his bills. Along with friends and colleagues, Lucia interviews the women in her father’s life—her siblings, her mother, and his other ex-wives and girlfriends. Relationships have been forsaken to follow his call to brilliance. Was it worth the cost? Whimsical animation is dotted throughout this candid exchange between father and daughter. ST

world premiere

In this brief film, Alfred Guzzetti dissects a single image taken by his amateur-photographer father seventy-three years ago. The photograph, taken at night, features an empty street in Philadelphia. Street lamps glow, light subtly reflected in the asphalt below. As Guzzetti traces the origins of the image, a tender portrait of his father comes into focus. What was and what could have been are inexplicably entwined in one static shot. ST

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / US / 11 minutes Director : Alfred Guzzetti Producer : Alfred Guzzetti Editor : Alfred Guzzetti Cinematographers : Alfred Guzzetti, Felix Guzzetti

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2002 / US / 82 minutes Director : Lucia Small

A lfred G uzzetti 167 Babcock Street Brookline, MA 02446 617.731.9697 guzzetti@fas.harvard.edu

Producers : Lucia Small, Linda Morgenstern Editor : Karen Schmeer Cinematographers : Laurel Greenberg, Lucia Small Small A ngst F ilms 216 West 89th Street, 7-C New York, NY 10024 917.428.9121 smallangstfilms@gmail.com

Friday, April 13 — 10:30 am DAC / P SI Theater

Thursday, April 12 — 2:20 pm Cinem a 1

family affairs

TRANSLATING EDWIN HONIG: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s

TROUBLESOME CREEK: A Midwestern

A transfixing tribute to filmmaker Alan Berliner’s cousin Edwin Honig. Once a master of intricate phrasing, the acclaimed poet now struggles with a fading memory. Berliner tenderly captures Honig in the final stages of Alzheimer’s. His diminished capacity for phrases, faces, and even his own personal history is evident. He fails to recall his cousin’s name and words often escape him, but Honig now relies on a new vocabulary of sayings, noises, and gestures. Divided into sections, Berliner weaves these various articulations into a rhythm of sounds and expressions, creating poetry from the words that remain. ST

Russ and Mary Jane Jordan’s Iowa farm has been in the family for 125 years. Like the heroes of their beloved western movies, the Jordans have survived their share of hardship. So when their daughter, Jeanne, learns that this may be their last season on the farm, she is stunned. Foreclosure has overtaken many of their neighbors, and now the Jordan’s bank is demanding payment on their own longstanding debt. Their plan for survival is a radical one: to auction off all of their equipment and cherished belongings, from combine harvester to dining room table. Along with her husband, filmmaker Steven Ascher, Jeanne documents the painstaking process of letting go, capturing the emotional and physical landscape with equal poignancy. The film won both the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury and Audience Awards in 1996. It is the first of the filmmakers’ Families in Trouble trilogy; the latter two films, So Much, So Fast and Raising Renee, screened at Full Frame. ST

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2010 / US / 20 minutes Director : Alan Berliner Producer : Alan Berliner Editor : Alan Berliner Cinematographer : Ian Vollmer

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

E xperiments in T ime , L ight & M otion

1996 / US / 81 minutes

13 Vestry Street, 4th Floor New York, NY 10013 212.226.5213 ajberliner@aol.com

Directors : Jeanne Jordan, Steven Ascher Producers : Jeanne Jordan, Steven Ascher

Saturday, April 14 — 10:30 am

Editor : Jeanne Jordan Cinematographer : Steven Ascher

DAC / P SI Theater W est City F ilms , Inc 30 Wiltshire Road Newton, MA 02458 617.969.3133 info@westcityfilms.com

Sunday, April 15 — 10:00 am Cinem a 1

new d o cs

new docs The films included in our 2012 NEW DOCS program showcase the many innovative forms nonfiction storytelling can take. Whether personal or global, historical or contemporary, vérité or impressionistic, these films encourage us to reflect on the world around us as only documentary can. It’s incredibly humbling that filmmakers allow us to exhibit their work and take part in sharing the stories they tell with their films. We are honored to present fifty-seven titles—thirty-nine features and eighteen shorts— as part of NEW DOCS. Many of these films are premieres: seven World Premieres, thirteen North American Premieres, and four U.S. Premieres. Nearly all of the films are screening in North Carolina for the first time. Full Frame’s selection committee chose these titles from over 1,200 submissions from around the world. Beginning in the fall, this seventeen-person volunteer committee reviews each entry and meets throughout the winter to make final selections. Films completed within the last two years qualify for the NEW DOCS program. The NEW DOCS program alone includes work from twenty-seven different countries. Twenty-one of the fifty-seven films are from the United States. The remaining thirty-six come to us from many points around the world: Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Scotland, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. All NEW DOCS are eligible for the Full Frame Audience Award. NEW DOCS films are also shortlisted for a variety of additional prizes, listed on pages 66 and 67. Award winners will be announced at the Awards Barbecue on Sunday, April 15th. A selection of award-winning films will be rescreened in the TBA programs on Sunday afternoon. The Award winners and their rescreening times and venues will be available online and at the box office on Sunday following the Barbecue. Whether it’s to see these films again or for the first time, we hope you’ll stay with us until the screenings conclude Sunday evening.

new d o c s

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry With intimate access to the artist, Alison Klayman presents a portrait of Chinese photographer, sculptor, architect, and activist Ai Weiwei. Captured over the course of three years, this portrait is as much about the current state of China as it is Ai Weiwei’s art and character. Exhibited all over the world, his pieces present a unique collision of grand imagination and pointed politics: This is the artist who filled the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern with millions of porcelain sunflower seeds, each one “Made in China” although in this instance individually painted and sculpted by artisans. Despite great acclaim, his work remains controversial in China, and the threat of censorship is imminent. Still, Ai Weiwei continues to push artistic, cultural, and political boundaries, implementing a Twitter feed and blogging to propel the message of his art. Though these actions culminate in his highly publicized arrest in Beijing, it will clearly take more than intimidation to stall this intrepid artist. His work, and this film, is a powerful testament to the potential impact of art, and the change one vision can inspire. ST

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / US, China / 91 minutes

An Angel in Doel (De Engel van Doel) *

us premiere

Tom Fassaert’s debut feature film is a mesmerizing black-and-white elegy for the Belgian village of Doel. Located across the river from the mega-port of Antwerp in the Flemish-speaking half of Belgium, Doel is an area marked for harbor expansion. Most of the residents have moved away when we meet Emilienne and her friends, forthright seniors who must choose to accept or resist the tide of “progress.” The film quietly documents the town’s decay and de-construction as it allows us to glimpse snatches of life at the end of a street, to catch a haunting tune floating on air. Aerial shots hover high above the rooftops as over time the buildings seem to slowly recede into the harbor, a nuclear power plant brooding in the distance. As Emilienne refuses to accept yet another eviction notice, a tour bus rounds a corner heralding Doel as a new tourist destination and latterday ghost town. DP

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / The Netherlands, Belgium / 76 minutes Director : Tom Fassaert

Director : Alison Klayman

Producer : Digna Sinke

Producers : Alison Klayman, Adam Schlesinger

Co-Producer : Willem Thijssen

Executive Producers : Andrew Cohen, Julie Goldman, Karl Katz

Editors : Tom Fassaert, Thabi Mooi, Axel Skovdal Roelofs

Editor : Jennifer Fineran

Cinematographers : Daniël Bouquet n.s.c., Diderik Evers, Reinout Steenhuizen

Cinematographer : Alison Klayman S N G F ilm IF C F IL M S

Elizabeth Brambilla

11 Penn Plaza New York, NY 10011

Digna Sinke

Van Hallstraat 52-2 1051 HH Amsterdam, The Netherlands +31 20 686 7837 sngfilm@xs4all.nl

212.324.4635 ebrambilla@ifcfilms.com

Thursday, April 12 — 4:20 pm Friday, April 13 — 7:20 pm Cinem a 4

Cinem a 3

new d o cs

Aranda *

north americ an premiere

Beauty Is Embarrassing *

Aboard the Finnish marine research vessel Aranda, life is governed by the insistent pitch and roll of ocean waves. The existential explorers on this ship both observe and exemplify the way that mariners adapt to their alien, cobalt blue surroundings—surrendering to the rhythmic pull of deep ocean currents that take 1,600 years to travel around the globe. In this entrancing film, silence only begrudgingly gives way to words in the forms of letters written to loved ones at home or when ecstasy erupts over million-year-old ice cubes. The film’s visual restraint and rigorous cinematography may generate comparisons to the work of Stanley Kubrick, yet Aranda celebrates without irony the human, the machine, and nature in equal measure. The ship itself becomes personified through its humble mechanical operations, and grants viewers a sweet release from the frenetic pace of our networked lives. MP

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / Finland / 59 minutes Director : Anu Kuivalainen Producer : Markku Tuurna Editor : Lasse Summanen Cinematographer : Jarkko T. Laine T he F innish F ilm F oundation Kanavakatu 12 00160 Helsinki, Finland

Meet Wayne White—affable Emmy award-winning artist and profane, prolific iconoclast full of energy and southern verve. You may recognize his incredibly creative artwork from Pee-wee’s Playhouse or music videos for the Smashing Pumpkins and Peter Gabriel. Or perhaps you’ve seen one of his hysterically irreverent paintings—where he crafts cleverly concise words in a 3D effect onto repurposed vintage landscape reproductions. Director Neil Berkeley quickly draws you in as he steadfastly trains his camera on the artist, wisely letting White act as his own narrator. White essentially sums up the trajectory of his artistic life and his process when he states early on, “I want to try everything I can. I want to take this painting idea and see if you can do a puppet version of it. I want to take this cartooning and turn it into a set. I want to take this set and turn it back into a painting.” And so he does. WM

Filmmaker Q&A following screening, with guest Wayne White 2012 / US / 88 minutes Director : Neil Berkeley Producers: Chris Bradley, Morgan Neville, Milan Erceg, Neil Berkeley Executive Producers: Aimee Bothwell, Bart McDonough, Eddie Schmidt Co-Producers: Liah Corral, Anthony Maiuri Editors : Chris Bradley, Kevin Klauber

+35 89 622 0300 otto.suuronen@ses.fi

Cinematographers : Chris Bradley, Neil Berkeley

Friday, April 13 — 10:50 am

2525 Hyperion Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90027

F uture You Pictures

Cinem a 1

323.660.6600 neil@brkly.tv

Friday, April 13 — 4:10 pm Cinem a 3

new d o c s

CatCam

Chasing Ice

Ever wonder what your pet does all day? After adopting a stray cat Jürgen Perthold did, but he also had what most animal lovers don’t—a degree in engineering and the capacity to reconfigure a microcontroller board. The result of Jürgen’s labors and Mr. Lee’s unflappable personality is a delightful and unexpected cat’s-eye view of the world. This charming short documentary will satisfy an itch most pet owners never dreamed they’d get to scratch. DP

Can photography change the world? James Balog, a National Geographic nature photographer, hopes so. Smitten with the glittering, translucent beauty of arctic landscapes, Balog uses his inspiring images as catalyst in his new role as climate change activist. He and his colleagues created the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) and installed cameras in remote northern locations to take photos at measured intervals. These time-lapse photography sequences stretch over years and sound an alarm as northern ice landscapes dramatically melt and recede. In the belief that a person’s own eyes can register evidence that overrides the statistics that skeptics question, his team’s images show how the dramatic changes in the world’s glaciers demand an urgent response. Scientific fact and aesthetic beauty merge in the monumental and dramatic scenes illustrating global warming’s chilling ravages. Invite your climate-changedoubting friends to deny the sight of “the miracle and the horror” of vanishing glacial fields. LB

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / US / 16 minutes Director : Seth Keal Producers : Seth Keal, Charles Miller EditoRS : Sinead Kinnane, Seth Keal Cinematographer : Charles Miller Seth K eal 198 17th Street, Apt 2 Brooklyn, NY 11215 info@catcamthemovie.com

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / US, Iceland, Greenland / 74 minutes

Friday, April 13 — 7:20 pm

Director : Jeff Orlowski

Cinem a 4

Producers : Jeff Orlowski, Paula DuPre’ Pesmen, Jerry Aronson Editor : Davis Coombe Cinematographer : Jeff Orlowski E xposure , L L C 60 Cedar Brook Boulder, CO 80304 310.243.6306 info@chasingice.com

Saturday, April 14 — 1:20 pm Cinem a 4

new d o cs

Children of the Sea (Les enfants de la mer/mère) In 1906, Belgium’s Albert I founded the Ibis School to educate orphaned boys from the country’s seafaring communities. More than a hundred years later, the school’s current crop of irresistible urchins in uniform testifies to these origins; in the words of the school anthem, they are “pious sons of fisherman of the honorable Flemish country.” The daily routine, as captured by Annabel Verbeke’s clear-eyed observational style, consists of queuing up, marching, saluting—all while avoiding punishment cards—activities meant to reflect the maritime values of honor, duty, and chivalry. The film’s unstated truth, however, is that no amount of discipline or Vigo-esque horseplay can restore a childhood to these lonely lads whose lives have been rived by divorce, abandonment, and other tribulations of modern life. MP 2010 / Belgium / 27 minutes Director : Annabel Verbeke Producer: Annabel Verbeke Editor : Katrijn Declercq Cinematographers : Annabel Verbeke, An-Marie Breem A nnabel V erbeke Kemmelseweg 44

8900 Ieper, West–Vlaanderen, Belgium

+32 478 257 957 annabel.verbeke@hotmail.com

Friday, April 13 — 10:50 am Cinem a 1

Cutting Loose In and out of jail for the last seventeen years, Francis Duffy can’t seem to cope in the outside world. He can’t structure his life or pay his bills. But on the inside, Duffy is a virtuoso barber—three-time winner of the Scottish Prison Service hairdressing competition—and by his own account, a social worker, a psychologist, and the best-known guy there. With only days to go before his release, Duffy defends his title. Adrian McDowall and Finlay Pretsell serve up this crisply shot, reflective visual essay with precision and dexterity. More than the story of a competition, this highly meditative narrative clips quickly through a cast of inmates, their musings and their hairstyles. Duffy’s story and a snappy score combine brilliantly to make this short film play like a feature, leaving you to wonder what happens next. The real prize for Duffy is getting out, but will he be able to cut loose from the system once and for all? WM 2011 / Scotland / 30 minutes Directors : Finlay Pretsell, Adrian McDowall Producers : Finlay Pretsell, Adrian McDowall, Paul Welsh Editors : Mark Jenkins, Susan Korda Cinematographer : Martin Radich S cottish D ocumentary Institute

Finlay Pretsell

74 Lauriston Place Edinburgh EH3 9DF, UK +44 131 221 6116 finlay@scottishdocinstitute.com

Saturday, April 14 — 4:10 pm Cinem a 3

new d o c s

The D Train

DETROPIA

A man enters the subway, paying with a token. To the accompaniment of a jaunty Shostakovich waltz, archival images tell a life story—at once singular and universal. The latest inspired composite from Jay Rosenblatt (Phantom Limb, The Darkness of Day) features a dynamic collection of found images, mostly black and white but with the occasional splash of vibrant color. Texture, movement, and connections spark as life passes before our eyes. AT

Full Frame alumni Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (12th and Delaware) return with an affecting and modern symphony of Detroit, a casualty and the epitome of fin de siècle industrial and urban abandonment. The city’s rapid decline (half of its inhabitants have moved since 1970 and half of its manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000) triggered a fight-or-flight response on a massive scale, resulting in unprecedented political and civic challenges and corresponding radical countermeasures. Composed of emotional survivor stories and rendered in a ruddy Midwestern chiaroscuro of brick and rust, Detropia reveals facets of the beleaguered metropolitan organism that have remained unseen and unspoken in the spate of trendy and superficial decay-chic marketing campaigns. All told, the circumstances, and the film, engender a feeling for the present-day pioneer sensibility, equal parts daunted and inspired. TM

2011 / US / 5 minutes Director : Jay Rosenblatt Producer : Jay Rosenblatt Editor : Jay Rosenblatt Jay R osenblatt 4159 20th Street San Francisco, CA 94114 415.641.8220 jayr@jayrosenblattfilms.com

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Saturday, April 14 — 1:50 pm Cinem a 1

2012 / US / 91 minutes Directors : Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady Producers : Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady, Craig Atkinson Editor : Enat Sidi Cinematographers : Tony Hardmon, Craig Atkinson L oki F ilms

Christina Gonzalez

195 Chrystie Street, Suite 901B New York, NY 10002 212.343.8900 christina@lokifilms.com

Friday, April 13 — 4:40 pm F let cher H all

new d o cs

Eating Alabama With the rise of slow and local food movements over the last few years, America’s regional food cultures have become a boutique industry. So when filmmaker Andrew Beck Grace and his wife decide to spend a year eating only foods sourced and grown in their native Alabama, they understandably expect to rely on the state’s long history of small-farm agriculture for sustenance. But as Grace and a group of dedicated friends crisscross the state in search of fresh ingredients at a handful of farmers’ markets, their quest starts to prove inefficient, costly, and frequently hilarious. Along the way, Grace takes in the landscape that his grandfather once farmed, and ponders a way of life that’s all but disappeared. He is keenly aware that any attempt to resurrect this attachment to the land will be driven to some extent by nostalgia, and may be unsustainable to boot. Thoughtful without ever being dogmatic, Eating Alabama is a wry rumination on the South, American food consumption, and the hidden challenges of eating local. RM

ESCAPE FIRE: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare

2012 / US / 63 minutes

Well-researched, with powerful graphics and strong narrative threads, ESCAPE FIRE presents a comprehensive and complex case for how our American healthcare system has really become a disease-management business. From former top executives like Wendell Potter at CIGNA to pioneering physicians like Dr. Andrew Weil, influential individuals provide insight as to how the system has reached this point and what new measures have the potential to revolutionize our nationwide health. Perhaps most compelling, however, are the patients whose lives have been significantly affected by the system’s failings, some of whom are now offered new hope by doctors looking at wellness through a different lens. The case of Sergeant Robert Yates is particularly moving. After returning from combat with injuries, Yates became reliant on pharmaceutical drugs; an innovative new program supports his struggle to wean himself off the medication. Together, these powerful perspectives create an overwhelming argument that healthcare means more than a ten-minute office visit and that drugs are not the only way to treat an illness. RS

Director : Andrew Beck Grace

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Producer : Andrew Beck Grace Co-Producer : Bartley Powers

2012 / US / 99 minutes

Editors : Andrew Beck Grace, Bartley Powers

Directors : Matthew Heineman, Susan Froemke

Cinematographer : Andrew Beck Grace

Producers : Matthew Heineman, Susan Froemke

M oon W inx F ilms 1613 2nd Avenue Tuscaloosa, AL 35401 205.222.7324 andy@moonwinxfilms.com

Editor : Bradley Ross Cinematographers : Wolfgang Held, Matthew Heineman M atthew Heineman info@ourtimeprojects.com

Thursday, April 12 — 4:30 pm Cinem a 4

Friday, April 13 — 10:40 am F let cher H all

new d o c s

Ethel

Fanuzzi’s Gold

“By the time I was born, part of the story was already over. And another, different story, was just beginning.” These are the words of director Rory Kennedy, born just six months after the death of her father, Robert Kennedy. In this moving portrait of the filmmaker’s stalwart mother, Ethel, we get an intimate look at a woman who lost the love of her life over four decades ago, and steeled herself to the task of raising eleven children on her own. Equal parts home movie and firsthand account, the film takes us to the earliest days of Camelot and the moment in California that shattered the hopes of a generation. As history unfolds onscreen, Ethel Kennedy shares her unique perspective on these critical moments in the political life of twentiethcentury America. Through family interviews and a wealth of stunning archival footage, Kennedy gracefully traces her mother’s arc from rambunctious youth to a woman with a lifelong passion for progressive causes—as much a champion of social justice as the man she married. RM

Q&A following screening, with guest Kathleen Kennedy Townsend 2011 / US / 97 minutes

world premiere

Ed Fanuzzi is a Staten Island inventor and treasure hunter. He sees gold where others see trash, combing the beach with a metal detector and searching through bins at the junkyard. Some of Fanuzzi’s finds end up in his cluttered backyard while others become construction projects for family members in need. Meanwhile, in approximately 2,000 videotapes, Fanuzzi records his life, explorations, and adventures. His home movies are interspersed throughout this portrait of an eternal optimist who has faced tragedy and heartache yet continues to dream of gold. NT

Filmmaker Q&A following screening, with guest Ed Fanuzzi 2012 / US / 27 minutes Director : Georgia Gruzen Producer : Georgia Gruzen Editor : Grace Klein Cinematographer : Georgia Gruzen G eorgia G ruzen 21 South End Avenue, #408 New York, NY 10280 917.796.1187 ggruzen@gmail.com

Director : Rory Kennedy Producers : Rory Kennedy, Jack Youngelson Editor : Azin Samari Cinematographer : Buddy Squires T ina L eonard 29169 Heathercliff Road, Suite 204 Malibu, CA 90265 310.457.3100 tleonard@moxiefirecracker.com

Saturday, April 14 — 1:40 pm F let cher H all

Friday, April 13 — 1:50 pm Cinem a 1

new d o cs

Five Star Existence *

north americ an premiere

A Girl Like Her *

The film’s title refers to the luxury rating aspired to by Songdo City, a super-modern metropolis in South Korea. Sonja Lindén’s Five Star Existence is a comprehensive and stimulating exploration of technology’s role in the human condition and vice-versa. By turns illuminating, complex, and troubling, much like the technological advances under scrutiny, the film poses salient questions, both practical and philosophical, all the while suffusing the screen with an exquisitely photographed assembly of vignettes. Whether you find yourself dependent on, wary of, or awestruck by technology and its place in society, Five Star Existence will simultaneously support and subvert expectation. TM

world premiere

2011 / Finland / 90 minutes

Today, unwed mothers account for nearly half of all births in this country. But in the not-too-distant past having a baby without being married was shameful, to yourself, your family, your church, your community. In previous generations, “nice” girls didn’t get pregnant. They were sent away to institutions dedicated to sheltering single pregnant women. They had their babies far away from prying eyes and were forced to give them up for adoption, so they could supposedly start over with a clean slate, if not a clear conscience. This moving story is told by the anonymous voices of women who suffered in silence, unspooling over images from mid-century social engineering films and documentary footage. In a day when some regard the era before easily accessible contraception as a moral golden age, take heed. LB

Director : Sonja Lindén

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Producer : Sonja Lindén

2011 / US / 48 minutes

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Editor : Samu Heikkilä Cinematographer: Peter Flinckenberg

Director : Ann Fessler Producer : Ann Fessler

T he F innish F ilm F oundation

Editor : Ann Fessler

Kanavakatu 12 00160 Helsinki, Finland

Cinematographer : Dennis Goulden

+35 89 622 0300 otto.suuronen@ses.fi Circle A S tudio

Ann Fessler

121 Foster Center Road Foster, RI 02825

Friday, April 13 — 8:00 pm

401.440.1962 ann@agirllikeher.com

Cinem a 1

Friday, April 13 — 1:30 pm DAC / P SI T heater

new d o c s

Girl Model

Grandmothers (Abuelas)

“The first secret of a successful modeling career is to start modeling at five to ten years old. If you haven’t decided what your child should be doing yet . . . then perhaps you can offer them a modeling career.” Everyone has his or her own vision of beauty. For some, it is compassion; for others, it is youth. Thirteen-yearold Nadya believes she’s grabbed the brass ring when she wins a modeling contract that includes travel to Japan. She will leave Siberia, have a glamorous professional life, and help her cash-strapped family, or so she thinks. Ashley, a former model, recruits young girls like Nadya for international modeling agencies. She says she loves her freedom, even while she despises the industry that makes it possible. Ashley’s teenage self tells her story in a chilling video diary, revealing truths that Nadya will have to uncover on her own. The two women are bookends in a story of hope, ambition, manipulation, and exploitation. CRE

From 1976 to 1983 a brutal regime in Argentina “disappeared” thousands, including hundreds of pregnant women who gave birth in concentration camps before they were killed. For years the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo have searched for their grandchildren. At first they took blindly to the streets, practically helpless, but after years of determined protest they met with success when scientific advances in genetic testing made positive identifications possible. This is a multigenerational story of familial love and devotion that surmounts cruel and seemingly impossible barriers. Told with strength and resolve, touching images of ordinary domestic spaces are creatively animated to bring the sad truth to light. TBW

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / US / 77 minutes

2011 / UK / 10 minutes Director: Afarin Eghbal Producer : Kasia Malipan Editor : Katherine Lee Cinematographer : Claire Buxton

Directors : David Redmon, A. Sabin

N ational F ilm & T elevision S chool

Producers : David Redmon, A. Sabin

Hemant Sharda

Editors : David Redmon, A. Sabin

Beaconsfield Studios, Station Road, Beaconsfield

Cinematographers : David Redmon, A. Sabin

Bucks HP9 1LG, UK +44 1494 731 452 festivals@nfts.co.uk

A shley S abin 203.417.3136 carnivalesquefilm@gmail.com

Friday, April 13 — 10:20 pm Cinem a 4

Friday, April 13 — 1:30 pm DAC / P SI T heater

new d o cs

Herman’s House *

world premiere

Jackie Sumell is inspired most by the lives of everyday people. As a multidisciplinary artist, her work transcends the boundaries of art and activism in an attempt to connect people in provocative and meaningful ways. No one has been in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola longer than Herman Wallace, who has spent close to four decades there for a crime many believe he did not commit. Sumell and Wallace’s correspondence eventually becomes a gallery installation, at the center of which is a wooden replica of Herman’s 6 x 9 cell. The exhibition also includes drawings and models of his dream house, on which the two collaborate for five years. Herman gets to exit his cell through this project, and Jackie gets to enter it. Now they’re working to make his dream a reality. CRE

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

The House I Live In Eugene Jarecki’s previous film, Why We Fight, was a startling look at the genesis of United States combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House I Live In explores another war altogether, one fought in America’s own streets and courts. Extensive in its reach and haunting in its outcome, The House I Live In is a definitive statement on America’s War on Drugs. After witnessing the wrenching impact of drugs on a close family friend, Jarecki pursues the origins and intricacies of this broken system that has spent billions, incarcerated millions, and still has a mounting problem on its hands. DEA agents, lawyers, individuals standing trial, and those serving time reveal personal experiences with profound political implications. An in-depth interview with David Simon, author and producer of The Wire, further contextualizes these viewpoints. The diverse perspectives build toward an alarmingly clear analysis: America’s War on Drugs is really a war against people, specifically targeting minorities and the impoverished while leaving the wealthy and powerful unaccountable. ST

2012 / Canada / 81 minutes

Filmmaker Q&A following screening Director : Angad Singh Bhalla Producers : Lisa Valencia-Svensson, Angad Singh Bhalla Executive Producers : Ed Barreveld, Loring McAlpin Editor : Ricardo Acosta Cinematographers : Iris Ng, Angad Singh Bhalla S toryline Entertainment Inc . Lisa Valencia-Svensson 115 Palmerston Avenue Toronto, ON M6J 2J2, Canada 416.603.8333 lisa@storylineentertainment.com

2012 / US / 110 minutes Director : Eugene Jarecki Producers : Eugene Jarecki, Melinda Shopsin, Sam Cullman, Christopher St. John Editor: Paul Frost Cinematographers : Sam Cullman, Derek Hallquist K ara E lverson 145 Sixth Avenue 7th New York, NY 10013 212.352.3060 kara@charlottestreetfilms.com

Saturday, April 14 — 1:10 pm Cinem a 3

Saturday, April 14 — 10:00 am Cinem a 3

new d o c s

How to Survive a Plague

I Send You This Place

In the early 1980s when the number of AIDS cases in America began to soar, many organizations with the resources to help turned a blind eye to the epidemic. Enter ACT UP, a group of activists who felt they’d been backed into a corner by society’s complacent attitudes. Many of ACT UP’s members were HIV-positive and saw this unifying political action as their only hope of survival. In a two-pronged attack strategy, the group sought to raise awareness through high-profile protests, while simultaneously infiltrating the scientific community to help steer research toward a manageable cure. This film recounts their epic journey almost entirely through the use of archival footage, providing a firsthand account of the heated meetings and desperate emotions that would eventually fracture the group but at the time were instrumental in finding a cure. How to Survive a Plague is a gripping historical account of the movement culled from hundreds of hours of existing footage. The result is a beautiful testament to those who never gave up the fight for change. RM

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Editors : Andrea Sisson, Peter Ohs

2012 / US / 120 minutes Director : David France Producers : David France, Howard Gertler Executive Producers : Joy Tomchin, Dan Cogan Co-Producers : Henry van Ameringen, Alan Getz, Peggy Farber, Lindy Linder, Ted Snowdon Editors: T. Woody Richman, Tyler Walk Cinematographer : Derek Wiesehahn IF C F IL M S

Elizabeth Brambilla

11 Penn Plaza New York, NY 10011 212.324.4635 ebrambilla@ifcfilms.com

Saturday, April 14 — 7:20 pm Cinem a 4

world premiere

Part enigmatic love letter, part existential exploration, I Send You This Place takes the viewer to and from Iceland in search of clues to a family mystery, and the solace of reunion and reconciliation. Allusions to space and place abound as the filmmakers seek to glean fact from speculation and to fully understand why a sibling elected to disappear into a landscape of interiority. Visually arresting and experimental in approach, the film employs a moody soundscape, painterly composition, and philosophical inquisition as tools to craft a cinematic snow globe: a fragile, intimate, and closed system that remains accessible and evocative throughout. TM

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / US, Iceland / 69 minutes Directors: Andrea Sisson, Peter Ohs Producers : Andrea Sisson, Peter Ohs Cinematographers : Andrea Sisson, Peter Ohs L auren E dward 30 St. Felix Street #4D Brooklyn, NY 11217 918.261.0392 we@laurenedward.com

Friday, April 13 — 1:50 pm Cinem a 1

new d o cs

The Imposter

The Invisible War

In 1994, a thirteen-year-old boy mysteriously goes missing in Texas. His mother and sister hold out hope for his return, but years pass without word of his whereabouts. Until, out of the blue, they receive a phone call. Three and half years later, a man claiming to be their son and brother has been found in Spain. There is profound relief, but a bizarre reunion follows. This young man’s eyes are a different color, and he speaks with an accent. Though his family members justify these developments, others are convinced something’s not right. This unbelievable story plays out like a thriller, woven together through interviews and meticulous dramatizations. Staring directly into the lens, everyone involved seems earnest and forthcoming in his or her recollection of events. Yet as steps are retraced and perspectives shift, the pieces fail to fit. Sometimes reality is deceptively entangled with what we wish to be true. ST

2011 / UK / 95 minutes

This well-crafted film directed by Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Outrage) investigates the widespread phenomenon of rape in the United States military. While the documentary provides plenty of disturbing statistics taken from official records, its greatest power lies in sympathetic portrayals of the strong women who became victims of sexual assault, and who were subsequently betrayed deeply by a system in which they and their families trusted idealistically and naively. The film provides a moving and hard-hitting expose of the long-term traumatic consequences for the survivors. It also depicts the perseverance some of them have been able to muster in trying to attain justice, or even medical care, for sustained injuries. We see the hypocrisy in some systemic attempts meant to prevent rape, the indifference of administrators, and the struggle of individuals against almost unbreakable chains of command. The outrage the film generates leads to an examination of larger cultural issues, too, such as gender equality and the role of the military. AM

Director: Bart Layton

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Producer : Dimitri Doganis

2012 / US / 98 minutes

Executive Producers : John Battsek, Simon Chinn, Molly Thompson, Katherine Butler, Bob DeBitetto

Director : Kirby Dick

Co-Producers : Poppy Dixon, Vanessa Trovell

Producers : Amy Ziering, Tanner King Barklow

Editor : Andrew Hulme

Editors : Doug Blush, Derek Boonstra

Cinematographers : Erik Alexander Wilson, Lynda Hall

Cinematographers : Thaddeus Wadleigh, Kirsten Johnson

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

T ony Koch

A my Ziering

9355 Wilshire Boulevard Beverly Hills, CA 90210

2711 Angus Street Los Angeles, CA 90039

310.271.4500 tony.koch@indomina.com

323.662.8484 amy@janedoefilms.com

Saturday, April 14 — 4:20 pm

Friday, April 13 — 7:10 pm

Cinem a 4

Cinem a 3

new d o c s

ITALY LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT

Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet

Luca and Gustav, a young couple living in Rome, leave their apartment and debate deserting Italy altogether. Wouldn’t life be better in Berlin? In a rainbow of Fiat 500s, they spend six months crisscrossing the country, from the shuttered factories of once-iconic brands to tourist-heavy Tuscany, chatting with devoted Fascists, fevered acolytes of the corrupt President Berlusconi, and victims of organized crime. They also pop over to George Clooney’s villa on Lake Como. They gaze upon an Italy that seems to have forgotten its own history and struggle to focus on the inspiring, the tasty, and the tolerant with a collage of witty animations, archival footage of a bygone dolce vita, and their own affectionate banter. Even Sophia Loren lives in Switzerland, Gustav wryly notes. Will they join her as Italian expatriates? LB

In the 1980s, Jason Becker was on the fast track to become speed metal’s reigning guitar god. His acrobatic fingers once tapped out swirling licks that sounded like Paganini playing double-time in a Tilt-a-Whirl. Becker toured internationally before he graduated from high school. At twenty, the young virtuoso was David Lee Roth’s lead guitarist and destined for stardom. But just before embarking on his first stadium tour, Becker was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Today, more than twenty years after doctors predicted he would have two to three years to live, Becker’s life is still unfolding in a glorious, extended coda. While his digits can no longer perform fiery gymnastic leaps up and down the fretboard, his mind continues to dance to the music, and—thanks to the ingenuity and support of a coterie of family members, friends, and lovers—he continues to compose the fanciful flights of arpeggiated fury he hears in his head. TW

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / Italy, Germany / 75 minutes

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Directors : Gustav Hofer, Luca Ragazzi

2012 / US, UK / 87 minutes

Producers : Gustav Hofer, Vania Del Borgo Editor : Desideria Rayner

Director : Jesse Vile

Cinematographer : Michele Paradisi

Producer : Jesse Vile Editor: Gideon Gold

F ilms T ransit International

Diana Holtzberg

Cinematographer : Carl Burke

166 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003 212.614.2808 diana@filmstransit.com

O pus P ocus F ilms 53 Kynaston Road London N16 0EB, UK +44 0 791 020 8055 jesse@ocuspocusfilms.com

Friday, April 13 — 1:20 pm Cinem a 4

Friday, April 13 — 10:10 pm Cinem a 3

new d o cs

Justice for Sale *

north americ an premiere

A young soldier has been convicted of raping the wife of a general in Congo. He’s serving time in jail and his own wife has already moved in with another man. Enter Claudine Tsongo, a calm and courageous attorney, who soon discovers there is no concrete evidence proving the soldier is guilty. Justice for Sale is a well-told story that follows the compelling Claudine as she wends her way through Congo’s evolving justice system in search of documents, witnesses, and ultimately the truth. In the process she exposes weaknesses in the system and raises questions about the role that the international community inadvertently plays in making real justice unobtainable. The film includes riveting footage of the young soldier’s shocking trial in an open-air, makeshift courtroom. Following Fighting the Silence and Weapon of War, and years invested in Congo, filmmakers Ilse van Velzen and Femke van Velzen conclude their trilogy on the atrocity of rape and its devastating consequences. RS 2011 / The Netherlands / 83 minutes Directors : Ilse van Velzen, Femke van Velzen Producers : Ilse van Velzen, Femke van Velzen, IFProduction EDItor: Paul de Heer

The Kingdom of Mister Edhi (Le royaume de monsieur Edhi) *

north americ an premiere

Abdul Edhi’s kingdom is a bustling village without borders—it houses drug rehabilitation clinics, homes for the elderly, the largest ambulance service in the world, and 4,500 employees. But the heart and soul of this kingdom are the abused women and abandoned children who find an oasis in the midst of Pakistan’s unforgiving male-dominated social structure. Serenely disparaging capitalism and the tyranny of fundamentalism, the taciturn Mr. Edhi presides over an organization dedicated to his society’s most disenfranchised while refusing to be beholden to the donations offered by governments, foreigners, and business interests. This observational film offers an intimate and inspiring look at Edhi and his stalwart wife, Bilquis, at work nurturing a ragtag community of misfits and the misbegotten. Harnessing the power that comes with numbers, these women who have found asylum in Mr. Edhi’s kingdom find the support they need to stand up to entrenched patriarchy’s most destructive forces. TW

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / Belgium, Spain / 80 minutes Director : Amélie Saillez

CinematographER : Rogier Timmermans

ProducerS : Stéphanie Lippens, Antonio Folguera, Danielle Schleif, François Van de Abeele, Amélie Saillez

W omen M ake M ovies

Editor : Carlos Prieto

Kristen Fitzpatrick

462 Broadway, Suite 500 New York, NY 10013

Cinematographer: Tone Andersen

212.925.0606 x312 kf@wmm.com CBA 19f Avenue des Arts 1000 Brussels, Belgium

Thursday, April 12 — 5:00 pm

+32 2 227 2230 cba@skynet.be

DAC / P SI Theater

Thursday, April 12 — 1:30 pm Cinem a 3

new d o c s

Kiss the Paper As Alan Runfeldt opens the door to the barn in his backyard, we are transported into his world as one of the few remaining artisans of letterpress printing. A cacophony of sounds signal a day’s progress, generated from the cranking of knobs, turning of wheels, and pressing of finely spread ink onto paper. Sliding drawers reveal a minute army of letters and symbols lined up with a soldier’s precision, which will soon make their mark on paper. Having worked with letterpress since the age of twelve, Runfeldt has seen the world’s trends come and go. But within this very tactile universe, no amount of technology has ever been able to curb his passion for the craft of manual printing and all of its beautiful imperfections. TD

The Law in These Parts (Shilton Ha’Chok)

Cinematographer : Fiona Otway

The Law in These Parts exposes the widening moral gap between the presumed ethical aspirations of Israeli society and its promulgation of discriminatory laws against Palestinians. Israeli director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz (James’ Journey to Jerusalem; The Inner Tour) examines four decades of Israeli military law, through interviews with its architects, that since 1967 has been imposed on Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. This multilayered film accrues its ethical power gradually, through subtle techniques of visual palimpsest, dialectical editing, and self-reflexive voice-over. Its analysis resonates historically through the deployment of Israeli archival footage in ways that recall the Nazi period and Nuremburg trials while evoking more recent examples of human rights violations by the United States and its allies in the Middle Eastern arena. A sophisticated and deceptively low-key style renders an ultimately devastating indictment of the misuse of the institution of law in order to justify large-scale oppression. AM

F iona O tway

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / US / 20 minutes Director : Fiona Otway Producer: Fiona Otway Editor: Fiona Otway

festivals@fionaotway.com

Thursday, April 12 — 4:30 pm Cinem a 4

2011 / Israel / 101 minutes Director : Ra’anan Alexandrowicz Producer : Liran Atzmor Editor : Neta Dvorkis Cinematographer : Shark De Mayo L iran Atzmor 86 Sokolov Street Tel Aviv 62284, Israel +972 528 003362 info@thelawfilm.com

Friday, April 13 — 10:00 am Cinem a 3

new d o cs

A Letter to Dad (Pismo ocu) *

north americ an premiere

Director Srdjan Keca is halfway around the world when his dad, Marinko, dies suddenly and alone. Griefstricken, confused, and somewhat angry, he rushes home to try to make sense of his dad’s death, and his life. Once there, Keca begins assembling the compelling narrative of how his parents met, fell in love, served their country, and began their family; “Your mum led the girl’s troop. Your dad carried the baton. . . .” Keca is aided by an impressive legacy of letters, photos, and video footage taken and saved by his father, though things get a little murky surrounding his father’s later participation in the war. Earnest interviews with Keca’s mother, his alcoholic uncle, and two of his dad’s oldest friends, compliment Marinko’s footage and propel the gripping narrative toward unexpected discoveries. Throughout, Keca engages a keenly poetic style as he narrates this profoundly personal essay; “Hey Dad, Mum still believes or wants to believe that you had to go. . . .” WM

The Lifeguard (El Salvavidas) *

north americ an premiere

Meet Mauricio, a lifeguard on a popular Chilean beach. Driven by fierce dedication to safety rules and regulations, Mauricio frustrates beachgoers and his seemingly lackadaisical colleagues as much as they frustrate him. Bathers are scolded, complaints are filed, accusations are made—all contributing to a simmering feud with Jean-Pierre, Mauricio’s chief rival and detractor. Firsttime filmmaker Maite Alberdi brings it all to life with a vibrant palette, tactile depth of field, and a surprisingly suspenseful day at the beach. TM 2011 / Chile / 64 minutes Director : Maite Alberdi Producer : Paola Castillo Editor : Alejandro Fernández Cinematographer : Pablo Valdés C at& D ocs

Maëlle Guenegues

18 Rue Quincampoix 75004 Paris, France

2011 / Serbia, UK / 48 minutes

+33 144596353 maelle@catndocs.com

Director: Srdjan Keca Producer : Srdjan Keca

Thursday, April 12 — 5:30 pm

Editor : Katherine Lee

Cinem a 1

Cinematographer : Srdjan Keca S tudio S trike

Srdjan Keca

68 Clapham Manor Street London SW4 6DX, UK +44 75 06386522 studio@skeca.com

Saturday, April 14 — 1:50 pm Cinem a 1

new d o c s

Light Plate *

world premiere

Mr. Cao Goes to Washington *

Durham filmmaker Josh Gibson (Kudzu Vine) returns to Full Frame with Light Plate, a black-and-white celluloid essay illustrating and conjuring vistas of the Italian countryside. Temperature is evoked by gossamer rays of warm light and cool swaths of shadow, time is suggested by the pastoral metronome of daily routine, and space is articulated by window-framed intersections of near and far. A lyrical and diametrical study, Light Plate is sturdy yet ethereal, alien yet familiar, and ultimately persuades the viewer that a new film can be an old soul. TM

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / Italy / 11 minutes Director : Josh Gibson Producer : Josh Gibson Editor : Josh Gibson Cinematographer : Josh Gibson J osh Gibson 918 North Mangum Street Durham, NC 27701 919.667.9093 joshigi@duke.edu

This sobering political documentary follows Joseph Cao, the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress, during his 2010 long-shot reelection bid to represent Louisiana’s predominantly African American 2nd district. Not only does Cao’s race mark him as an outsider in the district he represents, he’s also the first Republican to hold his seat since 1891. Despite the apparent mismatch between his party affiliation and his constituents’ political beliefs, Cao’s willingness to buck the party line in his first term (including proudly proclaiming his friendship with President Obama) earns him the kind of trust that appears to bridge ideological and racial divisions. Cao seems like the embodiment of Frank Capra’s mythical Mr. Smith: capable of effecting change through an appealing combination of earnest naiveté, integrity, and passion. But when his campaign gathers momentum, the specter of partisan politics reappears. Cao slowly recognizes that friendships in congressional politics come with a two-year lifespan and that bipartisanship is the stuff dreams are made of. TW

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / US / 71 minutes Director : S. Leo Chiang Producer : S. Leo Chiang

Saturday, April 14 — 10:40 am F let cher H all

Editor : Matthew Martin Cinematographers : Bao Nguyen, S. Leo Chiang Walking Iris Media 2263 15th Street San Francisco, CA 94114 415.829.8592 info@walking-iris.com

Friday, April 13 — 1:10 pm Cinem a 3

new d o cs

Nation (Nació) *

north americ an premiere

Needle Exchange *

A young man in Catalonia tirelessly trains amidst a sprawling landscape in this meditation on extensive preparation towards a mysterious end. Jesus Navarro is the athletic subject of director Homer Etminani’s exploration of process and place, which perhaps poses more questions than it answers. Jewel-toned scenery and the bucolic sounds of nature, combined with Jesus’s puzzling regimen (and a cameo by an ardent and faithful canine) all contribute to the film’s enigmatic charm. Comprised of long, sumptuous takes and a skillful avoidance of exposition, Nation invites deduction and contemplation alike. TM

Spencer and Glenn are lovable lads and best mates. They’re also recovering addicts who have traded heroin for copious amounts of tattoo ink. With a faithful terrier, Jack, by their side (and under their skin!), these illustrated men affectionately needle one another— both literally and figuratively—like an old married couple. Though Spencer and Glenn insist that what they share “is not a relationship,” this charming portrait makes it clear that inking is the way they share a delicate intimacy. They have swapped one addiction for two others: their art and each other. TW 2010 / Ireland / 10 minutes

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Director: Colm Quinn

2011 / Spain / 66 minutes

Editor : Maeve O’Boyle

Director : Homer Etminani Producers : Homer Etminani, FakeFilms

Producer : Andrew Freedman Cinematographer : Aidan Maguire V enom F ilm

Andrew Freedman

Editors : Rapha Spencer, Juan Monsalve

2 Chelmsford Lane, Ranelagh Dublin 6, Ireland

Cinematographer : Beñat Revuelta

+353 1 4975980 freedman@venom.ie

H omer E tminani Gran Via CC. 516. 3º3ª Barcelona 08015, Spain +34 646572434 hetminani@gmail.com

Thursday, April 12 — 1:40 pm Cinem a 4

Friday, April 13 — 10:10 pm Cinem a 3

new d o c s

Peak *

north americ an premiere

A People Uncounted *

The Alps are the backdrop for this wry and captivating take on climate change and how idiosyncratic responses to its effects impact natives and tourists alike. Striking Alpine images, and the lengths to which the tourism industry will go to preserve them, depict an ecosystem and a population dependent on science and sleight-of-hand in equal measure. International caretakers work diligently, millions of Euros are spent, and locals worry about the future of the region, where rising temperatures lead to lowered spirits. Disquieting and beautiful, Peak takes a complex issue, and the exploration of its possible ramifications, to new heights. TM 2011 / Germany / 91 minutes Director : Hannes Lang Producer : Titus Kreyenberg Editor: Stefan Stabenow Cinematographers : Thilo Schmidt, Hajo Schomerus Rise A nd Shine W orld S ales Schlesische Str. 29/30 10997 Berlin, Germany +49 30 4737 2980 info@riseandshine-berlin.de

Holocaust documentaries such as this one remind us that the Allied victory in World War II did not eradicate genocide. This deeply moving film unearths the long-buried history of the Porrajmos, the “devouring” of the Romani people during the Nazi era, and with harrowing intimacy, bears witness to an ongoing chronicle of shocking injustice. Survivors bravely recount their experiences as children being deported to death camps: One is turned away from the Auschwitz crematorium because the Zyklon B has run out; another becomes a victim of Dr. Mengele. Director Aaron Yeger acknowledges the difficulty of fully representing either individual traumas or the enormity of the war’s death toll: an estimated 90 percent of the Roma in Europe perished. Yet he also implicates decades of postwar human rights abuses of this misunderstood minority (recently declared the group in the European Union that suffers from the most discrimination) as a reason the world does not know this profoundly important history. MP

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / Canada / 99 minutes Director: Aaron Yeger Producers : Marc Swenker, Tom Rasky Executive Producer : Lenny Binder Editor : Kurt Engfehr

Saturday, April 14 — 10:40 am F let cher H all

Cinematographer : Stephen C. Whitehead U rbinder F ilms 55 Bloor Street West, P.O. Box 19630 Toronto, ON, Canada 647.932.0903 info@urbinderfilms.com

Thursday, April 12 — 1:50 pm DAC / P SI T heater

new d o cs

The Photographer’s Wife (Die Frau des Fotografen) *

north americ an premiere

Amateur photographer Eugen Gerbert’s favorite model was Gerti, his wife of many years. Countless vacations and happy domesticity are documented for posterity. The decades of seemingly commonplace marriage flow by; all the while, Gerbert meticulously photographs his beloved’s body, dressed and undressed. Through a photographer’s eyes, however, this ordinary woman becomes a goddess of femininity. Charmingly, his appreciation for his muse seems to have increased as she aged. Ultimately, Gerti’s nakedness turns the pictures into aesthetic objects on the theme of womanhood. The photographer’s notes and diaries, read aloud, have a deadpan quality, in contrast to the sensuality of the images. NK 2011 / Germany / 29 minutes Directors : Karsten Krause, Philip Widmann Producer : Philip Widmann Editors : Karsten Krause, Philip Widmann

Radio Unnameable *

world premiere

Tune in and turn on to this unheard tale from America’s counterculture. When Bob Fass sat down behind the microphone at New York City’s public radio station WBAI in 1963, his improvisational mixture of music and musings played like jazz. Though the show Radio Unnameable unfolded in the wee hours of the morning, its spontaneous vibe attracted the city’s most talented night owls; on any given night, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, or Joni Mitchell might show up to play, and random callers always added to the chorus of voices. Well before the hippie movement blossomed into a full-blown national industry, Fass’s mellifluous innovations nurtured a thriving regional alternative scene, prompting folk performances, local activism, and spontaneous happenings . . . all the stuff that wouldn’t become de rigueur until 1967. Featuring moody archival footage and pristine recordings of Fass’s original broadcasts, this film will re-introduce you to an era you only thought you knew, while paying loving tribute to an invisible medium that may have vanished altogether. TW

Cinematographers : Karsten Krause, Philip Widmann

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

P hilip W idmann

2012 / US / 90 minutes

Wrangelstr. 86 10997 Berlin, Germany +49 176 2411 4830 philip@workscited.de

Directors : Paul Lovelace, Jessica Wolfson Producers : Paul Lovelace, Jessica Wolfson Editor : Greg Wright

Saturday, April 14 — 10:20 am Cinem a 4

Cinematographer : John Pirozzi Paul L ovelace 100 West 94th Street #24F New York, NY 10025 347.268.1125 lostfootagefilms@gmail.com

Saturday, April 14 — 4:50 pm Cinem a 1

new d o c s

Raising Resistance *

north americ an premiere

Reportero *

In one generation, the cultivation of transgenic soy has exploded in South America and has changed the way people live. Enormous tracts of land are cleared for the intensively mechanized, herbicide-dependent production of soy. A relatively few people profit from the export of this “green gold,” while small farmers find their traditional way of life destroyed. In a field in Paraguay, campesinos stop a tractor in protest, forced to take action because they can no longer depend on their small patch of earth to support them, to be “the factory of the poor.” Deftly weaving multiple threads together, the film addresses the issue from many angles, from local direct action to street protests in Asunción to the larger political arena. Biotechnology can be seen as a means of feeding the world, or as a poisonous horror that will eventually destroy the land and everything that lives on it. TBW

us premiere

At some point every war reporter questions how far he or she is willing to go for a story and whether the threat of death is worth the risk. One of the deadliest places to work is just across the border in Mexico, where more than eighty reporters have been killed since 2000. Reportero focuses on a fearless journalist-run newspaper in Tijuana called Zeta that dares to print stories about organized crime and drug cartels, complete with mug shots of narco dons on the front page. The film follows Sergio Haro and his intrepid colleagues as they investigate corruption in their own neighborhoods while facing very real death threats that are often seen through. The film examines the toll the reporters’ pursuit of the truth takes on them and their families. RS

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / US, Mexico / 71 minutes

2011 / Germany, Switzerland / 85 minutes Director : Bernardo Ruiz Directors : Bettina Borgfeld, David Bernet

Producers : Bernardo Ruiz, Patricia Benabe

Producer : Oliver Stoltz

Editor : Carla Gutierrez

Associate Producer : Wekas Gaba

Cinematographer : Claudio Rocha

Editor : Inge Schneider Cinematographers : Marcus Winterbauer, Börres Weiffenbach

Q uiet Pictures

Bernardo Ruiz

611 Broadway, Suite 714 New York, NY 10012 212.380.6890 bernardo.ruiz@quietpictures.com

D RE A ME R J oint V enture F ilmproduktion G mb H Regensburger Strasse 25 D-10777 Berlin, Germany +30 300 2444 0 info@dreamerjointventure.de

Friday, April 13 — 4:20 pm Cinem a 4

Thursday, April 12 — 11:00 am F let cher H all

new d o cs

Santa Land *

Silent Springs

north americ an premiere

Taking a cue from the work of biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson, this experimental film reveals the apparatus of how life on earth is threatened by change that comes too quickly and at too high a price. As director Erin Espelie writes, “Try as we might, we cannot autopsy (from the Greek, to see for oneself) the whole natural world. As diversity of life reduces, we further lose the ability to be amphibious (from the Greek, to lead dual lives), to be above a surface and below. In different planes, it may be impossible to achieve focus (from the Latin, place of fire, used first by Johannes Kepler as reference to the burning convergence of a lens).” DP

Real Bearded Santas are men so committed to portraying Santa Claus that they maintain their lustrous whiskers year-round. They are Santa Claus when they go out to eat. They are Santa Claus when they go to the park. With the beard comes a way of life and a responsibility: If you always look like Santa Claus should you always act like Santa Claus? This funny and poignant film profiles “Santa Ray” and his wife “Mrs. Claus” in their Florida retirement community and follows them to the Celebrate Santa Convention in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. There we meet a host of Real Bearded Santas who each reflect on what it means to be jolly old St. Nick all year long. NT

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

2011 / US, Italy / 13 minutes

2011 / US / 22 minutes

Director : Erin Espelie

Director : Kim Nguyen Producers : Andy Carrigan, Eric Stevens, Kim Nguyen, Sean Linehan Editors : Will Znidaric, Dave Anderson Cinematographer : Ed David MI G H T y F IL M C O

Producer : Erin Espelie Editor : Erin Espelie Cinematographer : Erin Espelie E rin E spelie erinespelie@gmail.com

Kim Nguyen

248 Main Street Venice, CA 90291 310.452.0101

Saturday, April 14 — 1:20 pm Cinem a 4

Saturday, April 14 — 10:20 pm Cinem a 4

new d o c s

Sivan

Special Flight (Vol Spécial)

This minimalist experimental short is the opposite of a sports documentary. Instead of photographing the field or the athletes, filmmaker Zohar Elefant inverts our gaze, focusing exclusively on the animated, wideeyed face of the eponymous Israeli soccer fan as she watches a live Hapoel game in a Tel Aviv stadium. The actual athletic contest is never depicted on screen, and each shot is fairly static, so the game is only visible as a reflection on Sivan’s alternately tortured and ecstatic face. In its portrayal of a single viewer’s singing, chanting, screaming, mocking, pleading, phone-talking, weeping, and praying, this funny, noisy film manages to move beyond sports to touch lightly on issues of spectatorship, politics, history, religion, and family in contemporary Israel. By blurring the lines between ethnographic, art film, and reality television aesthetics, Sivan conjures a humorous, tongue-in-cheek answer to Zidane, the 2006 documentary that followed the soccer star through a single game. BG

2010 / Israel / 14 minutes Director : Zohar Elefant Producer : Zohar Elefant Editor : Zohar Elefant Cinematographers : Zohar Elefant, Yuri Gershbrrg Zohar E lefant zelefant@gmail.com

Thursday, April 12 — 5:30 pm Cinem a 1

us premiere

Upon first glance, the Swiss detention center of Frambois seems ideal. The head-count is low; the inmates appear to get along and are treated with dignity and respect. However, with xenophobia in Switzerland at an all-time high, Frambois has become a way station for immigrants whose requests for political asylum have been rejected. They sit in holding cells for months, sometimes years, awaiting the day when they’ll be put in chains and forcibly returned to their native country. It’s a terrifying prospect, affecting even people who’ve lived in Switzerland for years without incident, paying taxes and raising families. This documentary tracks the palpable tension and desperation that builds as people bide their time until they are transported, alone and afraid, to a country that is no longer their home. Special Flight provides a bracing look at the global issue of immigration, and the indifference with which First World countries sometimes treat those who seek a better life. RM 2011 / Switzerland / 103 minutes Director : Fernand Melgar Producer : Climage Editor : Karine Sudan Cinematographer : Denis Jutzeler M arine Girardin +41 21 648 35 61 marine@climage.ch

Saturday, April 14 — 7:50 pm Cinem a 1

new d o cs

Tahrir: Liberation Square

The Time We Have (Den tid vi har)

Sicilian filmmaker Stefano Savona traveled to Cairo as soon as possible after hearing about the protests in Tahrir Square, arriving in time to begin filming on January 30, 2011, the sixth day of the revolution. While three young demonstrators Noha, Ahmed, and Elsayed act as guides and Greek chorus, thousands of recurring faces and strident voices punctuate this intense and strangely dreamlike portrait of a place and a people on the cusp of political transformation. Savona’s skillful and patient observational cinematography—so different from the poor-quality footage of the Arab Spring revolts seen elsewhere—provides a compelling window on the vertiginous confusion, anxiety, and violence experienced during those heady days and nights, as well as the transporting expressions of national pride and community identity. The film, beautifully edited and presented without any voice-over or explanatory titles, immerses the viewer in the prosaic and transcendent details of a collective reimagining of Egypt, echoing the Soviet montage of Sergei Eisenstein. BG

2011 / France, Italy, Egypt / 91 minutes

us premiere

This is a quiet love story. Beautiful, intimate, and deeply tender, it unfolds from the pages of a photograph album, in gentle words, in caresses. Ruth and Arne Conrad were young and handsome together. Married for sixty-seven years, they shared a good life, romance, travel, parties, children. Now the time has come to part. As they live their last days together, Arne must resign himself to change—to the loss of independence and control over his home, and to letting go of the love of his life. CRE 2011 / Denmark / 25 minutes Director: Mira Jargil Producer : Elisabeth Victoria Poulsen Editor : Rasmus Gitz-Johansen Cinematographer : Adam Wallensten Mira Jargil Hostrupsvej 6, st. tv. 1950 Frederiksberg, Denmark +45 25 488 599 mirajargil@hotmail.com

Director : Stefano Savona Producers : Penelope Bortoluzzi, Marco Alessi Editor: Penelope Bortoluzzi Cinematographer : Stefano Savona I carus F ilms 32 Court Street, Floor 21 Brooklyn, NY 11201 718.488.8900 rentals@icarusfilms.com

Friday, April 13 — 10:40 pm Cinem a 1

Saturday, April 14 — 1:50 pm Cinem a 1

new d o c s

Trash Dance Trash Dance tells the story of an unusual, creative partnership between a dancer, Allison Orr, and the men and women of the Austin, Texas, Department of Solid Waste Services. In the film, non-dancers contribute to choreographing a public performance based on their daily activities in order to demonstrate what workers and their machines do on the job: quotidian movements parsed into ballet. The film documents the yearlong collaborative process that led to a rain-drenched but utterly cinematic performance in front of a cheering hometown audience. Gigantic mechanical trash vehicles really can dance, both as graceful soloists and in a synchronized chorus line. We observe the live show through a filmmaker’s lens: Multiple cameras allow the end product to become a statement of individuality that supersedes conventions of “faceless labor.” Indeed, the workers who collect trash, yard waste, dead animals, and bulky items reveal their unexpected talents, ambitions, and responsibilities. NK

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom In 2011, a Tsunami ravaged Japan. This tribute captures the recollections of survivors in one of the hardest hit areas. Their family and friends perished in the disaster, and their profound sense of grief and inconsolable losses are palpable. Radiation is of grave concern, and many have lost their homes and are still living in community shelters. And yet, amidst anguish and devastation, the cherished cherry blossoms begin to bloom. Those who bask in the flutter of these pale blush petals, find solace, even inspiration in the blossoms’ arrival despite recent events. A visual poem beautifully articulated by acclaimed director Lucy Walker (Waste Land, Blind Sight), The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom is a testament to grace and survival in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. ST 2011 / US, Japan / 40 minutes

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Director : Lucy Walker

2012 / US / 68 minutes

Editor: Aki Mizutani

Director : Andrew Garrison

Producers : Lucy Walker, Kira Carstensen Cinematographer : Aaron Phillips

Producer : Andrew Garrison

G oldcrest F ilms

Editor : Angela K. Pires

65-66 Dean Street W1D4PL London, UK

Cinematographer : Andrew Garrison

+20 7437 8696 ajeyes@goldcrestfilms.com

Andy Jeyes

A ndrew G arrison 10501 Hard Rock Road Austin, TX 78750 512.925.6769 garrisontx@gmail.com

Saturday, April 14 — 4:10 pm Cinem a 3

Friday, April 13 — 10:20 am Cinem a 4

new d o cs

Unfinished Spaces

Violated Letters (Cudze Listy)

In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro called on ambitious Cuban architects to create five National Art Schools on the site of a lush golf course in Havana. Castro’s vision, shared by a team of idealistic young people, was to situate buildings for art, music, dance, ballet, and theater on the grounds of a former imperialist symbol. The architects’ visionary plans clashed with the burdensome embargo on construction supplies in the early 1960s. These shortages led to the creation of a campus of structures at once uniquely local and universally utopian. The technology for erecting Catalan vaults, for example, was rediscovered by necessity because there was no steel for supporting large interior spaces. After a very few glorious years, Cuban architecture became rigidly aligned with Soviet construction methods and styles, and the Havana art schools and the architects themselves fell out of favor. The film tells the fascinating story of architectural creation, decay, and renewal. NK

north americ an premiere

After World War II, Eastern European states attempted to maintain state control over personal expression. In the case of Poland, a special office intercepted, opened, and scrutinized personal mail from 1945 to 1989. Millions of letters, never received by their intended readers, were eventually rediscovered in police files. The filmmakers show how this correspondence develops into rich material to explore daily life under the strictures of an authoritarian society. Extraordinary archival and period footage provides a cinematic backdrop to carefully chosen excerpts from the letters. The film sets forth an oral history of decades of Cold War history and culture from the perspective of ordinary people, as well as a chilling examination of repression at its most efficient and impersonal. Videotape of the rise of mass protest movements such as Solidarity subtly anticipates recent democratic uprisings in the Middle East. NK

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / US, Cuba / 86 minutes Directors : Alysa Nahmias, Benjamin Murray Producers : Alysa Nahmias, Benjamin Murray Editors: Kristen Nutile, Alex Minnick Cinematographer : Benjamin Murray A jna F ilms

Alysa Nahmias

31 Powers Street, Suite 1 Brooklyn, NY 11211 347.693.3564 alysa@ajnafilms.com

Thursday, April 12 — 4:10 pm F let cher H all

2011 / Poland / 56 minutes Director : Maciej Drygas Producer : Maciej Drygas Editor : Maciej Drygas Cinematographer : Maciej Drygas A gainst G ravity Widok 5/7/9 LOK.410 Warsaw 00–023, Poland +22 828 10 79 kuba@docreview.pl

Saturday, April 14 — 10:20 am Cinem a 4

new d o c s

The Waiting Room *

world premiere

Peter Nicks’s rigorous vérité film spends twentyfour hours in an Oakland Emergency Room, his camera evenly maneuvering through the complex environment. A stoic nurse intercepts boisterous patients before they are admitted. A physician laments slow bed turnover; he can’t discharge his stabilized patient because it’s clear the man has nowhere else to go. A young couple faces expensive treatment without having insurance to cover the procedure. Methodically, Nicks’s steady lens peels back layers of frustration, imbalance, and tension; patients feel manipulated, physicians are overwhelmed, the system is exhausted. The film also records the mechanics of this ever-shifting space, admittance, beds, prescriptions, testing, discharge. Every move is pressurized by the burden of limited resources. The Waiting Room offers a portrait of contemporary healthcare, but the greater focus is the human beings who consistently feel its impact. This treatment is meant to be a last resort, yet for many it’s the first and only option. ST

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

While You Were Gone (Medan du var borta) A young man reflects upon his volatile past while driving through the rain to a hospital, where an anxious and suspenseful night awaits him. Rain-dappled reflections in the street and overhead fluorescents in the hospital highlight his raw recollections. As a boy, he desperately missed the love and attention of his father. As a man, he is equally desperate for answers. This latest film from Frida Kempff (Bathing Micky) briefly encapsulates the emotional evolution from adolescence to adulthood. Past, present, and future gradually intersect in a loving embrace. TD 2011 / Sweden / 11 minutes Director : Frida Kempff Producer : Erik Andersson Editor : Erik Andersson Cinematographer : Camilla Skagerström S wedish F ilm Institute

Sara Rüster

Box 27126 Stockholm 10252, Sweden +46 8 665 11 41 sara.ruster@sfi.se

2012 / US / 82 minutes Director : Peter Nicks

Saturday, April 14 — 1:50 pm

Producers : Linda Davis, William B. Hirsch, Peter Nicks

Cinem a 1

Editor : Lawrence Lerew Cinematographer : Peter Nicks O pen ’ hood, Inc . 2600 10th Street, Suite 604a Berkeley, CA 94710 510.220.6940 pete@openhood.org

Friday, April 13 — 7:30 pm DAC / P SI T heater

new d o cs

Winter Light (Vinterlys)

Without a Fight

In the archipelago of Lofoten, off the Arctic coast of Norway, sunlight wanes in autumn and ultimately dips below the winter horizon. Filmmaker Skule Eriksen’s spectacular images show us the beauty and isolation of that landscape. Despite the frozen atmosphere, feelings of warmth result from the perpetual magic hour, and a poetic calm seems to pervade the everyday activities of the people who inhabit this world. A true example of “less is more,” this stunning short film will draw you into a corner of the world very few have the chance to experience. AT

2011 / Norway / 25 minutes Director: Skule Eriksen Producer : Lisbeth Dreyer Editor : Skule Eriksen CinematograpHER : Skule Eriksen L isbeth D reyer Nedre Nattland 15 5099 Bergen, Norway +47 48048333 lisbeth.dreyer@gmail.com

north americ an premiere

Nairobi is home to Kenya’s largest slum. Comprised of thirteen villages that are divided along religious and ethnic lines, Kibera suffers from continual outbreaks of civil unrest. The local soccer league offers a reprieve from the violence and restores respect among participating groups—for the last ten years, in an estimated 20,000 soccer matches, the boys and young men of Kibera have played in the Champions League Soccer Tournament without a fight. This is no small feat in a city where work is scarce, high school is too expensive for many residents, and crime is a prevalent alternative to education. The Champions League is lead by Kenny Juma and a cadre of volunteer coaches who wholeheartedly believe in the ability of soccer to combat the constant cycle of community discord and crime. As the soccer season draws to a close, teams SHOFCO and More Fire face off in the final game. Who will win? WM

Filmmaker Q&A following screening, with guest Kenny Juma 2012 / US / 60 minutes

Thursday, April 12 — 4:20 pm Cinem a 3

Director : Jason Arthurs Producer : Beth-Ann Kutchma Editor: Jason Arthurs Cinematographers: Jason Arthurs, Andrew Johnson C hasing the M ad L ion P roductions Beth-Ann Kutchma 301 Pittsboro Street, CB# 5145 Chapel Hill, NC 27599 919.599.6504 beth@withoutafight.org

Friday, April 13 — 10:20 am Cinem a 4

new d o c s

Young Bird Season Competitive pigeon racing in New England is featured in this short film that reveals the camaraderie and competition of the niche sport and its participants. As their treasured birds race hundreds of miles night and day, the men of the Braintree Racing Pigeon Club pass the time with chitchat, obsessive stat-keeping, and affable trash-talk adorned with a Boston brogue. Director Nellie Kluz’s vérité portrait briefly immerses the viewer into a menagerie of crowded coops and clubhouses, punctuated with flourishes both artistic and avian. TM

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2011 / US / 19 minutes Director : Nellie Kluz Producer : Nellie Kluz Editor: Nellie Kluz Cinematographer : Nellie Kluz Nellie K luz nelliekluz@gmail.com

Thursday, April 12 — 1:40 pm Cinem a 4

Film & E vent Schedule * Cinema 2 Cinema 3 Cinema 4

Thursday, April 12

Fletcher

DAC Cinema 1

Elsewhere

9:00

10:00 10:00 – 1:30 11:00

10:30 – 12:25 Diaries

11:00 – 12:30

The Black Press

Raising

Noon

Resistance

1:00

2:00

1:30 – 3:15 The Kingdom of Mister Edhi

3:00

1:40 – 3:30 1:50 – 3:55 Young Bird Season

2:20 – 4:40

A People Uncounted

Nation

Time Exposure Family Portrait Sittings

4:00

4:20 – 6:30 5:00

Winter Light An Angel in Doel

6:00

4:10 – 6:05 4:30 – 6:20 Kiss the Paper

Unfinished Spaces

5:00 – 6:30 Justice for Sale

Eating Alabama

5:30 – 6:55 Sivan The Lifeguard

7:00

7:30 – 9:15 8:00

Opening Night film

Jesse Owens

9:00

premium event

9:00 – 11:00 Opening Night Party

10:00

11:00

10:00 – 12:05

Durham Arts Council

Samsara

premium event

9:30 – 12:10 Marley

12:00

1:00

FILM CATEGORY

Tribute

New Docs

Thematic Program

Invited

Conversations

Film & E vent Schedule * Cinema 2 Cinema 3 Cinema 4

Friday, April 13

Fletcher

DAC Cinema 1

Elsewhere

9:00 9:30 – 10:30 Speakeasy One

10:00

CArolina theatre

10:00 – 12:10

3rd Floor

no ticket required

10:20 – 12:20 The Law in These Parts

11:00

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

10:40 – 12:45

10:30 – 12:20

10:50 – 12:45

My Father,

Escape Fire

Children of the Sea

The Genius

Without a Fight

Noon

Aranda

12:30 – 1:30 Speakeasy Two

1:00

CArolina theatre 3rd Floor

2:00

1:10 – 2:50

1:20 – 3:00

Mr. Cao Goes

Italy Love It or Leave It

to Washington

no ticket required

1:30 – 2:55 1:40 – 3:45 The Queen of

Grandmothers

1:50 – 3:55

A Girl Like Her

Fanuzzi’s Gold

Versailles

3:00

I Send You This Place

3:30 – 4:30 Speakeasy Three

4:00 4:00 – 5:30 5:00

CArolina theatre 3rd Floor

no ticket required

4:10 – 6:05 4:20 – 6:00

Vault One Beauty Is Embarrassing

Reportero

4:40 – 6:40

4:30 – 5:55

Detropia

A Place of Our Own

4:50 – 7:10 40th Anniversary of New Day Films

6:00

7:00 7:00 – 8:30 7:10 – 9:15 8:00

Vault Two The Invisible War

7:20 – 9:30 CatCam

7:40 – 9:50 center frame

Ai Weiwei

9:00

7:30 – 9:20 8:00 – 9:55

The Waiting Room

Five Star Existence

Photographic Memory

8:30 – 10:00 Vault Three outdoor screening durham central park

premium event

no ticket required

10:00 10:10 – 12:15 11:00

Needle Exchange

10:20 – 12:05 10:40 – 12:15

Girl Model

Jason Becker

Tahrir

12:00

1:00

FILM CATEGORY

Tribute

New Docs

Thematic Program

Invited

Conversations

Film & E vent Schedule * Cinema 2 Cinema 3 Cinema 4

Saturday, April 14

Fletcher

DAC Cinema 1

Elsewhere

9:00 9:30 – 10:30 Speakeasy Four

10:00

CArolina theatre

10:00 – 12:15

3rd Floor

10:20 – 11:50 The House I Live In

11:00

The Photographer’s Wife Violated Letters

Noon

no ticket required

10:30 – 12:20 10:40 – 12:50 Light Plate

Translating Edwin Honig

Peak

Intimate Stranger

10:50 – 12:45 Diana Vreeland

12:30 – 1:30 Speakeasy Five

1:00

CArolina theatre 3rd Floor

1:10 – 3:00 2:00

Herman’s House

no ticket required

1:20 – 3:15 1:40 – 3:45 Silent Springs Chasing Ice

1:30 – 3:25

1:50 – 3:25

Jonestown

The D Train

Ethel

While You Were Gone

3:00

The Time We Have A Letter to Dad

3:30 – 4:30 Speakeasy Six

4:00 4:00 – 5:30

CArolina theatre

4:10 – 6:15

Vault Three

5:00

Cutting Loose

3rd Floor

no ticket required

4:20 – 6:20 The Imposter

4:40 – 6:50 center frame

Trash Dance

4:30 – 6:25 4:50 – 6:45 51 Birch Street Radio Unnameable

Love Free or Die

6:00

6:30 – 7:30

premium event

Garrett Scott

7:00

CArolina theatre

7:00 – 8:30

3rd Floor

7:10 – 9:20

Vault One

8:00

Marina Abramovic´

no ticket required

7:20 – 9:35 7:40 – 9:55 How to Survive a Plague

center frame

7:30 – 9:15 In Search of Our Fathers

Big Boys Gone Bananas!*

9:00

7:50 – 9:40 Special Flight

8:30 – 10:00 Vault Two outdoor screening

premium event

durham central park

no ticket required

10:00 10:10 – 12:05 11:00

Bones Brigade

10:20 – 12:20 Santa Land

10:30 – 12:10

The Bus

Must Read After My Death

12:00

1:00

FILM CATEGORY

Tribute

New Docs

Thematic Program

Invited

Conversations

Film & E vent Schedule * Cinema 2 Cinema 3 Cinema 4

Sunday, April 15

Fletcher

DAC Cinema 1

Elsewhere

9:00

10:00

10:20 – 11:50 11:00

10:50 –12:20

Putin’s Kiss

10:00 – 11:45

10:10 – 12:00 Sweet Honey in the Rock

10:30 – 12:05

10:40 – 12:35

First Position

Vault Two

Troublesome Creek

St-Henri

11:30 – 1:00

Noon

Awards Barbecue Durham Armory premium event

1:00 awards & tba screenings announced 1pm online and at the box office

2:00

1:30 – 3:00 School of Doc Presentation no ticket required

2:20 – 4:20

2:10 – 4:10

3:00 tba 2

tba 1

2:00 – 3:50 Under African Skies

1:50 – 3:50 SDF: In-the-Works

1:40 – 3:25 Under Control

4:00

5:00

5:20 – 6:50 6:00

5:10 – 7:10

5:00 – 7:00

tba 6

Vault Three

4:50 – 6:50

tba 5

4:40 – 6:40

4:30 – 6:30

tba 3

tba 4

tba 7

7:00

7:30 – 9:30

8:00 8:00 – 10:00

7:50 – 9:50 tba 8

9:00

tba 10

tba 9

8:30 – 10:00 Vault One outdoor screening durham central park

no ticket required

10:00

11:00

12:00

1:00

FILM CATEGORY

Tribute

New Docs

Thematic Program

Invited

Conversations

awards & juries

new docs

AWARDS & JURIES

Prizes will be awarded on Sunday, April 15, at the Awards Barbecue. The festival offers the following awards: ANNE DELLINGER GRAND JURY AWARD

FULL FRAME AUDIENCE AWARD

Established by Anne and Walter Dellinger

$3,000 Sponsored by Merge Records

$5,000 Sponsored by Chuck Pell, CSO, Physcient, Inc. $5,000 in-kind for transfer of winner to film Provided by Alpha Cine Labs, Seattle Judith Ehrlich Filmmaker (The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It) Eric Daniel Metzgar Filmmaker (Reporter, Life. Support. Music., The Chances of the World Changing) Marco Williams Filmmaker (Two Towns of Jasper, Banished) Film Educator, NYU

FULL FRAME JURY AWARD FOR BEST SHORT $2,000 Provided by Drs. Andrew and Barbra Rothschild Steven Ascher Filmmaker (Troublesome Creek, Raising Renee) Author (Filmmakerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Handbook)

The Audience Award is determined by counting audience ballots filled out during the four-day festival. Though the Audience Award prize will be presented to a feature film, the festival will present an honorable mention to the short film with the highest score All NEW DOCS are eligible for this award.

CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES FILMMAKER AWARD $7,500 Provided by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University The CDS Filmmaker Award recognizes documentary films that combine originality and creativity with firsthand experience in examining central issues of contemporary life and culture. In keeping with the Centerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mission, the award was created to honor and support documentary artists whose works are potential catalysts for education and change. All NEW DOCS are eligible for this award. For the Center for Documentary Studies:

Jessica Edwards Filmmaker (Seltzer Works, Tugs, The Landfill)

Randy Benson

Edwin Martinez Filmmaker (To Be Heard)

Marc Maximov

Katie Hyde Lynn McKnight Dan Partridge Tom Rankin Elena Rue Teka Selman April Walton

awards & juries

THE CHARLES E. GUGGENHEIM EMERGING ARTIST AWARD $2,000 Provided by the Charles E. Guggenheim family This annual prize is awarded to a first-time documentary feature filmmaker as a way to foster the work of new directors, young and old. It recognizes the extraordinary care that Charles Guggenheim took with the filmmakers whom he mentored and counseled throughout the filmmaking process. Natalie Bullock Brown Chair, Department of Film and Interactive Media, St. Augustine’s College

THE KATHLEEN BRYAN EDWARDS AWARD FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Heather Courtney Filmmaker (Where Soldiers Come From, Los Trabajadores, Letters from the Other Side)

$5,000 Sponsored by the Julian Price Family Foundation

Mark Elijah Rosenberg Founder and Artistic Director, Rooftop Films Filmmaker (Orbit(Film), Ad Inexplorata)

This annual award is presented to a film that addresses a significant human rights issue in the United States. By inspiring advocacy, increasing awareness, and promoting equity and justice, the winning film will honor the legacy of Kathleen Bryan Edwards’s passion and activism for human rights.

FULL FRAME INSPIRATION AWARD $5,000 Sponsored by the Hartley Film Foundation This award is presented to the film that best exemplifies the value and relevance of world religions and spirituality.

In memory of Melanie Taylor

For the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Family: Anne Arwood Laura Edwards Clay Farland Margaret Griffin

Jim Klein Filmmaker (Taken for a Ride, Growing Up Female, Union Maids, Seeing Red) Sarah Masters Managing Director, Hartley Film Foundation Fiona Otway Editor and Filmmaker (Hell and Back Again, Sari’s Mother, Iraq in Fragments)

FULL FRAME PRESIDENT’S AWARD $5,000 Sponsored by Duke University The President’s Award recognizes up-and-coming filmmakers; the prize is awarded to the best student film. Representatives on behalf of the President’s Office of Duke University

Pricey Harrison

THE NICHOLAS SCHOOL ENVIRONMENTAL AWARD $5,000 Sponsored by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University This award honors the film that best depicts the conflict between our drive to improve living standards through development and modernization and the imperative to preserve both the natural environment that sustains us and the cultural heritages that define us. For the Nicholas School of the Environment: Cindy Horn Stephen Nemeth Rebecca Patton Tom Rankin

opening night film

Jesse Owens *

world premiere

center frame

Big Boys Gone Bananas!* *

“Jesse Owens was a model of technical perfection the way he ran. . . . That was in such opposition of what African Americans were supposed to be.” Writer William Rhoden’s powerful statement opens this dynamic history of the track and field star. Owens was discovered in junior high and quickly ascended from high school star to college sensation to national celebrity. The 1936 Olympics in Berlin would be the pinnacle of his career—to the dismay of Nazi Germany, Owens triumphed, winning four gold medals. He returned a hero, only to find that achieving success at home would be more difficult than he’d imagined. This beautiful tribute is woven from archival footage, recollections by Owens’s friends and daughters, and interviews with writers and scholars like Jeremy Schaap and Harry Edwards. In exploring Owens’s legacy, the film highlights the intersections between racism and sports, and in doing so, tells us as much about the past as it does the present. ST

Moderated conversation following screening with filmmakers Laurens Grant and Stanley Nelson and featured guest Jeremy Schaap 2012 / US, Germany / 54 minutes

Fredrik Gertten did not set out to make this film. Originally, it was an entirely different film that was making headlines. Bananas!*, released in 2009, documented a successful lawsuit brought against the Dole Food Company by Nicaraguan migrant workers because of the company’s use of banned pesticides. Gertten was at the Los Angeles Film Festival for the U.S. premiere when things started to go haywire. Unhappy with a portrayal they felt was slanderous, Dole instigated an all-out war of intimidation. With an army of lawyers and a wealth of resources, they delivered cease-and-desist letters to everyone involved with the film—including the film festival and its sponsors—and brought a defamation lawsuit against Gertten. With the pacing and plotting of a taut supermarket thriller, Big Boys Gone Bananas!* follows Gertten as he fights to save his name and reputation, as well as to turn the tide of public opinion against Dole. Who says there’s no such thing as bad press? RM

Moderated conversation following screening with filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and featured guests Lincoln Bandlow and David Magdael 2012 / Sweden / 88 minutes Director : Fredrik Gertten

Director : Laurens Grant

Producer : Margarete Jangård

Producers : Laurens Grant, Stanley Nelson

Editors : Jesper Osmund, Benjamin Binderup

Editor : Aljernon Tunsil

Cinematographers : Jason Wavro, Stefan Berg, Fran Pineda, Joe Aguirre, Sasha Snow, Malin Korkeasalo

Cinematographers : John Baynard, Roland Breitschuh, Aaron Britton, Rick Butler, Vicente Franco, Elia Lyssy, Chris Openshaw

W G F ilm Emma Svensson Västergatan 23 21121 Malmö, Sweden

W G B H Vanessa Ezersky

+46 40 78150 emma@wgfilm.com

One Guest Street Boston, MA 02135 617.300.5953 vanessa_ezersky@wgbh.org

Saturday, April 14 — 7:40 pm Thursday, April 12 — 7:30 pm F let cher H all Sponsored by the American Tobacco Campus and Capitol Broadcasting Company

F let cher H all

center frame

Love Free or Die

Photographic Memory

When Gene Robinson was elected Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, he made history as the first openly gay, non-celibate bishop in the Episcopal Church of America. His election ignited an international controversy with Anglican leaders warning of schisms within the church. An official report of the Anglican Communion directed the American church to refrain from consecrating future gay or lesbian bishops and to cease the practice of blessing same sex relationships. Love Free or Die begins in 2008, when Robinson was pointedly excluded from the Lambeth Conference in Great Britain by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and follows Robinson over the next three years as he advocates for the full inclusion of LGBT people in the life of the church. This film is both a personal portrait of a courageous individual and a larger exploration of the emotions involved when religious institutions confront the increasing legal and social acceptance of gay people. AT

Moderated conversation following screening with filmmakers Macky Alston and Sandy Itkoff and featured guests Otis Charles and Felipe Paris 2012 / US / 83 minutes Director : Macky Alston

us premiere

It may be inevitable that relationships between young adults and their parents will be turbulent. When your parent is filmmaker Ross McElwee and your life has unfolded in acclaimed films, perhaps that’s another matter altogether. Adrian, Ross’s son, is no longer the sensitive boy his father remembers. Now in his early twenties, Adrian’s activities center on the Internet, loud music, and other pastimes foreign to his father. In an effort to understand his son, Ross sets out to revisit his past—in the 1970s, much to the dismay of his own father, Ross was an assistant to an eccentric photographer in Saint-Quay-Portrieux in Brittany. Camera in hand, he returns to the idyllic town to track down his employer and friends. Snapshots, family movies, and vivid recollections pinpoint his efforts to reconnect with himself and, in the process, his son. The result is a poignant exploration of the many ways memory allows us to stay connected in spite of discord and distance. ST

Moderated conversation following screening with filmmakers Ross McElwee and Marie-Emmanuelle Hartness and featured guest Adrian McElwee 2011 / US, France / 84 minutes

Producer : Sandy Itkoff

Director : Ross McElwee

Editor : Christopher White

Producers : Marie-Emmanuelle Hartness, Ross McElwee

Cinematographer : Tom Hurwitz

Editor: Sabrina Zanella-Foresi

Murphy P R Darin Darakananda 250 West 24th Street, Apt. 2GE New York, NY 10011 212.414.0408 ddarakananda@murphypr.com

Cinematographer : Ross McElwee S t Q uay F ilms Marie-Emmanuelle Hartness 429 Huron Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 617.642.1015 mhartness@stquayfilms.com

Saturday, April 14 — 4:40 pm F let cher H all

Friday, April 13 — 7:40 pm F let cher H all

40th anniversary — new day films

40th ANNIVERSARY OF NEW DAY FILMS

Anything You Want to Be

makers came together to distribute their films. It was

A teenager’s parents tell her time and again that she can grow up to be anything she wants to be. Through playful, yet troubling, reenactments, “anything” is discovered to be what exists within the realm of certain limitations. ST

the beginning of the feminist movement, and tradi-

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

Founded in 1971, New Day Films is a groundbreaking distribution company, democratically operated by over 100 filmmakers. Forty years ago, four film-

tional educational distributors were uninterested in documentaries exploring feminist principles. What started as Liane Brandon, Jim Klein, Julia Reichert, and Amalie Rothschild working together to get their movies seen has become an immensely successful undertaking. The current catalogue includes over 250 titles, covering subjects ranging from human rights to media to disabilities and more. Full Frame is proud to celebrate this landmark achievement. We will screen New Day Films’ very first documentaries, directed by the four founding members. The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University recently acquired

1971 / US / 8 minutes

Betty Tells Her Story A woman sits in a chair before the camera. At the urging of the filmmaker, she describes a past event. Years ago, she was invited to attend the Governor’s Ball, and though she didn’t have much money, she splurged on an expensive, beautiful dress, only to have her expectations go awry. She finishes her story, but then the filmmaker asks her to recount it. The distinctions between the first and second telling are restrained yet perceptible, raising ideas about femininity and self-worth. ST

the New Day Films Collection, including these films and the founding papers, for the Archive of Documen-

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

tary Arts. Anything You Want to Be, Betty Tells Her

1972 / US / 20 minutes

Story, Growing Up Female, and It Happens to Us will screen as one program, to be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. A conversation in the A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy will also be dedicated to discussing the legacy of New Day Films with its founders.

Director : Liane Brandon Producer : Liane Brandon Editor : Liane Brandon Cinematographer : Liane Brandon New D ay F ilms

all four films screen together

Friday, April 13 — 4:50 pm Cinem a 1

190 Route 17M, Suite D Harriman, NY 10926 845.774.7051 orders@newday.com

Friday, April 13 — 4:50 pm Cinem a 1

40th anniversary — new day films

Growing Up Female

It Happens to Us

Growing Up Female captures six women, from the ages of four to twenty-six, as they experience coming of age in America. Each reveals impressions specific to her age. Kindergarten girls play with dolls and make mock homesteads while the boys are outside moving trucks in sand and mimicking work. An eleven-year-old prefers the freedom of pants, though her mother longs for her to wear more dresses. In high school, a teenager is counseled on how to be a suitable wife. A young single mother must forgo a college scholarship for a factory job that will allow her to provide for her daughter. A twenty-something discusses the influence of men, fashion, and advertising. Touchingly revelatory, this pioneering feminist film acknowledges the countless pressures applied to young women and the many forms these influences can take. ST

It Happens to Us features women of different ages, races, and economic backgrounds who boldly speak about having had an abortion. This diverse collection of stories articulate and connect the viewer to powerful, sometimes graphic, recollections of the physical and emotional experience. The different types of procedures are also plainly described by doctors who counsel women and provide valuable information that was mostly unavailable at the time. Some stories are marked by pain and shame, others by relief and gratefulness that the option is available. As the film was made before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, most of the procedures described are illegal. The film documents a powerful argument for women’s right to choose that is still markedly relevant today. It offers significant reflection on abortion, a topic some have wished, and may perhaps still wish, not to address. ST

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

1971 / US / 52 minutes

1971 / US / 32 minutes

Directors : Jim Klein, Julia Reichert

Director : Amalie R. Rothschild

Producers : Jim Klein, Julia Reichert

Producer : Amalie R. Rothschild

Editors : Jim Klein, Julia Reichert

Editors : Amalie R. Rothschild, Nancy Bennett

CinematographerS : Jim Medalia, Julia Reichert

CinematographerS : Amalie R. Rothschild, Nancy Bennett, Juliana Wang

New D ay F ilms 190 Route 17M, Suite D Harriman, NY 10926

New D ay F ilms

845.774.7051 orders@newday.com

190 Route 17M, Suite D Harriman, NY 10926 845.774.7051 orders@newday.com

Friday, April 13 — 4:50 pm Cinem a 1

invited programming

Bones Brigade: An Autobiography

The Bus

Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain—names synonymous with skateboarding—dominated the sport in the late ’80s and early ’90s, inventing many of skating’s greatest tricks. And they all came from one team. Stacy Peralta, trading on the success of his own career, paired with businessman George Powell to create a team of fresh, undiscovered talent, Bones Brigade. And with the help of artistic mastermind Craig Stecyk, the Bones crew was responsible for a whole new art form, the skate video. This revolutionary marketing campaign of stylized print ads and videos captivated legions of young skaters, and the team’s outsized personalities made them fan favorites. Under the strong mentorship of Peralta, they weathered bouts of adversity and emerged as the most successful and innovative team in the history of the sport. A sequel of sorts to Dogtown and Z Boys, Peralta’s previous skateboarding documentary, Bones Brigade draws on a similar mix of enthusiastic interviews and rare footage. But the real heartbeat of the film is in the raw emotions still felt by the team members, and the director’s pride in their accomplishments. RM

Hit the open road with a motley assortment of Volkswagen bus devotees and collectors who rhapsodize about the siren call of freedom embodied by the distinctive vehicle. This Model T of vans appeared after World War II; it was affordable and durable, and the memorable ads (“Think Small”) capitalized on its quirky appeal. During the 1960s, the bus, sometimes brightly painted, going a stately pace (it didn’t really go much above 50 mph), became a counterculture icon, its owners rejecting their parents’ materialism for the hippie lifestyle. A whole generation embraced a vagabond way of life, where you could always park on a beach, draw the curtains, and leave the world behind. The film doesn’t gloss over the bus’s tendency to break down, the need for an occasional push, and the affection developed out of necessity for John Muir’s philosophical repair handbook. As one happy owner simply says, “It looks hella cute and has a lot of style.” LB

world premiere

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / US / 63 minutes Director : Damon Ristau Producer : Damon Ristau

2012 / US / 110 minutes Director : Stacy Peralta

Editor : Damon Ristau Cinematographers : Damon Ristau, Eric Ristau

Producers : Stacy Peralta, John Oliver, Nadine Brown

F irewater F ilm C ompany

Editor : Joshua Altman

259 West Front Street Missoula, MT 59802

Cinematographer : Pat Darrin

studio@firewaterfilmcompany.com

Jason Ishikawa 165 Madison Avenue, Suite 601 New York, NY 10016 212.481.5020 jason.ishikawa@filmsalescorp.com

Saturday, April 14 — 10:10 pm Cinem a 3

Saturday, April 14 — 10:20 pm Cinem a 4

invited programming

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel Fashion is fickle. Remaining relevant over a whole career is an accomplishment few are afforded, but Diana Vreeland had the touch. With a keen eye and strong editorial viewpoint, she steered Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through some of the greatest revolutions in fashion history. Never a slave to trend, Vreeland embraced the fantasies in her head and brought them to life—her collaborations with larger-than-life artists and models, such as David Bailey and Verushka, led to many of the most memorable fashion images ever created. With audio clips from Vreeland’s interviews with George Plimpton as our guide, we are taken through the timeline of her life, which includes dizzying stops in Paris, London, and New York. Along the way, we are privy to the colorful collage of Vreeland’s work. These richly textured layers, lovingly pieced together by director Lisa Immordino Vreeland, are a fitting tribute to an icon whose life and work always jumped off the page. RM

First Position First Position follows six young performers for a year as they work to compete in the Youth America Grand Prix, one of the world’s largest, and toughest, ballet competitions. Winning could mean a scholarship to one of the best ballet schools around the country, not to mention career-making recognition. Though all under the age of seventeen, the young dancers in this film have already made significant sacrifices to follow their dreams. Family schedules and finances revolve around dance—some have even moved to be closer to a particular coach or program, one young man going so far as to leave his family behind in Colombia to study in the United States. At this point in their young careers, the choice has been made to put it all on the line, to see if they have what it takes. Beautifully shot, with all the texture and glamour of ballet, the film also goes beyond layers of tulle and satin to capture the dancers’ most intense experiences, emotional and physical, behind and on stage. Like the very best performances, First Position breathtakingly navigates moments of gravity and graceful ascent with equal aplomb. ST

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / US / 86 minutes Director: Lisa Immordino Vreeland Producer : Lisa Immordino Vreeland Editors : Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt, Frederic Tcheng Cinematographer : Cristobal Zanartu S amuel G oldwyn F ilms 1133 Broadway Suite 1120 New York, NY 10010 212.367.9435 sean@idpfilm.com

Saturday, April 14 — 10:50 am Cinem a 1

2011 / US / 94 minutes Director : Bess Kargman Producers : Bess Kargman, Jennilyn Merten, Nick Higgins Editors : Kate Amend, Bess Kargman Cinematographer : Nick Higgins IF C F IL M S

Elizabeth Brambilla

11 Penn Plaza New York, NY 10011 212.324.4635 ebrambilla@ifcfilms.com

Sunday, April 15 — 10:30 am F let cher H all

invited programming

Marina Abramovic´ The Artist Is Present If you are not familiar with the work of performance artist Marina Abramovic´, prepare to be riveted. Abramovic´ is known for stretching the limits of what body and mind can handle, and her fearless physical commitment has made her one of the most renowned artists in her field. This film follows Abramovic´ as she prepares for a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and ponders what the implications of this mean for her. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a three-month-long performance piece in which she sits motionless at a table every day during the museum’s operating hours, silently “trading energy” with the revolving audience members across from her. The piece is electrifying to watch and brings forth an astounding outpouring of emotion from the museumgoers. As you are drawn into this exchange over the course of the film, don’t be surprised if you suddenly start contemplating your own relationship with Marina, the artist present. RM

Marley In this epic, exhaustively researched documentary, Kevin Macdonald explores the reasons why music legend Bob Marley, who died in 1981 at the age of thirty-six, remains so universally appealing to millions of people across the world. He traces the reggae star’s evolution from his troubled childhood in Jamaica to the height of his fame in the late 1970s, and garners an impressive array of personal narratives from those closest to him, including bandmates, lovers, and close friends. Macdonald illuminates all aspects of Marley’s life to reveal a complex character, both politically and personally. Ultimately, of course, the music takes center stage. The doc features rare footage and photos that track Marley’s career from early covers of rock and roll hits to the unique and sophisticated sound that made him famous. The live concert footage captures Marley’s hypnotic charisma as a singer and bandleader, and provides a great testament to a man whose message and music far outlived his short life. RM

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

2011 / US, UK / 152 minutes

2012 / US / 65 minutes

Director : Kevin Macdonald

Director : Matthew Akers Co-Director : Jeff Dupre Producers : Jeff Dupre, Maro Chermayeff Editor : E. Donna Shepherd.

Producers : Steve Bing, Charles Steel Executive Producers : Ziggy Marley, Chris Blackwell Editor : Dan Glendenning Cinematographers : Alwin Kuchler BSC, Mike Eley BSC

Co-Editor : James Hession

M agnolia Pictures Maureen Masters

Cinematographer : Matthew Akers

49 W. 27th Street, 7th Floor New York, NY 10001 212.924.6701 x216 mammaster@magpictures.com

D an Gilbert 430 East 10th Street, 3A New York, NY 10009 212.247.3057 dan@showofforce.com

Thursday, April 12 — 9:30 pm Cinem a 1

Saturday, April 14 — 7:10 pm Cinem a 3

invited programming

Putin’s Kiss (Putins kys)

The Queen of Versailles

Masha Drokova is a model member of Nashi, Russia’s nationalistic youth movement. Not yet twenty years old, she has climbed the ranks to become an influential spokesperson. A symbol of self-reliance, she left her family behind in the country and lives in an apartment in the city. She even has her own talk show. Masha’s composure and eloquence impress her peers, mentors, and even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and yet her perspectives begin to shift. She befriends a group of outspoken journalists who are members of the liberal opposition. Though she is comfortable with their differences of opinion, the movement is not as open-minded toward her budding relationships. As situations become increasingly tense, even violent, Masha must decide where her allegiance really lies. Is it possible to maintain public convictions and still hold on to personal ideals? Set amidst a volatile political climate, Masha’s moral decision becomes the center of this powerful coming-of-age story. ST

The Queen of Versailles is a character-driven documentary about a billionaire family’s financial challenges in the wake of the economic crisis. With epic proportions of Shakespearean tragedy, the film follows two unique characters, whose rags-to-riches success stories reveal the innate virtues and flaws of the American Dream. The film begins with the family triumphantly constructing the biggest house in America, a 90,000-square-foot palace. Over the next two years, their sprawling empire, fueled by the real estate bubble and cheap money, falters due to the economic crisis. Major changes in lifestyle and character ensue within this cross-cultural household of family members and domestic staff.

Filmmaker Q&A following screening 2012 / US / 100 minutes Director : Lauren Greenfield Producers : Danielle Renfrew Behrens, Lauren Greenfield

2012 / Denmark / 85 minutes Director : Lise Birk Pedersen Producer : Helle Faber

Executive Producers : Frank Evers, Dan Cogan Editor : Victor Livingston Cinematographer : Tom Hurwitz

Editors : Janus Billeskov Jansen, Steen Johannessen

M agnolia Pictures Maureen Masters

Cinematographer : Lars Skree

49 W. 27th Street, 7th Floor New York, NY 10001 212.924.6701 x216 mammaster@magpictures.com

Kino L orber 333 West 39th Street, Suite 503 New York, NY 10018 212.629.6880 contact@kinolorber.com

Friday, April 13 — 1:40 pm F let cher H all

Sunday, April 15 — 10:20 am Cinem a 3

invited programming

Samsara Through an intricate synthesis of images, and without a single word of dialogue, this intoxicating film takes us on a cross-continental journey through our modern world. Samsara is a Tibetan word that means “the ever-turning wheel of life.” Contributing to the cyclical rhythm at work, music builds and drifts away throughout this vast array of images, impeccably captured on 70mm film. Golden hilltop palaces glisten in the sun. Conveyor belts lead to lines of workers plucking and cutting chicken carcasses. A series of children are tenderly baptized in extreme close up, droplets of water falling from their heads. Buckled homes lay atop crushed cars in post-Katrina New Orleans. Some images are entirely familiar while others are remote and exotic, but in this presentation their interconnectedness becomes evident. Our capacity to build is nearly always met with the possibility of decay and destruction. This fascinating work, in portraits that range from the horrific to the divine, invites us to embrace our perplexing existence. ST

St-Henri, the 26th of August (À St-Henri le 26 août) This film promises to do for Montreal what Richard Linklater’s Slacker did for Austin, only with a French Canadian accent. This kaleidoscopic romp through a semi-industrial neighborhood pays homage to Hubert Aquin’s 1962 film of the same name by seamlessly drawing together the work of seventeen cinematographers to capture everyday life in a vibrant working-class community on a single summer day. Glide along the boulevards of St-Henri with the charming perpetual motion machines that are this district’s diverse denizens, from the taciturn milkman to resourceful Doris the gleaner to a group of fashion-forward Mohawk hipsters. A thoughtful spatial metaphor organizes the anarchy and the camerawork: People—the city’s vital force—flow through St-Henri’s streets, steam tunnels, train tracks, and magnificent central canal like blood throbbing through veins. In St-Henri, people are definitely on the move, not to escape from home, but rather, to revel in it. MP

Filmmaker Q&A following screening

2011 / Canada / 86 minutes

2011 / US / 99 minutes

Director : Shannon Walsh

Director : Ron Fricke Producer : Mark Magidson

Producers : Sarah Springs (Parabola), Colette Loumède (National Film Board of Canada)

Editors : Ron Fricke, Mark Magidson

Editor : Sophie Leblond

Cinematographer : Ron Fricke

Cinematographers : Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, Richard Brouillette, Fabien Côté, Tracey Deer, Claude Demers, Yanie Dupont-Hébert, Halima Elkhatabi, Sylvain L’Espérance, Julien Fontaine, Paul Kell, Caroline Martel, Amy Miller, Kaveh Nabatian, Brett Story, Denis Valiquette, Karen Vanderborght, Shannon Walsh

O scilloscope L aboratories

Jacob Wolters

511 Canal Street, Suite 5E New York, NY 10013 212.219.4029 x38 jacob@oscilloscope.net

Thursday, April 12 — 10:00 pm F let cher H all

N ational film board of canada Élise Labbé 3155 Côte-de-Liesse Road St-Laurent, QC H4N 2N4, Canada 514.283.9133 festivals@nfb.ca

Sunday, April 15 — 10:40 am DAC / P SI T heater

invited programming

Under African Skies

Under Control (Unter Kontrolle)

Paul Simon is arguably one of America’s most beloved singer-songwriters, but in the early 1980s his career was sagging. His last few solo efforts had failed to connect with the public, and he was ready to try a new direction. Intrigued by a tape of South African music, Simon was taken by the similarities between the roots of classic American rock and roll and the driving rhythms of traditional African songs. And so was born 1986’s masterpiece Graceland. The album was a critical and monetary success, but Simon’s decision to record in South Africa proved contentious. Charged with breaking the UN’s widely adopted cultural boycott against South Africa, Simon was branded a political traitor. Twenty-five years later, director Joe Berlinger follows Simon back to South Africa to reunite with the musicians with whom he collaborated, and to candidly face criticism from locals who felt betrayed by his decision. Between electrifying performances and revealing interviews, the audience is left to determine whether or not great art can rise above the controversy it creates. RM

Approaching scientific and industrial facts with a stylized science fiction lens, this formally stunning film examines the design and culture of German nuclear power plants as they near extinction. With clinical calm and glacial detachment, Volker Sattel trains his Cinemascope camera on the minutest details of the immaculate, disturbingly elegant 1970s architecture, landscapes, and technologies of German nuclear energy, which seem at once futuristic and archaic. The artful sound design transforms mechanistic whirs and drones into an ambient elegy for the nuclear era. The cumulative effect is a solemn, Kubrickesque aesthetic of anxiety, wherein the banality and wonder captured in meticulous tracking shots assume a creeping dread in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Almost as troubling is the staff’s tenuous position in relationship to the power and potential doom they ostensibly wield in boardrooms and laboratories. For all the safety processes described, the control of these spaces appears as psychological and artificial as it is actual. BG

2012 / US / 101 minutes

2011 / Germany / 98 minutes

Director : Joe Berlinger

Director : Volker Sattel

Producers : Joe Berlinger, Jon Kamen, Justin Wilkes

Producers : Susann Schimk, Jörg Trentmann

Editor: Joshua L. Pearson

Editor : Stefan Krumbiegel

Cinematographer : Bob Richman

Cinematographer : Volker Sattel

Paolina P oe- A zcarraga

C redofilm Nadja Smith

435 Hudson Street, 6th Floor New York, NY 10014

Schiffbauerdamm 13 10117 Berlin, Germany

212.462.1647 azcarraga@radicalmedia.com

+49 30 257 6240 office@credofilm.de

Sunday, April 15 — 2:00 pm

Sunday, April 15 — 1:40 pm

F let cher H all

Cinem a 1

vault

In honor of our fifteenth anniversary , we have curated a selection of short films from the Full

Frame vault, a title from each year of the festival. The fourteen shorts will screen in three separate programs.

Vault One Features A Thousand Words from the 2004 festival, Caretaker for the Lord from the 2011 festival, For a Miracle from the 2005 festival, and Salt from the 2009 festival. Films are listed in screening order. The total running time is 72 minutes.

A Thousand Words Williams’s lack of communication with her father, especially after a stroke silences his memories, leads her to his home movie footage and accomplished still photos from the Vietnam War, which speak of a fettered artistic soul. Melba L. Williams

2003 / US / 9 minutes

Caretaker for the Lord The maintenance man of a church in Glasgow’s East End muses about its future as he mops floors and changes light bulbs. The run-down church ministers to more members of its vulnerable community than those in charge realize. Jane M c Allister

2010 / Scotland / 17 minutes

For a Miracle (Po Cud) This astonishing film of the national pilgrimage of disabled people and their caregivers from Poland to Lourdes by train—under the auspices of Catholic clergy—is a surreal passage that inspires faith and mercy, anxiety and despair. Jarek Sztandera

2004 / Poland / 18 minutes

Salt A photographer ventures to the middle of a desolate salt flat in South Australia, pitching camp at its core. With neither land nor water in sight, he looks into the abyss and finds that, in the midst of nothingness, there is everything. Michael Angus, Murray Fredericks 2009 / Australia / 28 minutes

three screenings Friday, April 13 — 4:00 pm

Saturday, April 14 — 7:00 pm

Sunday, April 15 — 8:30 pm

Cinem a 2

F ree O u tdoor S c reening D urha m Central Park

vault

In honor of our fifteenth anniversary , we have curated a selection of short films from the Full

Frame vault, a title from each year of the festival. The fourteen shorts will screen in three separate programs.

Vault Two

Picture Day

Features Picture Day from the 2000 festival, Crow

One school. 601 kids. 12 frames per kid. What do you get? This playful, funny parade of images reveals the range of possibilities contained in half a second’s worth of pictures. Steven Bognar

2000 / US / 7 minutes

Film from the 2003 festival, The Intimacy of Strangers from the 2006 festival, and Lost Book Found from the 1998 festival. Films are listed in screening order. The total running time is 83 minutes.

Crow Film Ubiquitous and much-maligned crows are transformed into stately, mysterious objects of beauty. This film captures the intricate rhythms and textures of the birds flying and pecking their way through their world and ours. Edward P. Davee

2002 / US / 20 minutes

The Intimacy of Strangers Cellphone conversations have the ability to collapse the distinctions between public and private space. Intimate moments obliviously performed for strangers capture a love story of the modern age, transmitted for all to hear. Eva Weber

2005 / UK / 20 minutes

Lost Book Found Lost Book Found updates the venerable city symphony, but without the genre’s grandiose claims. Instead, this is more of a chamber piece; it starts as a personal documentary but then shifts from the private to the enigmatic. jem Cohen

1996 / US / 36 minutes

three screenings Friday, April 13 — 7:00 pm

Saturday, April 14 — 8:30 pm

Sunday, April 15 — 10:50 am

Cinem a 2

F ree O utdoor S c reening

Cinem a 2

D urha m Central Park Sponsored by Bull City Mobile

vault

In honor of our fifteenth anniversary , we have curated a selection of short films from the Full

Frame vault, a title from each year of the festival. The fourteen shorts will screen in three separate programs.

Vault Three Features Metacarpus from the 2007 festival, Bitter and Sweet from the 2001 festival, A Love Supreme from the 2002 festival, Seltzer Works from the 2010 festival, Breadmakers from the 2008 festival, and Leche from the 1999 festival. Films are listed in screening order. The total

Bitter and Sweet Witness a day at an acupuncture shop in New York’s Chinatown. A delightful, affectionate portrait of both a business and a marriage. Johanna Lee 2000 / US / 10 minutes

running time is 76 minutes.

A Love Supreme In this stunning and elegant tribute, Nilesh Patel pays homage to his aging mother as he captures the beauty and artistry of her life’s work: making samosas. Nilesh Patel 2001 / UK / 10 minutes

Seltzer Works Regular consumers are a rare breed but the dedicated owner of Gomberg Seltzer Works in Brooklyn takes great pride in creating real throat-tingling spritz. Jessica Edwards 2010 / US / 7 minutes

Breadmakers At the Garvald Bakery, a team of workers with mental disabilities prepare bread for all of Edinburgh. The participants, each in their own way, contribute to the rhythm of this choreographed effort. Yasmin Fedda 2007 / UK / 11 minutes

Metacarpus Musicians, doctors, and others sing the praises of their hands. A collage of insight and image portrays this special limb’s beauty and diverse utility, its development and distinctive form. Nicole Triche 2006 / US / 8 minutes

Leche A dreamlike evocation of a dairy farm in Mexico through a textured film surface—the filmmaker develops her film in buckets. A document of a timeless place and the magic of crafting things by hand. Naomi Uman 1998 / Mexico, US / 30 minutes

three screenings Friday, April 13 — 8:30 pm

Saturday, April 14 —4:00 pm

Sunday, April 15 — 5:20 pm

F ree O u tdoor S c reening

Cinem a 2

D urha m Central Park Sponsored by Bull City Mobile

conversations

A&E I ndie F il m s S peakeasy Full Frame is proud to present the A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy for the second year in a row. The venue hosts a number of panel conversations over the course of the festival that are free and open to the public. The Speakeasy offers a casual, intimate setting where a small audience can listen to industry leaders take on topics that are at the heart of the documentary community today. Last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy featured spirited and engaging discussions and debates between professionals working at the highest levels, both on stage and in the audience. This is a not-to-be missed series of conversations that will take place on Friday and Saturday in the Carolina Theaterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Donor Lounge, which is located on the third floor. A list of specific topics and panelists will be available on site at the festival. In addition to the A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy, Full Frame will feature a number of extended conversations following specific films, including all Center Frame programs. Q&A sessions have been noted for screenings where filmmakers will be in attendance. See film descriptions for detailed information.

conversations

Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant Only thirty-seven at the time of his death, Garrett Scott made a distinctive mark in the documentary genre during his brief career. Without any formal training, he directed Cul De Sac: A Suburban War Story and went on to make Occupation: Dreamland, co-directed by Ian Olds. Created by family, friends, and colleagues, this grant recognizes first-time filmmakers who, like Garrett, bring a unique vision to the content and style of their documentary films. The recipients are selected based on their works-in-progress and are provided with travel and accommodations at the festival. Full Frame is honored to host these filmmakers and looks forward to their finished work. Now in its sixth year, the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant has honored an impressive collection of filmmakers. Their completed works have gone on to screen at the Sundance Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, SXSW, and numerous other events, including Full Frame. Previous grant recipients include Robin Hessman for My Perestroika, Cameron Yates for Canal Street Madam, Rebecca Richman Cohen for War Don Don, Mai Iskander for Garbage Dreams, and Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall for Call Me Kuchu. The 2012 Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant has been awarded to Jason Osder for Let the Fire Burn and Ben Powell for Barge. Grant founder Rachael Rakes will join the grant recipients in presenting short excerpts from their works-in-progress.

Barge ben Powell Barge examines the impact of one of America’s great rivers, documenting the next chapter of life on the Mississippi. Fascinating riverboat workers— notorious captains and seasoned first mates—expose both the decidedly colorful and highly specialized aspects of their profession. The Mississippi, from its source in Lake Taska, Minnesota, all the way down to its mouth in New Orleans, offers a constantly moving and ever-changing backdrop for the beautiful, yet harsh, realities of this way of life.

Let the Fire Burn jason Osder In 1985, police closed in on the Philadelphia row home headquarters of MOVE, a radical group some considered terrorists. After firing thousands of rounds of ammunition, police dropped two pounds of explosives on the house, starting a fire that eventually claimed the lives of five children, six adults, and sixty-one of the surrounding homes. Eschewing interview footage for pure archival imagery, Let the Fire Burn reveals a remarkable example of how intolerance, and incompetence, can lead to unthinkable acts of violence.

Saturday, April 14 — 6:30 pm

A & E indiefilms speakeasy

conversations

SDF: In-the-Works The Southern Documentary Fund (SDF) is proud to present In-the-Works at Full Frame again this year. This program provides audiences with a unique opportunity to watch documentaries in various stages of production, and to participate in the critique process. It also gives southern filmmakers the opportunity to receive feedback from a dedicated assembly of their peers and serious documentary enthusiasts. This year, In-the-Works will screen the short film Café Sense, and excerpts from Can’t Stop the Water and untitled LUCY film. The Southern Documentary Fund is celebrating ten years of nurturing documentaries made in or about the American South. SDF connects filmmakers with resources and audiences and has sponsored over 100 projects since 2002. The work of SDF artists has broadcast nationally and internationally, screened at hundreds of film festivals around the world, and is being used as effective tools for education and community development.

Café Sense vittles Morning coffee is a familiar routine for Americans. In the last few decades, specialty roasting companies have tried to make the connection between the small farms that grow the plant to what we find at gas stations and in whipped drinks. Durham’s Counter Culture Coffee hosts a weekly tasting where drinkers learn to distinguish the flavors associated with different countries. Café Sense explores these hidden taste notes and a side to coffee we rarely see.

Can’t Stop the Water Rebecca Marshall Ferris, Jason Ferris For 170 years, a Native American Cajun community has lived on Isle de Jean Charles, a tiny island deep in the bayous of south Louisiana. Over the last fifty years, the island has been gradually shrinking, and is now almost gone. Four months into filming the lives and daily dramas of the families that call this place home, one of the greatest environmental disasters in history left the people of Isle de Jean Charles with an even more uncertain future.

untitled LUCY film Elisabeth Haviland James Lucy Daniels believes a family secret she was told at four years old radically changed her life. Born into a prominent newspaper family, she lived— and almost died—by her ability to write. Despite suffering from anorexia and enduring brutal treatment in mental hospitals, she penned a bestseller and won a Guggenheim—all before age twenty-two. The film uses imagined narrative, constructed dream sequences, intimate interviews and Lucy’s writing to explore a story with implications for all artists and dreamers.

Sunday, April 15 — 1:50pm

dAC / psi theatre

educational programs

Tea ch the Tea c hers In 2011 Full Frame introduced the enormously successful program Teach the Teachers, which allows six teachers from Durham public high schools to attend Full Frame free of charge under the guidance of Professor Alan Teasley. These education professionals watch and discuss films and learn to apply the principles set forth in John Golden’s book Reading in the Reel World: Teaching Documentaries and Other Nonfiction Texts (National Council of Teachers of English, 2006). Studies show that documentaries are often used in class as a time when teachers disengage from students, rather than as opportunities to teach valuable literacy skills. Each teacher receives educational credit for completed work, and the cost of their substitutes is provided to place as little financial burden on our schools as possible. Some of last year’s participating teachers utilized these new skills by creating lesson plans for our annual Free Youth Screening of Nancy Buirski’s The Loving Story this past November. We are thrilled at the synergy these two programs provide educators and our local schools. The 2012 Teach the Teachers program is funded with generous support by GlaxoSmithKline.

School of D o c For the second year, Full Frame, in association with East Durham Children’s Initiative, will conduct a camp for teens to learn documentary filmmaking. This summer, a select group of Durham high school students will attend a five-week workshop in which they will make their own short documentary film. In addition to learning basic filmmaking skills, students gain self-esteem from working as a group to tell their own stories. This program is completely free to participants. A study by the Adobe Corporation Youth Voices Program shows that students who participate in such classes show a 91 percent rate of interest in continuing their education after high school. Half of our first group of campers found work as professional production assistants after their training at the camp. Our 2011 class of young filmmakers will attend Full Frame this year to learn more about the documentary medium and to screen the work they created for the public on Sunday. The 2012 School of Doc will be held at the Emily K Center, located near the main Durham bus terminal, giving access to more students in the Durham school system. Provided with the support of the Fenhagen family and Helen’s Fund and individual donors in our community. Full Frame is currently seeking participants and additional support for the 2012 School of Doc. To learn more, please contact Alexis Hourselt at alexis.hourselt@fullframefest.org.

fellows & archive

F u ll Fra m e Fellows Program The Full Frame Fellows Program is designed to educate, motivate, and nurture students interested in the documentary form. During the four days of the Festival, participating students have the opportunity to immerse themselves in everything Full Frame has to offer: films fresh on the circuit, classics from years past, engaging panel discussions, and the filmmaking community as a whole. Fellows also enjoy private master classes with legendary filmmakers. Previously, we have hosted sessions with DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Ross McElwee, Steve James and Peter Gilbert, Marshall Curry, Albert Maysles, Gary Hustwit, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, and James Longley, among others. This year, nearly 150 students from 13 different colleges and universities will participate in the Fellows Program. Students from the following schools are visiting Full Frame this year: American University Duke University Elon University Florida State University New York University North Carolina Central University North Carolina State University Stanford University University of Alabama University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill University of North Carolina School of the Arts University of Pennsylvania Wright State University

The Fellows Program is made possible with generous support from the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and North Carolina State University.

The Full Frame Archive The Full Frame Archive preserves award-winning films from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival to ensure a lasting legacy for the documentaries, their creators, and the festival itself. Now in its fifth year, the collection has grown to include eighty-three titles, winners from all fourteen Full Frame Festivals since 1998. A master of each film is preserved in a secure, climate-controlled storage facility at Duke University for the benefit of future generations. Part of the Archive of Documentary Arts in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, the Full Frame Archive is one of the few festival collections in the nation dedicated to preserving documentary films. It was established in 2007 as a collaboration between the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and Duke University Libraries, a partnership reinforced by the Festival’s recent return to Duke. The Full Frame Archive is made possible through support from Eastman Kodak; Alpha Cine Labs, Seattle; Duke University Office of the President; Duke University Libraries; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Recent acquisitions have included Banished, We Still Live Here/Âs Nutayuneân, Love and Diane, and Waste Land. Non-circulating DVD copies of each preserved film are available for individual research use in the reading room of the Rubenstein Library. From time to time, films are screened on campus at educational events. For more information, including a link to the Full Frame Archive finding aid, please see our website: http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/fullframe.

how things work —

passes

Passes Passes enable you to reserve tickets to any ticketed event before they go on sale to the general public. At the festival, passes also allow you to acquire free tickets at the Box Office and in the Last Minute Line. The number of tickets you can acquire varies depending on the type of pass. With the exception of Full Frame’s free events, all festival events require a ticket for admittance. This page explains how to use your pass to get Passholder Tickets and admission to events. How to Get Passholder Tickets

How to Get Into an event

Passholder tickets can be selected online before the

All ticketed Full Frame events offer two seating lines

festival (Advance Passholder Tickets) or acquired at the

(Green Line & Blue Line) that correspond to pass type,

Box Office (Box Office Tickets) and at the event’s venue

and a third line for filmgoers without tickets (Last Minute

(Last Minute Tickets) during the festival.

Line).

Advance Passholder Tickets

The Green Line offers first admittance to programs

— Tickets that a passholder selects online before the

Filmmaker, Guest, Priority, Patron and First Team.

festival will be packaged with the pass, and can be

and is where the following passholders line up:

picked up (ID required) during the festival at the Durham

The Blue Line seats after the Green Line and is where

Armory, Thursday – Sunday, 8:00am – 8:00pm

ticketholders and the following passholders line up: Festival, Film, Fellow, Student, and Press.

Box Office Tickets — Available at the Box Office, located in the Durham Convention Center, 8:00 am – 8:00 pm daily

The Last Minute Line seats after the Green and Blue lines. Last Minute Tickets can be acquired for any remaining seats; availability is not guaranteed.

— Limit: 1 ticket per passholder per event

PLEASE NOTE — Full Frame begins seating 30 minutes before

— Free for passholders until individual pass ticket limit

showtime. If you arrive after seating has concluded, your ticket no

is reached (Priority 20, Festival 15, Film 10)

longer guarantees a seat. Out of respect to exhibiting filmmakers, Full Frame strongly discourages entrance to theaters after showtime.

— Tickets are available during Box Office Hours, until

At that time all remaining seats will be forfeited. Passes and tickets

they sell out, or 30 minutes before showtime. At that

are non-refundable and non-exchangeable.

point, tickets may still be available in the Last Minute Line at event venues.

Last Minute Tickets — Available in the Last Minute Line of the event’s venue after all ticketholders are seated. — Limit: 1 ticket per person; first come, first served — Free for passholders

how things work —

tickets

Tickets Tickets can be purchased online for a limited time prior to the festival, at the Box Office during the festival, and at the event’s venue in the Last Minute Line. With the exception of Full Frame’s free events, all festival events require a ticket for admittance. Tickets are limited and many shows do sell out. If you are a passholder and looking for Passholder Ticket information, see How Things Work – Passes on the facing page.

How to Get Tickets

How to Get Into an event

Tickets can be purchased online before the festival

All ticketed Full Frame events offer two seating lines

(Advance Tickets), at the Box Office during the

(Green Line & Blue Line) that correspond to ticket

festival (Box Office Tickets), and at the event’s venue

type, and a third line for filmgoers without tickets

(Last Minute Tickets).

(Last Minute Line).

Advance Tickets Print at Home — If you printed your ticket at home, there’s no need to go to the box office. Proceed to the event’s venue and enter the Blue Line for seating. Will Call — If you selected Will Call for your Advance Tickets, those tickets can be picked up at the Will Call table at the Box Office. Once you have your tickets, proceed to the event’s venue and enter the Blue Line for seating.

The Green Line offers first admittance to programs and is where the following passholders line up: Filmmaker, Guest, Priority, Patron and First Team. The Blue Line seats after the Green Line and is where ticketholders and the following passholders line up: Festival, Film, Fellow, Student, and Press. The Last Minute Line seats after the Green and Blue lines. Last Minute Tickets can be purchased for any remaining seats; availability is not guaranteed.

Box Office Tickets — Available at the Box Office, located in the Durham Convention Center, 8:00 am – 8:00 pm daily — Limit: 8 tickets per event — $10 Regular Price; $15 Premium Events — $2 service charge on all tickets (excluding Last Minute Tickets) — Free for passholders — Tickets are available during Box Office hours until they sell out or 30 minutes before showtime. At that point, tickets may still be available in the Last Minute Line at event venues.

Last Minute Tickets — Available in the Last Minute Line of the event’s venue after ticketholders are seated. — Limit: 1 ticket per person; first come, first served — $10 films; $15 Premium Events (CASH ONLY) — Free for passholders

ple ase note — Full Frame begins seating 30 minutes before showtime. If you arrive after seating has concluded, your ticket no longer guarantees a seat. Out of respect to exhibiting filmmakers, Full Frame strongly discourages entrance to theaters after showtime. At that time all remaining seats will be forfeited. Tickets are non-refundable and non-exchangeable.

how things work —

S c reening V en u es

venues

The Plaza Corner of Foster and Morgan Streets

Theater

Locale

Capacity

Fletcher Hall Carolina Theatre / 309 W. Morgan St.

1000

Cinema One Carolina Theatre / 309 W. Morgan St.

275

Cinema Two Carolina Theatre / 309 W. Morgan St.

Cinema Three Durham Convention Center / 201 Foster St.

460

Cinema Four Durham Convention Center / 201 Foster St.

460

PSI Theater* Durham Arts Council / 120 Morris St.

200

Free Outdoor Screenings at Durham Central Park 534 Foster Street Lawn seating for 400+ — chairs and blankets welcome *NOTE : Food & drinks are not allowed in the PSI Theater. The Carolina Theatre, Convention Center, and Central Park venues offer concessions.

F estival V en u es Box Office Durham Convention Center, Meeting Rooms 3 & 4 thursday – sunday

8:00am – 8:00pm

thursday – sunday

9:00am – 9:00pm

Located at the heart of the festival amidst the Armory, Marriott, Convention Center, and Carolina Theatre, the Plaza features Giorgio Bakatsias’s outdoor café, where he grills Mediterranean specialties and offers sandwiches, pastries, coffee and sweets. The Durham Convention Center also offers beer and wine on the Plaza. Open for lunch and dinner daily, the Plaza is also home to seating lines for Fletcher Hall performances.

Press Lounge Durham Convention Center, Meeting Room 2 thursday – sunday

9:00am – 7:00pm

The Press Lounge is where members of the press pick up passes, inquire about press availabilities, and contact festival staff.

A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy Carolina Theatre, Donor Lounge (third floor)

The Box Office provides tickets to purchasers and passholders. Tickets are available during Box Office hours, until they sell out, or 30 minutes before showtime. At that point, tickets may still be available in the Last Minute Line at event venues. The Box Office accepts Visa / MasterCard / American Express / Discover and cash. Will Call is also located in the Box Office.

The A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy will host a number of panel conversations during the festival. Free and open to the public – capacity of 60 – no tickets required.

Pass Pick Up

Durham Convention Center, Meeting Room 1

Durham Armory 2:00pm – 8:00pm 8:00am – 8:00pm

WEDNESDAY

thursday – sunday

All passes (excluding Press) are picked up in the Durham Armory, across the street from the Marriott and Durham Convention Center. Valid ID is required to pick up a pass. In addition to passes, the Armory is also where you can find general information, learn more about the event schedule and pass benefits, and find maps and recommendations for local sites and restaurants. Lost & Found is also located in the Durham Armory.

The Melanie Taylor Hospitality Suite Carolina Theatre, Connie Moses Ballroom (second floor) thursday

9:00am – 4:00pm 9:00am – 7:00pm

FRIday – sunday

Located on the second floor of the Carolina Theatre, the Hospitality Suite provides refreshments and light fare daily to the following passholders: Filmmaker, Guest, Priority, Patron, First Team, and Press.

Information Durham Armory and Durham Convention Center thursday – sunday

8:00 am – 8:00pm

Two Information desks, one located in the Durham Armory and one in the corridor of the Durham Convention Center, are where you can receive general information, learn more about the event schedule or pass benefits, and find maps and recommendations for local sites and restaurants. Official Full Frame Merchandise can also be purchased at the Convention Center Information desk.