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Previous Festivals- docfest 1998
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FIRES OF KUWAIT 36 min. Canada, 1992. Directed by veteran IMAX cinematographer David Douglas, this film takes us to an ecological holocaust with a difference. Unlike Chernobyl or Bhopal, this vast tract of Earth was intentionally defiled. Retreating Iraqis in 1991 detonated 607 oil wells, transforming the fragile desert landscape into a living hell of fiery skies and black suns veiled by towering plumes of toxic soot. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, FIRES OF KUWAIT portrays like a suspenseful cliff-hanger the desperate 10-country firefighting effort that followed: Will heroism and sheer ingenuity prevail? In time to curb poisonous clouds already 800 miles long? Will the desert recover? With images reminiscent of Sebastão Salgado, FIRES OF KUWAIT brings surprising immediacy to a struggle against the odds and 2000 degree temperatures, appropriately exploiting the extraordinary scale of IMAX to bring us a visceral sense of the magnitude and awesomeness of this war's destructive aftermath. Editor Barbara Kerr was nominated by her peers in the American Cinema Editors (ACE) as Best Editor of a documentary. An IMAX Corporation Release.
On the 30th anniversary of the fierce Tet offensive that turned American public opinion against the war in Vietnam and forced a beleaguered Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the '68 Presidential race, docfest '98 presents a double bill of unforgettable 1967 Vietnam War documentaries broadcast in primetime by CBS News. Neither MORLEY SAFER'S VIETNAM: A PERSONAL REPORT nor THE ANDERSON PLATOON has been seen in public since. Both were audacious works - critical yet reflective, predicated on a legacy of journalistic integrity established by the likes of CBS News legends Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly (who sadly passed away this March). In fact, the Canadian-born Safer, who cut his teeth as producer/reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and later the BBC, was so aggressively frank in his Vietnam reporting for CBS that Johnson ordered him secretly investigated. Friendly came to call Vietnam "Morley Safer's War." Courtesy of the CBS News Archives.
Perhaps the best real war movie ever made was in fact created by former LIFE correspondent Pierre Schoendoerffer, himself once a soldier in the French Indochina War, for the French Broadcasting System (RTF) and re-broadcast in the U.S. by CBS exactly three months after MORLEY SAFER'S VIETNAM. Just imagine a roving cinéma vérité camera in the hands of a master battlefield photojournalist like World War II's Alfred Eisenstaedt or Robert Capa, in the muck filming nervous grunts on patrol, being shot at by unseen snipers while platoon leader Capt. John B. Anderson, a 24-year-old African-American West Pointer, struggles to limit further casualties, and you have an idea of the beauty and danger and horror and tension of this riveting film. (Photographed by Dominique Merlin.) It falls to CBS News's credit that they sponsored this masterpiece in primetime under their own aegis, a thing unthinkable today. Courtesy of the CBS News Archives.
Directed by poet and veteran filmmaker Mark Daniels, it is an arresting new documentary written and performed by Van Peebles himself, which parses with Van Peebles's patented blend of poetry and polemics the visual history of African-Americans in Hollywood films. Given that director Van Peebles's own 1971 SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG sent shockwaves through Hollywood and launched a decade of "blaxploitation" films, Van Peebles makes his case with rare authority, presenting over seventy classic film clips that evidence typecasting and patent Tinseltown racism. Premiered at the '98 Sundance Film Festival. A Co-production of Les Films d'Ici, Paris.
The Runnin Man precedes MELVIN VAN PEEBLES' CLASSIFIED X, and is director Mark Daniels' brief riff on the astonishing life story of Van Peebles, from his days as a cable car grip in San Francisco to his sometime career as a Parisian novelist (five were published) and art scene provocateur. Daniels made RUNNIN' MAN as a prologue to the French broadcast of CLASSIFIED X to familiarize French TV audiences with Van Peebles, whose SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG was never seen in France. After viewing RUNNIN' MAN one cannot help but conclude that Van Peebles is an artist who, in pure Sartre fashion, has willed himself into being. That Van Peebles failed (for reasons self-evident) to generate as many films as, say, Cassavetes (who possessed a similar verve) in no way diminishes the impact that RUNNIN' MAN has on every filmmaker-at-heart inspired by this can-do tale of pure moxie. A Co-production of Les Films d'Ici, Paris.
The centerpiece of docfest '98 is the first New York presentation in 25 years of the seminal cinéma vérité masterpiece, Jean Rouch's CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (Chronique d'un Eté) from 1961. With its man-in-the-street interviews ("Are you happy?") and explicit concern over the camera's intrusion, CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER, made in collaboration with sociologist Edgar Morin, prefigures in form, content, and technique virtually every documentary made since. In fact it was Rouch himself who coined the term cinéma vérité, now common to dictionaries, to describe his new non-fiction approach. With top-shelf credits including legendary French cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Truffaut's Jules et Jim, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and Contempt) and the late producer Anatole Dauman (La Jetée, Tin Drum, Paris Texas, Wings of Desire), it's no wonder this film had immediate impact on the styles of Godard and Chris Marker, among others.
"Swirling snowflakes invite me to dance, and the whistling wind is my music." - Saltmen song Since before time, a certain tribe of nomadic herdsmen in northern Tibet who pasture their yaks in the highest meadows in the world has gathered each spring with their yak herds and ventured off on a three-month pilgrimage to a holy salt lake whose shores, if conditions permit, are lined with large salt crystals big as diamonds. The herdsmen harvest the precious "white gold" with rakes, fill their many yak-hair sacks, then load the poor beasts for the long return. No woman is allowed to accompany them even one step of the way, lest the powerful goddess of the holy salt lake take offense. In fact, the moment the men lose sight of their women, they lapse into their secret "salt language," which only they are permitted to speak. But never did they anticipate the perseverance and determination of director Ulrike Koch, a German who studied Asian languages and culture in Zürich and Beijing and then acted as location scout and casting director for Bertolucci's THE LAST EMPEROR and assistant director to Nikita Mikhalkov on URGA. So what if during the arduous trek she had to trail behind at a short distance and permit her superb cameraman, Pio Corradi, to hang out with the guys? Because what results is one of the more spectacular journeys on film in a long while, with breathtaking David Lean-type vistas and high altitude Tibetan Plateau landscapes from the fabled "rooftop of the world." Even more amazing: Koch's "film" was shot in its entirely with a Sony VX-1000, a small consumer miniDV (Digital Video) camcorder, for transfer to 35mm. This is a breakthrough film on not one, but two levels! Premiered at the '98 Sundance Film Festival. A Zeitgeist Films Ltd. Release.
Imagine Lenny Bruce as a Manhattan double-decker tour guide and you begin to approach the anarchic neo-Beat rhythms of THE CRUISE - docfest's comedic valentine to New York City. The unlikely hero of director Bennett Miller's remarkably self-assured debut is tour guide Timothy "Speed" Levitch, a wiry, intense young pedant and motor-mouth who seizes the microphone high above moving traffic not to deliver the usual Baedeker of what-was-built-when, but to fire off his poetic and philosophic flights of fancy at machine-gun velocities that inspire and confound his captive audiences, both on the bus and in the theater. At times a would-be Kerouac and Maimonides too, Levitch's public ruminations on the history, architecture, and sensuality of New York are self-reflexive like all great comedy (philosophy too) and ultimately serve to raise the question: is there any better way to meet women? Director Miller, who shot THE CRUISE "one-man band" style in the miniDV format before enlarging it to 35mm, fires a strong volley in the Digital Video revolution that has swept documentary making, while Levitch treats us to an inimitable and often poignant tour of the canyons of lower Manhattan.
Directed by Paul Wilmshurst, Mob Law profiles Las Vegas mob lawyer Oscar Goodman, famed in wiseguy circles as the best there is, in his natural element, hobnobbing with "clients" and touting his lucrative career as an idealistic battle for individuals' civil rights in the face of a sinister, inimical American government, à la William Kunstler. (Well, you decide.) Clients Joey Cusamano, Dominic Spinale, Dean Shendal, and Charlie Panarella contribute colorful anecdotes to this uneasy portrait, speaking freely from out of the shadows because "Oscar says it's OK." Despite a three-person crew, director Wilmshurst and cinematographer Chris Titus King limn Goodman's world in shades of noir worthy of Gordon Willis in his GODFATHER days. A co-production of Channel Four Television and Non Fiction Films.
What would a Chinese documentary about a handful of optimistic 20-something single women rooming together in Beijing look like? Friends in Mandarin? Not if shot and sensitively directed by another young woman, Li Hong, an independent (!) documentary maker who appropriated the time and equipment from her day job at China Central TV to follow the lives of the Wang sisters and their cousin for two years after they departed Phoenix Bridge village in Anhui province to work their way up in the world as Beijing maids. Documenting the trials of these necessarily brave souls venturing far from home and prescribed sexual roles - they must subsist in a crowded shack, do without plumbing or heat - director Li, whom the young women initially fear as a possible kidnapper (documentary makers not being common in Beijing) and later call "elder sister," has fashioned an unforgettable and emotionally incisive contribution to the cinéma vérité canon, as well as a quietly eloquent condemnation of the low status of women in Chinese society. Winner of the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize of New Asian Currents, 1997 Yamagata International Film Festival.
This film weaves four portraits of individual Cubans in their teens and early twenties poised at turning points in their lives and facing dramatically different prospects: Wendy, a talented but mercurial dancer, wants to follow her dancer father to professional success in Spain; Osiel, a boxing hopeful, intends to fight his way out of deprivation via the Cuban Olympic team; beautiful Yaricel has embraced prostitution partly as a means of supporting her parents; and charismatic idealist Equis, son of successful artists, rehearses his popular rock band. Director Dimitri Falk spent several years filming in 16mm around "the island," mostly sans official permission, and what results is thankfully unfettered by the usual ideological constraints. MIDNIGHT IN CUBA is a clear-eyed glimpse at life in Cuba today from the viewpoint of an upcoming generation that doesn't want or perceive itself to be cut off from the rest of the world. Equis's band without irony performs a credible cover of Nirvana's "Come As You Are" over the closing credits. Premiered at the '98 Berlin Film Festival.
Loneliness prompts Israeli director Dan Katzir, a twenty-something former paratrooper now studying film, to document his personal life in order to understand why he cannot find love in a country repeatedly paralyzed by terrorism and violence. In the process he meets and falls in love with Iris - just as she's being drafted. Their story flows on two parallel levels, the personal and the national, as the streets of Tel Aviv brim with soldiers and angry protesters incensed over Prime Minister Rabin's efforts to move the region from war to peace, a charged atmosphere that finally climaxes in Rabin's 1995 assassination. Winner of the Wolgin Award for Best Documentary, 1997 Jerusalem International Film Festival.
Cuba 15 will precede OUT FOR LOVE... BE BACK SHORTLY. Elizabeth's Schub's utterly delightful depiction of the quinceañera - the 15th birthday coming-of-age celebration - of an irrepressible young Cuban woman named "Tzunami" was a favorite with this year's Sundance and Berlin audiences, earning the Panorama Award of the New York Film Academy for the Best Short Film in Berlin. Both CUBA 15 and OUT FOR LOVE playfully construct intimate portraits of passages into adulthood - a juncture given to high hopes and romanticized dreams - in societies whose younger civilians have never known a peacetime without soldiers, saber rattling and siege mentalities. 12 min. USA, 1997.
Grateful, admiring, offended, put off - New York director Maggie Hadleigh-West left audiences at the recent Berlin Film Festival anything but complacent following the premiere of her provocative broadside, fired smack into the middle of the battle of the sexes. An East Village artist, Hadleigh-West decided she'd had enough of common street harassment, those leering catcalls and vulgar come-ons the sidewalks of New York are famous for, at least among women. So Hadleigh-West decided to turn the tables - her camera - on the perpetrators, not only in New York, but Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco too. The result, filmed on the street from a woman's point-of-view - namely, that of the indomitable Hadleigh-West - is a unique public confrontation of a not-so-trivial form of sexual aggression. Hadleigh-West doesn't miss a trick, doesn't allow a single untoward remark or southward glance slip by without a challenge, which will likely leave some elements of every audience uncomfortable. 76 min. USA, 1998.
Directed by Vicky Funari, Paulina is a Garcia Marquez-like journey that reaches back through the hidden travails of the life of a seemingly ordinary Mexican maid, the diminutive Paulina, who was Funari's childhood caretaker during the years her father was stationed in Mexico City. The story takes on unexpected force as Funari's mix of documentary and re-enactment builds up to Paulina's revenge for her rape and imprisonment as mistress of the town boss of her Veracruz hometown. An authentic tale of heroism and personal growth that fiction strives for but rarely attains, PAULINA won standing ovations and tears at both Sundance and the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. 88 min. USA, 1997.
Directed by Susan Muska and
Gréta Ólafsdóttir, the film investigates the 1993 murder of a handsome 20-year-old
who arrived in a small Nebraska town, quickly made friends, and found a pretty girlfriend.
Then, on Christmas Eve three weeks later, Teena was brutally raped when it was discovered
that the likeable Brandon Teena was in actuality Teena Brandon, a young woman living as a man.
A week later on New Year's Eve, the two rapists sought out and savagely murdered Brandon and
two hapless witnesses, a young mother and another man who had befriended him.
THE BRANDON TEENA STORY picks up where the unsettling New Yorker article on the same
subject left off, with interviews of Brandon's girlfriends, family, acquaintances, law
enforcement officers and murderers. While there are many tellings, this is no RASHOMON;
details of the rape and murder are unchallenged. Instead Muska's and Ólafsdóttir's
tape recorder and camera take us into subjective dimensions of those who loved and hated Brandon,
revealing a great deal more than headlines about the deep reserves of conformity, fear, and
desire that form the labyrinths of sexual personae. THE BRANDON TEENA STORY won two gay &
lesbian awards at this year's Berlin Film Festival: the coveted Teddy Award for Best
Documentary and the Readers' Prize of the Siegessäule Award.
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