Previous Festivals- docfest 1999

Directed by the brothers Belic--Roko and Adrian--is a rare passage to a pure place in the heart where chasms of race, blindness, aging, and loneliness are forever bridged by the universal language of music, in this case the dialects of American Blues and Tuvan throat singing. It's also a rare pilgrimage to Kyzyl, the capital city of Tuva, a tiny forgotten nation next to Mongolia that has somehow survived history's tides of conquest, if not Russian occupation. That's where blind San Francisco bluesman Paul Pena, who first heard the earthy, ethereal overtones of Tuvan throat music on short-wave radio twelve years ago, must go to share with the Tuvan people, proud descendants of Genghis Khan whose faces he will never see, his fascination and growing involvement with their unique vocal art. Don't miss this unusual adventure in geography, language and musical culture, which had audiences at Sundance and Berlin in tears and on their feet applauding. Premiered at the '99 Sundance Film Festival, where it was Winner of Audience Documentary Award.

Directors Roko and Adrian Belic, along with master Tuvan throat singer Kongar-ol Ondar, will attend.

Directed by 1997 Academy Award winning documentary director Jessica Yu (BREATHING LESSONS, Best Short Documentary, remembered for her remark that her dress cost more than her film), visits the oft-scrutinized intersection of art and madness and discovers not a snake-pit of anguished scrawlings but instead a prodigious creative milieu where fine art succeeds at a very high level. Yu and ace cinematographer Shana Hagan locate this world at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens - not a must-see on the art world circuit, but that may change after this film. Psychologist Dr. Janos Marton and the late artist/actor/activist Bolek Greczynski, once buddies at art school, have created out of a decrepit dining hall a creative refuge for the mentally disturbed whose works large and small are so imaginative and incisive they put many a formal art institution to shame. As the unsentimental Dr. Janos says, "You won't find one artist here who's pretentious, and you can't say that about the Whitney."
Premiered at the '99 Sundance Film Festival.
Director Jessica Yu will attend. Art produced by participants at Creedmoor will be on display at the Directors Guild of America Theater throughout docfest.

THE SOURCE
(New York Premiere) 90 min. USA, 1999.

Directed by Chuck Workman, THE SOURCE traces the epicenter of the '60's youthquake that shook up conventional attitudes towards music, sex, drugs, and war to a chance meeting at Columbia University in 1944 between student writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and older, heroin-addicted Harvard man William S. Burroughs, knockabout scion of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company and himself an aspiring writer. The literary spark thus struck in New York - poetry fused to jazz, prose cut-up and scattered, stream-of-consciousness wordplay and willful disorientation of syntax - along with similar activities on the part of kindred spirits in San Francisco, helped kindle a rejection of '50s conformist values among poets, writers, artists, musicians that presaged the gender and identity politics of the '70s. Workman, who showcases a talent for compiling film clips in those cinema-history-in-a-minute sequences he creates for the Oscars every year, demonstrates here a similar encyclopedic grasp of the roots of The Beat Generation. Through rare and surprising snippets of old TV shows, interviews and of course film clips, Workman brings to our eyes a kaleidoscope through which to view a time when literary and popular culture defined deviancy upward. On hand are Dennis Hopper, Johnny Depp, and John Turturro, who breathe new fervor into landmarks of Beat literature. Premiered at the '99 Sundance Film Festival.
Director Chuck Workman will attend.

Outside of gambling casinos, most Americans have no direct experience with the nations within a nation called Indian Reservations. These artificial homelands are both throwbacks to an era of conquest and modern-day economic engines for the tribes who occupy them. Director Nick Kurzon takes us to the White Earth Indian Reservation in western Minnesota where Ojibwa tribal chairman Darrell "Chip" Wadena rules his roost with an open patronage system Chicago's former Mayor Daley would envy. 1,100 jobs at the Shooting Star Casino is a lot of leverage on a small reservation and Wadena is not shy, airbrushing "Super Chief" on the door panel of his "fully-loaded" pick-up. This time, however, his perennial opponent in tribal elections, "Bugger" McArthur, thinks he can unseat Wadena, despite a history of sudden recounts of absentee ballots which always favor Wadena. The stage is set for a classic confrontation between the people and their oppressor, and this time it isn't the Bureau of Indian Affairs. At least not directly.
Winner Best Documentary, 1999 New England Film Festival .
Director Nick Kurzon will attend.

Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen avoid the easy clichés that flatten most boxing-as-metaphor-for-life portrayals. True, there are the usual struggling up-and-comers from impoverished backgrounds being told they can make it if they try hard enough, but that's only the launching-off point for a documentary that starkly captures an upside-down world in which the courts convict the innocent, talent doesn't win out, the underdog doesn't make it, and fallen angels get stepped on. Even Harry, the sympathetic trainer who is the towering moral center of this film, is a penitent in search of redemption for a dark sin he suddenly reveals to the camera. His sanctuary, the selfsame sweet-science laboratory that breathed life into the fists of Iron Mike Tyson, is a dingy ring that continues to frame the dreams of young gloved fighters looking for a fast ticket out of hopelessness. What elevates ON THE ROPES into the same class as HOOP DREAMS is the complexity of its narrative, the unforgettable humanity of its young boxers, and a powerful musical score in perfect synch with Brooklyn's percolating street life.
Premiered at the '99 Sundance Film Festival.
Directors Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen will attend.

No one can accuse the four guys of the cult underground guitar band Fugazi of greed. Hardcore fans of the Washington D.C. area neo-punk rockers know the rules: no T-shirt sales, no vapid music videos, only cheap $8 self-produced CDs and a $5 cap on ticket sales, no matter the venue. If anything, performances by this self-styled political band at benefits on behalf of the homeless or AIDS research or in protest of Desert Storm have fortified the band's reputation for righteous activism. Jem Cohen's depiction of the band since inception a decade ago, however, is more collage than homage: what Cohen calls a dub mix of Super-8, 16mm, and Hi-8 video capturing live performances, recording sessions, behind-the-scenes horsing-around, interviews with band members and clips of TV appearances, notably pert host Jamie Valdez's 8th grade video class interview of members Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto. In tune with the band's purist ethics, Cohen eschews all but basic editing, favoring long single takes and strings of poignant head-shot portraits of fans waiting in line. More than mere militants, these are musicians struggling to remain connected to their fans, alive artistically and true to their values. As Ian MacKaye says in a TV interview from a tiled men's room, "You ask me what Fugazi's about, I'd say Fugazi's about being a band."
Director Jem Cohen will attend.

The first title of THE VALLEY reads: "In 1389 a Serb army made a a last stand in Kosovo against Islamic invaders. The Serbs were crushed." The first images in THE VALLEY show a bucolic landscape marred by black plumes rising from flaming rooftops. The first sounds are distant, sporadic tat-tat-tats of automatic weapons fire. We know where we are, and it's not the Fourteenth Century. If ever a documentary merited the cliché "ripped from the headlines, " this is it. Producer/director Dan Reed and cinematographer Jacek Petrycki have brought back from the Drenica Valley of central Kosovo not a network-style voiceovered news report, but a raw depiction through unfiltered images of the unimaginable tragedies inflicted on each other by former neighbors of Albanian and Serb descent. Albanian villagers digging neat rows of graves, cattle shot and rotting in dark, fetid puddles, wailing Serb processions bearing coffins through the countryside, Orthodox nuns in head-to-toe black tending to religious duties as guns cackle nearby - the list of sad, indelible scenes in THE VALLEY goes on and on. In a place where each side calls the other invader, where families have lived for 500 years or more, quick fixes are impossible. The Drenica Valley is the heartland of the Kosovo Liberation Army, but whatever their prospects are, there is no glory here. As one hardened KLA fighter remarks upon viewing another charred corpse in the Albanian village of Ashlan, "I'll need a shrink after this." Be warned, this film is heartbreakingly graphic.

Four-hundred miles west of Senegal lies an archipelago of islands called Cape Verde (Green) by its Portuguese colonizers. These days it's anything but verdant. Commercial coffee and orange crops wither under draught, food must be imported and 80 per cent are unemployed, conditions that would oppress any small island republic. But the inhabitants of the island of Fogo, descendants of West Africans brought as slaves to till the land, are content. They fish rich waters and raise beans, corn, and potatoes in fertile soil, a gift of Pico, the active volcano that overlooks their village. Pico erupted in 1951 and 1995, destroying their fields and houses, and the government wants to resettle them to a safer, modern town fifteen miles away. But the villagers don't wish to give up their ways-or their volcano. Why? A wizened griot, a pipe-smoking 110-year-old woman named Mima, conveys to a little girl with braids-and to us-a sense of both the island's wonder and misery. This strikingly photographed black & white film is no political tract. It's a lyrical homage to the life force of these hardy people and the destructive force of their smoking leviathan, at times evoking both the elemental power of Robert Flaherty and the neorealist pathos of Roberto Rosselini. Cinemascope.
Director Daniel Emmanuel Thorbecke will attend.

"What I really want when I die is to have a burial ceremony with only a few people attending... I don't want my mother to come... absolutely not." These are diary entries of 17-year-old Rita Atria, who had the misfortune of being born into a Sicilian family trapped in the culture of the Mafia. After her brother and father were murdered despite being "men of honor," Rita Atria broke rank with tradition and contacted a judge investigating the Mafia. In retaliation she was forsaken by her mother, rejected by her boyfriend, and ostracized by the entire town. She fled into hiding in Rome, but as the judges investigating her leads were assassinated one after the next, Rita Atria's diary entries grew darker. Would there be any way out? How far would the Mafia go to pursue a 17-year-old girl? As director Marco Amenta writes, "In this film about Mafia, the Mafia boss is not the hero, he is not a great actor, he is not handsome, charming, or brave." 1st Prize, International Festival Radiotelevisivo, Assisi, Italy; 1st Prize, Medianet Awards, Munich.
by Marco Amenta

A century after the first flickering images from the Lumiere Brothers' projector transfixed a Parisian crowd and filled their eyes with tears of awe and wonder, there are still places on Earth where no one has ever seen a motion picture. Who but Mr. Battu, then, to rectify this sorry state of affairs. Like the other 2,000 "mobile cinemas" that ply the dusty backroads of India, "Battu's Bioscope," as he calls it, is more accurately described as a colorfully painted carny truck crammed with an old Soviet projector, some sheets, and banged-up cans of scratched "Bollywood" (Bombay) musicals, piloted by a cranky and elderly midget man named Mama who hits the sauce when Mr. Battu looks away. Battu is no P.T. Barnum - he's also searching the remote landscape for his kidnapped wife - but he does have a dream: to show a motion picture to a village that has never seen one. What ensues is literally unforgettable and strangely appropriate, too. 59 min.
Director Andrzej Fidyk will attend.

(New York Premiere) 95 min. Canada, 1998.

Who would think a documentary about a professional wrestler named Hitman Hart would prove to be a moving, thought-provoking meditation on loyalty, physical pain, personal conscience, business ethics, and even American chauvinism? There's no more lurid circus on the planet at this moment than the inexplicably popular live wrestling circuit, so there's no reason to believe a year spent by a documentary crew in the presence of Bret Hart and his colleagues would yield much more than puerile sensationalism. But in the capable hands of director Paul Jay, the Hitman's year of reckoning with the consequences of his own moral code of loyalty to paternalistic promoter Vince McMahon and his World Wrestling Federation becomes a morality play, a coming-of-age, if you will, of a man of principle. With its can't-believe-they-caught-that camerawork and abundant mordant humor, Hitman Hart is also one of the most satisfyingly entertaining documentaries to come along in years. Shakespeare would have had great good fun with this.
Director Paul Jay will attend.

Radiohead's Grammy-winning OK COMPUTER is widely viewed as the most important "alternative rock" CD of 1997, blending slow, trenchant melodies with lyrics "driven," as one critic put it, "by a feeling of impotence with the world around it." Director Grant Gee joined the shy English band for their 1997-98 OK COMPUTER tour, and given the reactions of the world media and their thousands of mesmerized fans, the band might have felt anything but powerless - until we see the costs of this hyper-intensive grind of promotional appearances, interviews, and live performances. In MEETING PEOPLE IS EASY, Gee, who also directed Radiohead's No Surprises video, casts the interchangeable stadiums, hotel suites and interview studios as visual counterparts to the band's lyrics of displacement. Performances and downtime on the road are captured in stark, grainy images over which Gee layers text from articles and commentary inspired by Radiohead's popularity. Out-takes from radio station promos and endless interviews fill another page in this pulsating "multi-media scrapbook" depicting the post-postmodern dilemma of a band, in Gee's words, "whose music's all about the tension of trying to deal with the world with integrity, and of trying to keep a hold on 'reality,' while at the same time, the media-saturated situations they find themselves in are much closer to the virtual than to the real." Capitol Records/EMI Music Distribution/7th Arts Releasing.
Director Grant Gee will attend.

There's a reason Frederick Wiseman is considered a dean of American documentary. This pensive, observant filmmaker belongs to disappearing class of pre-video verité pioneers who approached their material with forethought, selectiveness and social purpose. Commercial prospects were, at best, an afterthought.
Director Frederick Wiseman will attend.

The recent releases of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and THE THIN RED LINE have caused World War II to resurface in the public's imagination. docfest takes this opportunity to present the only film ever reviewed on the front page of The New York Times, Lieutenant Colonel William Wyler's 1944 classic color documentary, THE MEMPHIS BELLE. One of the most widely-distributed documentaries ever - seeing it for the first time, an emotional FDR ordered 500 35mm Technicolor prints given free to theaters - BELLE tells the story of the battered bomber and its crew as only the gutsy Wyler could, stuffing himself, portable oxygen tank and wind-up 16mm Bell & Howell into the ball turret to gain a more vivid perspective. But what sets the tense drama of BELLE's record 25th mission without fighter escort apart from any Hollywood war movie is its 16mm authenticity. The "flak so thick you could walk on it" is no special effect. 45 min. U.S. 8th Air Force/Paramount Pictures, 1944.
Director William Wyler's daughter, film producer Catherine Wyler, will attend along with Memphis Belle pilot Robert Morgan.

Accompanying MEMPHIS BELLE will be THE MARINES IN TARAWA, the only film directed by veteran Hollywood actor Louis Hayward, who won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Short Documentary for this color film. Propagandistic yet prefiguring the TV photojournalism that would mark coverage of Vietnam, TARAWA depicts the fierce, harrowing battle between U.S. Marines and Japanese for control of an obscure Pacific atoll the size and shape of Fire Island. 20 min. U.S. Marine Corps Photographic Unit/Universal Pictures, 1944.

Don't be put off by the wildly misleading title of this unique and enthusiastic high-five to the universality of rhythm and dance as a medium of spirituality and sensuality. For two years visual artist Erik Pauser and "video percussionist" Johan Soderberg traversed the globe, filming the quiltwork of meditations, ecstatic rituals, religious rites, and drumming sessions that make up the visual component of this latter-day KOYAANISQATSI. Updating the portentous and driving arpeggios of Phillip Glass to the sleek, neo-tribal beat of techno, Pauser and Soderberg tie together tempos of world music with reflections about man's condition on Earth today, featuring commentary from a primatologist who exchanges warning cries with monkeys, a dancing chorus line of angry Maori warriors, an experienced Voudou priestess, a Japanese businessman with a double life in shrill art-rock, an ecumenical Navajo medicine man, an limb-entwined Hindu mystic perched on one hand, even porn performance artist Annie Sprinkle, who makes a surprisingly affecting case for natural sexual bliss. What started as Lucky People Center, a progressive dance music collective founded in 1984 in the Swedish city of Göteborg, culminates in a millennial message to the world.
Directors Erik Pauser and Johan Soderberg will attend

Last year in an effort to showcase the growing phenomenon of feature-length documentaries shot on the consumer MiniDV digital format and transferred to 35mm, docfest proudly premiered Bennett Miller's THE CRUISE and Ulrike Koch's THE SALTMEN OF TIBET to New York audiences. This year docfest is thrilled to present the U.S. premiere of Jesper Jargil's THE HUMILIATED, a candid and moving diary of the making of bad-boy director Lars von Trier's latest opus, THE IDIOT, to be released this summer. Von Trier (THE KINGDOM, BREAKING THE WAVES) and fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (THE CELEBRATION) co-formulated the now-famous tenets of Dogme '95, and true to form, Von Trier decided to shoot this one mostly himself, using a handheld Sony VX-1000 consumer digital camcorder. Jargil, with his own VX-1000, tracks von Trier's every step and misstep, adding excerpts from von Trier's nightly audio diary that transform this portrait of an engaged artist into the best exposé of a director's torment and triumph since Truffaut's DAY FOR NIGHT.
Director Jesper Jargil will attend.

"Documentary Making: An Update"

Featured will be the first-anywhere, public sneak peek at the pre-release version of Aaton's A-Minima Super-16mm camera, the most anticipated new film camera in years. Peter Abel of Abel Cine Tech will introduce the Aaton breakthrough, which weighs less than 4.5 lbs. with film and battery and includes a revolutionary new DistantEye shutter, Aaton-II timecode, intervalometer, incident light meter and more. Steve Garfinkel of Eastman Kodak will introduce a new 200 ft. daylight load for A-Minima's quick-change magazines.

Legendary documentary makers D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus will present edited scenes in high definition from their latest project. Pennebaker, who tried out Sony's HDW-700 on behalf of docfest's NEW TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR, switched to the HDCAM as a result, saying "it's like learning filmmaking all over again." On display will be Pennebaker's HDCAM rig with manual 5.3-61mm Angenieux zoom and modified Aaton handgrip. The HDW-700 is courtesy of Liman Video Rental; HD editing courtesy of The Tape House High Definition Center. Company representatives will be on hand. Clips will be projected by an Electrohome Vistagraphic 8000 projector featuring Texas Instruments' Digital Micromirror Device.

Another debut: straight from its smash debut at April's National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Las Vegas, Apple Computer presents to New York's film and video community Final Cut Pro, Apple's new, inexpensive DV editing software which requires nothing more than an off-the-shelf Power Macintosh G-3.

Patrick Lindenmaier, technical director of the premiere tape-to-film facility Swiss Effects, will demonstrate the latest in transfers of digital video to 35mm. PAL and NTSC samples will be shown. Swiss Effects transferred Sundance Special Jury Award winner and docfest '99 film ON THE ROPES, as well as docfest '98 films THE SALTMEN OF TIBET and THE CRUISE.

The docfest '99 NEW TECHNOLOGY SHOWCASE is presented by The New York Documentary Center, Inc. in association with The Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, The Independent Feature Project, and indieWIRE.

"Four Decades of Documentary Making: Dialogues with Fred Wiseman and docfest'99 directors."

Esteemed master fly-on-the-wall, Fred Wiseman, attending docfest '99 with a rare screening of his film Basic Training, will hold forth on changes and continuities in the form and technique of documentaries over the span of his career. Joining him in a later roundtable discussion will be other docfest '99 directors, representing projects in every format from miniDV and Hi8 to Super-16 and 35mm Cinemascope.