Previous Festivals - docfest 2000

The bandoneon is a squeeze box, a square accordion with round buttons and a special soul. It gasps and sighs as it pumps the blood and passion of the human heart into its every darting note, but it is more than just a mainstay of Argentinean tango, as master Dino Saluzzi demonstrates throughout director Daniel Rosenfeld's heartfelt meditation on creativity and the redemptive power of music. French and German Baroque, Stravinsky, even Toots Thielemans course through Dino's playing. SALUZZI is equally about Saluzzi's return from a European tour to his childhood home, his musical brothers, and their spirit and struggle against disadvantage and racism. Throughout, Rosenfeld manages to find a spare visual language to match.

Dino Saluzzi will perform his celebrated tango and jazz improvisations at the reception.

When fate places people in the wrong place at the wrong time, fear and suspicion can fuel injustice like a runaway train. Directors Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker resurrect the once-famous case of the nine Scottsboro Boys, a dramatic miscarriage of justice from the early 1930s: nine poor young black men, charges of white rape, a fancy New York Jewish defense lawyer, an all-white Alabama jury, sentences of death, a dogged international campaign to free the "Boys." What befell these nine and their overconfident lawyer recalls 1930's racism and leftist subculture with a storytelling power inherent to great drama alone. A Co-production of Social Media Productions and The American Experience.

BENJAMIN SMOKE
(New York Premiere) 80 min. USA, 2000.

Robert Dickerson lived in Cabbagetown, a broken shell of a dead mill town near Atlanta, "home of the go-karts and little kids that go to jail really young, whose parents all do inhalants." A veteran performer from the local punk music scene, the heavy-lidded, emaciated Dickerson, known locally as Benjamin Smoke, rasped like Tom Waits with a two pack-a-day habit, often in drag. Before he died of HIV complications in 1999, heaven magically granted him a fantastic wish, to open for Patti Smith who memorialized him in her song, Death Singing. Visual poet Jem Cohen and co-director Peter Sillen have created a haunting sense of persona, place, and predicament that seeps slowly, determinedly into the soul. A Cowboy Booking International Release

The 20th Century displaced more people than any before it, wielding nationalism and ideology to inflict unparalleled separation, disappearance, and heartbreak on families the world over, and we're still sorting the consequences. Ten years after the death of her father, Dr. Ionel Rapaport, a Romanian Jew who spent WW II in Paris, filmmaker Pola Rapaport found a curious photo of a boy in his desk in New York. Ten years later a letter arrived unexpectedly from Bucharest. "I am taking all my courage when I say that I am actually your brother," wrote Pierre Radulescu-Banu. So begins a brave search for missing family truths in this poignant, poetic depiction of a sibling connection being born across cultures and continents. 58 min. USA, 2000.

One of docfest's founding principles is building bridges between all forms of documentary making, including independent, cable, network, and international. One redoubt of the documentary spirit on network TV remains CBS Sunday Morning, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Originally the brainchild of veteran TV journalist Charles Kuralt and Executive Producer Shad Northshield, CBS Sunday Morning remains an island of culture, diversity, and ideas, where art, literature, music, and everyday heroes are celebrated with short features that tell compelling stories with concision. A special compilation of CBS Sunday Morning's outstanding work will be presented, along with a discussion with the creators of CBS Sunday Morning regarding the controversial topic of how long on-screen stories really need to be.

Thomas Arthur Green, 51, is in a heap of trouble. In April this Utah polygamist, who raises broods of children in a West Desert trailer-home outpost he calls Greenhaven, was charged with first-degree felony rape of a child, four counts of felony bigamy and failure to pay $10,000 in child support. Director Jane Treays, however, finds a thoughtful, thought-provoking if maddeningly righteous patriarch who seems to truly love his children, all twenty-nine of them, and his six or seven wives, four of whom he married at fourteen. And to our discomfort, we believe him.

With his haunted eyes and mad innocence, street poet Avraham Shine evinces the unsparing sense of Weltschmerz (world pain) characteristic of a classic Werner Herzog anti-hero. His "mission," as he puts it, is to sell a million copies of his poems for a shekel each "in record time" by hounding every passer-by he encounters on the streets of Tel Aviv with the question, "Do you like poetry?" A former bank manager, combat soldier and family man, the frenetic 60-year-old Shine, Jewish German in origin, has slipped the bonds of convention with a vengeance, and director Gidi Dar's jittery camera barely manages to keep up with him as he holds forth on the spiritual disorders of the world. Plays with Diceworld.

Imagine that from this point forward you were to decide every important decision in life by a toss of the dice. Would your odds of happiness improve, or would you freefall into a vertiginous downward spiral of depravity ending in nihilism and perhaps death? Why not decide the answer to this question with another toss? So believe devotees of cult novelist Luke Rinehart, author of the best-selling The Dice Man, who asserts all we need is more random chance in our lives. And what better way to illustrate the power of chance than a cacophony of evocative, ephemeral images -- possibly meaningless -- in this latest work by master-of-atmosphere Paul Wilmshurst (MOB LAW, docfest '98). Plays with Shine.

Tobias Schneebaum sailed off as a young man, ventured to strange uncharted places, spent years among exotic peoples, warred alongside them, took lovers, joined their rituals, then made his way back to his native land, New York City of the late 1950s. Eventually he penned a successful book detailing his exploits, Keep the River on Your Right. The river in question is the Amazon, the Homeric hero a Greenwich Village painter described by the New York Observer as "probably the city's only gay, Jewish, ex-cannibal," and the documentary, an Odyssey directed by siblings David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Expect only the unexpected here. Distributed by Next Wave Films.

As Prince Eugeny Meshchersky explains to the judge on Russia's popular "Television Court," he wishes to reclaim his ancestral estate "so we can own it once more as we did before the Revolution." Director Marina Goldovskaya saw a newspaper article about the determined Prince, recognized from her childhood the bombed-out ruins of the Alabino Estate thirty miles from Moscow and set about with her camcorder to record the big dreams of a man with rolled-up sleeves who, with his family, overcomes primitive living conditions in a quest to breathe life if not glory into buildings and grounds wrecked by Russian history. A Co-production of Dune Gold Films and Arte.

FIRST PERSON PLURAL
(New York Premiere) 58 min. USA, 1999.

Deann Borshay began her present incarnation in 1966 as a young Korean adoptee, Cha Jung Hee, standing forlorn in an American airport while being hugged and fussed over by strangers who would become her parents. Fortunately her adoptive parents turned out to be loving and supportive and Deann's middle-class life cheerful, but dim memories and disturbing dreams haunted her all along, and when she opened her adoption file as an adult, she discovered a shocking possibility: the picture most resembling her was that of another little girl, Ok Chin. Deann Borshay's moving investigation into her true identity and unknown past provides grist for a surprisingly honest re-examination of the notions of cultural identity and family.

Like photographers, documentary makers think of the world as raw material to which they're entitled, but sometimes a subject steps forward and objects, in this case firing a fatal shot into prominent Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor in 1967 while he was producing a report on life in rural eastern Kentucky. Local landowner Hobart Ison had gotten fed up with media outsiders portraying Kentucky as rundown and impoverished. From this sad incident long ago, Appalachian documentary maker Elizabeth Barret fashions a brilliant and moving inquiry into documentary ethics, "the difference between how people see their own place and how others represent it." 61 min. USA, 1999. A Co-production of Appalshop Films and the Kentucky Network.

Three images define New York: skyscrapers, fire escapes and those eerie columns of steam that vent from fissures in the street like geothermal springs. They're a product of a unique 100-year-old, 100-mile-long grid of steam pipes that heat Manhattan's buildings, and like the rest of the city's infrastructure, they're deteriorating. Enter W.I.S.O.R., a robot designed to creep like an inchworm inside the old pipes and repair them. Unlikely material for a philosophical review, but in the hands of director Michel Negroponte (JUPITER'S WIFE), the process of inventing the homely "robo-welder" becomes an excuse to discuss God, fate, baseball, and Richard Nixon. A Co-production of ITVS, ZDF, Arte.

Never before has a camera been allowed to capture the fateful thumbs up or down vetting process of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the U.S. government agency which decides who gets political asylum in America and who doesn't. Critical to each decision is a "well-founded fear" that deportation would place an applicant's life in jeopardy, and it's up to INS officials to sort through unfamiliar languages, cultures, and conflicts to decide who is truthful. Directors Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini convey an unforgettable glimpse into the lives of intrepid souls desperate to share in the freedoms we Americans take for granted and of beleaguered bureaucrats who must face issues of profound moral responsibility on a daily basis.

Concert pianists must possess fire, wit, physical prowess, spiritual depth. How can children barely a decade old produce this result? This is the imponderable core mystery of director Irene Langemann's lovingly observant film on the lives of four prodigies at Moscow's prestigious Central Music School. Hours of practice is not enough to explain this phenomenon, as any would-be student of piano can attest. To a certain extent, Ira, Mitya, Nikita, and Lena are products of a Soviet cultural legacy that is being overtaken by a rapidly changing present, but these young prodigies must also face a future in which they will no longer stand out as children. A Co-production of WDR and Arte.

Director Nina Davenport is a wedding videographer who is secretly unhappy at weddings. When, if ever, will it be her turn? Cute boyfriend Nick Kurzon (director of docfest 99's SUPER CHIEF) is five years younger and noncommittal -- perfect material for self-sabotage and 30-something Davenport knows it. So begins an odyssey of the heart which will ring true for anyone entertaining misgivings and thoughts of marriage at the same time. Along the way Davenport also seeks insight from elderly women who chose not to marry, all of which combines to form a bittersweet first-person comedy that reaffirms the rule that the heart wants what the heart wants. A Co-production of Channel Four, HBO, Cinemax.

SKYY VODKA AWARDS $20,000 in cash awards from Skyy Vodka: A $10,000 Jury Prize and five $1,000 grants to New York City student filmmakers will be presented before the evening's screening. A $5,000 Audience Award will be presented after the evening's eligible screening.

Like "Technicolor" and "low-key," "cinéma vérité" has slipped into common parlance, yet few outside film school know the story behind this early '60s burst of vision and invention. In this day of consumer camcorders it's hard to appreciate what a breakthrough handheld, battery-driven 16mm cameras and portable synchronous sound recorders were. As pioneer Robert Drew marveled, "Life is a kind of theater when you get the right story. But they're not acting." Director Peter Wintonick assembles on camera for the first time the original cinéma vérité filmmakers from the U.S., Canada, England and France for a spirited recollection of the birth of the modern documentary form. National Film Board of Canada.

The usual 30 minute Q&A will be supplimented with an historic gathering of cinéma vérité pioneers on stage in roundtable discussion. Scheduled to appear are Jean-Pierre Beauviala, William Greaves, Ricky Leacock, Al Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker, Fred Wiseman and more.

"NEW TECHNOLOGY SHOWCASE"

Last year's New Technology Showcase yielded two firsts: the first public preview of Aaton's breakthrough A-Minima Super-16mm camera and the first New York demonstration of Apple's Final Cut Pro. In addition Swiss Effects showed new samples of their unique tape-to-film transfers and D. A. Pennebaker unveiled his first tests shooting high definition using a Sony HDW-700 camcorder courtesy of Liman Video Rental.

This year's New Technology Showcase will focus on issues surrounding production in the 16:9 aspect ratio, a confusing topic which is on the minds of most producers embarking on new projects. The featured guest will be legendary Aaton philosopher/inventor Jean-Pierre Beauviala of Grenoble, France, who made Super-16 and film timecode a practical reality.

Participants in the 16:9 discussion will include leading manufacturers of nonlinear editing systems, video cameras, and motion picture film. Representatives of PBS and European broadcasters will detail their latest aspect ratio requirements with regard to "deliverables"--conventional 4:3, 4:3 with letterboxing, or squeezed 16:9? A unique, not-to-be-missed event.

Each year docfest selects a master documentary maker for a special dialogue about the past, present, and future of the documentary form. Docfest '98 featured Jean Rouch joined on-stage by Albert Maysles and D. A. Pennebaker and docfest '99 featured Fred Wiseman.

This year docfest is proud to honor RICKY LEACOCK, a seminal cinéma vérité documentary maker featured in docfest's closing night film, CINÉMA VÉRITÉ: DEFINING THE MOMENT, whose astonishing career spans shooting Robert Flaherty's LOUISIANA STORY (1948), shooting combat footage for the U.S. Army Signal Corp in the Pacific during W.W. II, joining Drew Associates in New York as cameraperson for cinéma vérité masterpieces like PRIMARY (1960), joining D. A. Pennebaker in 1965 to form Leacock/Pennebaker Associates, and in 1970 forming the film department at M.I.T. which produced many notable "diary" documentary filmmakers. In addition, Leacock has always been at the forefront of experimenting with smaller cameras and recorders. In the '60s he invented cableless sync by adapting Bulova Accutron watches to cameras and Nagras, in the '70s he developed the Super-8 Sync Sound system, and in the '80s he was one of the first to forgo 16mm in favor of Hi8mm video.

In the course of the discussion, Ricky Leacock will be joined by other docfest directors for a roundtable exchange of views about documentary making today and over the digital horizon.