Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

5 Things I Learned at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

Robert Silva — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:31:28 GMT

Four days and a dozen screenings later, I've returned from 2013's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival -- one of the largest documentary film festivals in North America. I saw reality turned to art. I witnessed unforgettable moments (check out my notes on this panel). And I discovered the glory of Biscuitville (Full Frame takes place in Durham, North Carolina -- where the restaurant Biscuitville reigns supreme). Here's what I learned from the experience:

1. Why All Polemical Documentaries Fail
Someone asked me what I thought of "Pandora's Promise," Robert Stone's documentary about nuclear energy. "I thoroughly enjoyed it and was totally persuaded by it," I said. "Until I realized I had actually been given no information." That's the gist of my problem with Stone's film, which makes the argument that nuclear power is the only realistic way to curb global warming -- and totally safe, he promises! Stone makes impressive use of visual devices such as graphs with no data and children grinning at the camera. His argument may be airtight, but that's because it's hermetically sealed. As absorbing as the film is, I can't help but feel like I'm being sold a stereo.

2. What the Sun Does to Dead Bodies
A Tucson coroner unzips a body bag to reveal a corpse tanned to the color of boot leather. He rolls over the migrant whose roasted body seems ready to fall apart. "The Undocumented," which made its world premiere at Full Frame, takes pride in not shielding our eyes from the human casualties of U.S. border policies. Each year, hundreds of migrants die while making the journey across the Arizona desert. Director Marco Williams monitors the workflow of those who patrol the border, recover the bodies, and identify the dead. If the film struggles to find a human center to the story, its images are likely to stay with viewers.

3. You Can Compare a Masterpiece to Anything
According to one of its three editors, the first cut of "American Promise" was 32 hours long. "After that, twenty hours came out easy," she said. The spellbinding doc, which won Full Frame's Grand Jury Award (and resists the capsule review format), follows two African-American boys who attend the elite Dalton School in New York. It's been compared favorably to "Hoop Dreams" and Michael Apted's "Up" series. But the closer resemblance is I think Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret." Sure, both films are about young people attending prep schools who grow up in New York. But the closer affinity has to do with their willingness to embrace the complexity of life.

4. How to Make a Movie About Mass Murder (And Keep Your Soul)
You might not be familiar with the 2011 shootings in Norway, but it doesn't really matter; you don't learn much about it in John Appel's "Wrong Place, Wrong Time," which made its North American premiere at Full Frame. The documentary avoids the ethical quandaries of making a film about a mass murder, one that left over 70 dead, many of them children, by maintaining an a rigid (and at time stultifying) focus on the survivors. In interviews that recall Andy Warhol screen tests, the survivors speak quietly about the seconds and minutes that meant the difference between living and dying.

5. It's Possible to Blow a Postage Stamp 100 Meters While Holding a Baby Sloth
When I saw "The Record Breaker," about Guinness Record-breaking addict Ashrita Furman, I expected a retread of his story segment on 60 Minutes. Instead I got a swimmingly edited, life-affirming film that was, yes, genuinely touching. Clichés all, but so what. The short won Full Frame's Audience Award and features an image of the above act that I will carry with me forever.

Sundance and True/False Programmers Discuss Festival Economics at Full Frame

Sean Farnel — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:37:52 GMT

This past weekend the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival hosted a speakeasy chat around the issues raised in the series of Indiewire articles that followed my Fair Trade For Filmmakers piece in this space. Props. It's a queasy discussion for many festivals, evident in some of the defensiveness that has informed certain responses to the topic thus far. Yet, it's also an opportunity for those festivals progressive enough to reimagine the role their events may have in tangibly supporting independent filmmaking.

Full Frame is one such event, as is True/False. T/F co-conspirator David Wilson, who joined Sundance's Caroline Libresco and I in leading the discussion, seized the moment. Wilson announced that True/False festival would be offering filmmaker honorariums at next year's event. It was the third time he received applause during the talk, that fucking scene stealer.

Libresco pointed to broader issues around filmmaker support and remuneration ("Why are filmmakers always the last to get paid?"), but our moderator was having no deflections (as worthy a discussion as it may be). So we stayed on topic. The notion that any sum that a festival could pay a filmmaker is small change next to the way way more massive financial obstacles faced by creators doesn't wash with me. If it's that minuscule, then pay it. As one very respected filmmaker/producer attending put it (and I paraphrase), "It's always nice to be a able to tell your mom and dad that you're getting paid for your work."

We all agreed that, as a first step, the imperative of any film festival should be negating all costs incurred by a filmmaker in attending their event (more applause for Wilson!). I confessed that my 35% rule was a provocation, maybe even a bit of a red herring, and that the whole point of the discussion, for me, is getting a better deal, and tangible value, for filmmakers presenting their work at festivals.

Travel expenses and honorariums are a great start. And here are a few other practical suggestions for those festivals looking to make their events more filmmaker friendly:

Here's the video of the panel courtesy of the Full Frame Documentary Festival

ELIMINATE OR SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE SUBMISSION FEES. These fees 1) offset the administrative expense of the submission process 2) generate revenues and 3) provide a minimal barrier to entry, helping to stem the flood of submissions. Still, they are also taxes on the unconnected, especially as most credible festivals derive only minuscule portions of their programme from truly unsolicited submissions. And if filmmakers are to pay a fee, then perhaps festivals could consider some kind of feedback mechanism, even if it's the most perfunctory of human acknowledgments that a work was, indeed, seen.

IF YOU LOVE SOMEBODY, SET THEM FREE. Yes, I just quoted a Sting song. Most festivals invite films as they roll through their programming process, yet do not issue declination letters until well after they've locked their programmes. Filmmaker's fates hang in the balance, and often they lose months waiting on decisions that may have been made many weeks before they are notified. While a festival's shortlist is invariably rather long, even longer is that list of films that are decisively ruled out early in the process. Festivals should cut those filmmakers loose as early as possible. Sure, it might be can of rattlesnakes, but figure it out. Share a bit of the pain with the filmmakers, but set them free.

GIVE THEM THEIR AUDIENCE. Here I pay tribute to the great Les Blank, who always sold DVDs of past work directly to audiences following screenings of his films. I once helped him out after a Hot Docs screening of All In This Tea. He pocketed a few hundred bucks in twenty minutes, pulling discs out of rucksack he carried around. In the digital age every festival has a website page for each film in the programme. They also have large email lists. How about allowing direct donations to filmmakers via a paypal link on the festival website? Or, actively promoting digital releases with direct marketing to the festival audience? This comment, by James Belfer, was one of my favourites generated by the Fair Trade pieces: "If festivals gave me my audience I could do incredible things with it. I could A/B test SEO and inbound marketing techniques. [huh?] I could use it use it as a springboard towards self-distribution. I could even make new friends and family for my film. These things lead to a stronger audience overall, a higher chance of becoming cash flow positive, and maybe even leverage to show proof of concept when negotiating distribution deals. Don't give me money, give me my audience."

ISSUE ATTENDANCE REPORTS. Oh, here I go, pushing buttons again, but this was also mentioned on the panel at Full Frame. Wouldn't it be useful for producers to use the data from a film festival screening or run as negotiating leverage, or even for distributors to be able to report festival box office to drive up the screen averages? This is a raw idea, but we'd all like to know exactly how many people are watching films at film festivals, wouldn't we? Never mind the elusiveness of VOD numbers, even less is known about festival box office numbers.

Somebody recently advised me that I should never write more than 1000 words on the internets, so I stop here. In fact, I'm passing the torch on the issue. I'm no evangelical. There's a comments section below in which to provide your constructive suggestions, or your anonymous snipes. I'll offer my favourite comment a complimentary festival consultation (which I honoured, last time, btw). I'll also continue to collate the whole shebang on Storify. God speed. There are other bridges to burn.

Sean Farnel will be learning more about transmedia, and fine tequila, next week at Ambulante. He's working on something amazing. Many things, actually.

To Pay or Not to Pay: Discussing Film Festivals, Money and What You Need to Know at Full Frame

Robert Silva — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:16:57 GMT

In his Indiewire article "Fair Trade for Filmmakers," former Hot Docs programmer Sean Farnel made the case that film festivals owe something more to filmmakers than the honor of being selected. They owe them money. His contention that festivals should give filmmakers a cut of the ticket sales yielded strong reactions.

Last week at the 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Farnel appeared with True/False co-director David Wilson and Sundance senior programmer Caroline Libresco to discuss the article and making the festival experience better for filmmakers. Here's some highlights:

What inspired you to write the article?

Sean Farnel: I was programming at Hot Docs and we were often asked for screening fees. We had a 'no screening fee' policy . . . And yet we did pay screening fees from time to time when I really wanted a film. If it was going to be five hundred bucks or a thousand Euros or whatever, we'd find a way, we'd do it . . . I thought it was unfair because usually these fees would never find their way to the filmmaker because they weren't in the normal revenue line. . . And I thought if a few distributors are getting that money for us why can't we figure out a way to spread this money around to independent filmmakers?

A commercially released film gets 35 percent of ticket sales. But how does a festival run compare to a theatrical run?

Sean Farnel: Toronto has like seventy film festivals. That is the art-house repertory life of the city. If you did the numbers, the festivals combined do better numbers. . . But none of those revenues are cycled back to distribution or the filmmaking chain.

In an ideal world, how much should filmmakers get paid in screening fees?

Sean Farnel: The goal for me is thirty-five percent.

David Wilson: I think ten percent, even as a more far-off number, is a more realistic number.

Sean Farnel: And reach for the stars, maybe you'll make the moon.

David Wilson: I think my goal would be to make attending a festival a zero-sum for filmmakers. As an initial first thing. You know, even when we're doing flight and lodging and doing food and voucher for restaurants; they're still spending money. It's still going to cost them.

Caroline Libresco: I just don't think [screening fees are] relevant to the conversation . . . I think it raises the larger question: To what extent can we support artists in the U.S. at large? I don't think screening fees at film festivals would solve that problem on even a miniscule level.

Bare minimum, what should a festival offer filmmakers?

David Wilson: Flight and lodging. Every small festival in the country can do at least that. If you can't do that, I'm not sure why you're a festival.

Let's forget screening fees. What else could festivals do to make the experience better for filmmakers?

Sean Farnel: Festivals invite people as they go in the [submission] process, yet they never let filmmakers know until the end. Ninety-five percent of the people are going to be declined from most of the festivals, but they don't find out at the end . . . Why can't filmmakers be notified when there's a definitive "no" to their film? So they can move on and find another strategy? Yet they have to wait months in some cases for a "no."

David Wilson: It's so much nicer to think your film lasted all that way!

Caroline Libresco: It would create a frenzy among the filmmaking community if decisions were given before the end.

Sean Farnel: But it's a change in culture. Things in the culture have to change. And that's a major snag for a filmmaker to wait three months to find out they didn't get into Sundance. To have to regroup to miss a lot of deadlines as they're waiting. And you've lost three to six months of the life cycle of your film.

How about submission fees. Why are they so expensive?

Sean Farnel: There are submission fees because it's an expensive process to administer. Yet, I still tell filmmakers to refuse to pay them because in reality they're unevenly applied. Most filmmakers that we know, we waive the fees for them. It was, I thought, a very unfair practice in terms of evenly and justly applying those fees. And usually it was I thought a tax on the poor. You were making the filmmaker with the least chance of getting into the festival pay the fee.

Anything else filmmakers should know before submitting to festivals?

Sean Farnel: It's an honor to be selected. It's difficult to be selected in the film festival circuit. But it's also a business transaction.

'American Promise' Tops Full Frame Winners

Peter Knegt — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:01:02 GMT

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has announced the winners of its 2013 edition, which ran this past weekend. Joe

Full list of winners below, with descriptions and statements provided by the festival:

The Reva and David Logan Grand Jury Award

The Reva and David Logan Grand Jury Award was presented to American Promise directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. This personal film follows the directors’ son and his best friend from their first day of kindergarten through high school graduation, and how their lives diverge. This award is sponsored by The Reva and David Logan Foundation.

The Jury, Greg Barker, Nina Davenport, and Tia Lessin, stated: “We chose this film – which spans twelve years in the lives of two African American families – for the elegance and honesty with which filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson tell the story of their son Idris and his best friend Seun growing up in Brooklyn. This epic cinema-verite film is at once a revealing and affecting depiction of the contemporary black male experience and a deeply personal and beautifully observed portrait of a family.”

The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short

The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short was given to By Her Side directed by Niels van Koevorden, In this film, three fathers-to-be share their hopes, dreams, and anxieties as they anticipate the birth of their children. The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short is provided by Drs. Andrew and Barbra Rothschild.

The Jury, Ross McElwee, Elise Pearlstein, and Angela Tucker stated: “By Her Side takes the simple approach of intercutting interviews with three expectant fathers followed by the births of their children to deliver a surprisingly profound take on the act of becoming a father.”

Honorable Mention

The shorts Jury awarded an honorable mention to A Story for the Modlins directed by Sergio Oksman, stating “we also felt inspired to recognize the experimentation and inventiveness of A Story for the Modlins, which felt like it deserved a category of it’s own.” After discovering a stranger’s box of family photos on the sidewalk, Oksman pieces together a sketch of the Modlins’ bizarre lives.

Full Frame Audience Awards - Feature

A Will for the Woods, directed by Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale and Brian Wilson, received the Full Frame Audience Award Feature. This film explores the green burial movement by focusing on one man’s quest for a final resting place that will do no harm to the earth.The Audience Award Feature is sponsored by Merge Records.

Full Frame Audience Awards - Short

The Record Breaker, directed by Brian McGinn, received the Full Frame Audience Award Short. Even though he holds more Guinness Book of World Records than anyone else on the planet, McGinn’s film shows that Ashrita Furman is not slowing down. The prize for the Audience Award Short is provided by Vimeo.

The Center For Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award

The Center For Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award was given to A River Changes Course, directed by Kalyanee Mam. Is convenience progress? The film is a beautiful and heartbreaking vérité look at three families subsisting in (what may be the end of) rural Cambodia. Provided by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, this award honors a documentary artist whose work is a potential catalyst for education and change. Representatives from the Center for Documentary Studies juried the prize: Randy Benson, Katie Hyde, Lynn McKnight, Dan Partridge, Tom Rankin, Elena Rue, Teka Selman, and April Walton.

The Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award

Cutie and the Boxer, directed by Zachary Heinzerling, was awarded The Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award. Provided by the Charles E. Guggenheim family, this prize honors a first-time documentary feature director. In this film, the tension between an artist and his supportive wife of forty years is further strained when a curator expresses interest in her work. Robin Hessman, Alison Klayman, and Mark Landsman participated on the Jury.

Full Frame Inspiration Award

God Loves Uganda, directed by Roger Ross Williams, received the Full Frame Inspiration Award. The film captures how American Christian evangelists export virulent anti-gay teachings to Sub-Saharan Africa with deadly consequences. 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. Andrew Garrison, Sarah Masters, and Petna Ndaliko Katondolo participated on the Jury.

Full Frame President’s Award

The Full Frame President’s Award was presented to the Pablo’s Winter, directed by Chico Pereira. Former Almadén mercury miner Pablo spends his halcyon days cursing, kvetching, and chain-smoking to the chagrin of his wife and his doctor. Sponsored by Duke University, representatives on behalf of the President’s Office juried the prize.

The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights

After Tiller, directed by Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, received The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights. After the murder of their friend and colleague Dr. George Tiller, only four physicians continue to perform late-term abortions, risking their lives for women’s right to choose. Provided by the Julian Price Family Foundation, this award is presented to a film that addresses a significant human rights issue in the United States. Representatives from the Kathleen Bryan Edwards family juried the prize: Anne Arwood, Laura Edwards, Clay Farland, Margaret Griffin, and Pricey Harrison.

Honorable Mention

The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Family awarded an honorable mention to The Undocumented directed by Marco Williams. This film offers an unvarnished account of the repatriation of the remains of immigrants who died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the Arizona desert.

The Nicholas School Environmental Award

The Nicholas School Environmental Award was presented to A Will for the Woods directed by Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale and Brian Wilson. This film explores the green burial movement by focusing on one man’s quest for a final resting place that will do no harm to the earth. The Nicholas School Environmental 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 heritages that define us. Representatives from the Nicholas School of the Environment juried the Prize: Cindy Horn, Stephen Nemeth, Hart Bochner, Rebecca Patton, and Tom Rankin.

Review: In Documentary 'Maidentrip,' Laura Dekker Looks for Paradise in a Sea that Never Ends

Beth Hanna — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:05:03 GMT

Jillian Schlesinger’s “Maidentrip,” which debuted at SXSW and screens this weekend at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, chronicles Dutch teen Laura Dekker’s sail around the globe at age 14, a feat which would win her the title in 2012 of youngest person in history to make the voyage alone. Observant and unassuming, the documentary looks at the significance of Laura’s trip not in terms of records, but as a rite of passage, and as a way for the teen to negotiate her past.

The film gets the ugly stuff out of the way first. Following Dekker’s announcement to sail in 2009, she and her father were embroiled in a ten-month legal battle. Dutch authorities claimed that Laura needed a custody transfer, while the internet tossed words at her including “arrogant,” “spoiled” and the particularly nasty sentiment: “I hope she sinks.” After a year of warring with the courts and shouldering waves of media opinion, Laura was permitted to make her voyage, and to remain under her father’s custody. This period in time Schlesinger keeps to an economical five-minute montage.

Indeed, “Maidentrip” is pleasantly free from the hysteria that surrounded Laura Dekker for over a year, and instead presents her trip in a judgment-free manner. It neither suggests (as it understandably could) that 14 is an alarmingly young age to traverse the mightily unforgiving Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, nor takes a blindly positive “Ra! Ra! Go Laura!” stance (as would be tempting, given that Laura proves herself an admirable badass in many ways).

Instead, Laura is portrayed as an independent outsider, at once open-hearted, enviably confident and a bit prickly, sick of what she sees as daily life in Holland (which she rounds up succinctly: “Get money, get a house, get a husband, get a baby, then die”). She pines for a truly outsized adventure. While other young record-holding sailors completed the round-world trip without lengthy stops at ports, Laura gives herself two years for the excursion, so that she can soak in the land-bound culture of the different climes where she alights (among them French Polynesia, Australia, the Galapagos Islands and South Africa).

A large portion of the footage we see was filmed exclusively by Laura while onboard. To be eligible as a record-holder, she was allowed no crewmates while captaining her trusty boat The Guppy, so Dekker acts as her own camera operator and narrator, periodically filming herself throughout her trip, commenting on the winds, weather and whatever else might be on her mind.

Laura’s camera proves therapeutic for the onset of loneliness that strikes her early in the expedition; the device is something to talk to. She comments on the silly and mundane, but also on the more profound experiences of being thousands of miles from land or another human. We hear her sniffling through tears as she films a pod of dolphins swimming alongside her boat, pleading with them to stay awhile and assuage her feelings of isolation.

Yet as time and the documentary go on we sense a change in Laura. She’s relishing the days on end of alone time, and seemingly more attuned to the fluctuations of the ocean. A rather dicey passage around the southernmost tip of South Africa offers up 60-foot waves and weather conditions that a newspaper informs us “even the bravest skipper wouldn’t attempt.” Laura checks in with us for a moment during this leg of the journey, glowing green in her camera’s night vision, unphased by the torrents of rain and wind raging outside.

Of course many of the most daring parts of Laura’s voyage -- those that would consume her undivided attention -- aren’t caught on camera, and we’re left to fill in the blanks. Director Schlesinger instead focuses on the meditative aspects of the young woman’s sail, examining how a preternaturally assured teen handles the day-in, day-out routines of taking care of herself and her home, getting from point A to point B, drifting pleasantly in between, and greeting and parting from new places and friends.

I would argue that Laura’s voyage is a coming-of-age, at once grander and more outlandish than most, while set in a strangely contained microcosm of time (two years) and space (her 40-foot boat). Yet Schlesinger also pointedly includes home video and photo montages of Laura’s early life as an infant and toddler, when she and her parents, who soon thereafter divorced, were sailing the globe as a family. It’s telling that Laura retraces her parents’ route port for port, and that she repeatedly refers to the sunny, tropical locations as “paradise.” As she describes in voiceover her difficult childhood, much of which she spent alone while her single father worked and her mother began a new, separate life, we realize that Laura’s record-breaking sail not only represents her ascension into adulthood, but also her way to reclaim a paradise lost.

Watch an exclusive clip from "Maidentrip" here.

Exclusive: 2 Powerful Scenes From Health Insurance Doc 'Remote Area Medical'; Premieres at Full Frame

Mark Lukenbill — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:08:06 GMT

Last year, filmmaker duo Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman (2010's election doc "Gerrymandering") made a three minute informational doc on Remote Area Medical, a free, three day pop up medical clinic in Tennessee that specializes in providing care to Americans without health insurance. You can see the short here, but ever since the two have been working on completing a full length version of the doc.

The feature, also titled "Remote Area Medical," aims to put a human face on what it means to not have health insurance. It will have its world premiere at Full Frame Film Festival, which runs from April 4th to 7th in Durham, North Carolina. It'll then move over to Hot Docs, the Canadian International Film Festival, from April 25th to May 5th. The moving doc boasts a score from longtime David Gordon Green collaborator David Wingo and was cut by Spike Lee's go to doc editor Sam Pollard. You can check out two exclusive scenes from the film below.

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Reveals 2013 Slate

Beth Hanna — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:56:38 GMT

At a time when doc production is exploding and ways of telling real-life stories have never been more innovative and varied, it's a great moment to check out the eclectic selection at the 16th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which is becoming a major doc showcase. Running April 4-7 in Durham, North Carolina, Full Frame has revealed its 2013 slate.

Included in this year's voluminous program of new films are Sundance hits "After Tiller," a portrait of doctors who perform third-trimester abortions, Lucy Walker's portrait of an intrepid snowboarder, "The Crash Reel," and HBO's CIA vs. Bin Laden doc "Manhunt," as well as SXSW entries "Maidentrip" and "Downloaded"; the former following teen Laura Dekker's record-breaking sail around the world, and the latter an in-depth look at Napster.

The invited program includes two TIFF debuts, Williams' sisters portrait "Venus and Serena," and "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners" as well as arty fishing industry close-up "Leviathan."

HBO's "Gideon's Army," following three young public defenders in the Deep South, is set for opening night.

Invited Program

Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (Directors: Drew DeNicola, Olivia Mori)
Myth and music collide in this story of the influence and impact of revered power-pop band Big Star, featuring never-before-seen footage, photos, and interviews.

Citizen Koch (Directors: Carl Deal, Tia Lessin)
A multilayered dissection of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United campaign finance decision as seen through the lens of Wisconsin’s 2011 election standoff.

The Crash Reel (Director: Lucy Walker)
After a training accident leaves Kevin Pearce with a traumatic brain injury, the intrepid snowboarder undertakes a remarkable recovery.

DaVinci (Director: Yuri Ancarani)
This surreal portrait of a fantastic voyage features visuals from a camera-based surgical computer controlled by a single joystick.

The Editor and the Dragon: Horace Carter Fights the Klan (Directors: Martin M. Clark, Walter E. Campbell)
A smalltown newspaper editor in North Carolina stands up to the KKK and is awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for his courageous and tireless dissent.

Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children (Director: Patrick Reed)
If you’ve been to hell and back, how do you exorcise the memories? Former U.N. commander Roméo Dallaire’s new mission: end the use of child soldiers. North American Premiere

First Cousin Once Removed (Director: Alan Berliner)
In this stirring tribute, Alan Berliner traces the tenacious lines of connection between him and his cousin Edwin Honig as Edwin slowly succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease.

Free Angela & All Political Prisoners (Director: Shola Lynch)
Activist Angela Davis recounts her 1970 arrest and trial, which helped define her life as a revolutionary icon and champion of free speech.

The Fruit Hunters (Director: Yung Chang)
Extremely dedicated connoisseurs seek to devour, yet also sustain, the world’s most intoxicating and elusive produce.

Gideon’s Army (Director: Dawn Porter)
This remarkable film—a powerful testament to what it means to dedicate one’s life to the service of others—follows three young public defenders as they wrestle with massive caseloads and overwhelming student loans in order to ensure the rights of the accused.

If You Build It (Director: Patrick Creadon)
Innovative teachers, striving students, and a radical curriculum in Bertie County, N.C., are chronicled over the course of one transformative year. World Premiere

In So Many Words (Director: Elisabeth Haviland James)
This intensely revealing biography of writer Lucy Daniels expands the documentary form with its imaginative visualization of the stresses of her early life. World Premiere

The Last Shepherd (L’ultimo pastore) (Director: Marco Bonfanti)
This beautifully shot story of the last travelling shepherd shows that pastoral bliss may be sustained even in industrial northern Italy.

Leviathan (Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel)
This gripping multi-perspective account takes us deep within the shadows of a commercial fishing vessel.

Manhunt (Director: Greg Barker)
This spellbinding film dissects the painstaking search for Osama bin Laden, which originated with the “Sisterhood,” a remarkable team of CIA analysts.

Mussels in Love (L’Amour des Moules) (Director: Willemiek Kluijfhout)
In this magnificently photographed and playful ode, a variety of characters profess their devotion to the briny mollusk. US Premiere

Open Heart (Director: Kief Davidson)
Rwandan six-year-old Angelique must have heart surgery, but her dad isn’t allowed to go with her to the hospital in Sudan, or to recover her body if she dies.

Pandora's Promise (Director: Robert Stone)
Environmentalists and former anti-nuclear activists on three continents reflect upon their changes-of-heart about the safety and tremendous potential of nuclear energy.

Running from Crazy (Director: Barbara Kopple)
In light of her family’s history of suicide, Mariel Hemingway refuses to let mental illness overwhelm her own life: “control is everything.”

Sofia’s Last Ambulance (Director: Ilian Metev)
Krassi, Mila, and Plamen staunchly navigate the potholes that pepper Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, in one of the city’s few remaining ambulances.

Venus and Serena (Directors: Maiken Baird, Michelle Major)
This unprecedented look at the tennis legends’ lives on and off the court is accentuated by the testaments of family, friends, and some of their more famous fans.

We Always Lie to Strangers (Directors: AJ Schnack, David Wilson)
This touching portrayal takes us into the lives of four families who perform for tourists in the “live music capital of the world,” Branson, Missouri.

Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (Director: Sebastian Junger)
A warm and candid portrait of the extraordinarily brave, empathic photographer, who died in Libya in 2011, by his partner on the film Restrepo.

The World According to Dick Cheney (Directors: R.J. Cutler, Greg Finton)
A wealth of archival material and interviews shape this comprehensive, even-handed portrait of one of America’s most divisive politicians.

NEW DOCS

12 O'Clock Boys (Director: Lotfy Nathan)
A struggling adolescent seeks acceptance from a group of extreme dirt bikers, an illegal gang seen to be terrorizing the streets of Baltimore.

After Tiller (Directors: Martha Shane, Lana Wilson)
After the murder of their friend and colleague Dr. George Tiller, only four physicians continue to perform late-term abortions, risking their lives for women’s right to choose.

AKA Doc Pomus (Directors: Peter Miller, Will Hechter)
This biopic celebrates blues legend Doc Pomus, AKA Jerome Felder, a man who didn’t just write “Lonely Avenue” but lived it.

American Promise (Directors: Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster)
This personal film follows the directors’ son and his best friend from their first day of kindergarten through high school graduation, and how their lives diverge.

Ash (Director: Nathan S. Duncan)
This moody, experimental portrait of Austin State Hospital’s vacated spaces is a ghostly memorial to the patients who once stayed there. World Premiere

The Baby (De Baby) (Director: Deborah van Dam)
As one woman pieces together the fragmented memories of her childhood, she finds herself linked to a photograph of Anne Frank holding an infant girl. North American Premiere

Battery Man (Biba Struja) (Directors: Dusan Cavic, Dusan Saponja)
“Electricity has no friends but me.” The story of a (super)man who can withstand, and control, up to 20,000 volts of electricity.

Black Out (Director: Eva Weber)
With no power at home, Guinean children walk miles to study for exams beneath the humming glow of airport, gas station, and parking lot lights. North American Premiere

Blood Brother (Director: Steve Hoover)
A man's life is changed forever when he travels to India and realizes he cannot leave the children he has met at an orphanage behind.

Buzkashi! (Director: Najeeb Mirza)
A visually stunning film in which a Tajikistani shepherd must confront momentous changes both at home and in his beloved sport of Buzkashi.

By Her Side (Ik stond erbij) (Director: Niels van Koevorden)
Three fathers-to-be share their hopes, dreams, and anxieties as they anticipate the birth of their children. North American Premiere

Camera/Woman (Director: Karima Zoubir)
A Moroccan divorcée supports her family by documenting wedding parties while navigating her own series of heartaches. North American Premiere

Cutie and the Boxer (Director: Zachary Heinzerling)
The tension between an artist and his supportive wife of forty years is further strained when a curator expresses interest in her work.

Dance for Me (Dans for mig) (Director: Katrine Philp)
A teenage Russian dancer relocates to Denmark to live with his adolescent partner so they can prepare for a series of prestigious ballroom championships. North American Premiere

Downloaded (Director: Alex Winter)
The history of Napster, from its humble chatroom beginnings to its takedown at the hands of a music industry that didn’t know what hit it.

The Expedition to the End of the World (Ekspeditionen til verdens ende) (Director: Daniel Dencik)
A motley collection of scientists and artists board a restored three-mast schooner and set out for uncharted territory, engaging in equal measures of exploration and whimsy.

Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story (Director: Brad Bernstein)
Expect the unexpected from this outré graphic artist, erotic illustrator, and revolutionary children’s book author and his unconventional views.

First Comes Love (Director: Nina Davenport)
In this autobiographical portrait, Nina Davenport boldly lays bare the hardships and triumphs of her journey toward single motherhood in a modern age.

God Loves Uganda (Director: Roger Ross Williams)
American Christian evangelists export virulent anti-gay teachings to Sub-Saharan Africa with deadly consequences.

Good Ol’ Freda (Director: Ryan White)
Liverpudlian teenager Freda Kelly was the Beatles secretary and tells “one of the last true stories of the Beatles you’ll ever hear.”

Homegoings (Director: Christine Turner)
This film explores the mind of a man whose heart and passion for the dead inspires our own appreciation for the human soul.

Irish Folk Furniture (Director: Tony Donoghue)
Spirited animation brings handmade furniture to life in this colorful and delightfully quirky slice of rural Ireland.

Magnetic Reconnection (Director: Kyle Armstrong)
The Canadian Arctic is the terrestrial, and extraterrestrial, setting for a contemplative survey of transience, from generations-old decay to fleeting particles of light.

Maidentrip (Director: Jillian Schlesinger)
Follow teenager Laura Dekker across three oceans and five continents on her journey to become the youngest person to sail around the world—alone.

Medora (Directors: Andrew Cohn, Davy Rothbart)
In Indiana, a high school basketball team on a 44-game losing streak isn’t reaching for the championship—they just want to win a single game.

Menstrual Man (Director: Amit Virmani)
A microenterpreneur has a dream: to reduce gynecological diseases among rural Indian women by teaching them to make, and sell, sanitary pads. World Premiere

Muscle Shoals (Director: Greg 'Freddy' Camalier)
There is more than meets the ear in these vivid and surprising accounts of performance and perseverance in the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, music scene.

Nile Perch (Director: Josh Gibson)
An austere and contemplative observation of Lake Victoria fishermen rendered in arresting chiaroscuro.

Our Nixon (Director: Penny Lane)
Super 8 footage by Oval Office intimates Haldeman, Ehlrichman, and Chapin deliver an astonishingly fresh view of the Nixon White House.

Outlawed in Pakistan (Directors: Habiba Nosheen, Hilke Schellmann)
After a young woman is brutally raped, her family overcomes severe social customs and tribal norms in order to take her case to trial.

Pablo’s Winter (Director: Chico Pereira)
Former Almadén mercury miner Pablo spends his halcyon days cursing, kvetching, and chain-smoking to the chagrin of his wife and his doctor.

The Palace (Director: Tomasz Wolski)
A fascinating and witty cinematic portrait of a gigantic Soviet-era edifice and its denizens in Warsaw, Poland.

The Pleasures of Being Out of Step (Director: David L. Lewis)
This non-linear profile of jazz critic Nat Hentoff is laced with music and illuminates the civil libertarian’s enduring influence. World Premiere

Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer (Directors: Mike Lerner, Maxim Pozdorovkin)
The titular band’s controversial performance and subsequent imprisonment are documented in this revealing portrait of the women and their cause.

Reborning (Directors: Yael Bridge, Helen Hood Scheer)
The story of one woman’s calling to create dolls that look exactly like newborn babies.

The Record Breaker (Director: Brian McGinn)
Even though he holds more Guinness Book of World Records than anyone else on the planet, Ashrita Furman is not slowing down.

Remote Area Medical (Directors: Jeff Reichert, Farihah Zaman)
Over the course of one weekend, RAM's dedicated team sets up a “pop-up” clinic at a NASCAR speedway to provide no-cost, accessible healthcare to people in need. World Premiere

A River Changes Course (Director: Kalyanee Mam)
Is convenience progress? A beautiful and heartbreaking vérité look at three families subsisting in (what may be the end of) rural Cambodia.

Slomo (Director: Josh Izenberg)
A wealthy neurologist leaves the rat race behind and gracefully skates his way, on one foot, to spiritual fulfillment.

Spinning Plates (Director: Joseph Levy)
From a small cocina to a mecca for country dining to a three-star restaurant in Chicago, this film celebrates our passion for eating out.

A Story for the Modlins (Director: Sergio Oksman)
After discovering a stranger’s box of family photos on the sidewalk, Oksman pieces together a sketch of the Modlins’ bizarre lives.

Suitcase of Love and Shame (Director: Jane Gillooly)
This experimental film reconstructs a mid-century love affair using erotically charged correspondence left behind on reel-to-reel tape. North American Premiere
Taxidermists (Director: Nicole Triche)
This story of artists who love wildlife culminates in the “Olympics of taxidermy” and presents some of the most breathtaking animal sculptures ever captured on film.

True-Life Adventure (Director: Erin Espelie)
A dramatic four-minute nature documentary chronicling what happens in a tiny area of a Rocky Mountain stream on a lovely June afternoon. North American Premiere

Twenty Feet from Stardom (Director: Morgan Neville)
Backup singers, the unsung heroes of pop music, finally get their moment in the spotlight in this jubilant history and appreciation.

The Undocumented (Director: Marco Williams)
An unvarnished account of the repatriation of the remains of immigrants who died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the Arizona desert. World Premiere

A Will for the Woods (Directors: Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale, Brian Wilson)
This film explores the green burial movement by focusing on one man’s quest for a final resting place that will do no harm to the earth. World Premiere

Wolf Mountain (Directors: Dan Duran, Brendan Nahmias, Sam Price-Waldman)
At Wolf Mountain Sanctuary in the Mojave Desert, Tonya Littlewolf literally runs with the wolves, those that were born in captivity and are unsuited for life as pets or in the wild.

Wrong Time Wrong Place (Director: John Appel)
Survivors of the 2011 bombing and mass shooting in Norway recount the day’s tragic events in this look at how chance circumstances can have profound consequences. North American Premiere

You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Director: Scott Calonico)
Diplomacy, arm-twisting, and gastronomy as lifted from LBJ’s daily diaries and recorded phone conversations and animated by archival photographs.

Yucca Mtn Tally (Director: Phoebe Brush)
An artful reflection on a nuclear waste repository in the Nevada desert is filmed against a backdrop of boundless horizon and thoughts about deep time.

First Look At The 16th Annual Full Frame Festival Lineup & Opening Night Selection, 'Gideon's Army'

Cristina A. Gonzalez — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:52:39 GMT

Full frame announced their complete program lineup today with Dawn Porter's critically-acclaimed "Gideon's Army" set as the Opening Night Film on Thursday, April 4th.

The opening night selection, "Gideon's Army", is an HBO Documentary Film. The film follows the personal stories of Travis Williams, Brandy Alexander and June Hardwick, three young public defenders who are part of a small group of idealistic lawyers in the Deep South challenging the assumptions that drive a criminal justice system strained to the breaking point.

Director Dawn Porter said: "We are thrilled and honored to be the Opening Night selection of this celebrated and beloved festival. This is the 50th anniversary of the Gideon decision guaranteeing the right to counsel, and we are grateful to be able to share this film at such a prestigious event during the anniversary year."

Expect competition to increase as this year's festival marks that first time that Full Frame will be a qualifying event for consideration for nominations for both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject and The Producers Guild of America Awards.

Festival Passes are on sale now and can be purchased online here.

Full lineup below. The festival runs April 4-7, 2013, in Durham, NC.

Full Frame 2013:

Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (Directors: Drew DeNicola, Olivia Mori)
Myth and music collide in this story of the influence and impact of revered power-pop band Big Star, featuring never-before-seen footage, photos, and interviews.

Citizen Koch (Directors: Carl Deal, Tia Lessin)
A multilayered dissection of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United campaign finance decision as seen through the lens of Wisconsin’s 2011 election standoff.

The Crash Reel (Director: Lucy Walker)
After a training accident leaves Kevin Pearce with a traumatic brain injury, the intrepid snowboarder undertakes a remarkable recovery.

DaVinci (Director: Yuri Ancarani)
This surreal portrait of a fantastic voyage features visuals from a camera-based surgical computer controlled by a single joystick.

The Editor and the Dragon: Horace Carter Fights the Klan (Directors: Martin M. Clark, Walter E. Campbell)
A smalltown newspaper editor in North Carolina stands up to the KKK and is awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for his courageous and tireless dissent.

Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children (Director: Patrick Reed)
If you’ve been to hell and back, how do you exorcise the memories? Former U.N. commander Roméo Dallaire’s new mission: end the use of child soldiers. North American Premiere

First Cousin Once Removed (Director: Alan Berliner)
In this stirring tribute, Alan Berliner traces the tenacious lines of connection between him and his cousin Edwin Honig as Edwin slowly succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease.

Free Angela & All Political Prisoners (Director: Shola Lynch)
Activist Angela Davis recounts her 1970 arrest and trial, which helped define her life as a revolutionary icon and champion of free speech.

The Fruit Hunters (Director: Yung Chang)
Extremely dedicated connoisseurs seek to devour, yet also sustain, the world’s most intoxicating and elusive produce.

Gideon’s Army (Director: Dawn Porter)
This remarkable film—a powerful testament to what it means to dedicate one’s life to the service of others—follows three young public defenders as they wrestle with massive caseloads and overwhelming student loans in order to ensure the rights of the accused.

If You Build It (Director:Patrick Creadon)
Innovative teachers, striving students, and a radical curriculum in Bertie County, N.C., are chronicled over the course of one transformative year.
World Premiere

In So Many Words (Director: Elisabeth Haviland James)
This intensely revealing biography of writer Lucy Daniels expands the documentary form with its imaginative visualization of the stresses of her early life. World Premiere

The Last Shepherd (L’ultimo pastore) (Director: Marco Bonfanti)
This beautifully shot story of the last travelling shepherd shows that pastoral bliss may be sustained even in industrial northern Italy.

Leviathan (Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel)
This gripping multi-perspective account takes us deep within the shadows of a commercial fishing vessel.

Manhunt (Director: Greg Barker)
This spellbinding film dissects the painstaking search for Osama bin Laden, which originated with the “Sisterhood,” a remarkable team of CIA analysts.

Mussels in Love (L’Amour des Moules) (Director: Willemiek Kluijfhout)
In this magnificently photographed and playful ode, a variety of characters profess their devotion to the briny mollusk. US Premiere

Open Heart (Director: Kief Davidson)Rwandan six-year-old Angelique must have heart surgery, but her dad isn’t allowed to go with her to the hospital in Sudan, or to recover her body if she dies.

Pandora's Promise (Director: Robert Stone)
Environmentalists and former anti-nuclear activists on three continents reflect upon their changes-of-heart about the safety and tremendous potential of nuclear energy.

Running from Crazy (Director: Barbara Kopple)
In light of her family’s history of suicide, Mariel Hemingway refuses to let mental illness overwhelm her own life: “control is everything.”

Sofia’s Last Ambulance (Director: Ilian Metev)Krassi, Mila, and Plamen staunchly navigate the potholes that pepper Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, in one of the city’s few remaining ambulances.

Venus and Serena (Directors: Maiken Baird, Michelle Major)
This unprecedented look at the tennis legends’ lives on and off the court is accentuated by the testaments of family, friends, and some of their more famous fans.

We Always Lie to Strangers (Directors: AJ Schnack, David Wilson)
This touching portrayal takes us into the lives of four families who perform for tourists in the “live music capital of the world,” Branson, Missouri.

Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (Director: Sebastian Junger)
A warm and candid portrait of the extraordinarily brave, empathic photographer, who died in Libya in 2011, by his partner on the film Restrepo.

The World According to Dick Cheney (Directors: R.J. Cutler, Greg Finton)
A wealth of archival material and interviews shape this comprehensive, even-handed portrait of one of America’s most divisive politicians.

NEW DOCS

12 O'Clock Boys (Director: Lotfy Nathan)
A struggling adolescent seeks acceptance from a group of extreme dirt bikers, an illegal gang seen to be terrorizing the streets of Baltimore.

After Tiller (Directors: Martha Shane, Lana Wilson)
After the murder of their friend and colleague Dr. George Tiller, only four physicians continue to perform late-term abortions, risking their lives for women’s right to choose.

AKA Doc Pomus (Directors: Peter Miller, Will Hechter)
This biopic celebrates blues legend Doc Pomus, AKA Jerome Felder, a man who didn’t just write “Lonely Avenue” but lived it.

American Promise (Directors: Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster)
This personal film follows the directors’ son and his best friend from their first day of kindergarten through high school graduation, and how their lives diverge.

Ash (Director: Nathan S. Duncan)
This moody, experimental portrait of Austin State Hospital’s vacated spaces is a ghostly memorial to the patients who once stayed there. World Premiere

The Baby (De Baby) (Director: Deborah van Dam)
As one woman pieces together the fragmented memories of her childhood, she finds herself linked to a photograph of Anne Frank holding an infant girl. North American Premiere

Battery Man (Biba Struja) (Directors: Dusan Cavic, Dusan Saponja)
“Electricity has no friends but me.” The story of a (super)man who can withstand, and control, up to 20,000 volts of electricity.

Black Out (Director: Eva Weber)
With no power at home, Guinean children walk miles to study for exams beneath the humming glow of airport, gas station, and parking lot lights. North American Premiere

Blood Brother (Director: Steve Hoover)
A man's life is changed forever when he travels to India and realizes he cannot leave the children he has met at an orphanage behind.

Buzkashi! (Director: Najeeb Mirza)
A visually stunning film in which a Tajikistani shepherd must confront momentous changes both at home and in his beloved sport of Buzkashi.

By Her Side (Ik stond erbij) (Director: Niels van Koevorden)
Three fathers-to-be share their hopes, dreams, and anxieties as they anticipate the birth of their children. North American Premiere

Camera/Woman (Director: Karima Zoubir)
A Moroccan divorcée supports her family by documenting wedding parties while navigating her own series of heartaches. North American Premiere

Cutie and the Boxer (Director: Zachary Heinzerling)
The tension between an artist and his supportive wife of forty years is further strained when a curator expresses interest in her work.

Dance for Me (Dans for mig) (Director: Katrine Philp)
A teenage Russian dancer relocates to Denmark to live with his adolescent partner so they can prepare for a series of prestigious ballroom championships. North American Premiere

Downloaded (Director: Alex Winter)
The history of Napster, from its humble chatroom beginnings to its takedown at the hands of a music industry that didn’t know what hit it.

The Expedition to the End of the World (Ekspeditionen til verdens ende) (Director: Daniel Dencik)
A motley collection of scientists and artists board a restored three-mast schooner and set out for uncharted territory, engaging in equal measures of exploration and whimsy.

Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story (Director: Brad Bernstein)
Expect the unexpected from this outré graphic artist, erotic illustrator, and revolutionary children’s book author and his unconventional views.

First Comes Love (Director: Nina Davenport)
In this autobiographical portrait, Nina Davenport boldly lays bare the hardships and triumphs of her journey toward single motherhood in a modern age.

God Loves Uganda (Director: Roger Ross Williams)
American Christian evangelists export virulent anti-gay teachings to Sub-Saharan Africa with deadly consequences.

Good Ol’ Freda (Director: Ryan White)
Liverpudlian teenager Freda Kelly was the Beatles secretary and tells “one of the last true stories of the Beatles you’ll ever hear.”

Homegoings (Director: Christine Turner)
This film explores the mind of a man whose heart and passion for the dead inspires our own appreciation for the human soul.

Irish Folk Furniture (Director: Tony Donoghue)
Spirited animation brings handmade furniture to life in this colorful and delightfully quirky slice of rural Ireland.

Magnetic Reconnection (Director: Kyle Armstrong)
The Canadian Arctic is the terrestrial, and extraterrestrial, setting for a contemplative survey of transience, from generations-old decay to fleeting particles of light.

Maidentrip (Director: Jillian Schlesinger)
Follow teenager Laura Dekker across three oceans and five continents on her journey to become the youngest person to sail around the world—alone.

Medora (Directors: Andrew Cohn, Davy Rothbart)
In Indiana, a high school basketball team on a 44-game losing streak isn’t reaching for the championship—they just want to win a single game.

Menstrual Man (Director: Amit Virmani)
A microenterpreneur has a dream: to reduce gynecological diseases among rural Indian women by teaching them to make, and sell, sanitary pads. World Premiere

Muscle Shoals (Director: Greg 'Freddy' Camalier)
There is more than meets the ear in these vivid and surprising accounts of performance and perseverance in the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, music scene.

Nile Perch (Director: Josh Gibson)
An austere and contemplative observation of Lake Victoria fishermen rendered in arresting chiaroscuro.

Our Nixon (Director: Penny Lane)
Super 8 footage by Oval Office intimates Haldeman, Ehlrichman, and Chapin deliver an astonishingly fresh view of the Nixon White House.

Outlawed in Pakistan (Directors: Habiba Nosheen, Hilke Schellmann)
After a young woman is brutally raped, her family overcomes severe social customs and tribal norms in order to take her case to trial.

Pablo’s Winter (Director: Chico Pereira)
Former Almadén mercury miner Pablo spends his halcyon days cursing, kvetching, and chain-smoking to the chagrin of his wife and his doctor.

The Palace (Director: Tomasz Wolski)
A fascinating and witty cinematic portrait of a gigantic Soviet-era edifice and its denizens in Warsaw, Poland.

The Pleasures of Being Out of Step (Director: David L. Lewis)
This non-linear profile of jazz critic Nat Hentoff is laced with music and illuminates the civil libertarian’s enduring influence. World Premiere

Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer (Directors: Mike Lerner, Maxim Pozdorovkin) The titular band’s controversial performance and subsequent imprisonment are documented in this revealing portrait of the women and their cause.

Reborning (Directors: Yael Bridge, Helen Hood Scheer)
The story of one woman’s calling to create dolls that look exactly like newborn babies.

The Record Breaker (Director: Brian McGinn)
Even though he holds more Guinness Book of World Records than anyone else on the planet, Ashrita Furman is not slowing down.

Remote Area Medical (Directors: Jeff Reichert, Farihah Zaman)
Over the course of one weekend, RAM's dedicated team sets up a “pop-up” clinic at a NASCAR speedway to provide no-cost, accessible healthcare to people in need. World Premiere

A River Changes Course (Director: Kalyanee Mam)
Is convenience progress? A beautiful and heartbreaking vérité look at three families subsisting in (what may be the end of) rural Cambodia.

Slomo (Director: Josh Izenberg)
A wealthy neurologist leaves the rat race behind and gracefully skates his way, on one foot, to spiritual fulfillment.

Spinning Plates (Director: Joseph Levy)
From a small cocina to a mecca for country dining to a three-star restaurant in Chicago, this film celebrates our passion for eating out.

A Story for the Modlins (Director: Sergio Oksman)
After discovering a stranger’s box of family photos on the sidewalk, Oksman pieces together a sketch of the Modlins’ bizarre lives.

Suitcase of Love and Shame (Director: Jane Gillooly)
This experimental film reconstructs a mid-century love affair using erotically charged correspondence left behind on reel-to-reel tape. North American Premiere

Taxidermists (Director: Nicole Triche)
This story of artists who love wildlife culminates in the “Olympics of taxidermy” and presents some of the most breathtaking animal sculptures ever captured on film.

True-Life Adventure (Director: Erin Espelie)
A dramatic four-minute nature documentary chronicling what happens in a tiny area of a Rocky Mountain stream on a lovely June afternoon. North American Premiere

Twenty Feet from Stardom (Director: Morgan Neville)
Backup singers, the unsung heroes of pop music, finally get their moment in the spotlight in this jubilant history and appreciation.

The Undocumented (Director: Marco Williams)
An unvarnished account of the repatriation of the remains of immigrants who died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the Arizona desert. World Premiere

A Will for the Woods (Directors: Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale, Brian Wilson)This film explores the green burial movement by focusing on one man’s quest for a final resting place that will do no harm to the earth. World Premiere

Wolf Mountain (Directors: Dan Duran, Brendan Nahmias, Sam Price-Waldman)
At Wolf Mountain Sanctuary in the Mojave Desert, Tonya Littlewolf literally runs with the wolves, those that were born in captivity and are unsuited for life as pets or in the wild.

Wrong Time Wrong Place (Director: John Appel)
Survivors of the 2011 bombing and mass shooting in Norway recount the day’s tragic events in this look at how chance circumstances can have profound consequences. North American Premiere

You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Director: Scott Calonico)
Diplomacy, arm-twisting, and gastronomy as lifted from LBJ’s daily diaries and recorded phone conversations and animated by archival photographs.

Yucca Mtn Tally (Director: Phoebe Brush)
An artful reflection on a nuclear waste repository in the Nevada desert is filmed against a backdrop of boundless horizon and thoughts about deep time.

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Chosen as Oscar-Qualifying in Documentary Short Category

Beth Hanna — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:24:33 GMT

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has been selected as an Academy Award-qualifying festival in the Documentary Short Subject category. This decision follows a recent similar decision by the Producers Guild.

This means that a short documentary film of 40 minutes or less that receives the fest's Jury Award for Best Short will automatically qualify for consideration in the Docuementary Short category of the Oscars, without a standard theatrical run.

The winner of this year's fest, running April 4-7, will qualify for the concurrent season, from September 1, 2012 to August 21, 2013.

Full Frame, celebrating its 16th anniversary, screened many of the nominated films in this year's documentary feature category, including "How to Survive a Plague" and "The Invisible War." "Searching for Sugarman" screened during Full Frame's year-round programming.

'The Waiting Room' Director Peter Nicks Talks Immersive Verite ER Documentary--On Oscar Shortlist

Anne Thompson — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:56:00 GMT

"The Waiting Room" is now on the Academy's shortlist of fifteen titles that are in the running to compete for the Best Documentary Oscar. Five films will be nominated. "The Waiting Room" is also nominated for the Indie Spirits' Best Documentary and Truer Than Fiction awards, and was nominated for a Gotham award. Check out our interview with the film's director, Peter Nicks, below. It was first published September 25, 2012.

Most documentaries emerge through various known gatekeepers at major festivals. More and more these days, such a plethora of strong docs are being made by talent able to deploy inexpensive digital cameras that it's easy for new faces to get lost. "The Waiting Room" is a brilliant first feature from veteran television journalist Peter Nicks, who was unknown by many fest programmers. Hence it didn't turn up at Sundance (which favored "Escape Fire," the health-care "Waiting for Superman"), SXSW or Tribeca, but rather at True/False, Full Frame, Silver Docs, Ashland and San Francisco fests.

(See TOH's review here and the trailer here.)

After listening to his wife come home every night with stories from her experiences at Oakland's main trauma center, Highland Hospital, Nicks decided to shoot a film there. "The Waiting Room" looks like it takes place over the course of one crammed night, but in fact he covered the ER for months, distilling a colorful cross-section of the most dramatic stories. Some are heartbreaking, from the father distraught that his little girl is burning with fever, to the young recently married man with no insurance who needs a major life-saving operation.

At a time when it's popular to make a film with a sharp edge that advocates a strong position, Nicks made a conscious decision to go immersive with a hybrid verite approach, "not to make a polemic film," he says. "As filmmakers we didn't want to tell the audience what we thought the problem was specifically and what we thought the solution should be."

Nicks admits he's "gotten into arguments with more activist filmmakers" about his stance. "My strong belief is when you allow the story to come forward, that can have as much impact as a film with an activist agenda. As we were watching the health care debate unfold, the story was dominated by people with vested interests: politicians, journalists, policy makers. The people who did not really have a voice in the whole thing were the patients and caregivers."

Needless to say Nicks is an ardent admirer of Frederick Wiseman. "I'm not going to lie, we deconstructed 'Hospital,'" he says. "We digitized it and our editor went through the film shot by shot. We wanted to understand what he was trying to do. His films were groundbreaking four decades ago. But we felt that his detached, fly-on-the-wall observational style would not work. We wanted to bring in the audience more intimately, in full color."

The film is a composite day in the life of a typical city hospital. Nicks was planning "to shoot the film on one day with 20 crews and do that ten times and pick the best days," he says, but for a variety of reasons that wasn't going to work. "We wanted the film to have a structural device--to have a sense that this is one average day at Highland Hospital--to weave the audience through the film."

Of course that means that the filmmakers are misleading the audience. They're not saying, we shot this story in November and this one in May. "That's where we get into debates, a philosophical analysis of non-fiction filming," he says. "No film is truly objective. We didn't want to make an advocacy film, through argument. We chose the characters we put in the film. Some of the best scenes are on the cutting room floor. We could not have every character be male or African American or Hispanic or the victim of a violent shooting."

Thus the film is not truly representative of what dominated the footage. "We spent one day with each character, never more than a day," Nick says. "Over and over, we'd meet at the beginning of the day as we met people and ask them if we could film them, quickly develop a rapport, and ended up with a basket of stories. Who made it in was based on broad criteria: thematic ideas we got at the end of filming, various ideas that were in the film, different problems with healthcare."

So you don't see as many wealthy accident victims as those of violent crimes, young African-American strokes, drug overdoses, hypertension, diabetes, he says:"We amassed an unbalanced collection of material that would not have communicated accurately what the community was dealing with as a whole."

The hero of the piece emerged early on: Nurse Johnson. "We got to hang out with her and knew immediately, she's off the charts, a customer service genius," Nicks says. "Her compassion is shared by lot of caregivers there. We wanted to tell that institutional story, a group of highly talented dedicated caregivers chose to be there. They could make more money, particularly attending physicians and surgeons. Like M.A.S.H., they're a self-selecting group with a war mentality."

Funded by ITVS, the $553,000 movie looked for a theatrical distributor. "Because we were not at any of the major 'distributor' fests, we had a difficult time getting their attention," says Nicks. What did happen is that the film started winning awards and gaining 'word of mouth' as it moved around the fest circuit.

Weinstein Co. almost pulled the trigger but didn't know how to market the film. "It's not a disaster film, it's a film with a human face on the story," says Nicks, who is cheered by the outreach from healthcare professionals poised to get out the word. "We've been inundated with emails from individuals as well as public hospitals, emergency room physicians, and National Nurses United."

Nicks eventually made a self service distribution deal with the International Film Circuit with $80,000 raised from Kickstarter. His plan: roll out the film theatrically, followed by a robust international semi-theatrical and non-theatrical run at schools, libraries, universities, community events. They will then air on television in the spring on PBS Independent Lens and hope to launch their interactive project as they expand to other hospitals around the country.

Nicks is taking this material online with "an interactive storytelling project akin to Story Corps that is meant to capture the experiences of people - both patients and caregivers - on the front line of the health care system," he says. "We're building interactive technology that will be placed and tested in the waiting room at Highland Hospital. It will mainly take the form of an interactive screen that will allow people to view and record video, text and photographs. On a basic level we believe the project will improve patient satisfaction. Since patients are already stuck for hours waiting, we are turning an isolating, frustrating and often depressing experience on its head by providing patients with an active experience. This will undoubtedly improve patient satisfaction - something hospitals are very focused on. And if we can move the needle on the patient satisfaction metric we see the potential for the system to be leased or purchased by hospitals and clinics around the country."

Doc Feature Oscar Voters Face Rough Process This Year

Anne Thompson — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 21:18:56 GMT

Never have so many worthy docs been produced and released into the indie marketplace. There's a complex set of filtering systems that throw the docs at the Academy branch. Film festivals are one sort of gatekeeper for the plethora of terrific low-budget docs made these days, while awards groups are another, from the upcoming critics groups to DOC NYC, the International Documentary Association and the Cinema Eye Honors.

A movie like Eugene Jarecki's "The House I Live In" won the grand jury doc prize at Sundance, which also boosted the profiles of Malik Bendjelloul's moving music doc "Searching for Sugar Man" and Lauren Greenfield's profile of the super-rich "The Queen of Versailles," both acquired on opening night and both indie hits theatrically. Sundance also launched Kirby Dick's damning military-rape documentary "The Invisible War," which helped to change Department of Defense policy, Amy Berg's murder mystery "West of Memphis," and Bart Layton's con-man expose "The Imposter," which continued to raise its profile at SXSW.

That's where "Paul Williams Still Alive" made its debut, and it doesn't hurt to have a well-known pop star to work the fest and press circuit--along with a catchy Oscar-nominatable original song. How odd that two docs this year were about musicians who were thought to have disappeared. But Rodriguez ended up on "60 Minutes." That doesn't happen every day.

This year, for the first time getting attention for a doc is front and center in gaining a foothold in the Oscar shortlist of 15 films. While "House I Live In" is a challenging piece of agitprop which seeks to do nothing less than change the structure of our country's approach to drugs and prison, it hasn't connected easily with audiences, which is one reason why Brad Pitt lend his name as executive producer, to push it harder.

Someone high-profile like Ken Burns is never left out of the doc conversation, and Cannes debut "The Central Park Five," which examines the 1989 miscarriage of justice in New York City, is no exception. Neither is Alex Gibney, who premiered his incendiary anti-Catholic diatribe "Mea Maxima Culpa" at Toronto.

But what about less well-known players like rookie feature filmmaker Peter Nicks, whose "The Waiting Room" wasn't accepted by the major festivals, but was recognized by doc fests like Full Frame? That film is going to have a tougher time getting seen by the Doc branch. Truth is, Nicks had a better shot of getting noticed via the old Academy doc branch voting system, which divvied up all the films to small groups of branch members who voted on a small slice of what they saw for the final nominations. The problem was that one idiosyncratic opinion could divebomb something worthy from the likes of Werner Herzog or Errol Morris. It was a crapshoot.

Now new doc rules pushed through by Michael Moore have opened up the list of eligible submissions to the entire branch--who have to see as many as they can before ranking 15 for the shortlist. Moore says that he didn't expect such high numbers--mandated reviews for theatrically booked films in the NY or LA Times were supposed to winnow the ranks--he had no idea as many as 132 would gain theatrical release. That's because more films like Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing's Sundance entry "Detropia" are self-released now; they no longer have to depend on the likes of HBO or Sony Pictures Classics to get their films out. They can raise their own P & A funds on Kickstarter.

So the branch voters have been given an extension until November 26 to sample the 132 films. Now they have a pile like everyone else. The stack started growing earlier in the year, but of course they were hit with an overwhelming number of 80 screeners in the fall. Now the doc rules are up for grabs again.

PGA Adds SXSW, Full Frame and AFI Silverdocs to Official Awards Eligibility List

Jay A. Fernandez — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:28:35 GMT

The Producers Guild of America has added SXSW, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival to its list of official festivals for awards-qualifying films. Among other exhibition methods, theatrically released documentaries that have screened in competition at these festivals will now be eligible for the Outstanding Producer of Documentary Theatrical Motion Picture award.

“This decision by the PGA answers a call among many in the film community that festivals focused on the documentary form have become an important supplement to the commercial marketplace, which, despite a few notable successes, is still limited in terms of documentary releases,” said Full Frame executive director Deirdre Haj. “It is an incredible honor for Full Frame and our colleagues at Silverdocs and SXSW and will be welcome news to our filmmakers that were here with us in 2012!”

AFI Fest, Berlin International Film Festival, Cannes Festival International Du Film, Los Angeles Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and Venice Film Festival are already PGA-eligible festivals.

A seven-day theatrical commercial run in a PGA-sanctioned market remains a valid method for entry.

10 Things Michael Moore Wants You to Know About the Academy's New Documentary Rules

Robert Silva — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:26:11 GMT

This year, Michael Moore helped rewrite the rules on which documentaries are eligible for the Academy Awards, and who votes for them. This has resulted in some heated exchanges with other filmmakers, largely because the new rules require a nominated film to have a review in either the New York Times or the L.A. Times.

At the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on April 12, Moore set the record straight about criticisms regarding the new rules. He appeared via Skype in a brown hoodie -- degrading into a pixelated Yoda when the Internet stream slowed -- and explained why he believes the rule changes are (mostly) for the good.

#1. Change Is Obviously Needed

"If I said to you that Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen, none of them have never ever won an Oscar -- that would seem really bizarre wouldn't it?" Moore said.

"Now, let me say this: Frederick Wiseman, the Maysles Brothers, D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Steve James. I could go down a very long list of people who never won an Oscar, and many, like Fred Wiseman, who've never been nominated. How can that happen? How could these godfathers of our genre -- modern documentary -- never have even been nominated or won?"

#2 The Old System Was Weird, Insular, and Corrupt

"For many years a small committee watched the documentary films. The committee was made up of volunteers from the Academy. They were not documentary filmmakers, and they were not from the documentary branch. And so they would sit there with the 16mm projector running and -- after 10 minutes, 20 minutes, everybody had a little flashlight and they hit the flashlight, and they would stop the projector and they wouldn't watch the rest of the film," Moore said.

"And Roger Ebert about 20 years ago did a story about one of the reasons why this was. . . There was a documentary distributor on the committee. And according to Ebert, a third and half of all nominated films were distributed by this documentary distributor who sat on the selection committee. In fact, in the year of 'Roger & Me,' 1989, three of the five nominees were distributed by this man's company."

#3 The New Process Will Be More Democratic

"When I was elected to the Board of Governor for my branch, this was one of the things I really wanted to fix. I said, 'We should create a democracy movement within the documentary branch of the Oscar. We should bring democracy to our branch, meaning the entire branch should vote on who the five nominees are going to be, and then the entire Academy -- all 6,000 members -- should pick the winner from those five nominees,'" Moore said. "It was decided it was time to let everyone vote."

#4 More Documentaries Will Get Seen

"We're setting up procedures to guarantee that every [submitted] film does get seen by someone,” Moore said. “And I asked the Academy if they would shoulder the expense of sending every qualified movie to every member of the documentary branch and they've agreed to do it. So, in other words, if you've made a documentary, you want to submit it this year and your film will be sent to all 160 members of the documentary branch," Moore said.

"You can submit and will submit your documentary films when they are released throughout the year. So, your film comes out in June, we will get your movie in July. This way, no one's going to have to watch 100 movies in December, like the Oscars work now. We're going to watch them throughout the year."

#5 Bigger Movies Will Benefit (and They Should)

"I know that people have said, 'The little films will be overlooked.' But actually the history of the Oscar for documentaries is that the little film has not been overlooked; it's the larger film that has been overlooked.

"And the joke 15, 20 years ago was that if you were critically acclaimed, if you got good notices, if you were thought well of by the audience as one of the best documentaries of the year, that would be the kiss of death. You were guaranteed of not even being nominated. It was a weird feeling like, 'Oh my god, I've got all they great reviews -- oh, we're screwed!'"
#6 Glorified TV Movies, So Long!

"Too many of our nominated movies seemed to be made for television and the network and were qualified by sneaking a quiet run in New York and L.A. that wouldn’t be announced publicly and wouldn't get a review in the New York Times and L.A. Times because they wanted to get that review when the film showed on the network in a few months. They kept to the letter of the law, but not the spirit. They were really TV movies that weren't satisfied with just winning an Emmy; they wanted to win an Oscar, too."

#7 Why the New York Times Matters, But Not as Much as It Thinks It Does

"We were told by the New York Times that it is their policy to review every movie that gets a true theatrical release that opens in Manhattan, regardless of how big or small the film is. We thought, 'Wow, that's the way to guarantee this was really and truly in theaters,'" Moore said.

"This got reported initially by the New York Times that somehow we were ceding control of who can get nominated over to the New York Times. That is absolutely not true. We're only using them because of their rule. If they change that policy, we'll change."

#8 "If A.O Scott Has a Cold," Filmmakers Can Appeal

"We’ve instituted a very liberal appeal process where essentially all the documentary filmmaker has to do is say, 'Hey, here is the day my film opened in Manhattan, there's no review in the New York Times, but the film was there. Well, our attitude is: you're in, you're qualified, you are eligible. We're not going to be sticklers about this. We're using it pretty much as a guidepost to guarantee that the film was at the theaters."

#9 The New Rules Favor the Coasts, and It Sucks

"It is [cultural imperialism]. It's not right," Moore said. "I say that as someone from Michigan. But the larger Academy, though, for all the other fiction movies, they have to play that week in New York and L.A. So we're just lining up our rules to be totally in sync with the rest of the Academy to be totally the same, so documentaries are not looked at as the bastard stepcousins of cinema. The L.A. - New York thing, I'm not the biggest proponent of that. It's there simply because that's the general rule of the Academy for all movies."

#10 The New Rules Will Ensure the Survival of the Documentary Category

"Those who want to remove documentaries from the Oscar show, they still exist in large numbers. They're not the majority right now, and one thing I'm hoping to do with these new rules is take away any of their ammunition. And one of the biggest things is that they don't get to vote for documentaries unless they happen to be in New York or L.A. during one of those three nights [where all five nominees are shown in theaters] in January or February," Moore said.

"Starting this year, there's none of that. We'll have screeners, you can watch them at home, we're going to start streaming them next year,” he said. “Once we get more these 6,000 Academy members engaged, I think the talk of removing the documentaries from the Oscars will never come again."

"Special Flight' Tops 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Awards

Indiewire — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:49:19 GMT

“Special Flight” took two top awards at the 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which screened 102 films in its run April 12-15 in Durham, NC.

Directed by Fernand Melgar, "Special Flight" won the Anne Dellinger Grand Jury Award and the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award. The film focuses on a Swiss detention center where tensions build as rejected asylum seekers await their forced removal from the country. The awards are sponsored by Chuck Pell, CSO Physcient, Inc. and Alpha Cine Labs, Seattle, and by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Representatives from the Center for Documentary Studies jurors were Randy Benson, Katie Hyde, Marc Maximov, Lynn McKnight, Dan Partridge, Tom Rankin, Elena Rue, Teka Selman and April Walton.

The grand jury, comprised of Judith Ehrlich, Eric Metzgar, and Marco Williams, said, “Director Fernand Melgar takes us deep inside the world of detained immigrants in Switzerland. With incredible access and patient observation, we experience the complex and powerful relationships between the captives and their captors. An exceptional work of vérité filmmaking, “Special Flight” forces us to confront the contradictions of humane incarceration.”

A Special Jury Award was also presented to “The Law in These Parts (Shilton Ha’Chok),” directed by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, a meticulously constructed exploration of the complex military laws imposed by Israel on citizens in the occupied territories.

The jury commented, “The Law in These Parts” we honor with a Special Jury Award. We admire its intelligence and unique Brechtian treatment of a very controversial subject.”

The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short was given to “The Time We Have (Den tid vi har),” directed by Mira Jargil, a beautiful, intimate, and deeply tender look at saying goodbye to the love of your life after 67 years of marriage. The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short is provided by Drs. Andrew and Barbra Rothschild.

The jury, comprised of Steven Ascher, Jessica Edwards, and Edwin Martinez, said: “The Jury Award goes to an elegantly realized portrait of a marriage that tenderly explores a husband’s last days with his wife. Beautifully observed, expertly paced, “The Time We Have” intimately captures the power of simple gestures between two people who will always be in love.”

The jury also awarded an honorable mention to “Sivan,” directed by Zohar Elefant, a minimalist portrait of an Israeli soccer fan in thrall to a team and an obsession,describing the film as employing "an innovative directorial approach to a fascinating character to capture a myriad of themes and emotions from one camera angle.”

“Trash Dance,” directed by Andrew Garrison, received the Full Frame Audience Award. The film documents an unusual partnership between a dancer and the Austin Department of Solid Waste Services to stage a public performance starring man, music, and machine. Sponsored by Merge Records, the Audience Award is determined by counting audience ballots filled out during the festival.

An Honorable Mention was presented to the short with the highest score, “Fanuzzi’s Gold,” directed by Georgia Gruzen. The film focuses on Ed Fanuzzi, a Staten Island inventor, treasure hunter, and eternal optimist, who sees gold where others see trash.

"Waiting Room,” directed by Peter Nicks, was awarded the Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award. This gripping vérité film is a symphony of patients, caregivers, and loved ones, bureaucracy and hard choices, in an Oakland ER’s waiting room. Provided by the Charles E. Guggenheim family,this prize honors a first-time documentary feature director. Natalie Bullock Brown, Heather Courtney, and Mark Elijah Rosenberg participated on the Jury.

“Mr. Cao Goes to Washington,” directed by S. Leo Chiang, received the Full Frame Inspiration Award. The film captures rookie congressman Joseph Cao of Louisiana as he angers fellow Republicans by befriending President Obama. 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. Jim Klein, Sarah Masters, and Fiona Otway participated on the jury.

The Full Frame President’s Award was presented to the “Grandmothers (Abuelas),” directed by Afarin Eghbal. This animated documentary about Argentina’s Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo features stories of women who search for their missing grandchildren. Sponsored by Duke University and aimed at recognizing up-and-coming filmmakers, this prize is awarded to the best student film.

“ESCAPE FIRE: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare,” directed by Susan Froemke and Matthew Heineman, received The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights. Provided by the Julian Price Family Foundation, this award is presented to a film that addresses a significant human rights issue in the United States. Representatives from the Kathleen Bryan Edwards family juried the prize: Anne Arwood, Laura Edwards, Clay Farland, Margaret Griffin, and Pricey Harrison.

The Nicholas School Environmental Award was presented to “Chasing Ice” directed by Jeff Orlowski. In this film, scientific fact and aesthetic beauty merge in monumental and dramatic time-lapse photos illustrating global warming’s chilling ravages. The Nicholas School Environmental 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 heritages that define us. Representatives from the Nicholas School of the Environment juried the Prize: Cindy Horn, Stephen Nemeth, Rebecca Patton, and Tom Rankin.

Full Frame Announces 2012 NEW DOCS Lineup

Austin Dale — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:01:55 GMT

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has announced 57 selections for the 2012 NEW DOCS program, which will take place in Durham, North Carolina from April 12-15.

Highlights include several high-profile Sundance award-winners, including "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," "Chasing Ice," "DETROPIA," "The Invisible War" and "The House I Live In."

Full lineup of documentaries reprinted below:

2012 NEW DOCS * Indicates short film, 40 minutes or under in length

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry     (Director: Alison Klayman)
This portrait of the intrepid artist and his work is also a reflection on modern-day China and the struggle for freedom of expression.

An Angel in Doel (De Engel van Doel)     (Director: Tom Fassaert)
In this mesmerizing black-and-white elegy to the Belgian village of Doel, Emilienne, an older resident, is caught between past and future. US Premiere

Aranda     (Director: Anu Kuivalainen)
Existential explorers aboard a marine research vessel contemplate iceburgs, ocean currents, and life itself. North American Premiere

Beauty Is Embarrassing     (Director: Neil Berkeley)
Paul Reubens, Todd Oldham, Mark Mothersbaugh, Matt Groening, and Mimi Pond love this LBJ puppet suit–wearing, profanity-spewing, banjo-picking artist and iconoclast—you will too!

CatCam *     (Director: Seth Keal)
Ever wonder what your pet does all day? This romp with Mr. Lee satisfies an itch most animal owners never dreamed they’d get to scratch.

Chasing Ice     (Director: Jeff Orlowski)
Scientific fact and aesthetic beauty merge in monumental and dramatic time-lapse photos illustrating global warming’s chilling ravages.

Children of the Sea (Les enfants de la mer/mère) *     (Director: Annabel Verbeke)
Students at Belgium’s Ibis school are urchins in uniform, reflecting the maritime tradition of this institution for troubled boys.

Cutting Loose *     (Directors: Finlay Pretsell, Adrian McDowall)
Francis Duffy, three-time champ of the Scottish Prison Service hairdressing competition, defends his title just days before his release.

The D Train *     (Director: Jay Rosenblatt)
To the accompaniment of a jaunty Shostakovich waltz, black-and-white found footage tells a life story, at once singular and universal.

DETROPIA     (Directors: Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady)
An affecting and surprising portrait of Detroit, heart of the American Dream, and the unprecedented challenges facing its citizens.

Eating Alabama     (Director: Andrew Beck Grace)
Attempts to eat locally in Alabama yield surprising, often funny results, for one couple on a quest for a simpler life.

ESCAPE FIRE: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare      (Directors: Matthew Heineman, Susan Froemke)
American healthcare has evolved into a profit-driven disease-care system—this film closely examines the medical industry and bold new measures that may help ease what ails us.

Ethel      (Director: Rory Kennedy)
Ethel Kennedy’s life, told in intimate interviews and never-before-seen archival footage, reveals her place, both public and private, in the Kennedy legacy.

Fanuzzi's Gold *     (Director: Georgia Gruzen)
Ed Fanuzzi is a Staten Island inventor, treasure hunter, and eternal optimist—he sees gold where others see trash.   World Premiere

Five Star Existence     (Director: Sonja Lindén)
A stimulating and exquisitely filmed exploration of technology’s ever-increasing affect on our lives—its benefits, and its limitations. North American Premiere

A Girl Like Her     (Director: Ann Fessler)
“Nice” girls didn’t get pregnant in the 50s and 60s. They had their babies far away from prying eyes and were then forced to give them up. World Premiere

Girl Model     (Directors: David Redmon, A. Sabin)
Hunting for beauty and the fulfillment of dreams, two women bookend this story of hope, ambition and exploitation.

Grandmothers (Abuelas) *     (Director: Afarin Eghbal)
This animated documentary about Argentina’s Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo features stories of women who search for their missing grandchildren.

Herman's House     (Director: Angad Singh Bhalla)
An artist forms a relationship with a man who’s been in solitary confinement for over three decades, embarking on a project to design and construct his dream home. World Premiere

The House I Live In     (Director: Eugene Jarecki)
The impact of narcotics on one family’s lives gives way to this comprehensive, multilayered interpretation of America’s War on Drugs.

How to Survive a Plague     (Director: David France)
Astounding archival footage chronicles the courageous, and innovative, battle waged by early AIDS activists against drug companies and the government as they fight the epidemic.

I Send You This Place     (Directors: Andrea Sisson, Peter Ohs)
A personal and experimental essay that transports the viewer to and from Iceland in search of clues to a family mystery. World Premiere

The Imposter     (Director: Bart Layton)
A Texas boy who mysteriously disappeared resurfaces years later in Spain. There’s a remarkable reunion, but something’s not quite right.

The Invisible War     (Director: Kirby Dick)
A shocking percentage of servicewomen and men are sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers. This film bears witness to their powerful and emotional stories.

ITALY LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT     (Directors: Gustav Hofer, Luca Ragazzi)
A couple sets out on a road trip through Italy, to decide whether or not they should stay in the country, or leave it, like so many of their other friends have done already.

Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet     (Director: Jesse Vile)
Twenty years after being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, the metal guitar god has not only survived, he continues to compose music.

Justice for Sale     (Directors: Ilse van Velzen, Femke van Velzen)
Attorney Claudine Tsongo winds her way through the Congo’s evolving justice system in search of truth in the case of a soldier who may have been unjustly convicted of rape. North American Premiere

The Kingdom of Mister Edhi     (Director: Amélie Saillez)
Mr. Edhi’s kingdom is a sprawling network of support systems for Pakistan’s most vulnerable, especially at-risk women and children. North American Premiere

Kiss the Paper *     (Director: Fiona Otway)
No amount of technology has been able to curb one man’s passion for hand-set type and the poetry of letterpress printing.

The Law in These Parts (Shilton Ha'Chok)     (Director: Ra’anan Alexandrowicz)
A meticulously constructed exploration of the complex military laws imposed by Israel on citizens in the occupied territories.

A Letter to Dad (Pismo ocu)      (Director: Srdjan Keca)
When his father dies unexpectedly in a Serbian hospital, a son interviews close friends and family to piece together his own unfocused recollections. North American Premiere

The Lifeguard (El Salvavidas) *     (Director: Maite Alberdo)
A Chilean beach is the setting for this vividly filmed collection of interactions with Mauricio, the complicated titular subject. North American Premiere

Light Plate *     (Director: Josh Gibson)
Hand processed film presents an evocative, whimsical and contemplative document of an Italian interlude.

Mr. Cao Goes to Washington     (Director: S. Leo Chiang)
Rookie congressman Joseph Cao of Louisiana angers fellow Republicans by befriending President Obama; will bipartisanship reward or ruin his chances for re-election?

Nation (Nació)     (Director: Homer Etminani)
A young man in Catalonia tirelessly trains amidst a sprawling landscape in this meditation on extensive preparation toward a mysterious end. North American Premiere

Needle Exchange *     (Director: Colm Quinn)
Spencer and Glenn are best mates and recovering addicts who have traded heroin for copious amounts of tattoo ink, and each other.

Peak     (Director: Hannes Lang)
The Alps are the backdrop for this wry take on climate change and the idiosyncratic responses to its affects on natives and tourists alike. North American Premiere

A People Uncounted     (Director: Aaron Yeger)
This film bears witness to the Porrajmos or “devouring” of the Roma by the Nazis during WWII and their ongoing struggles.

The Photographer's Wife (Die Frau des Fotografen) *     (Directors: Karsten Krause, Philip Widmann)
A widow revisits four decades of photos her husband took of her—nude portraits taken at home, in cars, and in the great outdoors. North American Premiere

Radio Unnameable     (Directors: Paul Lovelace, Jessica Wolfson)
Bob Fass has been broadcasting his midnight free-form show from New York City for nearly 50 years to reflect the decades’ alternative cultural scenes. World Premiere

Raising Resistance     (Directors: Bettina Borgfeld, David Bernet)
For some in Paraguay transgenic soy is “green gold,” but for others it is an unprecedented ecological and cultural disaster. North American Premiere

Reportero     (Director: Bernardo Ruiz)
A veteran journalist and his fearless colleagues at the Mexican newspaper Zeta investigate corrupt officials and drug lords despite increasing violence and repeated death threats. US Premiere

Santa Land *    (Director: Kim Nguyen)
Meet a husband and wife Mr. and Mrs. Claus team and the Real Bearded Santas—men so committed to portraying Santa they maintain their lustrous whiskers year-round. North American Premiere

Silent Springs *     (Director: Erin Espelie)
Taking a cue from Rachel Carson, this experimental film attempts to make visible what’s hard to see, the disappearance of species and a natural world under mortal threat.

Sivan *     (Director: Zohar Elefant)
A minimalist portrait of an Israeli soccer fan in thrall to a team and an obsession.

Special Flight (Vol Spécial)     (Director: Fernand Melgar)
Tensions build at a Swiss detention center as rejected asylum seekers await their forced removal from the country they now call home. US Premiere

Tahrir: Liberation Square     (Director: Stefano Savona)
An intense and deft account of the first weeks of protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the beginning of the Egyptian Arab Spring.

The Time We Have (Den tid vi har) *     (Director: Mira Jargil)
A beautiful, intimate, and deeply tender look at saying goodbye to the love of your life after 67 years of marriage. US Premiere

Trash Dance     (Director: Andrew Garrison)
An unusual partnership between a dancer and the Austin Solid Waste Services to stage a public performance starring man, music, and machine.

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom *    (Director: Lucy Walker)
Survivors of Japan’s recent tsunami find courage and solace in the cherry blossoms that emerge not long after the disaster.

Unfinished Spaces     (Directors: Alysa Nahmias, Benjamin Murray)
A thrilling and unknown story of the visionary architecture of the early Cuban revolution—its creation, decay, renewal, and rediscovery.

Violated Letters (Cudze Listy)    (Director: Maciej Drygas)
The Polish Secret Service monitored private correspondence during the Cold War. Brilliantly edited footage sets the stage for this story of repression, censorship, letters never delivered. North American Premiere

The Waiting Room     (Director: Peter Nicks)
This gripping vérité film is a symphony of patients, caregivers, and loved ones, bureaucracy and hard choices, in an Oakland ER’s waiting room. World Premiere

While You Were Gone (Medan du var borta) *     (Director: Frida Kempff)
Absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder. It can sometimes make it cold, violent, or even forgiving.

Winter Light (Vinterlys) *     (Director: Skule Eriksen)
In the Arctic archipelago of Lofoten in Norway, winter sun makes for a subtle yet spectacular landscape.

Without A Fight     (Director: Jason Arthurs)   North American Premiere
Far more than a mere sport, soccer equals survival and a sensible haven for the young men of Kibera, Kenya's largest slum. North American Premiere

Young Bird Season *    (Director: Nellie Kluz)
The flyers at the Braintree Pigeon Racing Club pass the time as their treasured birds race the hundreds of miles back home.

Full Frame Fest Announces Lineup of Ross McElwee's Family-Themed Retrospective Screenings

Bryce J. Renninger — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:09:21 GMT

Ross McElwee ("Sherman's March," "Bright Leaves") will be a guest of honor at Durham, North Carolina's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and as part of his trip to the festival, he has programmed a series of eight features and two short films to be a part of a special retrospective series about families.

“There are, of course, countless documentaries about American families. There are many about other people’s families, but the documentaries selected for this program are films about the families of the filmmakers,” said McElwee. “They 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 the camera—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.”

Full Frame runs from April 12-15, 2012.

The complete lineup for the Family Affairs series is below, with descriptions courtesy of the festival.

Family Affairs

51 Birch Street (Director: Doug Block)

Shortly after his mother's death, Doug Block is stunned to learn that his father is moving in with his secretary from 40 years before—so begins his journey to understand the parents he thought he knew.

Diaries (Director: Ed Pincus)

In this intensely personal memoir, Ed Pincus films his wife, children, and lovers in an effort to faithfully record his, and their, struggle to find and experience intimacy, commitment, and fulfillment.

Family Portrait Sittings (Director: Alfred Guzzetti)

First released in 1975, this introspective and unprecedented film depicts Alfred Guzzetti's family history through extended and candid interviews and carefully curated home recordings.

In Search of Our Fathers (Director: Marco Williams)

Marco Williams's quest to discover the father he never knew ultimately reveals more about the women in his family, particularly his mother and her efforts to enrich his upbringing.

Intimate Stranger (Director: Alan Berliner)

This vibrant film is full of the still photographs, celluloid film, and ephemera of a well-traveled life, that of Alan Berliner's grandfather, whose yearning for success and acclaim took him far away from home.

Must Read After My Death (Director: Morgan Dews)

After uncovering a trove of family movies and audio recordings, Morgan Dews assembles the materials together to present this daring portrait of his grandparents' strained relationship, and their very different expectations of family life.

My Father, The Genius (Director: Lucia Small)

Architect Glen Small asks his estranged daughter, Lucia, to craft his biography, which ultimately evolves into this documentary that delicately traces the lines of tension between artistic brilliance and familial disappointment.

Time Exposure (Director: Alfred Guzzetti)

In this short, Alfred Guzzetti deconstructs a single photograph taken by his father some seven decades earlier.

TRANSLATING EDWIN HONIG: A Poet's Alzheimer's (Director: Alan Berliner)

A transfixing portrayal of a poet as he succumbs to a fading memory, and his patterns of speech give way to new kinds of artistic expression.

TROUBLESOME CREEK: A Midwestern (Directors: Jeanne Jordan, Steven Ascher)

Faced with mounting debts, the Jordan family embraces a radical plan to save their Iowa farm. With husband Steven Ascher, Jeanne Jordan poignantly chronicles the emotional and physical landscape of her parents' attempt to maintain their way of life.

Jesse Owens Doc World Premiere Will Open Full Frame 2012 + Tribute Honoring Stanley Nelson

Tambay A. Obenson — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 02:06:57 GMT

Announced earlier today... The opening night film of the 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on Thursday April 12th will be the World Premiere of Laurens Grant’s Jesse Owens, which was produced and written by 2012 Full Frame Tribute honoree Stanley Nelson.

The PBS-produced film centers on the track and field star, who silenced the opposition at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin amidst Nazi propaganda.

This is obviously not to be confused with Anthony Mackie's long-in-development Jesse Owens narrative biopic.

“We are thrilled to be the home for the World Premiere of Jesse Owens... This film, while looking back at history, begs questions that still call for answers today about sports, celebrity, and race in our culture. It is a great example of documentary creating a platform for further examination and discussion, which is what Full Frame thrives on,” said Full frame executive director Deirdre Haj.

In addition to Grant's Owens doc, Full Frame also announced its lineup of films selected for its 2012 Tribute honoring Stanley Nelson. Four titles have been selected, including early work from Nelson like The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, A Place of Our Own, and Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice.

“Having this wonderful tribute to my work and the World Premiere of “Jesse Owens” at this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is for me a double honor,” said Nelson, who'll be present for screenings of his work throughout the festival, including a moderated conversation with Lauren Grant following the Opening Night screening event.

The 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will be held April 12-15, in Durham, N.C.

Full Frame Announces Opening Night and Tribute Programming

Austin Dale — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:38:56 GMT

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has announced the world premiere of Laurens Grant's "Jesse Owens" as its Opening Night film on Thursday, April 12 in Durham, NC. The film about the African American track and field star is produced and written by Full Frame Tribute honoree Stanley Nelson.

Nelson will receive a tribute with a line-up of four of his titles: "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords," "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple," "A Place of Our Own" and "Sweet Honey in the Rock."

Full press release reprinted below:

Full Frame Announces Opening Night Film and

2012 Tribute Programming Honoring Stanley Nelson

Durham, N.C., - March 6, 2012 – The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has announced the World Premiere of Laurens Grant’s “Jesse Owens” as its 2012 Opening Night Film on Thursday, April 12, at the Carolina Theatre. Produced and written by 2012 Full Frame Tribute honoree Stanley Nelson, the film centers on the African American track and field star, who triumphed at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin amidst the rise of Nazi propaganda.

“Jesse Owens” is an American Experience film in association with Firelight Films. It is the first feature documentary Laurens Grant has directed for PBS. Grant has a long history with Stanley Nelson and American Experience. She produced the 2010 award-winning film “Freedom Riders” directed by Nelson and was a coordinating producer for Nelson’s film “The Murder of Emmett Till” in 2003. Both were American Experience titles. Grant previously attended Full Frame with “Freedom Riders” in 2010 and as a juror for the Award for Best Short in 2011.

“To have my film screen at Full Frame is an incredible honor. And to screen as the Opening Night Film is just tremendous,” said Grant. “Full Frame is an incredible festival that really appreciates documentary films, and I am truly delighted to be a part of it. It is also a great tribute to Jesse Owens, and serves to ensure his legacy is not forgotten.”

Full Frame also announced its lineup of films around its 2012 Tribute honoring Stanley Nelson. Four titles have been selected, including early work from his Firelight Films banner: “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords,” “Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple,” “A Place of Our Own,” and “Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice.”

“Having this wonderful tribute to my work and the World Premiere of “Jesse Owens” at this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is for me a double honor,” said Nelson.

Nelson and Grant will take part in a moderated conversation following the film on Opening Night. Nelson will also be on hand for screenings of his work throughout the weekend. Other attending guests will be announced closer to the festival. Screening times and venues will be available March 22.

“We are thrilled to be the home for the World Premiere of “Jesse Owens,” said Full frame executive director Deirdre Haj. “This film, while looking back at history, begs questions that still call for answers today about sports, celebrity, and race in our culture. It is a great example of documentary creating a platform for further examination and discussion, which is what Full Frame thrives on.”

The 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will be held April 12-15, in Durham, N.C., with Duke University as the presenting sponsor. Tickets for programs are available to passholders beginning March 23 and will go on sale to the general public at fullframefest.org on April 2.

2012 Opening Night Film

Jesse Owens (Director: Laurens Grant)

African American track and field star, Jesse Owens, triumphed at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin amidst the rise of Nazi propaganda. Despite winning four gold medals, the iconic athlete found the brilliant start to his career would not be met with easy opportunity. World Premiere

2012 Full Frame Tribute Films

The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords (Director: Stanley Nelson)

The little known history of Black newspapers is highlighted in this film about the pioneering men and women who gave voice to the African American experience across the nation.

Jonestown: The Life and the Death of Peoples Temple (Director: Stanley Nelson)

Over 900 people died at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana, the largest mass suicide in history. The film traces the optimistic rise and devastating collapse of this utopian movement.

A Place of Our Own (Director: Stanley Nelson)

A personal meditation on the significance of Oak Bluffs, a town on Martha’s Vineyard where generations of upper-middle class black families, including Stanley Nelson’s own, have vacationed undisturbed by the tensions of racial America.

Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice (Director: Stanley Nelson)

Unprecedented footage from Sweet Honey in the Rock’s 30th anniversary tour is accented with in-depth interviews exploring the influence of the African American women’s a cappella group.

About Full Frame

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is an annual international event dedicated to the theatrical exhibition of non-fiction cinema. Each spring Full Frame welcomes filmmakers and film lovers from around the world to historic downtown Durham, N.C., for a four-day, morning to midnight array of over 100 films as well as discussions, panels, and southern hospitality. Set within a four-block radius, the intimate festival landscape fosters community and conversation between filmmakers, film professionals and the general public.

Full Frame Documentary Festival Will Pay Tribute to Stanley Nelson

Nigel M Smith — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:37:27 GMT

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (April 12-15) has chosen to highlight the career of Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson ("Freedom Riders," "A Place of Our Own") for its annual Full Frame Tribute.

In addition, the festival has announced that this year's Thematic Program -- curated by filmmaker Ross McElwee ("Bright Leaves") -- will focus on family.

Titles for both the Thematic Program and the Full Frame Tribute will be announced in March.

At the Full Frame Festival, Archives Are the Future

Indiewire Staff — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:09:09 GMT

Documentary cinema tends to balance the past and present. A few months after Charles Ferguson's “Inside Job” received the Academy Award for best documentary, the 2011 edition of the Full Frame Documentary Festival presented a strong program that drew heavily on themes of poverty, struggle and injustice. However, it was the past that set this year's Durham, N.C. festival apart.

"One Foot in the Archives," a 10-film sidebar dedicated to archival footage curated by filmmaker and archivist Rick Prelinger, utilized a wide range of films to explore the use of archival footage. From structurally difficult works like Phillipe Mora's 1979 "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" to this year's Sundance favorite from Göran Hugo Olssen, "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975," the films represented a cross-section of perspectives that extended the dialogue into the competition screenings.

Mora's film spends a great deal of time showing images of the great depression's poverty, presenting viewers with a sentiment they would later find in films like U. Roberto Romano's "The Harvest," Marianna Kaat's heart-wrenching "Pit No. 8" (winner of the festival's Emerging Artist and Environmental awards), Leonard Retel Helmrich's "Position Amongst the Stars" and Steve James' Special Jury Award-winning "The Interrupters."

People struggling against society were featured across a number of films in the program. Nancy Buirski, Full Frame's founder and former director, returned with the world premiere of her directing debut, "The Loving Story." A look into the complicated trial that took anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia to the Supreme Court, the use of archival footage in "The Loving Story" stood out as a parallel example to the festival's Thematic program.

Babcock and Blue Hadaegh's "Scenes of a Crime" also explored an arduous legal battle through archival footage -- in this case, access to a 10-hour-plus videotaped confession at the center of a case against a man accused of killing his four-month-old son. (The film received the festival’s Anne Dellinger Grand Jury Award.) And Chad Freidrich's "The Pruitt-Irgoe Myth" tackles the high-profile/highly segregated public housing disaster in St. Louis by relying heavily on images culled from moving image archives.

Not all of Full Frame's 2011 highlights took on heavy subjects. “Square Grouper: The Godfathers of Ganja” utilized archival footage to tell the unbelievable tale South Florida’s pot smuggling culture in the 1970s. Julie Moggan's "Guilty Pleasures" enjoyed its U.S. premiere as Full Frame's opening night, screening to a crowd who welcomed the quirky doc about the global reach and influence of romance novels (yes, the same ones at supermarket check-out counters).

Films like Tally Abecassis' hour-long "Unlikely Treasures" on the obsessive (to say the least) world of collectors and Constance Marks' Sundance hit "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey" also gave the festival a lighter edge without sacrificing quality or entertainment. And Cindy Meehl's "Buck" also proved to be a crowd-pleasing success, taking home Full Frame's Audience Award.

However, the weekend’s most entertaining -- or perhaps most interesting -- screening was Prelinger's interactive presentation of “Lost Landscapes of Detroit.” The 70-minute nearly silent film is made entirely out of home and industrial footage, forming as thin a narrative as one could ask. Before the screening, Prelinger invited the audience to create its own soundtrack, thus promoting an interaction similar to watching home movies in the living room. The filmmaker, who also encouraged the use of social media during the screening, wrote of the experience on his Twitter account during the screening: "Favorite moment at ["Lost Landscapes of Detroit"] screening: lights go down, room sizzles with unmuffled conversation. Not your ordinary screening or audience."

It might not have been ordinary, but it was certainly unforgettable. The weekend proved that Full Frame is firmly positioned in the current moment of the documentary film scene, a stance solidified by revealing that it has one foot following the present trends in the doc world and the other in the archives.

Full Frame Announces 2011 Opening Night Film

Indiewire Staff — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:40:19 GMT

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival announced it will open on Thursday, April 14 with the U.S. premiere of Julie Moggan's documentary "Guilty Pleasures."

"Guilty Pleasures" chronicles the impact of Mills & Boon romance novels upon the lives of five individuals, including a novelist, a male model and three female readers. Moggan, known for her non-fiction work for the BBC and Channel 4, will be on hand at Carolina Theatre's Fletcher Hall for the debut of her first feature length documentary.

The 2011 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival takes place April 14-17 in Durham, N.C.

The full release from the festival follows.

Durham, N.C., - February 24, 2011 – The 14th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will open with the U.S. Premiere of “Guilty Pleasures.” Director Julie Moggan’s vibrant feature traces the experiences of five individuals from around the world marked by their particular connections to Mills & Boon romance novels. We meet a successful romance novelist whose female pseudonym produces countless bestsellers, a male cover model in search of a soul mate and three women enraptured by paperback romances, whose perceptions of relationships are entangled with the scripted portrayal of courtship. As they navigate love in a modern age, we are captivated by their endearing and all-too-human journey.

“We are thrilled to host ‘Guilty Pleasures’ on Opening Night,” said director of programming, Sadie Tillery. “The film is an awesomely colorful, musical celebration of the desires and realities of the people it portrays. In examining the collision of fantasy and day-to-day life, the film offers a rare combination of levity and heart and serves as a reminder that documentary can be humorous while heartfelt. We could not ask for a more festive opening to our 2011 event.”

Julie Moggan’s extensive travels and background in anthropology have led her to making documentaries that focus on the beauty, drama and humor in everyday life. She has made films for the BBC and Channel 4, and “Guilty Pleasures” is her first feature length documentary.

“Full Frame has a reputation for showing some of the most inspiring films around to huge audiences of passionate documentary lovers,” said director Julie Moggan. “So it's a thrill and honor to have our U.S. premiere of ‘Guilty Pleasures’ at this festival. We hope that our romance novel documentary will get things off to an entertaining and uplifting start.”

Moggan will attend the premiere, along with a number of subjects from the film. The Opening Night Screening will take place the evening of Thursday, April 14 in the Carolina Theatre’s historic Fletcher Hall. The Screening is sponsored by the American Tobacco Campus and Capitol Broadcasting Company. The Opening Night Party will follow the screening next door at the Durham Arts Council. One of the Festival’s oldest traditions, the Opening Night Party will again be hosted by Giorgios Hospitality Group. Tickets for both the Screening and the Party are available to passholders beginning March 24 and on sale online April 4.

The 2011 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will be held April 14-17, in Durham, N.C., with Duke University as the presenting sponsor. Passes can be purchased online at www.fullframefest.org.

Full Frame Announces First 2011 Programming

Peter Knegt — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:44:23 GMT

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has begun preparations for its 14th annual event, announcing that "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work" directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg will receive the fest's 2011 Career Award and also present the U.S. premiere of their new film, "Burma Soldier."

Full release below.

Durham, N.C., - January 13, 2011 - The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has announced their Thematic Program, 2011 Career Award and the first US Premiere of the 2011 festival. Rick Prelinger will curate a series around archival footage for the Festival's 2011 thematic program. The 2011 Career Award will be presented to Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, who will present the US Premiere of their most recent film "Burma Soldier" at the 14th annual event.

"I'm excited to have the opportunity to work with Rick Prelinger," said director of programming Sadie Tillery. "I hope the series will encourage audiences to consider how archival footage is contextualized, while also giving viewers the rare opportunity to screen work that is less available."

Archivist, writer, lecturer and filmmaker Rick Prelinger founded Prelinger Archives in 1982 in New York. At its peak, the archives held over 60,000 ephemeral (advertising, industrial, educational, documentary and amateur) films and over 50,000 cans of unedited footage. The core film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Beginning in 2000, Prelinger Archives partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,100 key films available online for researchers, scholars, media makers and the public to view and reuse without charge. With Megan Shaw Prelinger, he co-founded an appropriation-friendly research library in 2002, which is currently open to the public in San Francisco. He is a long-time advocate of increased public access to archives and cultural material, and frequently writes and lectures in this field. His long-form films include "Panorama Ephemera," "Lost Landscapes of Detroit," and "The Lives of Energy," among others. He is currently in pre-production on "No More Road Trips," a feature-length exploration of "peak travel" and our fascination with tourism and the road.

"While archival material has been an integral component of documentary filmmaking since the earliest days, I believe makers have just begun to explore its creative potential. As archives slowly open up to the public, as new collections come online for reuse, and as we look to history for clues to help us understand our accelerating present, once-ignored images and sounds are becoming increasingly relevant," said Prelinger.

He continued, "archival imagery is ubiquitous today, appearing not only in documentary films but in advertising, educational media, and online. It's invoked in countless tweets and Facebook pages every day. What grew our fascination with these images? Will we still be interested in them as they become available to anyone with a few clicks? Perhaps most pertinent, will ever-more-immersive dramatic recreations of historical events, places and personalities cause authentic archival images to fade into the background?"

The Festival will honor filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg with the 2011 Career Award. For more than a decade, Stern and Sundberg have collaborated on a critically acclaimed body of work including "The Trials of Darryl Hunt," "The Devil Came on Horseback," "The End of America," and last year's "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work."

"We have been proud to exhibit Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's films over the years and are incredibly excited to present their body of work at the 2011 Festival," said Tillery. "Time after time they have put forward incredible subjects and stories, which are made all the more influential by the quality of Stern and Sundberg's filmmaking."

"We are elated to be honored with the Full Frame 2011 Career Award," said Stern and Sundberg. "As we look through the list of past recipients, filmmakers whose work we have long admired, we are honored to be part of this community."

The tribute will include screenings of Stern and Sundberg's work throughout the Festival, with a number of the films' subjects in attendance. Specifically, Full Frame will host the US Premiere of Stern and Sundberg's latest film "Burma Soldier," directed with Nic Dunlop. The film tells the unforgettable story of Myo Myint, a former Burmese soldier turned pro-democracy activist. Myint will be on hand to discuss his life and film following the premiere. Additional titles and guests will be announced in March.

Stern and Sundberg continued, "It is particularly meaningful for us to be able to have the US Premiere of "Burma Soldier" at Full Frame this April, as we know from our own experiences how audiences at this special festival embrace and engage with documentary film."

Stern and Sundberg's first collaboration "In My Corner" screened at Full Frame in 1999. "The Trials of Darryl Hunt" received Full Frame's Audience Award in 2006. Their next project, "The Devil Came on Horseback," won both the Full Frame/Working Films Award and The Seeds of War prize at the 2007 Festival. All of their films have garnered great critical acclaim, receiving national theatrical releases, television broadcasts and festival screenings around the world.

"To be honored by Full Frame with the Career Award comes as a wonderful surprise," said Stern. "Full Frame is not only a home to the documentary filmmaker and its audience, it truly celebrates the documentary film form and community. For me, it is a creative haven and all around great time!"

"We first attended the festival back when it was known as Doubletake, and it's been amazing to see how Full Frame has grown in presence and industry recognition over the years," said Sundberg.

The 2011 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will be held April 14-17, in Durham, N.C., with Duke University as the presenting sponsor. Festival passes can be purchased online at www.fullframefest.org.