All these wonderful things

In Competition? At Full Frame, You May Never Know

It came to a head at Full Frame two years ago.  Ballet Russes co-directors Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller approached jury member John Pierson at the opening night party.

"I went over to say hello and (John) and I each expressed disappointment at not having had been able to see each other’s films while we were at Sundance earlier that year," Goldfine told me recently via email.  "At that point I said that at least we’d be able to see each other’s work at Full Frame and noted that I planned to catch Reel Paradise** the following day at its screening.  (John) then told me that he wasn’t going to be able to watch Ballet Russes because it wasn’t part of the competition and, as a member of the competition jury, he could only watch the handful of films that were part of the competition."

"I scratched my head and ask him what he meant.  Believe me, I was really confused.  I think that might have been the first time that (John), himself, realized that Full Frame hadn’t been honest with the filmmakers about their inclusion in the competition."

Joe Angio, who directed the Melvin Van Peeples doc How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), was also at Full Frame that year.  "Dan & Dayna told (producer) Michael (Solomon) and I this the day of the ceremony.  Up to that point we had all thought our films were in competition, and now we werent so sure.  Before long, a small posse had gathered in the lobby of our hotel, some of them filmmakers who were told that they had been (in competition), others not, but all of whom thought they were."

David Fellerath, who covered the festival in 2005 for The Independent Weekly, covered the competition controversy in his festival recap:

But if the festival was a cultural and financial success, an unfortunate and avoidable controversy over the judging procedure emerged. Although the issue seemed to resolve itself, it also hints at new challenges ahead for the festival.

One of the festival's virtues is its intimacy, with fans, journalists and upstart filmmakers mingling with the likes of famed documentary makers like D.A. Pennebaker and Barbara Kopple on the street and at cocktail parties. But this intimacy came with a price when some filmmakers approached members of the grand jury and asked for their thoughts on their own films.

A typical story was that of Peter Friedman, co-producer of Mana: Beyond Belief, who approached grand jury member John Pierson at the HBO-sponsored party at Fowler's on Friday night. Pierson informed Friedman that not only had he not seen his film, but that Mana was not being considered for the Grand Jury Award because the jury had already received a short list of 12 films for consideration.

Pierson is a veteran of the indie film scene who is best known for his representation of the early work of Spike Lee, Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith. In a conversation Saturday night, Pierson acknowledged that he understood the impulse to create a short list so the jurors would not have to watch all 57 features in competition. Like everyone else, he stressed the need for transparency. "My bottom line is that if some other entity is creating a short list, people need to know about it," Pierson said.

At most film festivals, being in or out of competition is pretty obvious from the start.  You have a phone call with a programmer and either they tell you or you ask.  It's pretty straightforward and as far as I'm personally concerned, it rarely leads to hurt feelings.  My latest film has been in competition at five festivals and out of competition at a few others (still others, such as Toronto and True/False, don't have a competitive category).

This year, two things at Full Frame clouded the issue for me.  First was the announcement itself.  As noted here when I reported the films screening in Durham, the festival chooses to call nearly all of the films in its lineup "In Competition".  Specifically, "New Docs: Films in Competition".  83 of them to be precise.

Second, there was an exchange of emails between my New York production partners, myself and Full Frame that began on February 27. The purpose of the email exchange was pretty specific:

In the meantime, we need two copies of the film for press and jurying purposes.  Let me know by Thursday, March 1 whether you would like us to use the preview copies that were sent in as part of the original submission or if you would prefer to send new screeners.

So, here I see the words "Films in Competition" and "copies of the film for...jurying purposes" and I'm thinking that every film must be in competition for the Grand Jury Prize.  I was aware that there were also other categories, more narrowly focused to subject matter, that many films (particularly mine) would not be in contention for.  But, I thought, at least everyone is in competition for the Grand Jury Prize.  And I thought, wow, that's really great that Full Frame does this and that must be one of the reasons why everybody likes and respects the festival so much.

But when I get to Durham, I make the comment to one of the jurors that I can't believe that Ric Burns, Kirby Dick and John Sinno (who made up the Grand Jury) actually watched 83 films.  And the response was, "they didn't.  They only watched the twelve films that are in competition."

Huh?

"But we're all in competition," I said.  "They even sent me an email asking which DVD that the jury should watch."

And with that, the list of films was produced and I saw that we were not among the "finalists in consideration".  Nor were we "in consideration" for any other award.

Turns out I had missed an email, which had been sent to my New York production partners (but, strangely, not to me, even though I had been emailed directly on six other occasions by the person at Full Frame who sent this email).  The email reads as follows:

Below you will find a list of all the awards Full Frame offers and the films eligible in each award category.  This list is currently not public and will only be shared with the press on the first day of the festival.  We do this to ensure that no one film in the competitive program is privileged over another by audiences.

As we mentioned in your acceptance letter, Full Frame is proud to offer a number of prizes in various categories to our filmmakers. While not all films are eligible for all awards, we want to applaud you for your fine work.  We look forward to sharing your film with audiences soon!

[The films that were finalists for the Grand Jury Award were Crazy Love, The Devil Came on Horseback, Forever, Forgotten, Ghosts of Cite Soleil, Lake of Fire, Manda Bala, The Monastery, Operation Homecoming, Protagonist, War/Dance and White Light/Black Rain.]

The date the email was sent (again, not to me) was the evening of March 28, 2007, just over two weeks before the start of Full Frame - and well within the time that most people had decided whether to buy tickets and fly to Durham.  In fact, the festival had asked that you let them know whether you would attend by March 8.  For myself, I would have attended Full Frame whether I was in competition or not - but only because it's an important documentary festival that I hadn't been to before and I wanted to cover it for the blog as well.  In most cases, I have decided that I probably won't attend festivals where we are not in competition (or where festivals will not pay for travel).  I know that many other filmmakers have made similar decisions.

But, back to 2005.  When Goldfine, Geller, Angio and Solomon realized that they weren't in competition - even though it had been advertised otherwise - they decided to confront Full Frame Founder, CEO and Artistic Director Nancy Buirski.

"We told her that we thought it was duplicitous to make it appear in the Festival program as if all the films were being judged by the jury when in fact she personally had selected only a handful to be judged in this way," Goldfine said.  "We also expressed our dismay at not having been informed by the Festival that our films were not going to be part of the competition – the whole process smacked of dishonesty and it just didn’t make sense to any of us."

"She was doing some backpedaling," Angio said.  "Claiming how all the films were eligible for audience awards, special awards, but that only twelve (or however many there were) were eligible for the jury prize.  She also told us that this was spelled out on our acceptance forms.  And, indeed it was, but it was so buried in the fine print, as it were, that it was easy to overlook.  And, as it happens, everyone had overlooked it."

Again, Fellerath:

As it turns out, the festival did disclose its judging procedure for the Grand Jury Award in acceptance letters sent by e-mail in mid-February.

On Monday morning, Durham's Cynthia Hill, whose film The Guestworker, co-produced with Charles Thompson, was in competition at the festival but not on the short list, provided a copy of her acceptance letter. On the second page of a two-page missive from Director of Programming Connie Di Cicco, the policy is set forth: "Not all films are eligible for all awards. Specifically, the Grand Jury Award will be chosen from a selected number of finalists, determined by the Programming Department." (This programming department consisted of Di Cicco, Buirski, Full Frame programming and panel coordinator Phoebe Brush and the chairs of the selection committee, Nancy Kalow and David Paletz.)

In fact, Full Frame is the only festival that I've ever attended that has filmmakers sign an extensive release, called the "Full Frame Agreement".  While apparently past agreements included fine print about the byzantine awards qualifications, this year's agreement has nothing, with the only reference to awards stating:

If my film/video receives an award at Full Frame, I understand that the festival requires  that I include this information in publicity materials. A Full Frame logo and award laurels will be provided.

Goldfine says that because nothing Buirski said seemed satisfactory, they gave her an ultimatum.  "At that point, we gave her a choice.  Either she put out a press release explaining the reality of the “competition”, announce publicly at the Awards BBQ that not all of the films listed in the program as being part of the competition were indeed in that competition, and in so doing, specifically name the competition films, and promise that in future years filmmakers wouldn’t have to go thru the deception to which we’d been submitted, (i.e., that the whole competition situation, who was competing and who wasn’t, etc., would be transparent to public and filmmakers alike); or, we as filmmakers would go to the press ourselves."

"Nancy assured us that she would set the record straight publicly at the BBQ and in a press release, and she also promised that the whole Full Frame competition process would be fixed in subsequent years."

Says Angio, "She was clearly unnerved at the swelling buzz.  It was going through the crowd so quickly that in short time people were coming to us and saying, 'Have you heard?'"

Goldfine, Angio and Solomon all told me that despite her assurances, Buirski proceeded to announce the winners without making the clarification she had promised.  So, Dan Geller, the co-director of Ballet Russes, called Buirski out from the audience.

According to Fellerath:

But as Buirski concluded her remarks, one filmmaker, Dan Geller of Ballets Russes, called out, "What were the 12 films, Nancy?" Buirski responded that the titles would be released in a later press announcement.

The next day, the festival released the titles.

Phoebe Brush, who now is Full Frame's Director of Programming, told me that everyone at the festival felt a change was necessary after the events of 2005.  "We felt really terrible about it.  People were very upset.  But what we did last year and tried to do this year felt good.  If felt like we had reached a good place."

When I told Brush about my own confusion relating to the awards procedure, particularly in light of the email mentioning "jurying purposes," she told me that all films were up for two awards and were watched by those juries.  (These awards were the Working Films Award - which goes to a film "with the greatest potential for supporting serious grassroots organizing and social change" - and the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award - which is awarded to films that "combine originality and creativity with firsthand experience in examining central issues of contemporary life and culture...created to honor and support documentary artists whose works are potential catalysts for education and change".)  Clearly, I said, my film wasn't really in the running for the first award, and I have my doubts about the second (potential catalysts for education and change?).

I asked Brush about Full Frame's focus on social justice issues in its awards and she told me that each of their awards was proposed by someone outside of the festival.  She told me that they were open to more craft-oriented awards (such as cinematography or editing), but she emphasized that the festival considers craft in making its selections.  "We're not interested in films that are telling an important story but don't tell it well."

My problem remains the festival's choice of title: "New Docs in Competition".  Why even use that terminology?  No other festival does it and it seems guaranteed to produce confusion.  Brush told me that they don't specify which films are finalists because of a fear that such a designation "could privilege one film over another in the minds of the general public."

As was noted in that elusive email that I never received: 

"We do this to ensure that no one film in the competitive program is privileged over another by audiences."

It's almost an "everybody's a winner" kind of mind-set, although as is made clear by Full Frame's extensive roster of awards, everybody clearly isn't.  And when some films - at least fifteen by my count - aren't finalists in any category, what does "in the competitive program" mean?

Dayna Goldfine says that despite the change of emailing filmmakers the list of finalists, she remains curious "as to why Full Frame seems to be the only festival that has such a confusing competition policy.  In my 20 years as a documentary filmmaker, who has participated in countless festivals all around the world I can honestly say that I have never encountered anything like it."

Joe Angio says that my confusion suggests that the festival still has work to do.  "I know of no other film festival (certainly of the ones that we’ve participated in) where there was any confusion whether or not we were in competition or not."

Adds Goldfine, "I think Nancy should have to address why she chooses not to adhere to a policy more in line with these older, well-respected festivals."

Brush says that the festival will have to be vigilant in the future to make sure that filmmakers actually receive the email with the finalist listings.  But there's also the issue of timing - two weeks is way too late for a festival to let filmmakers know this information - as well as the fact that the general public doesn't really have access to the information, again by the festival's design, and therefore most assume that every film is, as advertised, "in competition".

Full Frame is truly not like other festivals.  It has a screening committe, comprised of academics and members of the community (not many filmmakers among them) that must watch each film - and programmers must defend their choices in front of the committee.  Brush says that she likes the system, although it's the only one she's worked under.  "It takes a lot longer, but at the end of the day, a group of people may see a film in a different way.  It's a very cumbersome system in a lot of ways, but it's very balanced."

Yet in spite of its quirks, the festival remains one of the top documentary festivals in the US.  Some believe it is the top festival, although I'd argue that AFI Silverdocs challenges that position.  It certainly is able to draw nonfiction starpower (as seen by this year's attendees Michael Moore, D A Pennebaker and Ross McElwee) and remains a regular destination of the New York doc community.  And I had a great time (aside from my dental emergency as documented in my blog post) and saw great films.

Additionally, I must admit that despite the contortions, the system has, two years in a row, produced as its winner my favorite film (of all that I have seen - not just those in competition).  Last year it was Iraq in Fragments, this year it was The Monastery.

But it seems so unnecessary and so easy to correct.  Just stop calling all films "in competition" and email or call filmmakers directly and let them know what awards - if any - they are actually up for.  Every other festival does this.  There's no reason that Full Frame shouldn't follow the pack.

**Clarification:  For those who don't know the film, Reel Paradise was directed by Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Stevie) and featured indie legend John Pierson (and his family) as its subject.  Reel Paradise was one of the film shown as a special screening in 2005 at Full Frame and everyone involved knew the film was not in competition.

Paul Harrill: First Person at Virginia Tech and the Fallout From NBC's Lack of Context

I want to make special note of my pal Paul Harrill's recent posts on his blog, which is normally one of my favorite reads about film.  Paul, who participated in the film blogger panel at SXSW, is also a professor at Virginia Tech and has, over the past couple of weeks since the tragic shootings there, written a number of thoughtful and passionate posts about the situation in Blacksburg.  He also has become - I think largely to his dismay - a small part of the story.  Paul felt that some of the photographs of the killer, which were sent to NBC and later disseminated by numerous media sources, bore a resemblance to images in Chan-Wook Park's recent South Korean film OldBoy.  And in the midst of the decision by these media outlets to immediately make public - without any kind of context - the killer's photos, videos and writings, Paul hoped to give some kind of reference.   Says Harrill:

For others, the image might have suggested something else, but I am a filmmaker and I suppose I am inclined to make comparisons between images of cinematic texts, if one can use such coolly academic terminology for a killer’s self-taped imagery. Both images feature people looking into a camera’s eye brandishing a hammer and, importantly for me, both images are “revenge texts.” The fact that both images are of Asian males was largely inconsequential to me; if either person had been of a difference race, nationality, etc. I would have, I feel, made the same connection.

Paul's observation made it into several news accounts and - as is the media's wont - it suddenly became the defacto link: MOVIE INSPIRES KILLER.

More from Paul:

I thought, some readers and viewers would be perplexed by such an image, and I wanted to suggest a possible reference. Mainly, though, I wanted to use this opportunity of having the Times’ attention to tell them how I would prefer that they did not show such images in the first place. This message was included in my email to them though, perhaps not surprisingly, they chose not to acknowledge that comment. I believe that giving airtime to a killer’s ramblings does a disservice to those of us here in Blacksburg who are deeply, actively grieving; I also believe that it likely gives the killer the attention he so desperately desired. For me, sharing these images publicly goes beyond pornography.

How misguided and naive can a person be, particularly in light of the comments in my last post? I should have said nothing, done nothing, and ignored it all. I made the mistake of attempting to make sense of the nonsensical, assuming that my comment could be a simple footnote to a single still image, and above all, presuming that a person can have any control over any comment he feeds to the Media Machine.

Last weekend in the Baltimore Sun, film critic Michael Sragow tried to discount the link between the perennially popular film and the Virginia Tech massacre:

Despite that one image of Cho with a two-fisted grip on a hammer, and another self-portrait of him holding a gun to his own temple, there appeared to be no clear connection between Oldboy and Cho.

Paul Harrill, who teaches film and video at Virginia Tech, initially drew attention to the similarities between Oldboy and Cho. London's Evening Standard first announced the link, reporting yesterday that, "Police believe Cho Seung-Hui repeatedly watched the movie." But no subsequent report has confirmed that theory or suspicion. Harrill, in an e-mailed statement, expressed dismay over the snowballing story, and said he was simply making an observation. His point, he wrote, was to "initiate a conversation" about "news outlets using a mass murderer's fantasies as sick spectacle and - let us never forget - as a source of revenue."

Harrill wrote on his blog about the fall-out:

This morning I awoke to several emails and blog comments accusing me of everything from racism against South Koreans to blaming cinema for the carnage on Monday. And all day I have been courted by several major media outlets salivating for an interview with me, as if I could somehow explain the events of Monday to them by way of a movie. How sad. How absurd. The answer to all of these individuals has been “No.”

Let me be clear: My comparison of these two images was not meant to suggest in ANY way that movies, any movie, “made him do it.” Likewise, my comparison of these two images is IN NO WAY an attempt to make ANY generalizations based on racial, nationalistic, or any other sorts of lines.

The unfortunate thing is that this sideshow lost focus from Harrill's initial intent, which he outlined in a previous piece that referenced Jill Godmilow's theory of "The Pornography of the Real":

I think of storytelling as a kind of citizenship, so I don’t blame people for wanting to know the stories unfolding in Blacksburg, nor do I blame journalists for telling those stories. Still, how one gathers the facts, why you gather them, and the way you tell them can’t be separated from the story you’re telling. Sadly I’ve been witnessing firsthand how many journalists, particularly those from out of town, seem to have forgotten that common decency is also facet of citizenship. My main consolation, and it isn’t much, is knowing that the members of the media will move on to another spectacle in very short time.

There should be an intelligent conversation in this country about how the media responded to the Virginia Tech story, particularly the decision by NBC and other media outlets to air (immediately, without context and seemingly without limit) the killer's photos and videos.  There's a legitimate question to be asked here.  Did the public at large gain anything from seeing - on their television screens and splashed across the front page of the morning papers - what amounted to a publicity shot of a madman, arms splayed open, guns cocked?  Would NBC have been justified in merely describing what they had received and saying that they saw no public good in rewarding the killer's evil by publishing his manifesto (despite comparisons to the Unabomber, in which the killer at the time was on the loose)?

Slate's Jack Shafer argues that NBC and the other media were somewhat in the right but questions the filtering of images:

NBC News needn't apologize to anybody for originally airing the Cho videos and pictures. The Virginia Tech slaughter is an ugly story, but the five W's of journalism—who, what, where, when, and why—demand that journalists ask the question "why?" even if they can't adequately answer it. If you're interested in knowing why Cho did what he did, you want to see the videos and photos and read from the transcripts. If you're not interested, you should feel free to avert your eyes.

The real story here is the odd restraint NBC News showed. Cho mailed NBC News about two dozen QuickTime videos, of which the network has aired only a handful. NBC anchor Brian Williams said last night that the network is also holding back Cho photos, as well as Cho writings it deems incoherent and obscene. It seems to think that it's protecting viewers by rationing Cho material while at the same time it reruns the already released video indiscriminately.

I think Shafer's view that "you should feel free to avert your eyes" is simplistic and intellectually dishonest.  I got off the plane in Tampa last Thursday morning and there was no averting my eyes - the photograph in question was everywhere you looked - on newspaper boxes, on hanging televisions in the terminal and in gift shops.  It was impossible not to see it.

The conservative blog Hot Air agrees with Shafer, perhaps surprisingly given that NBC seems to be the current big media villain in right-leaning circles:

I tip slightly in favor of airing it because (a) I hate when the media plays paterfamilias in deciding what is and isn’t “appropriate news” for the public to see, and (b) I was honestly curious. (The National Review's Stephen) Spruiell’s** been grasping for some grander justification, like bringing the power of collective intelligence to bear on the evidence, but I think he’s just dressing up natural curiosity about the psychology of a mass murderer in some nobler utilitarian faux purpose. Which is not to say the media should be showing us crime-scene photos and pornography, etc., pursuant to point (a); obviously the feelings of the victims’ families do matter and just as obviously there are experiences so mortal and private that we recoil instinctively from images that exploit them in the interest of news. As unsatisfying an answer as this may be, I think ultimately it’s just a gut reaction about where to draw the line of decency, and so long as NBC didn’t/doesn’t show any crime scenes, I’m willing to cut them a break.

[**Note from AJ - Bringing the conversation full circle, Spruiell's post at NRO reference's Harrill's Oldboy observation.]

NBC's Brian Williams later wrote on his blog that the worst of the videos will never be made public:

I do not know of a reputable news organization that would have stopped after that first step ... and put the contents into a drawer. We chose to air but a small portion of the sociopathic rants, writings and recordings of a murderer.  It was shocking material ... beyond disturbing.  However unpleasant it might have been for us all to watch, we are journalists and it was inarguably a huge news development.  In consultation with law enforcement, and with all of our senior and standards executives and producers present, we then set about heavily editing some of the material -- enough to convey the mindset of the troubled gunman....

A critical piece of information in a huge national news story was dropped on our doorstep.  While I love my work, our task yesterday was extremely unpleasant.  Yesterday was an awful day. There was no joy in this for any of us. To the contrary: opening each computer video snippet for the first time was a sickening and harrowing experience -- and it's good to know that the worst of them -- all now in the hands of investigators -- will never see the light of day.  As I said on the air last evening: we are aware that this puts words in the mouth of a murderer.  We are also aware that this danger, represented by this sick young man, lives among us ... and lives on our campuses and in our schools with our children ... and to see it and hear it is to understand the consequences.  We are fellow citizens, parents and television viewers -- we understand why families are upset -- and this continues to be an awful chapter in American life.

While I appreciate the position that NBC was in, I don't think that there was enough time between NBC's receiving the package and their releasing of images.  While NBC News claimed in a statement that "we did not rush the material onto air", there was little to be gained from running it the  same day that they received it.  It could have been put into context in a larger piece, rather than as wallpaper behind the yammering Chris Matthews on MSNBC.  If NBC has made judgments that some of the material - which no doubt would also give insight into what happened - should never be seen, I don't entirely buy the notion that the other material had to make it on the air in time for the evening news.

Further, NBC's excuse that their judgment has been validated by other news organizations...

The decision to run this video was reached by virtually every news organization in the world, as evidenced by coverage on television, on websites and in newspapers

...rings hollow to me.  The other organizations could claim that they were just following NBC's lead and that once the photos were out there, they had no choice but to run with them (I don't agree with this either but it's not an unlikely explanation).

This has me reflecting on two films I saw at Full Frame - The Devil Came on Horseback as well as Taxi to the Dark Side.  Both show extremely graphic images about major news events that no major news organization would touch.  And the images in both films are essential to the viewer's understanding of the stories, which may help explain why so many are still in the dark about Darfur and Abu Ghraib.

So why do I support the use of these images in these films while I think NBC erred in its use of the photos and videos from the Virginia Tech killer?  One word:  Context.  The thing that Paul Harrill was trying to provide and the thing that more time considering would have brought.  And more and more, it's the thing that nonfiction filmmakers seem to be able to provide with much more success than traditional journalists.

Losers and Winners at Hot Docs, Literally

Entering closing weekend in Toronto, juries at Hot Docs have announced this year's honorees, with Best International Feature Documentary going to Ulrike Franke & Michael Loeken's German film Losers and Winners.  A special jury prize went to Michael Skolnik's Without the King.  In the category of Best Canadian Feature Documentary, the award went to Bryan Friedman's The Bodybuilder and I. 

The press release, with a full list of winners in both features and shorts cateogries, follows:

In the Best Canadian Feature Documentary category, the award went to Bryan Friedman’s THE BODYBUILDER AND I (Canada, 90min), the director’s look at his complicated, estranged relationship with his elderly, body-building father. In addition to the award, Friedman was also presented with a $5000 cash prize, courtesy of the Documentary Channel.

The Special Jury Prize in the Canadian Feature Documentary category was awarded to Serge Giguere's DRIVEN BY DREAMS (Canada, 83 min), an inspiring look at a group of seniors who've embraced their twilight years with passion and a lust for life.  In addition to the award, Giguere was also presented with a $5000 FAP prize, courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada. Other finalists in the Canadian Feature Documentary category included John Zaritsky’s THE SUICIDE TOURIST (Canada, 90min) and Arturo Perez Torres’ SUPER AMIGOS (Canada, 82 min).

In the Best International Feature Documentary category, the award went to Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken’s LOSERS AND WINNERS (Germany, 96min), an examination of the collision of cultures and the impact of globalization as a German smelting plant is painstakingly disassembled to be rebuilt in China’s new industrial heartland. In addition to the award, Franke and Loeken were also presented with a $5000 cash prize courtesy of Hot Docs.

The Special Jury Prize in the International Feature Documentary category was awarded to Michael Skolnik’s WITHOUT THE KING (USA, 84 min), a revealing look at the growing civil unrest in the impoverished nation of Swaziland, Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy. Other finalists in the International Feature Documentary category included Irene Taylor Brodsky’s HEAR AND NOW (USA, 84 min) and Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK (USA, 88 min).

The Best Mid-Length Documentary Award, for films 30 – 59 minutes in length, was presented to Johanna Lunn’s FORGIVENESS: STORIES FOR OUR TIME (Canada, 56 min), a powerful and personal exploration of anger, grief and the process of forgiveness through four people whose lives have been ripped apart by murder and terrorism. Other finalists in the Best Mid-Length Documentary category included Johanna Straub, Sandra Kulbach, Michaela Schaeuble and Nan Mellinger’s MOTHERS – 4 PIECES (Germany, 58 min) and Sonja Linden’s NO MAN IS AN ISLAND (Finland , 40 min).

The Best Short Documentary Award, for films up to 29 minutes in length, was presented to Arturo Cabanas’ MAN UP (USA, 11 min), a shocking snapshot of a father who, through belittlement and punishment, is attempting to raise his son to be a soldier.  Other finalists in the Best Short Documentary category included Mark Craig's TALK TO ME (US, 23 min) and Kees van der Geest's SHIT AND CHICKS (Netherlands, 10 min).

The Don Haig Award, an annual prize awarded to an emerging Canadian director whose work has bridged the documentary and fiction filmmaking worlds, was presented to Toronto-based filmmaker Hubert Davis, whose work includes the Academy Award nominated short documentary HARDWOOD and the fiction film ARUBA. The $10,000 cash prize, presented in memory of Don Haig, the much beloved ‘godfather of Canadian cinema’ who gave generously of  his time and resources to support emerging directors, can be used for whatever the recipient needs towards his/her craft.

The inaugural Lindalee Tracey Award, founded in memory of the creative, socially-engaged documentary director, and awarded to an emerging Canadian filmmaker who works in the spirit of Lindalee – with passion, humour, a strong sense of social justice and a personal point of view – was presented to Edmonton-based Trevor Anderson whose work includes the short films RUGBURN and ROCK POCKETS. Accompanying the Lindalee Tracey Award is a $5000 cash prize.

Also at the ceremony, the Hot Docs Board of Directors presented acclaimed Dutch director Heddy Honigmann with the annual Outstanding Achievement Award. As part of the honour, Honigmann’s work is being featured in a retrospective programme during the Festival. She will also be a special guest in the final Hot Docs Talks panel, The Art of the Interview, on Saturday, April 28 from 1:00pm – 2:30pm.

Finally, in addition to the above awards, prizes associated with Rendezvous, Hot Docs’ service which arranges for one-on-one pitch meetings between producers with projects in development and commissioning editors, were also announced. The OMNI Prize for Best Third Language/Ethno-Cultural Pitch, which grants $10,000 in development money via the OMNI Diversity Television Independent Producers Fund, was awarded to 1001 PERFORMANCES, pitched by Josh Miller of Panacea Entertainment. The CBC Newsworld Camera Prize, which provides a $10,000 camera rental package for the best pitch received by the CBC, was awarded to SOUNDS LIKE A REVOLUTION, pitched by Summer Preney of Deltatime Productions. The NBC News Archive Prize for the best pitch at Rendezvous, which awards $2000 worth of rights for footage licensed by NBC News Archives, was awarded to GRANNY POWER, pitched by Isabelle Couture of Les Films de L’Isle.

The Hot Docs Audience Award, which is given to the film with the highest rating based on audience ballot, and the CIDA Award, a $5000 cash prize awarded to a filmmaker for the best Canadian film on an international development issue, will be announced on Monday, April 30

The Hot Docs Festival Juries are:

Canadian Feature Documentary
Mark Achbar, Claas Danielsen, Ibtisam Mara’ana

International Feature Documentary
Judith Helfand, Eugene Jarecki, Amir Labaki

Short and Mid-Length Documentary
Simon Houpt, Ivana Milosevic, Alexandre Trudeau

The Don Haig Award Jury are:
Joan Schafer (Chair), Michael McNamara, Louise Lore, Brigitte Berman

The "Premiere" Conundrum and the Race to Be Number 2

Anthony Kaufman had a great piece at indieWIRE the other day looking at the issue of festival premieres and the pressure premiere status places on filmmakers.  As Kaufman writes,

When the Tribeca Film Festival begins this week, the event will unveil 75 world premieres, five international premieres, and 30 North American premieres. That's no easy feat during the spring and early summer months, which see a dozen high-profile regional festivals around North America, from SXSW to Los Angeles, all competing for new films. But "this ridiculous concern for premiere status," as one festival programmer calls it, puts excessive pressure on filmmakers, limits their ability to generate momentum on the festival circuit, and arguably runs counter to the broader mission of film festivals in the first place: to showcase good films and cultivate cinephilia.

Kaufman also notes the contortions that some filmmakers and festivals have to go through in order to show films without jeopardizing their status at the more premiere event.  In order to still be in competition at the upcoming Los Angeles Film Festival, SXSW award winner Billy the Kid's screening at Full Frame was kept secret - so much so that I had botched my own coverage.  The filmmakers had told me that they were screening at Full Frame, I put it up on my blog post, then later retracted it when I didn't see Billy the Kid listed on the Full Frame schedule.

Similarly, at least one upcoming Tribeca premiere* had a secret screening in February at True/False, a festival that has no qualms about playing the premiere game if it allows them to show the films they want.  As indieWIRE's Jonny Leahan wrote last month:

Although the festival eschews the idea of world premieres, they offer many "sneak peeks" as well as works-in-progress. "We're taking this stand for a number of reasons," festival Co-Director David Wilson wrote in a recent email to indieWIRE. "But chiefly because we feel like the attention paid to premieres and premiere status is drawing focus away from the films themselves."

I wrote about this issue last fall when I pondered the linguistic contortions necessary to claim that certain films were having their world premieres at Toronto:

(T)his seems to be high season for the annual "you say premiere, I say preview" shell game.  It seems that nothing actually screens at Telluride - even though anyone can attend and members of the press and distribution companies are out in force.  It's treated as if it's a press screening, I suppose, or even a cast and crew screening that happens to be open to the public and followed by a press conference...

But at some point, all the maneuvering over premieres and previews of all shapes and sizes (international, European, North American, east coast, west coast, southeast, et al) gets to be a bit maddening for us filmmakers.  Without getting into specifics, one European festival wrote us to say that they were very interested in showing our film, that there was a good chance that they would program it, that if we hadn't played any other festivals in Europe there was a possibility that they would put it in competition, that if we played another European festival before their festival then we could not be in competition but it was very possible that they would still program the film.

Kaufman's article goes the extra mile on this topic by noting that the introduction of Tribeca has turned what used to be a somewhat friendly rivalry into a no holds battle for films.   If you play Tribeca, you can't play Los Angeles.  If you play SXSW, you likely won't play Tribeca - at least not in competition.   And with the battle to become #2 (behind Sundance) is an ever increasing monetary prize for competition winners.  Tribeca's narrative jury winner will receive $50,000, matching what Los Angeles gives to both its narrative and documentary prize recipients. 

But is this better for filmmakers in the end?  After all, if the same small group of films were in competition at Sundance, Tribeca, Los Angeles and SXSW, wouldn't that squeeze out a lot of worthy films?  Sure.  But something else has been lost, as noted in Kaufman's piece by Hot Docs programmer Sean Farnel:

"It's like opening weekend," says Farnel. "You get your one shot, and if you don't get it, you're buried, because there are so many films and at the next festival, everyone's looking for exclusivity."

Farnel, who used to program documentaries at the Toronto International Film Festival, fondly remembers the festival run for "Spellbound," which premiered at SXSW, screened at Tribeca and other regional festivals, and then eventually at the Toronto fest where it finally broke out. "But that can't happen anymore in the current context," he says, "because Tribeca doesn't screen films from SXSW, and Toronto doesn't screen films from Tribeca."

"It's better to give films a critical mass and a momentum through the festival circuit, and that's happening less and less," continues Farnel, who believes that Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Toronto have earned the right to insist on premieres. "But I think every other festival that does that is prioritizing their own interests over the filmmakers."

*Clarification: I had previously named one of the films that was shown at True/False but have taken down the title after being told that the information had been embargoed from other outlets.  As I have reported in this same article on Full Frame's sneak screening of Billy the Kid and as I have written about Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side, which also sneaked in Durham prior to its official premiere at Tribeca,  I am not entirely confident in my decision to remove the name of the film.  My instinct is that removing the name of the film facilitates the same unfortunate "premiere status" frenzy that I dislike.  And frankly, it goes against the tone of the rest of the piece.  Further, just taking down the name and changing it to "one upcoming Tribeca premiere" goes against my own rules for how I want to manage my writing and reporting on this blog, so I wanted to disclose that I had done so and that I was not sure that it was the correct decision.

Sarasota 2007: I'll Be Your George Peppard If You'll Be My Patricia Neal

Champagne in my room
The cougars are on the prowl
Oh! Sarasota

In January 2001, I arrived for the first time in Sarasota, Florida.  I had come with a (narrative) short film to the burgeoning film festival there (it was their third year), and I was a festival virgin.  My short had premiered at the previous year's Los Angeles Shorts Fest, but that was local and, aside from my own screening, I didn't really experience the festival much.  But this was something else.  Flying to Florida, staying on the beach, attending glitzy parties with Sarasota's bedecked and bejeweled finest, all of it was an amazing experience.  It was there that I met the filmmaker Kim Snyder, who was on the circuit with her doc, I Remember Me, and it was her experience with shooting in digital formats that encouraged me to seek out my own nonfiction project to shoot on DV.  A month later, I was in New York beginning to shoot what would eventually become my first feature.

So Sarasota holds fond memories.

This isn't even mentioning the more, shall we say, eccentric moments that the Sarasota Fest has provided, such as the crush of patrons heading into a theatre that caused me to have my hand firmly planted on the ass of then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris, mere weeks after the culmination of the Florida recount debacle.  Or the night that the local cover band opened for Aerosmith inside a local hotel ballroom.  Or the woman who stalked me at the Night of 1,000 Stars gala party in 2001 and returned to my side in 2003 - pity I'd had so much to drink the first year that I forgot I should avoid talking to her the second.

(Sarasota's Tom Hall addresses the troops at the Thursday afternoon filmmaker reception.)

During my four year absence, there have been some pretty major changes for the fest.  Tom Hall and Holly Herrick have come on to program the festival and they've developed what turns out to be one of the best regional fest line-ups around, with two separate narrative competitions (one for the likes of Sarah Polley and the late Adrienne Shelly - whose Waitress won the Grand Jury Prize - and another, called Independent Visions, which featured many of the so-called mumblecorps films, which made a big splash at SXSW and which many are still trying to define - see recent Filmmaker Magazine piece for proof) and a documentary competition featuring some of the most visually stunning films of the year (present company included - for which I give due credit to my excellent cinematographer).

(Doc Jury Members Ryan Harrington of A&E IndieFilms and Mary Kerr of the Flaherty Seminars - who handed the Doc Jury Prize to Benjamin Niles for his film Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 - surround Sarasota's Holly Herrick at an art gallery reception on Friday afternoon.)

The second change was time of year.  By moving from January to April, the fest has freed itself from the shadow of Sundance and the looming presence of SXSW and can freely program the best from both of those fests, as well as Toronto and others.  And the stunning April in Florida weather (you can just sense that the horrible humidity is right around the corner) is enough to bring sun-starved northerners to the festival in droves.

Suddenly, the fest is not just an eccentric secret.  It's a full on happening.

(Hannah Takes the Stairs director Joe Swanberg, yours truly, Orphans director Ry Russo-Young, the lovely and talented Jonny Leahan - in Sarasota moonlighting for indieWIRE - and Holy Modal Rounders...Bound to Lose co-director Paul Lovelace at the Night of 1,000 Stars party.)

I was mostly pleased to take in a few films that I'd been wanting to see - at least two of them since last year's Toronto fest.  The first was controversial director Tony Kaye's unflinching look at the abortion debate, Lake of Fire.  I'd been hearing great things about the film since it premiered and it picked up an honorable mention at the previous week's Full Frame Fest, so I was anxious to see the film.  So much so that I specifically scheduled my flight so that I would arrive in time to see the film in Sarasota. 

What surprised me about the film was how much of it was set during the 1990s.  I'd guess that 85% of the film was shot during the last decade, with numerous references to President Clinton and the killings of abortion providers.  Late in the film, when a woman seeks her own abortion, she reveals that her segment was shot in the previous decade when she reveals her age and the year she was born.  It made me wonder what had caused Kaye to stop working on the project and what caused him to pick it up again.  The strange thing is that the abortion debate is actually much different in 2007 than it was in 1997.  We no longer have a spate of clinic bombings, we have a Republican president and we have other issues - such as terrorism, war, stem cells and gay marriage - that seem to have diluted the issue somewhat, or at least put it on different footing.  Kaye does make reference to the recent bill in South Dakota that sought to make all abortions illegal, but the film isn't up-to-date enough to reveal that the bill was overturned by voters in November.

All the questions aside (and they are questions more than complaints), the film is something to see, beautifully shot in crisp black and white, with a strong (if occasionally overly foreboding) score and it does an effective job of blurring the lines in the debate.

(Silver Jew director Michael Tully and David Lowery, director of The Outlaw Son and Some Analog Lines at the Thursday afternoon reception.)

Also stunning to look at was Jennifer Baichwal's acclaimed film Manufactured Landscapes, which takes on themes similar to one of my favorite films, Koyaanisqatsi, mainly the transformation of nature into urban/industry by man.  In Baichwal's film, we see this through the lens of photographer Edward Burtynsky, who is famed for his large scale photographs of industrial settings.  The film is spare, quiet and haunting, and was strangely one of the most peaceful and relaxing experiences I've had watching a film recently.

(Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa co-directors Randy and Jeremy Stulberg flank Stan, one of the film's subjects, who flew from New Mexico to join the dynamic duo in Sarasota.  Off the Grid premiered at Slamdance, had a big screening at True/False and was in competition here.)

I was also glad to get a chance to see Ry Russo-Young's Orphans, a film that many were talking about at SXSW and had recently been in the news after one of its lead actresses died of a drug overdose.  Because of Lily Wheelwright's tragic death, a  sense of foreboding hung over the potentially doomed sisters in Orphans, and in many ways, the real life passing seemed to be the coda waiting right around the corner for the character she played.  It's hard to know how I would have viewed the film differently had I seen the film at SXSW and had the actress still been around to bask in the glow of a successful indie project.  But even without this knowledge, Wheelwright's performance, like the film itself, seems to be straddling an invisible third rail, and it seems strangely (and regretfully) proper that the denouement happens offscreen.

(The Rabbi Report's Mark Rabinowitz - who gave this blog post its Breakfast at Tiffany's title - along with Quiet City director Aaron Katz at the stellar Of Montreal show at the far away Minxx nightclub.)

Aside from films, the parties at Sarasota continued to live up to their reputation, with most everyone blown away by Of Montreal's glamtastic rock show on Thursday night.  Strangely, when I saw Of Montreal (who hail from Athens, GA) at True/False last year, they struck me as a band more in the realm of The Decemberists than David Bowie.  But whoever or whatever made them come over to glitter should be thanked.  It was a great, great performance.

And if you don't believe me, check out any number of other filmmaker/bloggers who spent much of last weekend in Sarasota (most of whom are featured in photos on this page).  There are in depth reports from pals David Lowery (who includes a photo of the two of us, one of us in eyeliner),  Michael Tully (who has some kind and descriptive thoughts about my film), "The Rabbi" Mark Rabinowitz, James Isreal and Sarasota's own Tom Hall.

Update Wednesday - Jonny Leahan's indieWIRE report is now up. 

Full Frame 2007: We're Like the Maya

Part of the appeal of the annual Full Frame Film Festival has always been its proximity to New York City.  Just an quick hour or so by plane to Durham, it's been a welcome kickoff to spring and the numerous festivals - doc-centric or otherwise - that will follow in the months to come.  This year, as the festival marked its tenth anniversary, mother nature and a surprise spring nor'easter made that quick trip a lot more complicated, as nearly every east coast guest was called upon to engage in a bit of flight juggling in order to get home.  Some moved up their flights, leaving Saturday night or early Sunday morning (and making that afternoon's awards BBQ slightly less packed with dignitaries) while others pushed their flights til Monday or even Tuesday.  Those who tried to fly out on Sunday were met with cancellations, had flights that sat on the tarmac - or even flew halfway to New York - before turning around and returning to RDU.

The uncertainty of travel and weather seemed to reflect the tone of many of the participants as well.  Despite the celebratory tone inherent in the festival looking back on the past ten years (and all the events that coincided with that), a number of participants told me that something seemed off this year but no one could put their finger on what that "something" was.  Perhaps it was the weather and the early departures.  Perhaps it was the fact that a number of high profile guests and industry leaders who were expected were suddenly and surprisingly MIA.  Perhaps it was that many of the filmmakers - including many of the winners - hadn't attended, which was surprising considering the fact that many veteran filmmakers have been attending on and off from Year One.

As this was my first time at the fest - and my first time back in the Triangle since I worked with the gifted filmmaker Norwood Cheek, who was then based in Chapel Hill - I can't compare to previous incarnations.  And my own experience was largely overshadowed by a ridiculous problem with my wisdom tooth that pretty much knocked me out of commission for most of Friday and early Saturday.  But I was able to see a decent number of films, including a couple that I'd been wanting to see since Sundance.

The first, of course, was Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's The Devil Came on Horseback.  Since Sundberg and Stern made one of my absolute favorite films of 2006 - The Trials of Darryl Hunt - I have been excited to see their (most immediate) follow-up.  But although we've played a few of the same festivals, we've often been time slotted against one another, so this was my first real opportunity to see their new film (which would go on to pick up two prizes at Full Frame).

(The Devil Came on Horseback's Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg at the post-screening Q&A.)

Taken together, The Devil Came on Horseback and Darryl Hunt announce Sundberg and Stern's incredible talent and versatility.  While Darryl Hunt was as dogged as a classic crime and courtroom thriller, The Devil moves like lightning, spurred by the stylish kinetic editing of Joey Grossfield and horrific photos of the Darfur crisis shot former Marine captain Brian Steidle.  Steidle is also the film's protagonist - a young man just out of the military, looking for cold, hard cash in an interesting, adventurous job who finds himself on an African Union monitoring team, where he gradually realizes that he is in the midst of a genocide - and by casting him as such, Sundberg and Stern have presented what is perhaps the first easy-to-understand look at the Darfur crisis.  The audience sees the development of tensions, followed by murderous raids on villages, just as Steidle does.  As he learns what's going on, we learn.

In some ways, Steidle is not unlike the defense lawyers in Darryl Hunt - with whom we followed leads (occasionally blindly and sometimes erroneously) in trying to get to the heart of what was happening - and Sundberg and Stern's innate understanding of how to patiently let the narrative unfold (yet somehow never condescending) serves them particularly well here.  I'm almost hesitant to say that it should be required viewing, because somehow that makes it sound like medicine - and aren't most Americans studiously avoiding learning about Darfur - but it's the kind of film that could really mean something if the right kind of attention is paid to it.  As a news report noted the other day, studies show that humans are more sympathetic to the killing of one person than they are to the massacre of hundreds of thousands.  We get numb to it.  This film, like Steidle's photographs, have the potential to change that dynamic.

One reaction I had to The Devil Came on Horseback is that I'd never seen television news tell me about the Darfur crisis in such an easy-to-understand (and yet thorough) manner.  I felt the same way when I saw a sneak preview of Alex Gibney's new film Taxi to the Dark Side, which has its official world premiere soon at Tribeca.  Gibney, who was Oscar nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, has not made the first documentary about Abu Ghraib (Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair - which profiled the shocking case of one inmate - was recently in theatres), nor will it be the last (Errol Morris' take on the scandal is likely to hit festivals this fall).  But in sketching a compelling and ultimately infuriating look at the whole of the Abu Ghraib story and the larger story of the Bush administration's decision that we needed to get "mean & dirty" after 9/11 and employ torture, I thought Gibney's film was quite good.   Gibney is clearly adept at this sort of political storytelling and even if - as was the case in the Enron film - much of the information exists in other news accounts, you do have that feeling that you are seeing much of it with fresh eyes.  Additionally, Gibney's films look great, and this is certainly no exception.

I also responded to For the Bible Tells Me So, Daniel Karslake's emotional film that looks at five American families and how they reconcile their previously held religious beliefs with the news that their son or daughter is gay.  The families are well chosen, balancing the well known - the stories of openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson and the daughter of former House leader Dick Gephardt - with lesser known folks who have since become activists.  But what Karslake does particularly well is to truly dig into the Bible's teachings on homosexuality - the five or six verses that fundamentalists use to condemn gays - and explores both the surrounding verses (in the same breath that homosexuality is deemed an "abomination", so is shell fish and mixing different kinds of material in clothes) and the cultural norms of the times.  Less successful is a middle section that features a satirical cartoon that seems straight out of Bowling for Columbine, but overall it's a moving and extremely thorough film about an important political and social topic.

In the midst of those wrenching films, it was great to see Gary Hustwit's Helvetica.  Much of the talk about Hustwit's film has been, "yes, it's really about the font", with people wondering if a feature length documentary can possibly support such a topic.  But after the film garnered raves from SXSW (where it premiered), and sustained laughter in Durham, it's clearly one of those entertainments along the lines of Wordplay, a film that will appeal to the smart set - both designers and public radio listeners, which come to think of it, is where most of the art house crowd comes from anyway.  The film, as one would hope from a film about design, looks beautiful - the digital cinematography by Luke Geissbuhler (who also shot Borat) is stunningly composed and the graphics are spare and in a familiar font type.  Helvetica will next be seen at Hot Docs although there are rumors of many more upcoming screenings.

Also enjoyable was Michael Chandler's Knee Deep, which was a Fargo-esque look at a familial crime gone horribly wrong.  With it's quirky characters and filmic style, Chandler has crafted a film that is both entertaining and completely thought-provoking, building a scenario in which you think you know where your loyalties lie and then mostly upending them by revealing more and more about the characters motivations.  Although an interview with the victim would have been welcome (one assumes she didn't feel the need to contribute to a film that at least partly blames her for the crime), Chandler does an effective job of making everyone a little bit guilty and redeeming everyone a lit bit in the process.  I found myself talking about it hours later with my audience companions, with different people taking different sides as to whether the crime's "victim" deserved what she almost got or whether other family members should be more to blame.

By Sunday afternoon (and the aforementioned departure of many of the east coast guests), the annual Awards BBQ was a welcome break.  Also, it was the first time since my trip to the dentist that I actually felt I could eat more than just incredibly soft foods, so I loaded up on a delicious buffet of pulled pork, potato salad, cole slaw, baked beans and cookies.

Held inside the large armory building across from the Carolina Theatre headquarters, the awards ceremony is both extremely comfortable and slightly strange.  More like a high school awards night than a traditional film festival close, onlookers sitting in a viewing gallery not unlike Congress hang over railings and cheer and scream when films they've seen go home with prizes.  And, like high school - where awards are handed out in niche categories, most of the prizes are related to specific causes or agendas, rather than focusing on craft elements - such as cinematography or editing.  More strange is Full Frame's positing that most all of its line-up are in competition (see here, where FF calls its roster of films "New Docs: Films in Competition"), even though this is not actually the case.  Apparently this was a huge issue two years ago and some are surprised that Full Frame continues this practice even after the dust-up that occurred then.  I'm working on a separate blog piece on this topic to run next week. 

(Marco Williams picks up the Spectrum Award for his film, Banished, which premiered this year at Sundance.)

(In attendance award winners gather after the ceremony for a group shot at the Armory.)

The Monastery Wins Big at Full Frame

The Monastery - Penille Rose Gronkjaer's film about the unusual relationship between Mr. Vig and the nun who comes to claim his castle for a Russian Orthadox Monastery - was the big winner this afternoon at the 10th Full Frame Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, taking both the Grand Jury Prize and the Charles Geuggenheim Emerging Artist Award for a first time filmmaker.

Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's emotional and stirring look at the Darfur genocide - The Devil Came On Horseback - also picked up two awards, the Working Films Award, which honors a film "with the greatest potential for supporting serious grassroots organizing and social change" and shared the Seeds of War prize (for "filmmakers who lay bare the seeds and mechanisms that create war") with Jesse James Miller and Pete McCormack for their film Uganda Rising.

Full Frame tends to focus on films with a social justice message - indeed, aside from the Grand Jury and Emerging Artist prizes (both of which went to the entertaining and decidedly un-social justice Monastery) nearly all the awards are issue-driven rather than specifically craft-focused (although juries certainly include craft in determining winners from the narrow selection of films they are given to watch). 

The double win by The Monastery, following its triumph at IDFA in November, makes it one of the front runners for this year's Oscar nominations.  Writing about the film after seeing it at True/False last month, I said:

As great documentaries often go, The Monastery is a small story extremely well told, with a central figure - Mr. Vig - that should go down in history as one of the great characters of nonfiction film.  But it is Grønkjær's filmmaking - and her relationships, both on camera and off - that make the film as good as it is.

It also has the potential to be a big break-out film that reaches beyond traditional documentary audiences if a distributor can figure out how to tap into audiences that are interested in entertaining stories that also deal with religion.  (As a personal aside, my sister and her husband, who as far as I know have never seen a doc in a theater - aside from my own - and whose politics are decidedly more Republican than my own, saw the Monastery at True/False and laughed heartily throughout).

I will have my own full report on Full Frame upon my return to Los Angeles.  A full list of winners follows:

Grand Jury Prize
The Monastery
directed by Pernille Rose Gronkjaer

Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award
The Monastery
directed by Pernille Rose Gronkjaer

Audience Award
War/Dance
directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix/Fine

Shorts Jury Prize
Cross Your Eyes Keep Them Wide
Ikeyadirected by Ben Wu
(Honorable mention - Zo is dat, directed by Elizabeth Salgado)

Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award
(for films that "combine originality and creativity with firsthand experience in examining central issues of contemporary life and culture...created to honor and support documentary artists whose works are potential catalysts for education and change")
The Ants
directed by Kaoru Ikeya

Inspiration Award
(for "a film that best exemplifies the value and relevance of world religions and spirituality")
Forever
directed by Heddy Honigmann
(Honorable mention - Lake of Fire, directed by Tony Kaye)

President's Award for Best Student Film
Lumo
directed by Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Nelson Walker III

Spectrum Award
(for "a filmmaker of color whose work demonstrates artistic excellence and achievement")
Banished
directed by Marco Williams
(Honorable mention - Leila Khaled, Hijacker, directed by Lina Makboul)

Women in Leadership Award
("given to the film that best portrays women in leadership")
Shame
directed by Mohammed Naqvi

Working Films Award
The Devil Came on Horseback
directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern

Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights
("presented to a film that addresses a significant human rights issue in the United States")
For the Bible Tells Me So
directed by Daniel Karslake

Seeds of War Award (presented to two films)
The Devil Came on Horseback
directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern
Uganda Rising
directed by Jesse James Miller and Pete McCormack

More Oscar Doc Rules

There have been a few posts on other sites about my recent look at the changing Oscar qualification rules for documentaries. 

Agnes Varnum notes my closing thought and argues:

"I think that awards should be for the best films. Imagine you beg, borrow and steal your way to a wonderful film that gets industry and audience behind it, but the fact is that you won’t win an award such as this without planning and then campaigning for it. The awards are only for those who try (and pay) to secure it, not necessarily for the best films."

Paul Harrill challenges my assertions on the requirement that you must have a 35mm print if you get shortlisted:

"(M)ost documentaries these days — including all five nominated last year — were shot on some form of video. A 35mm blow up may be an “up-rez”, but it is, in all likelihood, a decrease in visual quality of the camera original footage. In all likelihood, the best looking version is the film’s videotape color-corrected edit master tape, which is probably on HDCAM SR. Heck, it might be on DVCam.

My point is this: If a film can qualify for the Oscar without ever making a print (by the new rules, it can), and if a 35mm print is a downgrade in quality (as any 35mm blow up is) then why create some flaming hoop for cash-strapped filmmakers and/or distributors to jump through? This would be a minor point, of course, if such prints didn’t cost $20,000 or more. That’s chump change for a studio; for the smaller outfits that distribute documentaries I would imagine that’s a hefty price for what sounds like a few screenings for the Documentary Committee to decide whether or not you’ll be nominated."

Anthony Kaufman notes that previous rules were more specific about what kinds of theatres you were allowed to play in:

"According to last year's rules, "theaterical roll-out" requirements dictated that venues must:
"Regularly show new releases;" "Charge admission;" "Have regular non-specialized programming open to the general public;" "Exploit and market films through regular listings and advertising;" and "Generally run films for three to seven consecutive days, with multiple showings daily"

Can Schnack or anyone else out there confirm that the 14-city exhibition needn't conform to these rules? And as far as I know, most documentary museum series don't do 3-day runs, with two screenings a day for each individual film, so where exactly will distributor-less movies be going to live up to these requirements?"

I asked Michael Apted specifically about different kinds of venues, such as Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and Los Angeles' American Cinematheque, and he confirmed that the venues would indeed count, so long as there was advertising and admissions.  The current rules do not contain the requirements listed in Anthony's piece, although it does say:

"An exhibition is defined as follows:  All screenings must be held in a commercial motion picture theater for paid admission and must begin between noon and10:00 p.m.  An exhibition must be advertised and exploited in a manner considered normal and customary to the industry.  During an exhibition, a feature documentary film must be screened at least twice daily and a short subject documentary film must be screened at least once daily.  Exhibitions held at festivals, benefits, special events and the like do not fulfill this requirement."

In addition, there are some interesting comments to my post, including some by documentary filmmakers who have been through the process (and one who won).  Also, Ira Deutchman notes that Emerging Pictures' digital screens (24 in 23 cities) meet the requirements for rollout exhibitions this year (last year they did not).

I'm off to Full Frame tomorrow.  More on this topic and coverage from North Carolina in the days ahead.

In Depth: The Truth About the Academy's New Rules For Docs

Before John Sinno wrote his "open letter to the Academy", the whole issue of Oscar rules for docs was inside baseball.  Sure, there'd been the occasional blog post or trade article, debates on message boards, even a contentious meeting or two.  But why would the rest of the world (or even those with a keen interest in art house cinema) care?  Mostly, they wouldn't.  Enter Sinno, who helped distribute James Longley's Iraq in Fragments and was given a producer credit on the film (and subsequently was nominated for the Documentary Feature Oscar this year), and his letter, which had a touch of star power (the basis was a complaint that Oscar presenter Jerry Seinfeld had shown disrespect for the Oscar nominees with his jokes) and which culminated in a charge leveled against newly-discussed Oscar rules:

Seinfeld’s introduction arrived on the heels of an announcement by the Academy that the number of cities where documentary films must screen to qualify for an Academy Award is being increased by 75%. This will make it much more difficult for independent filmmakers’ work to qualify for the Best Documentary Feature Award, while giving an advantage to films distributed by large studios. Fewer controversial films will qualify for Academy consideration, and my film Iraq in Fragments would have been disqualified this year. This announcement came as a great disappointment to me and to other documentary filmmakers. I hope the Academy will reconsider its decision.

[The full text of Sinno's letter and my response can be found here.]

While most of the posts online dealt with Sinno's charge against Seinfeld, a number of the posts started to focus on the new rules - with many claiming that "what I find more interesting" was Sinno's claim that Iraq in Fragments wouldn't have qualified.  Nearly all took Sinno's accusations at face value.  [See posts from Sasha Stone, Nikki Finke, Erik Moe and Bilge Ebiri.]  Further, commenters to various posts weighed in to decry the new rules.  In response to Ebiri's post at Nerve.com, Blue23 wrote:

Those qualifications are completely unrealistic for a documentary. Besides "An Inconvenient Truth" which was considered a runaway success for a docu which of this year's films would have met these?

My own response to Sinno's letter was the only example I can find where someone challenged his assertion that Iraq in Fragments would not have qualified under the new, then-pending rules.  My post led to an animated phone conversation between Sinno and myself that had no real resolution, other than that I admire his putting money into James' film, which I consider one of the great films of 2006. 

[James himself has stayed mostly quiet on the issue, although he did post in the comments at Seattlest: 

"For my part, I thought Seinfeld's introduction was pretty funny. But, like David said, what do I know? Anyway, even if Seinfeld wasn't at the top of his form, his comments hardly took anything away from documentary film. It's good to have a sense of humor. So I think you're on your own with this one, John."]

Reading many of the posts, and comments like those of Blue 23 (above), I was irritated that there was a perception, however misguided, that none of this year's documentary nominees - aside from the blockbuster (for an indie doc) Inconvenient Truth - could have qualified under the new rules; that somehow playing 15 cities was this wholly unattainable goal for nonfiction filmmakers.  This is not hyperbole, it's an actual argument made both publicly and privately by some doc filmmakers and the occasional small distributor - that it's just too much to ask docmakers to do.  Considering that my first film, Gigantic, which made a decent but small sum at the box office, played in more than 40 cities theatrically, and knowing that numerous docs in 2006 played as many or more dates, this "whoa is us" argument is not only patently false but also sets up a notion that we're pretty much illegitimate as a box office entity.  Which, considering the current state of documentary distribution (as in, the number of players has collapsed and many are back to their "one doc a year" formulation) is not a notion I'm particularly inclined to promote.

[For context, here's a list of 30 documentaries that played more than 15 cities in 2006 - it is not meant to be a complete tally:  49 Up, 51 Birch Street, Al Franken: God Spoke, American Hardcore, Black Gold, The Bridge, Cocaine Cowboys, Deliver Us From Evil, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, The Heart of the Game, Inconvenient Truth, Iraq in Fragments, Jesus Camp, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man, Once in a Lifetime, Our Brand is Crisis, Shut Up and Sing, Sketches of Frank Gehry, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Unknown White Male, An Unreasonable Man, The U.S. Vs. John Lennon, The War Tapes, Why We Fight, Who Killed the Electric Car? and Wordplay.]

Meanwhile, looking around and having the occasional conversation at film festivals, I'd noticed that many were very unclear as to what the new rules were exactly.  While people got the gist - you'd have to play more theatres - the details were often lost.  So last week, I talked to Academy governors Freida Lee Mock and Michael Apted about the new rules, in an attempt to clarify the swirling rumors and misinformation.

But before I get to the new rules, some important history.

For much of the past two decades, the way the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out its award for Best Documentary Feature has been the subject of some controversy.  Much of the criticism has come from outside the Academy, primarily when well-known and critically acclaimed nonfiction films (such as The Thin Blue Line, Roger and Me, Hoop Dreams, Crumb and Startup.com) were passed over, while other, less well-known, often bound-for-television docs were nominated.   Those who voted for the documentary prize were often characterized as elitist or clubby, and accused of only voting for their friends or a specific issue or cause, as was characterized by a stretch in which Holocaust-themed films won the award four out of six years.

In a lengthy piece for The Nation in 2001, Carl Bromley investigated the history of recent complaints, starting with a story about the 2000 Oscar ceremony:

A few minutes before the winner in the Best Documentary Feature category was announced at last year's Oscars, Wim Wenders was feeling pretty confident. After all, his film, Buena Vista Social Club, had been a huge commercial and critical success, and it was the odds-on favorite to win. But then, according to Wenders, producer Arthur Cohn--whose picture, One Day in September, a sleek, flashy film about the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, was also in the running--approached him and said, "Whatever happens today, I hope we will remain friends and keep a mutual respect for each other." Says Wenders, "Before I could really say anything, he was gone again. That's when I had a sudden sinking feeling that we had been pretty naïve in thinking we had a good chance. I sat down and realized that [Cohn] didn't have to ask for mutual respect. That is the rule of the game in the Oscars; it goes without saying. You would only ask for it if you had a bad conscience, so to speak."

Wenders' bewitching film was about to go the way of so many other popular documentaries (if they were lucky enough even to be nominated): eclipsed by a virtually unknown film whose total audience barely exceeded the tiny fraction of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members who had seen it. When Cohn collected the Oscar, Wenders applauded, but Cohn's acceptance speech, he says, "left me speechless. Congratulating the academy for being able to distinguish between commercial success and artistic value was a slap in the face of all the other nominees. You just don't do that to your competitors when you get up there to receive an Oscar. Some of the other nominees sitting just behind us were just as appalled." Wenders walked out. "I was disappointed, but not because we lost," he continues. "Only because we had not really had a fair chance to win."

A box-office and critical hit with a strong distributor behind it not given a fair chance? Welcome to the strange world of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Since 1995 three of the winners have been Holocaust documentaries--Anne Frank Remembered, The Long Way Home and The Last Days--and One Day in September had obvious Holocaust undertones. After Spike Lee's documentary Four Little Girls lost to The Long Way Home in 1997, Lee said, "When the film is about the Holocaust and one of the producers is a rabbi and it comes from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there are not many sure things in life, but that was a sure thing when you consider the makeup of the voting body of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I'd have rather been the New York Knicks in the fourth quarter, down ten points, a minute left in the United Center, than have the odds we faced of winning the Oscar against the Holocaust film."

While Bromley's article is a fascinating step back in time and interesting for the perspective of some of the filmmakers he talked to, there are a number of problems with the piece, particularly with the cautionary tale that he wraps around Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club and the film that would "steal" its Oscar, and it's mainly that One Day in September is a revelation, a sign of the stylistic adventurousness that would follow in the next decade and the announcement of a major directorial talent, Kevin McDonald.  As much as I like Buena Vista Social Club, there's really no comparison between the two films.  (Bromley felt differently and calls September "unoriginal" and "one-sided".)

But Bromley had tapped into a common, and perhaps not too off-the-mark complaint about the Academy's choices:

Over the past decade, the films nominated, with a few honorable exceptions, have been the cinematic equivalent of castor oil. Then-New York Times critic Janet Maslin described them as "films about the Holocaust, the disabled, hard-working artists and inspirational programs in the inner city"--worthy subjects that all too often get mediocre or sentimental treatment.

In other words, the struggle over the documentary Oscar is a cultural struggle over documentary itself: between what some call the academy's "cultural commissars," who dictate the definition of a "good" documentary, and a diverse documentary filmmaking community that has challenged the selection committee's conservative aesthetic values. It has been a fight against what Errol Morris calls the "Mother Teresa school of filmmaking--the idea that if a film is about an exemplary person or subject matter, then it follows that the film is just as good."

It hadn't always been this way.  In a conversation last week with Freida Lee Mock, the chair of the Academy's Documentary Branch, she told me that between 1980 and 2000, the state of the theatrical doc was almost at its nadir.  "25 years ago, TV started to dominate, cable started to dominate.  Before that, when I first started doing it, it wasn't like that," Mock said.

In The Nation article, Bromley tries to make the case that the films that were nominated in the 1970s (including Woodstock, Harlan County, U.S.A. and Hearts and Minds) were a world away from the films of the next two decades, but this is a bit simplistic.  Life before 1980 was not perfect (not a single nomination for the Maysles Brothers or D.A. Pennebaker or Robert Drew) nor was everything from 1980-2000 a grim wasteland (winners included The Times of Harvey Milk, When We Were Kings and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie).

But it was the accusations of insider trading that colored much of the complaints raised by critics of the documentary committee.  The loudest came when Hoop Dreams failed to clear the Academy's selection procedure and Mock herself won the Oscar that year for Maya Lin: A Clear Strong Vision.  Reporters and critics pointed to Mock's role on previous selection committees as an "aha!" moment.  They almost always failed to mention how good Maya Lin was and the rave reviews it had received.  Mock and her film were a convenient target for the Academy's critics, and for them, Hoop Dreams was the third strike (Thin Blue Line and Roger & Me being the first two) that led many to want to shine a light on the Academy's selection procedures.  From Bromley's article:

Committee member Mitchell Block told the Los Angeles Times: "I think [the distributors] set [The Thin Blue Line] up as a shoo-in and...created an expectation among members that the film couldn't meet. But there was no backlash. As a group, we simply thought the five nominated films were better." (ed. note: The five films nominated were Hotel Terminus, Bruce Weber's excellent Let's Get Lost, and the largely forgotten The Cry of Reason - Beyers Naude: An Afrikaner Speaks, Promises to Keep and Who Killed Vincent Chin?) 

When Michael Moore was overlooked for Roger & Me the following year, he pointed out in a New York Times Op-Ed: "Mr. Block has a financial interest in who gets nominated; he owns a documentary distribution company and, in the last 10 years, nearly one quarter of all films that have won the Academy Award for best documentary have been Mitchell Block films." In the year of Roger & Me's omission, Block owned the distribution rights to three of the nominees.

Bromley went on to suggest that committee members actually aligned themselves against films that had found success in theatres:

According to (filmmaker Alan) Adelson, during a pre-scoring meeting in which members deliberated over the films submitted, one voter warned that if Hoop Dreams was nominated, its victory would be certain. "He appealed to his fellow members to preserve other films' chances of winning the Oscar by denying Hoop Dreams a nomination altogether," Adelson wrote. When the committee voted, at least two other attendees allied themselves with the anti-Hoop Dreams speaker and denied Hoop Dreams by giving it the lowest possible score, even though other committee members awarded the film top scores.

Why the animosity toward Hoop Dreams? "Many of the committee members at the time considered documentary the real weakling in the cinema litter," Adelson told The Nation. "They had a patronizing, paternalistic attitude toward the form: Documentaries are never seen by anyone until the academy shines their light on it and gives the poor weakling sustenance. There was a sense of mission. They promoted films they thought the public needed. And they felt threatened by an already successful film."

Bromley closes his article with a bit of cloudy forecasting:

(D)espite recent reforms in the selection process, the real proof of the pudding will be the day Errol Morris takes home an Oscar, as Alan Adelson has suggested. But that could be a long time coming. Even if the restrictive voting rules are relaxed, there's no guarantee that the general membership will get things right. Still, applying the academy's usual standards to documentaries would be a big improvement. As it stands, says Morris, "I've got more of a chance winning my first Oscar for a fiction film than a documentary."

Just three years later, Errol Morris had his Oscar, for directing the documentary The Fog Of War.  Michael Moore had his for Bowling for Columbine, and the Academy had a new Documentary Branch, with three governors and with new rules that favored theatrically released films.  But it's been since 2003, when new rules were first put in place, rules that may have helped Morris win, that these new complaints have arisen, this time from within the documentary community.  Filmmakers, particularly those whose films that had not necessarily been made with a theatrical release in mind, argued that the new rules were unfair.  Sinno was tapping into a wave of discontent amongst some (but by no means all) documentary filmmakers.

[Before I go on, a bit of full disclosure on my part.  In a December 2003 article for the Hollywood Reporter (subscription required) that dealt with changing perceptions of documentaries, I was quoted as saying that I thought the focus on theatrical documentaries was good for filmmakers and correct for the Academy.  I have written here often on the topic and have credited the change in Academy rules for some of the popularity documentaries have seen over the past six years.  (See here, here, here and here.)  My own film will be going through the qualification and submission process this year.]

This year, just the threat of change - particularly the notion that the theatrical requirement would be strengthened - led to a confrontational meeting last December between filmmakers and Academy Governors Mock, Michael Apted and Rob Epstein which I wrote about here.  Since then, rumors and, in some cases, misinformation have been swirling about what the new rules would be and what - or should I say who (shades of conspiracy theories) - was behind the latest changes.  Recently the Academy posted its new rules on its website and I talked to Mock and Apted (who also serves as DGA President and who directed the well-known, critically acclaimed and not nominated "Up series" of films) to get more information.

The changes:  Qualifying for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar is a multi-part process.  First, films that wish to qualify for the documentary feature category still must have a 7-day qualifying run in Los Angeles or New York.  The films have to play a minimum of two times a day (previously this was one) and must screen between noon and 10 PM (eliminating the popular 11 AM screenings that defined the documentary qualifying run for decades).  Films must screen in an approved projected format (either on film or digital) that adheres to the Academy's technical standards.  According to Apted, these technical standards are uniform for both narrative (fiction) and nonfiction films.

Second, the film must then roll out to fourteen other cities in at least ten different states.  The film must play twice daily for at least three consecutive days.  This is the increase, up from 8 last year, that Sinno talked about in his open letter.  However, in an important and helpful change, the projection requirements for the fourteen rollout cities have been altered so that films can project in any standard format, including Digibeta or DVD.  (Previously, you had to fulfill the same technical specs as were required by your initial qualifying run.)  I would argue that despite the increase in the number of theatres, the relaxing of technical standards for the roll out makes the new rules actually easier (and certainly cheaper) for most filmmakers.

Apted described the allowance of additional formats as part of the Academy's desire to "find a balance between keeping the demands of the Academy to have a theatrical release and keeping abreast of the technology."

Some have raised the question of whether enough theatres even exist to meet this demand.  My own notion on this is pretty clear (not incidentally formed by my experience with Gigantic) but I asked Apted about alternate theatrical venues, such as Boston's Museum of Fine Arts or Los Angeles' American Cinematheque or Columbia's storefront Ragtag Cinemacafe.  Did museums or microcinemas count toward the 14?  Apted assured that they did, as long as films were advertised and admissions were paid.

"We're trying not to make filmmakers leap through hurdles or bankrupt them," Apted told me.  "But we want to have films that have a theatrical life."  Later in the conversation, he added, "I think that if you can't do 14 cities, 3 days in different cities, projecting off of DVD, then something is wrong."

Mock echoed the thought, asking rhetorically, "Is (just having) a 7-day qualifying run a theatrical documentary?  I don't think it is."

From my point of view, the most important change in the current rules is the mandate that the roll out must occur before the Academy announces the films that have made the semifinals, or as it is commonly referred to, "the shortlist".  Previously, filmmakers could wait to hear whether they'd gone on to the next round, and then would have to fulfill the 8 city roll out.  Some films, particularly those that were destined for television (and would only get a theatrical if they were shortlisted) would stop there theatrical efforts the moment they discovered they hadn't made the list.  With the new rules, films have to prove that they have had a theatrical life before they can even be considered for the shortlist.

Says Apted, "The Academy got all these submissions that had no real attempt at a theatrical plan and these are awards for theatrical movies."

Another important change is a concession to films funded by television entities.  Both Control Room and Why We Fight had been disqualified in recent years over television screenings which had been built into their funding window.  Now, films must only wait 60 days after they have completed their rollout requirement the first day of their qualifying run and must complete their rollout requirements before the film airs.  Finally, films can air on television before nominations are announced or awards are handed out. [correction made 8-7-07]

 

Apted called the change in television rules part of the Academy's "experimentation", and the changes seem, at least in part, designed to answer criticism regarding these earlier disqualifications, showing that the Academy is at least more nimble and responsive to change than they had been a decade ago.

Some filmmakers have complained that if your film is shortlisted, you must produce a 35mm film print, a costly process that is starting to seem unnecessary in the midst of the digital revolution.  I find this complaint a bit hard to swallow, considering that just 6 years ago you couldn't play a film festival without a print, but Apted says that it's something the Documentary Branch is looking at, and that it's conceivable that in the near future you wouldn't have to have a print if you made the semifinals.

[A full list of Academy rules for feature documentaries is available here.]

According to former IDA (International Documentary Association) Executive Director Betsy McLane, the move toward a theatrical requirement began after the Academy had considered whether to do away with the documentary categories.  Posting at indieWIRE (scroll down to comments), McLane wrote:

"Only through the very strenuous efforts of IDA and others in the field were the two categories saved. An independent study commissioned by AMPAS as to the theatrical viability of documentaries proved that there was ample reason to keep the categories, and even to create the documentary Branch. Recall that the Branch only has existed for a few years and that a number of dedicated documentarians- Freida Mock, Michael Apted, and Arthur Dong, among others- have advocated within that Branch for the documentary at AMPAS."

Mock said that the changes were not, as some have thought, part of a mandate handed down by the larger Academy but rather grew from the experience of becoming an official branch of the Academy.  In justifying why documentaries should be a granted their own branch, filmmakers started to talk about what made them filmmakers, "people who make movies", what made their films a theatrical entity.  She told me that they looked at the previous year, when many of the nominated docs had gone straight to television and hadn't had any theatrical release.  The question Mock and others found themselves deliberating over was a fundamental one, "Are you a theatrical form?"

Both Mock and Apted talked about troubles in the previous decade, with Mock calling the 90's bumpy and Apted more bluntly calling the process "scandalous".  Apted said that the goal with each adjustment of the rules - and it sounds simple enough - was that the films nominated would actually be the best films of that year.

Some in the documentary community seems stuck in the mindset of the 1990s, with the idea that if you make a feature-length nonfiction film you should be able to play a couple mornings at the Laemmle Monica and be in the mix for the Oscar.  Some argue that it should be up to a selection committee to determine what is theatrical and what is television. 

But, in the current climate, who's going to make that choice?  Is Jesus Camp, a movie funded by a feature film arm of a cable television network, bound for theatres or bound for television?  What about The Trials of Darryl Hunt, one of the best films of last year, which received some of its funding from HBO?  Who should be entrusted with separating one type of film from another?  And isn't this how we got into the "scandalous" '90s in the first place?

Ultimately, the more films that play in more venues, the better it is for all of us who make nonfiction films.  Even if you're self-distributing and finding houses that will show your digibeta for a Monday - Wednesday run, we are, as a group, better off.  Every time that people pay money to see documentaries in a theatrical setting, it helps the next guy.

Just getting into Sundance doesn't mean you should be nominated for an Oscar.  Just paying to play a couple mornings in Santa Monica doesn't mean you should be nominated for an Oscar.  As Betsy McClane wrote on indieWIRE:

The shifting of AMPAS rules is nothing new. As a private club, not a public or not for profit organization, they are entitled to change any rules about any thing that they choose. AMPAS is under no obligation, other than a moral one, to serve any particular part of the film community or the public.

The sky isn't falling (even if a recent Best Documentary winner suggests it might be sooner than we think) and docmakers have a real opportunity to build a grass roots network of venues across the nation wherein filmmakers can accomplish self-distribution.  In future posts, I want to examine this possibility and hope to create a list of theatres, microcinemas and alternative screening venues that are open to self-distributed docs and can help filmmakers fulfill their Academy requirements AND get the theatrical they were hoping for.

Because if you weren't hoping, weren't planning, weren't thinking all along that you'd have a real theatrical, then you shouldn't be thinking Oscar.

Tribeca's Green Opening & "Gates" Closing Overshadowed By Sticker Shock

Two batches of doc-related news out of the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival in the past couple of days.  The first is an environmental initiative straight out of the Oscar winning An Inconvenient Truth and starring, you guessed it, Al Gore.  As reported on the Filmmaker Magazine blog, the former Veep will be hosting the festival's opening night, and will be screening 7 short films from Gore's SOS (Save Our Selves) series.  Among the filmmakers chosen to make shorts are Oscar nominated nonfiction filmmakers Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil) and the team of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp).

Second, and perhaps more exciting to those who've followed the previous films in the series, comes news (via Erik Moe at About: Documentaries) that Albert Maysles' The Gates, will close the Tribeca Fest.  The Gates is the sixth film that Maysles has made about the art projects of Christo and Jean-Claude, a collaboration that began more than 30 years ago.  The previous films in the series are available in a stunning box set from Plexifilm.

All this news comes in the midst of a public relations disaster for the festival, which began when Eugene Hernandez reported late last week at indieWIRE that Tribeca would be raising its ticket prices by 50% this year, up to $18 per ticket from last year's $12.  From Eugene's excellent piece:

Numerous organizers from other American film festivals privately expressed surprise at Tribeca's dramatic move and a few spoke with indieWIRE about general ticket pricing, noting that festival ticket costs are typically set at or near the cost of a regular movie ticket at local multiplexes and arthouse venues. A survey of costs for film festival tickets around the country supported the link to pricing at local theaters and not factored in are any number of fees and surcharges some customers pay when buying tickets online or by phone.

Eugene went on to post the following on his blog:

Increasing ticket prices to $18 for most movies is a bold and shocking move by a festival that unapologetically burst onto the scene six years ago after 9/11. In particular, the ill-fated decision sends an unfortunate message to many people in the industry, some of whom are silently skeptical about the motives and future of the event. Earlier this month an industry insider whom I respect confided a deep resentment towards the Tribeca Film Festival, detailing numerous reasons based on specific encounters over the years. I can only imagine what that person is saying to co-workers today after reading the news.

In its first few years I consistently praised Tribeca for one important thing, its committment to creating a community event aimed at engaging a broad cross section of New Yorkers and supporting diverse filmmakers. I was thorougly excited to see such an amazing array of people at the festival in the early years, people of many colors, ages and backgrounds. It was something I rarely saw at other film events in this city. I believe this decision will impact the broad community of support this festival has developed.

Several other film writers jumped on the festival after reading the news.  From Movie City News/Hot Blog's David Poland:

This is just a jaw dropper for anyone who knows film festivals. For one thing, Tribeca started as the second highest capitalized film festival in America, just behind Sundance... from Day One. American Express and others have kicked in millions to a budget said to exceed $12 million a year. But oh, that hasn't stopped the festival from whoring itself out in new and unique ways year after year. Last year seemed to be a low as a festival could go, with the Mission:Impossible III television program, funded in part by the festival.  (...)

Plus... it's just so f-ing arrogant. The excuse given to indieWIRE in their excellent coverage was, in part, ""unique experience that cannot be re-created." True... because most of their crap programming will never be seen again.

From The Rabbi Report:

(I)t's not Cannes, Sundance, Toronto or Venice and I don't think I'm giving away any state secrets by saying that. Is the festival raising expectations among the ticket-buying public to dangerous levels? What exactly is this "unique experience" and what comes with the $18? The chance to buy some milk duds? I mean really, how many films at Tribeca are going to be a $50 burger?

Most film festival programmers understand full well that a significant amount of their programming is less than what might be called outstanding. It's simply the nature of the beast. With hundreds of film festivals around the world programming hundreds of films, well you do the math. Film festival programming is "hit or miss" at best (or sometimes worse) and I think Tribeca's heretofore loyal audience knows that which makes this price rise a gamble of potentially Hindenburg-ian proportions.

And finally, from NY Post film critic Lou Lumenick:

Those of us who have covered the festival over the years have largely turned a blind eye to the issue that the bulk of the offerings are mediocre or worse -- largely films that were rejected by Sundance or New Directors/New Films, many of which are never heard from again. The steep ticket prices may force the media to abandon our previous civic boosterism and start looking at Tribeca's offerings from a more consumerist point of view -- are these flicks really worth $18?

Although I personally have not attended Tribeca, I want to add just a note that while I can't speak at all to the narrative choices of past Tribeca festivals, it's clear that Tribeca's line-up of doc premieres is usually among the best in the country.  As I noted in my post on this year's Oscar shortlist, Tribeca premiered three of the films that went on to make the semifinals (including eventual nominee Jesus Camp), second only to Sundance.  And this year's line-up, which I blogged about here, also looks quite promising.  So, while I agree with criticism of the ticket increase, I must at least lodge a small protest in support of Tribeca's doc offerings.