All these wonderful things

2010 Film Fests (Part Two): Taking Another Look at Hot Docs, Sarasota and LAFF

Yesterday, we wrote about two of our top film festivals for documentaries that we traveled to for the first time in 2010.

Of course, traveling to fests isn’t just about the new discoveries.  Our visits this year to several other top festivals re-ignited our thinking on their top status.

At #4, Hot Docs is such an obvious and easy choice that it might be hard to be impressed (this year was our third trip in a row).  But something about returning to Toronto in the spring once again reminds one of just why the festival works so well.  One can’t help but be wowed by the programming - a truly thoughtful selection of international titles selected by Sean Farnel - and the way in which the festival is constantly trying to rethink the long-tired panel templates. 

This year, we were also struck by the ease of seeing both films and a global coterie of docu heavyweights.  This latter point might be our own process - for some reason Toronto is a city that took us a long while to find our legs in - and maybe this is the year that everything seemed to click.  But attending Hot Docs this year felt somehow cozy and, it goes without saying, Toronto's docu-loving crowds just cannot be beat.

Sarasota (our #20), on the other hand, might be easier to overlook – but overlooking Sarasota would be a huge mistake.  Sarasota is, in our minds at least, a kind of perfect festival: a terrific and nearly completest look at the best films of Sundance and SXSW (the latter selected by Sarasota prior to their potential breakouts in Austin) as well as a handful that either premiered earlier or had been neglected by the bigger “name” festivals that preceded it.

As is the case with many of our favorite festivals, there are travel issues (and hotels near the main festival venues are few and far between – most folks were lodged in airport hotels) and there’s going to be some considerable walking involved (unless you get smart and ride some of the free bikes the festival secured), but Sarasota remains one of the big American “experience” festivals, the kind of place you tell stories about months and years later: like when a group of (nameless) documentary filmmakers feared they might have left another (nameless) documentary filmmaker to drown in the Gulf of Mexico at 2 AM; or when the bar of the (nameless) resort hotel opened back up after closing at 1 AM when the owner realized that several (nameless) indie film stars were boozing in the lobby with hula hoopers and drag queens; or when Patti Smith belted out “Gloria” five feet in front of this (not nameless) filmmaker in a small restaurant bar.

2010 Film Fests (Part One): In Praise of Dokufest and Ashland

Before we dive in to the fall festival season, a look back at the festivals and films that have made this year so notable...

When we set out a couple years ago to try to rank the world’s best documentary film festivals, there were unintended consequences to this notion.  One was that the festivals themselves might care where they might fall on such a homemade list.  The other was that filmmakers – particularly those that were just starting out – would take such a list as some kind of fifth gospel.

Not that we hadn’t taken it seriously.  We had.  But we also knew that lists, as much as they might spur discussion and be insanely linkable, are fallible.

And so, when we ventured out to make a second edition of this list last winter, we tried to make it less fallible.  We asked more than 75 pros in the documentary world to weigh in on their choices.  But still, but still, this is not a perfect system, because we are not Arthur Frommer, and there were/are some festivals that we have yet to attend.  And thus the list is second hand.  A really, really strong second hand, but still…

Thus, when we were invited to a couple of the festivals on our list this year that we hadn’t before experienced, there was a strong sense of excitement and no small fear that perhaps we had led those young, nubile filmmakers astray.

Certainly, encouraging folks to make the trek to southern Kosovo, to the decidedly buzzed-about Dokufest in Prizren, programmed by the much beloved Veton Nurkollari, wasn’t exactly a slam dunk, no matter what our insiders had determined in December.  After all, it’s no easy feat to reach this cultural heritage spot in a country whose independence had just been recognized by the International Court of Justice a couple weeks prior to this week's fest in early August.  Flights into Pristina, Kosovo or even neighboring Skopje, Macedonia require a certain amount of finangling, and these are followed by mountainous roads populated by traffic and drivers that give aggressive a new reputation.

But aren’t the best festivals worth a little bit of effort?

And Dokufest is certainly that.  Artfully programmed by Nurkollari from the best of the international documentary scene, projected onto screens indoor and outdoor throughout the city, Dokufest is actually creating the very notion of cinema in southern Kosovo.  Because for the past decade-plus, since the brutal war that tore up this portion of the Balkans, there has been no cinema in Prizren, which is otherwise a town filled with culture, both ancient and youth. 

No cinema at all. 

The young people of Prizren – and they are legion (if you’re told once that the average age of Kosovars is 25, you’ll be told it 100 times – in fact, the Isreali-made advertisement that runs before the each of the screenings drums home the point: “Kosovo – The Young Europeans”) are, for the very first time, encountering cinema in their streets and in their town. 

And that cinema is documentary film.

And if that isn’t enough to give you a docu-boner, I don’t know what is.

Toronto 2010: Thom Powers on This Year's Amazing Doc Line-Up

Last week we wrote about this year's pretty stellar documentary line-up at Toronto.  Previously - while he was at the Traverse City Film Festival - we had a chance to talk with Toronto documentary programmer (and full disclosure, our friend and colleague on the first several years of Cinema Eye) Thom Powers about the program.

We were interested in what might be new and unexpected from the veterans in this year's line-up as well as what effect - if any - Thom's role in his new festival (Doc NYC) might have on the program.  Here's our conversation:

ATWT: This has been a pretty high-profile year for well-known filmmakers coming out with new films.  Sundance was chock-a-block full of big name titles and from just the quick look at your list: Longinotto, Morris, Herzog, Gibney, Wiseman, Jørgen Leth, Charles Ferguson, Ondi Timoner – it’s a high profile pack of filmmakers.

Thom: It is indeed.  As the season was kind of rolling out I’d hear Werner Herzog has a new film, Errol Morris has a new film, every week brought a new revelation in that way.  I can’t really think of a line-up I’ve had before that was so packed.  And one of the things in creating this line-up was in making room for some new filmmakers, like we were able to do with THE PIPE and WINDFALL and a film that I want to bring to your attention called THE SOUND OF MUMBAI: A MUSICAL, which is about slum children in Mumbai, India presenting a performance of The Sound of Music with a classical orchestra.  That film had me choked up pretty much all the way through it and it’s actually hard for me to even think about without getting choked up again.

Toronto 2010: New Docs from Errol Morris, Kim Longinotto, Alex Gibney, Ondi Timoner and Werner Herzog in 3D

indieWIRE has the latest on an amazing Toronto Film Festival documentary lineup, including the second nonfiction Gala of Thom Powers' tenure at TIFF - Thom Zimmy's Bruce Springsteen doc THE PROMISE: THE MAKING OF DARKNESS AT THE EDGE OF TOWN  (his first was 2006' SHUT UP AND SING), along with a handful of world premieres from masters of the documentary form: TABLOID from Errol Morris, PINK SARIS from Kim Longinotto, CLIENT 9: THE RISE AND FALL OF ELIOT SPITZER from Alex Gibney (which had a work-in-progress screening at Tribeca) and the first 3-D feature from Werner Herzog - CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, about the cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave in Southern France.

Toronto will also feature some of the North American debut of the breakout titles of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival - Janus Metz' ARMADILLO, Frederick Wiseman's BOXING GYM and Charles Ferguson's INSIDE JOB - and a film that is sure to stir up controversy, Ondi Timoner's COOL IT, which promises a very unconvenient look at the issue of global warming.

The Toronto slate continues what has been one of the most powerful year's for nonfiction on record, following a Sundance lineup that was chock-a-block with Oscar nominees & winners and a SXSW crop that intro'd some extraordinary new voices in documentary.