All these wonderful things

The Great Lost Opportunity of Current's 50 Docs List

Our long national nightmare is finally over.

Current TV, the still-finding-its-identity network co-founded by Al Gore and newish home to left wing commentator Keith Olbermann, concludes its 5-week documentary film countdown - "50 Docs to See Before You Die" - tonight with the naming of its top 10 choices.

Revealed yesterday by the NY Times' Mike Hale, the top choice of the show's expert panel is Steve James' 1994 classic HOOP DREAMS, with Errol Morris' THE THIN BLUE LINE and Michael Moore's ROGER & ME coming in 2nd and 3rd.  The latter two films had previously been identified by the show as the demarcation of the beginning of the current "golden age" of documentary filmmaking on which the "50 Docs" list would focus.

It's this take on the modern age of documentary that seems to have brought the list and the series the most criticism: the late '80s cutoff forms a handy but ultimately confusing way for the series to eliminate any of the classic films by the Maysles, Robert Drew, Fred Wiseman, early Pennebaker, KOYAANISQATSI, HEARTS AND MINDS, HARLAN COUNTY, SHERMAN'S MARCH and any number of other influential works from contention. 

Despite the fact that the Times' Hale notes the "modern documentary" angle and bemoans the focus on "a relentless preference for the story-based or issue-based films that people now seem to think define the documentary field", commenters on the story still wrestle with the series/list's artificial construct - where is WOODSTOCK? THE LAST WALTZ? 7 UP? THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK? SHOAH?  The fact that potential viewers are still confused or find the current (get it) focus impractical suggests a basic problem with the premise.

Still, these are lists and lists are supposed to be fun, right?  Get past the confusion and the Times' comment section is filled with people's righteous indigation that their modern favorites have been overlooked.  Or those who argue that something should be higher on the list or lower or not on the list at all.

So if it gets people talking about documentaries, then who's to quibble, right?

Allow us.

Michael Rapaport's TRIBE CALLED QUEST Docu Storms the Indie Box Office

BEATS, RHYMES & LIFE: THE TRAVELS OF A TRIBE CALLED QUEST, the debut feature by actor Michael Rapaport, finally landed in theaters last weekend after months of behind-the-scenes and in-the-press strife between the director and several of his subjects.  But in the end, the formerly, vocally-opposed Q-Tip and his fellow members of A Tribe Called Quest encouraged fans to see the film - and indeed they did, giving the BEATS the biggest documentary opening of 2011: the film took in a stellar average of nearly $28,000 in 4 theaters.

That tally just edged the opening weekend for one of the biggest docs of the year, Werner Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, which averaged $27,820 on five screens back in late April.  After 11 weeks, CAVE is now zeroing in on $5M, a box office record for Herzog and a signal that he is one of the few directors working in nonfiction who have the strength to pull in an audience based on their name.

BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK, which is nearing the end of its run (with a cume of nearly $1.4M), still holds the per screen record for docs this year.  It opened at the Film Forum in March and took in $33K during its first weekend.

March Marks the Start of Festival Season with True/False, Miami and SXSW About to Unspool

Now that we've got award season out of the way (I tweeted on Monday that "Moving Cinema Eye to January was the best decision ever. I can't imagine planning an awards show right now."), we can dive full force into the films of 2011.  And nothing underlines that more than the impending launch of two major US film festivals - True/False and SXSW - and the documentary rebirth of the Miami Film Festival, courtesy of doc-master Thom Powers, that festival's new documentary programmer. 

Miami kicks off unofficially tonight with an outdoor screening of Sarah McCarthy's THE SOUND OF MUMBAI, a crowd-pleasing film that premiered in Powers' 2010 Toronto line-up and has been picked up by the folks at HBO.  During the week that follows, Miami will screen a potent round-up of the best of Sundance 2011, including James Marsh's PROJECT NIM, Morgan Spurlock's THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD, Marshall Curry's IF A TREE FALLS, Steve James' THE INTERRUPTERS, Liz Garbus' BOBBY FISCHER AGAINST THE WORLD, Andrew Rossi's PAGE ONE, David Weissman's WE WERE HERE, Daniele Anastasion and Eric Strauss' THE REDEMPTION OF GENERAL BUTT NAKED, Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's MAGIC TRIP and Göran Hugo Olsson's THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE.

[Full disclosure: I am on the documentary jury at the Miami Film Festival this year.]

Marsh, James, Garbus, Rossi, Ollson and Anastasion/Strauss will also be screening their films this weekend at True/False in Columbia, Missouri, where Marsh will be presented with the fest's True Vision Award (which has previously gone to Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney, Kim Longinotto and Kirby Dick) and the subjects of James' film THE INTERRUPTERS will be the beneficiaries of the fest's True Life Fund.

Nomination Dispute on Oscar Doc Short POSTER GIRL Ignites Divisive Fight at the Academy

For most of the world, the press release sent out by the Academy one week ago today seemed simple and direct.  Headed "Oscar Credits Determined for Documentary Short Subjects", the release was only somewhat notable in that it announced the first Oscar nomination for Mitchell Block, a veteran player and somewhat controversial figure in the documentary world, for the short film POSTER GIRL, which was directed by Sara Nesson.

But what seemed simple on the outside masked an fierce dispute within the Academy's Documentary Branch.  Two different committees had ruled that Block had not done enough work on the film to qualify for an Oscar nod, but those decisions were overturned by a four-person review committee that represented the Academy's Board of Governors.  How and why the decision went to the four-person committee is at the crux of the conflict.

Perhaps none of this would be known outside of the Academy if Freida Lee Mock, the Oscar winning filmmaker and former Doc Branch Governor, had not emailed some of the details to Roger Ebert, who last Friday wrote about the dispute and then quickly deleted the blog post, reportedly after hearing from Movie City News' David Poland.  By late Friday afternoon, all that remained was Poland's own post, which was sympathetic to Block and critical of Mock, but which remained somewhat vague as to what actually happened.

While Poland suggested that the situation was a smear job against Block, conversations with a number of Academy members over the weekend reveal a much more complicated - and a far more divisive - battle than has been publicly made known.  And while the heart of the dispute rests with the Academy's real desire to limit inappropriate producer credits, it's set against a backdrop of a series of personal grudges that date back to the late 1980s.

Jeff Malmberg on His Artistic Process & Inspirations for MARWENCOL and Bypassing the Oscars

Note: This is the fifth in a series of interviews with the makers of some of my favorite documentaries of 2010.

It's almost becoming traditional that there is a documentary each year that is the SXSW breakthrough, a portrait film that comes from nowhere to take the Grand Jury Prize in Austin and then comes to define the new wave of intimate, personal documentary filmmaking.  First Jennifer Venditti's BILLY THE KID, then Bill and Turner Ross' 45365, and now Jeff Malmberg's MARWENCOL, the latter a humanistic portrait of a man who, following a massive brain injury, finds himself creating new worlds out of G.I. Joe and Barbie dolls and World War II fantasia.

Malmberg, an editor by trade, came to his debut film the way many novice filmmakers do - a few weekends at a time, shooting a bit and then going back to make enough money to return to shoot some more.  Whatever the process, his final product - an intimate and layered portrait of his subject, Mark Hogancamp - would remind of the films and filmmakers that inspired many of us to make nonfiction (from the Maysles to Errol Morris).

We emailed with Jeff about his process, his relationship with Hogancamp and his decision to bypass the Academy Awards.

All these wonderful things:  One of the things I love about focusing on documentary each year are the discoveries, the folks who just a year ago were still hard at work tying up the edit on their first film - and then, it seems instantaneous, they are an ingrained part of the community.  This is to say that this past year must have felt like a whirlwind to you.

It seems like a natural thing that these discoveries are coming out of SXSW.  What do you think it is about that festival, and about Janet, that a.) finds these films and b.) gives them such a good launch?

Jeff Malmberg: I think Janet is really adventurous in her film taste and really brave in what she programs. It’s easy in retrospect to say that MARWENCOL was a good fit for SXSW, but at the time, it was just this strange little movie that no one had stood up for yet. No one knew how it was going to be received, but she brought the audience to it and shined a light on it. I’ll never forget what she said to the audience when it first premiered – “this is why I do what I do.” She walks the walk, man. Same thing with 45365 the year before – this beautiful film that’s not quite like anything else. Plus Janet’s taste seems like the perfect match for that audience which is really hungry for something fresh and new – and doc seems to be flowering that way these days. My wife [MARWENCOL producer Chris Shellen] is doing a panel at SXSW this year so I get to tag along and watch a bunch of films at the Alamo – I kind of can’t wait to experience that festival as an audience member this time around. When I was in it with a film, I didn’t have enough time or headspace to see all the films I should have.

ATWT: I asked you this question when I dragged you up onstage for the A to Z Chat Show in Sheffield, but can you talk some about your festival experiences this year.  What was your best experience?

DOCNYC 2010: Thom Powers Previews the Inaugural Edition of the New Nonfiction Festival in New York

In just 9 days, New York will see the launch of DOCNYC, the new festival birthed from the folks behind NYC's Stranger Than Fiction series (Toronto International Film Festival Documentary Programmer Thom Powers, STF Executive Director Raphaela Neihausen, IFC Center head honcho John Vanco and IFC Center Director of Programs Harris Dew).  It's perhaps the biggest documentary festival launch in over five years and it's grabbing the prime real estate in early November that's soon to be vacated by primo UK Doc/Fest Sheffield.

The first edition is marked by tributes to doc superstars Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, a retrospective of work by one of this year's Honorary Oscar recipients, Kevin Brownlow, and two competition sections - Metropolis, which focuses on New York-set stories, and Viewfinders, which includes the US Premieres of Janus Metz' ARMADILLO, Kim Longinotto's PINK SARIS and Bjarte Mørner Tveit's DISCOVERIES OF A MARIONETTE and the World Premiere of Robert Greene's KATI WITH AN I (following a sneak preview earlier this year at True/False).

We talked to Thom Powers (who was, full disclosure, my co-chair for the first two editions of the Cinema Eye Honors and who serves on Cinema Eye's Advisory Board) about the inaugural festival, his broader ideas for a "nonfiction festival" and what's exciting and scaring him nine days out.

ATWT: I guess I want to start with the other stuff, the non-film elements, because that's one of the things I think is so exciting about DOCNYC and what you're doing, because it's not just films and it's not just panels about films.

Thom Powers: It's not.  Film I would say is an 80 or 90 percent core of what we're doing this year but the longterm goal of this festival is to enrich the other aspects over the years.  And the heart of this is the daylong symposia that we have called Doc Convergence.  That's kind of where I laid down an initial structure for ways in which I want to invigorate this festival with all kinds of different documentary voices, not just filmmakers.  At Doc Convergence we have photographers, including Pulitzer Prize winner David Turnley, we have cartoonists, such as Joe Sacco, Linda Barry, we have people from the world of performance and also writing, such as Lawrence Wright, who did "My Trip to Al Qaeda", which was turned into a film by Alex Gibney, and Moises Kaufman, who's done these documentary-based theatrical works, including The Laramie Project, that was turned into a film.

Will the Liberal "Establishment" Kill the Documentary Resurgence?

A blog post by Tom Roston, aka POV Blog's Doc Soup Man, has been making the rounds this morning (h/t Basil Tsiokos) - it's a recap of a discussion at last week's Independent Film Week entitled "Cage Match: Filmmaking or Social Activism".  Moderated by POV's Yance Ford and peopled with opinionated industry leaders (including the BBC's Nick Fraser and Women Make Movies' Debra Zimmerman), the panel kicked off - as Roston summarizes - with the question "is the medium at an identity crisis?". 

What followed harkened back to a debate at last year's Sheffield Doc/Fest between Fraser and BritDoc leader Jess Search that had doc folks chattering for months.  The fierce (yet friendly) back-and-forth seemed to lay bare some of the things that documentary filmmakers talk about often but which rarely get played out on such a large canvas - can documentary filmmaking break free of the socially-important strangelehold imposed by a predominantly liberal financial-and-critical-support structure.

Guardian's David Cox wrote about that exchange in an article headed "Is this the end of the line for the impartial documentary?":

"This year, the normally clubby atmosphere of Sheffield's documentarists' convention has been shaken by a genuine row. The intensity of the debate at the Campaigning Documentaries: The Thin Line Between Passion and Propaganda session reflects the seriousness of what's at stake. It's not just the future of the genre that hangs in the balance, but its very identity.

One side maintains that documentary-making must be open-minded, impartial and journalistic. Its purpose should be to help people understand, not to encourage them to emote. The other side insists that the whole point of documentary-making is to effect desirable change. Campaigning is to be relished, not shunned...

The appearance of independence makes documentaries ideal vehicles for promoting corporate interests. Nowadays, NGOs, charities, single-issue lobby groups and the like sometimes have lots of money. Co-opting documentarists can prove an effective way of spending it. Plenty of film-makers are only too willing to play ball. After all, they want to make films. As Nick Fraser, the editor of the BBC's Storyville strand, said at the heated Doc/Fest session: "If Dr Goebbels appeared with a huge sack of money, there would be documentary film-makers queueing around the block to take it."

One of Fraser's key points in Sheffield was that the search for money - and the availabilty of funding by agenda-driven companies and organizations - meant that lots of films were being made with no (or little) aesthetic or cinematic ambitions.  In short - topic was trumping craft.

It's a debate that we've been talking about here on the blog (sometimes with more frequency than others) for years.  Our general frustration (and sometimes righteous anger) on the topic led to the launch of the Cinema Eye Honors, which will celebrate its fourth event this January. 

As we wrote in the summer of 2008:

"The debate is not that so-called "important" films can't be well made but that one shouldn't have knee-jerk approval of shoddily made films just because the subject matter has external value."

We delved further into this topic (and stirred up a real hornet's nest of anger against us) by writing about the knee jerk liberal/leftist reaction to the controversy surrounding the film BANANAS!*:

"In the documentary community, we are, it becomes increasingly apparent, occasionally enslaved by some who have pledged an unquestioning loyalty to a certain kind of social justice perspective."

Even Errol Morris, whose early, character-driven films were both celebrated and shunned (for their creative innovations) within the documentary community, asked a similar question via Twitter (which he reportedly later deleted, but which we had retweeted):

"Are all documentaries about worthy causes worthy documentaries? (Can't there be a bad movie about something good?)"

The Horse Race: Oscar Docs - Who's In, Who's Out, Who Might Make the Shortlist

With last week's Oscar qualifying deadline for documentary features, several awards prognosticators have been weighing in with their thoughts on this year's "Doc Race Spectacular": who will be nominated and who will take home the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Predicting these things at this point is admittedly a bit wonky.  First we have to see who even gets shortlisted - a tricky prospect at best - and from there, it's still all about the shortlist screenings, the internal jockeying and just who shows up to watch all 15 of the films.

For instance, last year at this time, BURMA VJ, THE COVE and FOOD INC. all looked like relatively sure nominees.  But no one had seen the DANIEL ELLSBERG film and no one could have predicted WHICH WAY HOME would make it all the way to the Kodak Theatre.

The ELLSBERG film, in particular, premiered late (at Toronto) and proceeded to gain speed throughout the process - as older, liberal Academy members, who not-so-coincidently make up the majority of the viewer/voters, rallied around the baby boomer, anti-establishment hero.

So predicting the Doc Feature contest in early September is less about who will get nominated than it is answering the question of who will get shortlisted.  And as we've seen many times in the past several years, getting shortlisted is no certainty - even for films considered to be shoo-ins for a nod.

And this year might bring more complications as so many of today's best documentary filmmakers (and the ones with the most open ideas about what documentary can be - think back to late-80's discussions about "recreations") are actually in the running.  And by "in the running", we mean that they are ineligible from participating in the voting that determines this year's shortlist.  So someone like Alex Gibney, who was on the IDA jury that awarded ANVIL last year, can't vote.  Neither can Laura Poitras, Rachel Grady, Heidi Ewing and a handful of other young guns.

Many Oscar prognosticators seem to be hanging their hats on some of the high profile titles rolling out of the fall festivals, but we hear that only some of the big Toronto titles are trying to qualify this year.  A commenter below notes that Cannes sensation ARMADILLO and Werner Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS are both on the Laemmle Theatre schedule for later this month, but you can  probably strike Wiseman's BOXING GYM, Ondi Timoner's buzzy and controversial COOL IT, Gala screening THE PROMISE: THE MAKING OF DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN and Errol Morris' TABLOID from this year's contenders. [Note that many recent Oscar nominees that premiered at Toronto - Herzog's ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD and last year's FOOD, INC. among them - waited for the next eligibility year before qualifying.] [ed. note - the above paragraph has been edited to reflect new information.]

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.