All these wonderful things

True/False 2011 Sneak Previews from Robert Greene, Frank Piaseck Poulsen and BENDA BILILI!

The 8th Annual True/False Film Festival kicks off tonight in Columbia, MO with the fest's new Jubilee event and a sneak preview of the French film BENDA BILILI!, a documentary about a group of paraplegics who play music in the DR. Congo.  (The film screened last year at Cannes and Sheffield Doc/Fest and has its official US premiere at SXSW next week.)

Yesterday, we skimmed some of this year's True/False titles that already have premiered at Sundance and elsewhere.  But True/False often offers land-locked Americans their first chance to sneak films that will later have official premieres at SXSW, Tribeca and elsewhere.  Two years ago, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher's OCTOBER COUNTRY famously had a sneak preview here, the year prior it was Anna Broinowski's FORBIDDEN LIES that made its mark in the midwest before heading on to Full Frame and Silverdocs. 

Here's a look at some of the films that will have sneak previews at this year's T/F (film descriptions from the festival):

AT THE EDGE OF RUSSIA
Directed by Michael Marczak

Surrounded by the frozen tundra of Siberia, a young soldier comes of age at an almost-forgotten military outpost.

BENDA BILILI!
Directed by Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye

A real-life fairy tale, Benda Bilili! is a five-years-in-the-making look at a group of paraplegic Congolese musicans who go from sleeping on cardboard boxes to worldwide attention.

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.

The Monday Brief: Awards Week in Los Angeles, Big Debut for ART OF THE STEAL & ND/NF Doubles Down on Docs

Our long national nightmare is almost over...

This year's Oscar race concludes in just under a week but first there's a long wind-up of activities in Los Angeles including a series of major awards-centric docuvents building to Friday night's Spirit Awards (in late night - or prime time if you're on the west coast) and Sunday's Academy Awards.

It all started last night with a fundraiser for Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush's forthcoming documentary HUNGRY IN AMERICA at Tom Collichio's Craft LA.  Inspired in part by CBS News' groundbreaking 1968 report "Hunger in America", which led to quick, bipartisan action in Washington, the duo hope to explore and explain why hunger continues to to be an issue in this country.  The benefit also served to kick off Vanity Fair's Oscar week activities and boasted a mix of doc veterans (including RJ Cutler, Participant's Diane Weyermann and Courtney Sexton, Gucci Tribeca Fund's Ryan Harrington - an EP on the Hunger doc - and Oscar nominee Roger Ross Williams) and celebrities (Topher Grace, Marcia Cross, David Arquette, Elizabeth Berkley and Top Chef winner Michael Voltaggio).

Tuesday night, the IDA hosts a private event at the Standard Hotel.  Wednesday night, the Motion Picture Academy takes over the IDA's annual Oscar reception with their first annual Docs! night, featuring clips from all 10 Oscar nominated documentary films and panel discussions with the nominees.

Thursday night, LA's Cinefamily kicks off their new nonfiction series What's Up Docs with a rare reunion of groundbreaking comedy doc pioneers TVTV (more on this series in a later post).

Friday, the aforementioned Spirit Awards kick off the weekend with their move to downtown LA and two awards for docs - the just announced Chaz and Roger Ebert Truer Than Fiction prize (which will go to either 45365, BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO or EL GENERAL) and the Best Documentary Feature award, which seems likely to go to ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL.  The late night party that follows will continue the nonstop revelry leading up to Sunday's Oscars.

But all the world is not the Kodak Theatre, and so...

The Monday Brief: A Week of Doc Sales, Controversy at RealScreen Summit and Why is True/False Secret Screening a Sundance Prize Winner?

Good morning, let's get right to it...

The seeds of deals that were beginning to be sown in Park City, began to come to fruition last week, with three major announcements for Sundance docs (and at least two more due to announced shortly). 

First up was the sale of out-of-competition buzz favorite CATFISH to Relativity Media and Rogue Pictures (with Brett Ratner helping to broker the deal and taking on Executive Producer duties).  Next, IFC grabbed Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK, followed quickly by a pact for Amir Bar-Lev's THE TILLMAN STORY with The Weinstein Co.

Those sales come as the film year hums merrily along (with Sundance turning into Rotterdam so to turn into Berlin) and slates and programs are announced for the next round of fests.  We covered SXSW's line-up last week (see here, here and here), there were also program announcements for True/False (more on that later) and Thessaloniki.  

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country (and prior to the snowpocalypse), Washington DC was abuzz with this year's RealScreen Summit - the annual reality television confab that draws broadcasters and nonfiction producers (and those who want to be) and charges a sizable fee for supplying the proximity.  Those of us in the documentary film world have long known of the Summit and it's trade magazine namesake, RealScreen, as a kind of corporate 2nd cousin twice removed.  While they may brand themselves as "the best in non-fiction" on their website, a banner ad for RealScreen's "factual entertainment awards" - "the first truly global celebration of factual entertainment excellence!" - and headlines about reality stalwarts Endemol and ex-NBC programming chief Ben Silverman's "newly formed multimedia company" tell you that RealScreen's heart is really in reality strips.

The Monday Brief: Wrapping Sundance, Our Oscar Predictions and Can THE COVE Break the DGA Curse?

Holy cow, it's February already?  That means we are 1/120 of the way through the twenty-teens.

More the the point, with the wrap of Sundance yesterday, we now have a sense of where the year is heading and some of the films we'll still be talking about next year at this time.  Think about it, by this point last year we already had our first looks at Oscar shortlisters THE COVE, FOOD INC., THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS, BURMA VJ, VALENTINO and EVERY LITTLE STEP (the above a mix of Sundance and Toronto '08 titles).  Which films from this year's Sundance will we be still talking about in early 2011?

A word of caution to folks celebrating RESTREPO's grand jury win at Sundance - only 3 films in the past decade won the Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize and went on to be nominated for an Oscar.  Can you name them? (answer a little later in our broadcast)

If you were hearing the buzz out of IDFA (and from certain quarters it was deafening), one can't help but be surprised that Lixin Fan's LAST TRAIN HOME failed to pick up a single award in the World Cinema Documentary competition.  The jury for that strand (which included filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown and Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival director Asako Fujioka) seemed to value films that made them laugh - aside from editing winner A FILM UNFINISHED and special jury prize recipient ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE), they heaped prizes on three films (THE RED CHAPEL, HIS & HERS and SPACE TOURISTS) that were notable for their use of humor.

The Monday Brief: Sundance Full Throttle, The Cove on the Fast Track and STF Ups It's Staff by 50%

It's Monday morning in Park City (and the rest of the United States) as folks are getting their first solid glimpses of the docu-class of 2010.

We've rounded up the critical reaction to opening night doc RESTREPO, big buzz title CATFISH, world cinema title THE RED CHAPEL and two US competition docs from Oscar winners - Davis Guggenheim's WAITING FOR SUPERMAN and Leon Gast's SMASH HIS CAMERA.  We'll have more critics surveys of this year's doc class as the week continues.

In other Sundance coverage, the NY Times profiles Participant Media's Diane Weyermann (the company has four documentaries at Sundance this year).  They also describe what happened when Bill Gates showed up at a screening of competition doc A SMALL ACT.  Last week, Movieline's S.T. Vanairsdale reported on the opening day press conference where Robert Redford talked about the departure of Geoff Gilmore and said, "We were beginning to flatline".  Anne Thompson digs further into Redford v. Gilmore.  And remember when we asked back in November "what does it say, exactly, that John Cooper's first year at the helm begins with the declaration that Sundance needed a rebirth and a re-charge?".

Meanwhile, away from Park City, life continues.  THE COVE, which before Christmas looked to be locked in a tight Oscar race with FOOD, INC., now seems to be pulling away.  A string of critics prizes, three Cinema Eye Honors (including Outstanding Feature) and a win Sunday night at the Producers Guild - along with the sense that FOOD, INC. just isn't trying that hard - seem to suggest that Louie Psihoyos' film is on the fast track for the Academy Award.  Anything can happen, of course - we don't even know who the five nominees are going to be.  But unless there's some kind of huge momentum shift when the nominees are announced (to Agnes Varda per chance?), more and more industry folks now seem resigned to a COVE win.

Our own thoughts on this year's Cinema Eye Honors, along with links to others' coverage is here.  More coverage since then by Tom Roston on the POV Blog, Hammer to Nail's Michael Tully, nominations committee member Tom Hall, IFC's Alison Willmore, Movieline's Airsdale and About.com's Jennifer Merin.  Further, POV Intern Alice Rhee writes about playing Mad Libs with Albert Maysles and being inspired to tell her own stories and Bob Alexander of Cinema Eye founding sponsor Indiepix posts his welcome remarks from the ceremony.

You can find pictures from this year's ceremony and afterparty along with this year's winners at the Cinema Eye wesbite.  [Kudos again to Cinema Eye's amazing 2010 design team - Ben Chlapek and Ryan Nelson.]

With Sundance having cleared its first weekend of premieres, some spring festivals are now locking in their schedules, ready to soon announce their own fest line-ups.  Columbia, Missouri's True/False Film Festival has announced six titles for this year's festival, including Laura Poitras' THE OATH, Lixin Fan's LAST TRAIN HOME, Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman's THOSE WHO REMAIN, Kaspar Astrup Schröder's THE INVENTION OF DR. NAKAMATS, Don Hahn's WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY and Marshall Curry's RACING DREAMS.

And finally, much congratulations to our friends and colleagues Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen, who welcomed their son Bez Powers Neihausen on Saturday.  There are photos and a (humorous, not-at-all-graphic) blow-by-blow of the arrival on the Stranger Than Fiction blog, where Thom notes that mother and father decided to forgo having the event documented on camera.  Here's a raised glass to the growing familia.

The Top 25 Film Festivals for Documentaries, 2nd Edition - #12. True/False

Previously: #11. CPH:DOX

#12. True/False

Our take: One of the most universally-beloved festivals on the circuit draws filmmakers to the middle of Missouri where appreciative sold out crowds and lovingly homemade activities await.  True/False is one of the very few American festivals that pays for everything.  Its reputation amongst filmmakers is nearly unmached:  without the pressure of deals being made or competition status, filmmakers are able to spend quality time together.  T/F is also one of the more innovative fests on the circuit, constantly re-imagining what panels and parties (and even parades!) can be.  There's enough press and other programmers attending that it's also a place where a film can burst on the scene (OCTOBER COUNTRY last year, FORBIDDEN LIE$ the year before) and leap into the national documentary conversation.

The downside: You won't find us grumbling about the 2 hour drive from St. Louis or Kansas City but others do.  There is pretty universal agreement that the fest hotel is one of (if not) the worst on the circuit.  There's a question of whether the festival's long-standing policy of not promoting premieres is actually benefiting filmmakers who screen there, a few films had their first screenings at True/False and then effectively disappeared for months, caught in a kind of had-a-premiere/waiting-for-a-premiere limbo.  Despite a handful of industry, T/F hasn't yet been able to translate its cred amongst filmmakers to the larger community in the way that Full Frame and Silverdocs have.  The festival's heavy focus on titles just out of Sundance makes it awfully reliant on the quality of that year's Sundance films.

Important recent premieres: They don't call them premieres but they had one of the first public screenings of OCTOBER COUNTRY as well as films that screened "secretly" and would later show up in competition at SXSW and Tribeca.

Selection of films screened at 2009 Fest: BURMA VJ, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC, NO IMPACT MAN, THE HORSE BOY, ROUGH AUNTIES, LOOT, BIG RIVER MAN, SERGIO, AFGHAN STAR, REPORTER

Our coverage of True/False here.

True/False 2009: Salvation Comes Via BIG RIVER MAN

I have not been slacking, this I promise.

On occasion, I have to run off and actually make movies, rather than just write about them, and this past week was one of those times when I found myself down in Southwestern Missouri (just a short car ride from Columbia) to continue the Branson project that I have been working on (with co-director David Wilson and our co-producer Nathan Truesdell) for the past year-plus.

It was nice to dive into filmmaking so quickly after the previous weekend’s True/False Film Festival, exactly the nonfiction tonic I was craving in this early year.  While the announcement of Sundance titles in late November/early December always seems to symbolically kick off the new year in docs (and provides a roadmap as to many of the films that we’ll be talking about in the year to come), Sundance’s place in the calendar year means that we’re still thinking about the year past, even while pondering the year forward: with both Cinema Eye and the Academy announcing their nominees during the festival, we’re as apt to think about TROUBLE THE WATER and MAN ON WIRE as we are WE LIVE IN PUBLIC and ROUGH AUNTIES.

But when we make the trek to Columbia, much of that is past.  The Oscars and the Spirit Awards are behind us – and while Cinema Eye still looms a month later, it feels like we can begin to fully appreciate and chew over the films of 2009.  Thankfully, most of the best of these will appear on screen at True/False.

Talking to someone the other night who had visited True/False for the first time, I was struck by her earliest reaction to the festival – the yearly March March that officially kicks off the festivities on Friday afternoon. 

For those who haven’t witnessed the parade firsthand, imagine a 7-block walk/dance/run across the heart of Columbia’s downtown, featuring drummers, balloons, kids, Snow White in a pedicab, large alien puppets, all manner of signs.  It’s also one of the first times that you will see the other guests – some longtime friends.

My friend noted that everyone was so happy, constantly embracing one another, dancing to the beat of the drummers.  What, she wondered, was this thing?

That is often the first-timer's ponderings once things get going in Columbia - what is this thing?  How can this smallish college town in the middle of nowhere (their words, not mine) have fallen so hard, so fast, so completely for this festival and the films that it screens?  This year, more than 23,000 tickets were sold over the course of 4 days - 5,000 more than last year. 

And the march is just the beginning.  As True/False would continue over the weekend, unfolding many of the year’s best nonfiction films, there would be more to cause feelings of wonder:

John Maringouin’s transcendent BIG RIVER MAN, a visually stunning and frequently hilarious expedition across the heart of the Amazon.  Maringouin, who made one of my favorite films of 2006/2007 – RUNNING STUMBLED, has made a film true to its subject, Martin Strel, one that engages in his excesses, his hallucinations, his quirkiness, his courage.  Working with frequent collaborator Molly Lynch (here both co-director and co-editor), Maringouin is fearless in allowing the audience to laugh at the absurdity of a rotund, wine-swilling marathon swimmer and in following his subjects into the mental abyss.  In a just-begun year of films that have often felt too cautious or even incomplete, finally a film that is unafraid of being messy, passionate, risky, hilarious.  Certainly one of the best films of 2009.

True/False 2009 Thanks You

A lovely thank you video from the folks at T/F and their pals at Boxcar Films...

True/False 2009: Bumpers

By our compatriot Nathan Truesdell...