Authors — Chuck Tryon
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Cannes 2013: Jia’s A Touch of Sin and Ozon’s Young and Beautiful
Negotiating Cannes is a unique challenge, especially for someone attending the festival for the first time. Although the festival is commonly associated with red carpets and other assorted glamour, my clearest memories of the festival entail trekking from a borrowed condo in Antibes early in the morning — thanks to the monumental patience of my wife who drove me in — to queue up with other journalists for an 8:30 press screening (finding those lines the first couple of days is an entirely different matter). Rainy weather early in the festival also seemed to undermine Cannes’ reputation for sun and […]
by Chuck Tryon on May 19, 2013 -
Full Frame Film Festival 2013
Nestled in downtown Durham, in the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is one of the region’s most engaging—and enjoyable—cinematic events. Full Frame has delivered an outstanding slate of documentary films to the local community every spring for well over a decade, but the festival thrives in part due to its friendly, relaxed atmosphere and involved audiences. Given the presence of three major universities—the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State University and Duke University (a festival sponsor)—the festival invariably attracts large crowds of highly educated viewers. But as a leading documentary festival, it […]
by Chuck Tryon on May 5, 2013 -
The Full Frame Film Festival, Part Three
Several of the films from this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival dealt with themes of community. Two films in particular that focused on question of community were Patrick Creadon’s If You Build It and Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s Remote Area Medical. In both cases, we are introduced to both the pleasures and the complexities of providing resources — medical or educational — to rural communities that have been neglected in recent years. If You Build It depicts the efforts of Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller to introduce a design-oriented curriculum to rural Bertie County, North Carolina, and to […]
by Chuck Tryon on Apr 8, 2013 -
The Full Frame Film Festival, 2013: Part Two
A number of films at this year’s Full Frame raised questions for me about issues related to memory, identity, and storytelling. As Amir Bar-Lev reminds us, in Full Frame’s programming notes, that documentary is a “strange and problematic medium where journalism and art meet,” and many of this year’s films reflect overtly or more subtly about the role of storytelling and its relationship to memory, identity, and in some cases, politics. Patrick Reed’s Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children, which had its North American premiere at Full Frame, depicts the efforts of Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, a witness to the Rwanda […]
by Chuck Tryon on Apr 7, 2013 -
The Full Frame Film Festival 2013, Part One
The opening day of this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has once again provided attendees with an eclectic offering of choices, including a number of timely films that touch on important political issues and a curated series organized by Amir Bar-Lev, Stories About Stories, that focuses on documentaries who engage with the question of narrative itself, as well as a tribute to the innovative documentary storyteller, Jessica Yu. But this variety of choices speaks to the vibrant work being done by documentary filmmakers and the programmers who organized this year’s festival, not to mention the vital questions that documentary […]
by Chuck Tryon on Apr 6, 2013 -
On-Demand Culture
In April 2012, comedian Mark Malkoff embarked on an extraordinary challenge when he set out to use his Netflix account to watch as many streaming movies as possible over the course of one month. Reasoning that he wanted to get the best value possible for his $7.99 monthly subscription, Malkoff pushed Netflix’s promise of a deep catalog of streaming movies to absurd lengths, managing to watch 252 movies — about eight titles per day — and bringing his cost per film to an impressively low three cents. The stunt helped to illustrate how easily and cheaply consumers can access and […]
by Chuck Tryon on Jan 17, 2013
