Documentary

INDIE FILMMAKING, IRAQ STYLE

Anybody else check out the ABC News Nightline tonight? I’m watching as I’m blogging here about Ted Koppel’s interview with Cyrus Kar, an American documentary filmmaker who was held in an American detention center in Iraq for 55 days after the cab he was riding in was pulled over. When U.S. soldiers found a collection of washing machine timers in the cab’s trunk, suddenly his camera equipment, microphone wires and the cab driver’s timers all seemed elements of potential Improvised Explosive Devices. Kar was held briefly at Abu Ghuraib before being transferred to a prison near the airport that also […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2005
BRICK BY BRICK

I was on the international jury this year at Toronto’s Hot Docs, and one of the best and most original docs I saw there, Simone Bittan’s Wall, is receiving its U.S. premiere this Friday at the Quad in New York. Paris-based Bittan, who is both an Israeli and French citizen, was born in Morocco and considers herself an Arab Jew. Employing her hybrid identity as something of a structuring device, Wall documents the construction of the “security fence” that is separating Israel from Palestine, creating a portrait not only of a region divided but of a world in which the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2005
AKERMAN REDUX

Our friends over at the essential GreenCine Daily linked to this 1995 interview between media programmer Chris Dercon and filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman, and that gives me a chance to link back to this blog I wrote a few weeks ago about Akerman’s current gallery installation at the Marian Goodman gallery. At the time I posted it, there were no press images available of the exhibition, but now there’s one, posted here, which captures the double-screen setup onto which Akerman’s quite powerful family history is projected. And here’s Akerman from the interview: “Anyway, I don’t really believe in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 18, 2005
PENN JILLETTE’S LONG CON

Over at his Hollywood Elsewhere (scroll down to his “Wired” section), Jeffrey Welles links to this conspiracy theory at the Slumbering Lungfish blog concerning the film The Aristocrats. Blogger Lore Sjoberg hypothesizes that the vaudeville-era dirty joke that is the sole content of the film is actually an invention of Penn Jillette: “My theory: this joke didn’t exist before circa 2001. The actual joke, really, is that they’re making up this dirty joke, having a hundred comedians tell it, and billing it as a documentary with historical significance.” I don’t know — it’s a fun theory, but Waxy.org provides a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 2, 2005
FINDING OUT THE WINNERS

Film Independent (formerly the IFP/Los Angeles) announced the winners of its 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival. Mark Banning won the Target Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature for his Jellysmoke, and the Target Best Doc Award went to Beth Bird for Everyone Their Grain of Sand. The Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature went to Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know. David Zeiger’s Sir! No Sir! won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature. Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins won the Audience Award for Best International Feature. Catherine Kellner and Ebon Moss-Bachrach of Leslie McCleave’s Road […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 27, 2005
CATHEDRAL IN THE SKY

While in Europe recently I heard about a documentary Martin Scorsese was making about Airbus, the European consortium of British, French, Spanish and German aircraft manufacturers formed in 1970 to rival the dominant American companies like Boeing. Of course, Scorsese recently memorialized an American aerospace pioneer with The Aviator. Today via Variety comes more details about the new project: “Scorsese will team with Spanish docu producer-director Jose Luis Lopez-Linares (Un instante en la vida ajena, Strangers to Themselves), who will take a co-director credit. Per Spanish monthly movie magazine Fotogramas, the doc will establish a parallel between the creation of […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 31, 2005
Z CHANNEL — YOU HAVE TO SEE IT

You can read about Xan Cassavetes’ doc on L.A.’s art-film cable pioneer The Z Channel (linked her via Nerve.com), but you should really watch it while it plays this month on IFC. The story of Z Prez Jerry Harvey’s murderous and suicidal demise is a captivating one, but what makes the doc really great viewing is its conveyance of a very specific brand of cinephilia that almost doesn’t exist anymore. Pre-internet, pre-DVD, the Z Channel’s generous scrambling of Euro greats, American auteurs and Euro-softcore — a mix that included everything from Berlin Alexanderplatz to Laura Antonelli festivals — undoubtedly shaped […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 10, 2005
25 NEW FACE ALUMNI WIN AT TRIBECA ALL ACCESS

As we begin putting together our annual “25 New Faces” issue of Filmmaker, in which we identify and profile the filmmakers who we believe will the independent stars of tomorrow, we also check back on the successes of our past selections. So, when a press release from the Tribeca Film Festival arrived in my in-box this morning I noticed that of the three winners of the Tribeca All Access Award, two — Dennis Lee (a member of the company Kulture Machine) and Mario de la Vega (pictured) — were directors spotlighted in last summer’s issue. From the press release: “The […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 29, 2005
AFRICAN ODYSSEY

Documentaries about kids triumphing (or sometimes not) within educational endeavors have been big hits recently, from Spellbound to the current festival favorite Mad Hot Ballroom. With its SXSW Special Jury Award, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s doc The Boys of Baraka should deservedly achieve the same level of recognition. Original, visually elegant and with an uncommonly ambitious narrative sweep, The Boys of Baraka was shot over a two-year period and makes a real investment in its subjects, an investment that pays off for the filmmakers. I met Ewing and Grady, who together run the New York production company Loki Films, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2005
DANGER AFTER DARK… THE SNEAK PREVIEW v.2

Our friend Travis Crawford, who appears often in our pages, drops from view in the late winter and early spring when, as associate director of programming for the Philadelphia Film Festival he puts together his Danger After Dark program. And now, in what has become an annual tradition, he re-emerges with an e-mail in which he sneaks his program to his friends a few days in advance of the official announcement. If you are a devotee of outre genre films — and even if you don’t plan to attend the festival — check out Crawford’s program, below. His wonderfully descriptive […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 9, 2005

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