Documentary

“BOBBY FISCHER AGAINST THE WORLD” DIRECTOR LIZ GARBUS

For the lucky few who get in, Sundance isn’t just a festival — it’s a resource. Over the years, the festival has nurtured the careers of a number of documentary filmmakers who went on to become what senior programmer David Courier recently termed “master filmmakers” — filmmakers so good and so respected that the festival had to create the out-of-competition category, “Doc Premieres,” to make sure their work didn’t overshadow the greener directors. It should come as no surprise to anyone in the documentary community to find Liz Garbus’ name in a category reserved for such filmmakers. Garbus’ history with […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Jan 21, 2011
“BUCK” | director, Cindy Meehl

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 2:30 pm — Library Center Theatre] What I have found most surprising about my film Buck is how it appears to affect people in so many different ways. As I started this journey to tell Buck’s story, I thought it would be about changing people’s perceptions about how they treat and train horses, as well as how to deal with life’s difficulties with a bit of cowboy wisdom. However as the film was completed and we started test screening it for a wide cross section of friends and associates, I was pleasantly surprised that we […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2011
“The Green Wave” | writer-director, Ali Samadi Ahadi

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 3:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV] Well the biggest surprise was, that it worked out! Really! Just imagine: Our goal was to make a film about a country we were not able to travel to anymore, about an event which had taken place in the past. Without having proper footage, we decided to produce 42 minutes of animation and mix them with real footage we got from 250 different cameras and cell phones. And all of that, from financing to finalizing the film within 10 months! That is a challenge I would say. And […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2011
“CONNECTED: AN AUTOBLOGOGRAPHY ABOUT LOVE, DEATH & TECHNOLOGY” | co-writer-director, Tiffany Shlain

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre] When I set out to make Connected, the original tagline was A Declaration of Interdependence. I set out to make an insightful/funny/provocative film that looks at what it means to be connected in the 21st century by exploring the history of interdependence and how it has changed over time. That was my pitch, that was our focus, that’s the film I thought I was going to make. At one point, we had an 80-minute rough cut and I watched it in one sitting (one rarely gets to do that on […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2011
“PROJECT NIM” DIRECTOR JAMES MARSH

During the past decade, some of the movies’ most crowd-pleasing moments can be found not in ballyhooed Hollywood blockbusters but in documentaries. Doc like Spellbound, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, and The King of Kong: A Fist Full of Quarters are best seen with an audience ready to cheer. The most dazzling example of this trend just might be James Marsh’s Man on Wire, the exhilarating story of Phillipe Petit, a small Frenchman with big dreams. Marsh recounts how the daredevil Petit strung a wire between New York’s Twin Towers and then proceeded to dance between the two skyscrapers — perhaps the […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Jan 20, 2011
BANKSY WINS TOP PRIZE AT CINEMA EYE HONORS

At an awards ceremony at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, Cinema Eye handed out honors to the best of this year’s documentary films. The top award, the Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking, when to Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, produced by Jaime D’Cruz. Laura Poitras was named Outstanding Director for The Oath, and Jeff Malmberg Outstanding Debut for his Marwencol. Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill won the first Filmmaker-sponsored Heterodox Award. One of the most moving moments of the night was a tribute to editor Karen Schmeer, who was killed last year in a hit-and-run, and one […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2011
“POSITION AMONG THE STARS” | co-writer-director, Leonard Retel Helmrich

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 12:00 pm — Screening Room Sundance Resort, Sundance] As a filmmaker you often hear the term “Kill your darlings” in order to make the story line of your film clear. The darling scenes are often scenes that reveal a poetic feeling, more than facts. Often I saw rough material of colleagues’ potentially beautiful poetic documentaries. But in the editing many of these films were demolished because too many darlings were killed. The story lines became clear but the poetry was gone. In other words, the facts were clear but the feelings were gone. For Position […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2011
“REBIRTH” | director, Jim Whitaker

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 8:30 am — Prospect Square Theatre] The biggest surprise was how the scope of the film continued to evolve. When I had the idea to put the time-lapse cameras up it was in part to record the history of the site moving forward, and in part to create a time-lapse installation at a future museum at Ground Zero. However, after spending more time at Ground Zero and seeing first-hand the emotional and human toll, I decided I needed to capture the human dimension of the event through the subjects. As time went on, we realized that the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2011
“HOT COFFEE” DIRECTOR SUSAN SALADOFF

No political season is complete without politicians taking up the case of tort reform. Greedy litigants are blamed for everything from clogging up our justice system to running up our medical bills as tort reform advocates take advantage of the fact that everyone hates a lawyer until they need one. With so much misinformation out there, what’s a lawyer to do? Well, if you’re Susan Saladoff, longtime lawyer, first-time filmmaker, you pick up a camera. Using the infamous “McDonald’s coffee case” as her prime example, her debut feature, Hot Coffee, investigates how and why corporations spend millions of dollars drumming […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Jan 18, 2011
“PROJECT NIM” | director, James Marsh

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 20, 9:30 pm — Egyptian Theatre] When you embark on any historical documentary or film about events that have already run their course, the biggest prize you’re after is visual images and archive [materials] showing elements of your story. On Project Nim, which is the life story of a chimpanzee who was brought up like a human child, we knew from various contributors that there was going to be sufficient archive of the chimp to embark on the film but we didn’t know the extent of it. Often the biggest surprise on a film project is […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2011

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