Documentary

“PIN GODS” AT STF

It may be hard to imagine, but there was a time when documentaries about off-brand sporting events and competitions were a rare thing. In this pre-Spellbound era, Pin Gods managed to make a small bowling-ball sized splash at the Toronto festival, only to fall through the cracks of the distribution system (a fact bemoaned last night by one of Pin Gods’ biggest fans, Stranger Than Fiction programmer Thom Powers). A film about what its director Larry Locke calls, “the small dream,” Pin Gods is an endearingly humane look at four men, each one trying to make a life out of professional […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on May 5, 2010
“KIDS” OPENS L.A. FILM FEST; LINE-UP ANNOUNCED

Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right will open the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival, which announced its line-up today. The Focus Features release, due out in July, stars Annette Benning, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Mia Wasikowska in a story of a lesbian couple and their children, who search for their sperm donor father. The closing night film will be Despicable Me, a 3D comedy-fantasy directed by Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin. The festival, organized by Film Independent, will be the first held in downtown L.A.’s L.A. Live complex. Rebecca Yeldham is the Director of the festival and David […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 4, 2010
NOTES FROM TRIBECA

With Tribeca wrapping up this weekend I thought this would be the right time to give some of my highlights from what I saw this year. Sadly, I didn’t get out to as many movies as I would have liked (but Howard Feinstein did, and he writes about some of them in his preview and at the half way point) but here’s some notes from my vantage point. Best Performance Melissa Leo in The Space Between. Leo plays a grumpy airline stewardess who after her flight is grounded on 9/11 has to watch over one of her passengers, a Pakistani-American […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Apr 30, 2010
TRIBECA WINNERS

The winners of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival were announced tonight. Feo Aladag‘s When We Leave received the fest’s top honor, the Founders Award for Best Narrative. The film follows a woman and her son as they try to escape her husband’s abuse and finds shelter with a family in Berlin. Best Documentary went to Alexandra Codina‘s Monica & David, which highlights a couple living with Down syndrome. Other winners include Dana Adam Shaprio‘s Monogamy taking home the New York Competition category and the outlandish comedy Spork won the first ever Best Feature in the Tribeca Film Festival Virtual category. […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Apr 29, 2010
SPARROW SONGS, GOD, KAROKE AND BANKSY

Sparrow Songs is a documentary project by filmmaker Alex Jablonski and d.p. Michael Totten, who are making and posting one short doc film per month on their site for a whole year. They are six episodes in, and the films are quite wonderful. Averaging about eight minutes, they are poetic essays that capture the essences of specific places, people, and moments, and that then, without pretension, build these observances into larger statements about love, truth, community, and the ways we are choosing to live our lives. The films include Porn Star Karoke, about the crowd that gathers weekly at an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 29, 2010
“CLEANFLIX” at STF

Despite being born and bred on our shores, Mormonism is still something of a fringe religion. For a lot of Americans, there’s something vaguely worrying about its army of clean-cut, nametag wearing missionaries. Neither Hollywood nor the independent film scene have helped the Mormon case for normalcy – their portrayals tend to fixate on the church’s checkered history with polygamy. Last night’s Stranger Than Fiction featured Cleanflix, a sympathetic look at the more mainstream side of Mormon culture. Directed by Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi, two filmmakers who grew up in the tradition (James is no longer practicing, but Ligairi […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Apr 28, 2010
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL, PART TWO

Some good, or at least interesting, films surfaced at Tribeca this year—I’ll get to a few a couple of paragraphs down, and I wrote about others here last week—almost in spite of the umbrella organization itself. You can’t help but wonder: What is the template for this festival, which has been struggling to find its identity since its inception? Toronto, Sundance, Cannes, Berlin? San Francisco, Denver? Answer: It’s not cast from a festival mold at all, in spite of the invaluable input of former artistic director Peter Scarlet and David Kwok, as far as I can tell the only current […]
by Howard Feinstein on Apr 26, 2010
DOUG BLOCK’S “THE KIDS GROW UP” AT STF

Last night’s Stranger Than Fiction screening of Doug Block’s The Kids Grow Up was a homecoming of sorts. Block’s previous foray into personal documentary 51 Birch Street was actually the first ever film to be screened in the series, a fact announced by its organizer, Thom Powers, when he introduced it (and his new baby) to the audience. In 51 Birch Street, Block recounted how his mother’s death and his father’s subsequent remarriage crystallized doubts he’d always had about his parent’s marriage. Block’s latest outing, The Kids Grow Up, is similarly a family affair — it weaves archival footage of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2010
SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN INFRINGING DOC RULE

Yesterday, in an 8-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a statute that would have infringed on certain documentary makers’ First Amendment rights. Relating to the depiction of animal cruelty and killing on screen, the statute, by criminalizing such depictions, would have limited filmmakers’ abilities to cover any number of subjects ranging from hunting to our food industry to, ironically, animal abuse itself. The IFP New York was one of several organizations filing an amicus brief in support of the filmmaker filing the case, a documentarian named Robert Stevens who was sentenced to 37 months in Federal prison for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2010
FULL FRAME FILM FESTIVAL |
By Ryan Koo

Now in its 13th year, the documentary-only Full Frame Film Festival (April 8-11) takes place in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. The city of Durham is historically a tobacco town, moving slowly but steadily towards an uncertain future: while its tobacco warehouses are being converted to swank lofts, downtown office space is readily available with a seemingly high vacancy rate. The festival is very much a cultural cornerstone for the city, and as a result Full Frame means a lot to Durham. As of late, however, Durham also means a lot to Full Frame: while in previous years the […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Apr 20, 2010

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