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News Brand New Doc Fest Coming to NYC Like 93 | by Brian Brooks (April 6, 2010) Filling an extended gaping hole for non-fiction filmmakers and fans that has existed in New York City, a new documentary festival is being launched in downtown Manhattan this fall.

Toronto International Film Festival doc programmer Thom Related Articles Powers, IFC Centerʼs John Vanco and Raphaela Neihausen, the new eventʼs executive director, have 1 Academy Awards Announce 10 Scientific and unveiled DOC NYC, the first documentary film festival of Technical Achievement Honorees itʼs kind in the city since filmmaker Gary Pollardʼs Docfest BAFTA Announces Foreign-Language Film effectively closed its doors nearly a decade ago. The trio 2 Nominees already work together on New York Cityʼs ongoing “Stranger Than Fiction” film series for new docs. 3 'King's Speech' and 'Black Swan' Lead BAFTA Long Lists Billing itself as an event “celebrating documentary storytelling across the fields of film, photography, prose, 4 indieWIRE @ Hulu Docs: Sundance radio and other innovative forms,” DOC NYC will hold its Flashback, Part One inaugural edition Wednesday, November 3 - Sunday, An image provided by DOC NYC. November 7 at IFC Center, site of “Stranger Than 5 'Inception' Leads Central Ohio Critics' Awards Fiction.”. Additionally, the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies (NYU-SCPS) will serve as the eventʼs ʻPresenting Partnerʼ along with Tisch School of the Arts. Both the festivalʼs opening and closing night events will take place at NYUʼs Skirball Center for Performing Arts Auditorium.

A New York City home is a core aspect of the event, explained Thom Powers, who said that the city itself will be a major plus for established and emerging doc filmmakers because it is at the pinnacle of cultural influence. “Filmmakers can take advantage of New York City as a center of media, publishing, advertising and humanitarian work to bring these films to very influential audiences that you donʼt necessarily get in other cities,” added Powers.

While the total size of the program is still being determined, eight films will anchor the festivalʼs documentary competition, which will emphasize world and U.S. premieres. But, Powers said that not all competition films need to be premieres. Additional sidebar sections will focus on specific themes and retrospective programming. Powers added that the festival will include roughly 30 events, ranging from films to conversations to other presentations. Organizers will not have an open call for submissions this year. Individuals interested in suggesting titles are invited to email a one paragraph description of a film to the festival (via their website).

“One thing weʼre excited about having is a festival that spotlights the wider nature of documentary storytelling,” Powers - who will serve as the eventʼs Artistic Director - told indieWIRE today. “As a documentary programmer, itʼs exciting when I get to reach outside the world of film and engage with Husband and wife doc duo Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen, in Cannes. Image courtesy Stranger Than Fiction. different groups. The significant footprint for us is to cross different documentary fields.” He also said that after premiering at a festival like Toronto or Sundance, docs sometimes have few options for screening in an event later in the year. He hopes DOC NYC will fill some of that gap.

“In Toronto there are great docs premiering and they donʼt have great choices sometimes for places afterward, so for some of these Toronto films like ʻVideocracyʼ or ʻColonyʼ that played at Stranger Than Fiction, a Doc NYC can be a great platform to move from Toronto to NYC.” Powers, who will continue to serve as a documentary programmer for the annual Toronto festival in September, said that DOC NYC does not plan to compete with pitching forums at festivals like this monthʼs Hot Docs and Novemberʼs IDFA in Amsterdam. But, he hopes the event will enable filmmakers to navigate the ever evolving distribution landscape with their docs.

“Hot Docs and IDFA do what they do very well and theyʼre not a model Iʼm looking to replicate, theyʼre already doing it. Filmmakersʼ Advertise with us strategies for festivals generally are moving away from viewing a festival as a place to sell your film, though that may still be the case for places like Toronto or Sundance, though even there itʼs a tough path,” Powers said, “So what I see are filmmakers using festivals not to reach distributors, but to reach audiences.” Powers continued by emphasizing the need for filmmakers to utilize festivals to generate buzz and identify their audience no matter which route to distribution is ultimately utilized.

The new event on the fall festival circuit will be up against other European doc festivals that are taking place at the same time this year, including Doc/Fest in Sheffield (Nov. 3 - 7) and CPH:DOX in Copenhagen (Nov 4 - 14). As for other concurrent U.S. fests, Denverʼs international festival is set for November 3rd - 14th this year and AFI Fest is set for November 4th - 11th.

“Of the overlap with Sheffield, Powers notes that heʼs had conversations with and has high admiration for Sheffieldʼs leadership team, including Heather Croall and Hussain Currimbhoy, and argues that the nonfiction world is big enough for both festivals,” filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack reported today, continuing, “He added that heʼd love for the fests to share titles and have filmmakers travel to both.”

DOC NYCʼs advisory board includes two-time Academy Award-winner Barbara Kopple, author Nelson George, cartoonist Joe Sacco, Cara Mertes of the Sundance Documentary Development Fund, Ruby Lerner of Creative Capital, and Philipp Engelhorn of Cinereach. Popular Today “DOC NYC will fill an important void in New York City and will be a cornerstone for documentary storytellers from all over the world to 1 For Your Consideration: Early 2011 Oscar showcase premieres, hold panels and give audiences the thrill of discovery,” said Vanco, who will serve as the festʼs Managing Director, Predictions in a statement about the new event. “Weʼre creating a festival that will curate people as much as work, creating a space for the worldʼs leading thinkers, activists, creators, and celebrities to come together for dialogue, inspiration, and incubation of ideas.” 2 Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers | 'The Ledge' Director Matthew Chapman [For more information about the DOC NYC, visit their website.] 3 'King's Speech' and 'Black Swan' Lead BAFTA Long Lists —the full press release is listed on page two— 4 Academy Awards Announce 10 Scientific and Technical Achievement Honorees

Which among these New 5 Tracking The Oscar Precursors: A Complete York City-themed Guide To Award Season documentaries is your favorite? "Bill Cunningham New York" (Press, 2010) "The Cruise" (Miller, 1998) "Dark Days" (Singer, 2000) "The Gates" (Ferrera, Maysles, 2005) "Gay Sex in the '70s" (Lovett, 2005) "Mad Hot Ballroom" (Agrelo, 2005) "Man On Wire" (Marsh, 2008) "New York: A Documentary Film" (Burns, 1999) "Paris is Burning" (Livingston, 1990) Other....

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COMMENTS tully says on April 6, 2010 at 3:06pm 1 Ooh, another new fest that is proudly playing the World/US premiere game. We so need another one of those!

dylan says on April 6, 2010 at 8:08pm Personally, Iʼm delighted. Film festivals bring films to audiences, and NYC is ground zero for documentary film 2 fans. This is a good idea.

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Movie Listings for Nov. 5-11 Published: November 4, 2010

Film Series

DOC NYC (Friday through Tuesday) This ambitious new festival of nonfiction films grows out of the Stranger Than Fiction series at the IFC Center and includes a wide range of work across many different genres, from the concert documentary (D. A. Pennebaker’s 1973 David Bowie film, “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” screening Saturday at midnight) to the diary film (Josh Freed’s “Five Weddings and a Felony,” filmed with a Flip camera and screening Saturday and Tuesday). A tribute to Kevin Brownlow, the British filmmaker who will be receiving an honorary Oscar at the next ceremonies, samples both his documentaries on silent film history (“Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces” and “Garbo,” both on Friday) and his historical dramatizations (“It Happened Here” and “Winstanley,” screening on Sunday); Errol Morris will be present Sunday to introduce his new documentary, “Tabloid,” about a former beauty queen accused of abducting a young Mormon missionary. Daylong symposia on Friday and Saturday focus on issues creative, financial and legal. Events will be held in four locations: IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street; New York University’s Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South; the university’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Place, at Washington Square South; and Ziegfeld Theater, 141 West 54th Street. (212) 924-7771, docnyc.net; most tickets are $16. (Dave Kehr)

A version of this schedule appeared in print on November 5, 2010, on page C22 of the New York edition.! POV - Blog . DOC NYC: Now Through Tuesday, November 9 | PBS 1/7/11 10:05 AM

DOC NYC: Now Through Tuesday, November 9

Ladies and gents, there's a new festival in town. Last night the inaugural edition of DOC NYC kicked off in a big way, featuring Werner Herzog and his breathtaking 3-D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Opening with such a mammoth (no prehistory-pun intended) piece of work is quite a statement about the goals and scope of DOC NYC.

Painting from the Grotte Chauvet featured in Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Artistic director Thom Powers and executive director Raphaela Neihausen have packed their schedule solid with buzzed-about new films. And they've added some classic Herzog and an Errol Morris retrospective for good measure — including big screen showings of Gates of Heaven (POV 1988, and a personal favorite), the New York premiere of Tabloid, as well as no-brainers like The Thin Blue Line and selects from First Person.

Still, DOC NYC promises to be more than a weekend extension of Powers' and Neihausen's popular Stranger Than Fiction film series. There are a slew of events beginning Friday morning under the heading Doc Convergence, aiming to address long-standing concerns for the industry (legal issues around confidentiality! licensing of archival material!). Later, an afternoon session will highlight non-cinema nonfiction storytelling — documentary photography, comics, and performance get equal time in the spotlight.

Check the POV blog for highlights from the festival as it progresses. In the meantime, if you're local or lucky enough to be visiting New York City this weekend, we highly recommend heading to the West Village for a screening or panel. Schedules are available at the festival website. See you there!

TAGS: docnyc, documentary, errol morris, festivals, stranger than fiction, thom powers, werner herzog

Permalink Comments (1)

posted by Andrew Catauro | November 4, 2010 5:02 PM

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Joshua Web 11/05/2010 03:31 PM

I was not lucky enough to be in NY for the DOC. I would have really loved to see Werner Herzog' 3D documentary. He had a bunch of information on the website but no promo video clips

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Ted Hope Producer Posted: December 14, 2010 01:29 PM Brave Thinkers of Indie Film, 2010 Edition We have a bit of a redundancy in the recognition of those that create good work, but that good work does not end with what is up on the screen -- which is the part that everyone seems to want to write about. I feel, however, that we must recognize those that focus not just on the development and production of good work, but those that commit themselves to ALL of cinema, including discovery, participation, appreciation, and presentation -- what I consider the other 4 pillars of cinema.

Last year at this time, I put forth a list of inspiring folks, people who by their acts and ideas were giving me the energy to keep striving for a better film culture and infrastructure, one that was accessible to all and slave to none. We are closer to a truly free film culture this year than we were last year, and I remain optimistic that we can be a hell of a lot closer next year than we are today, thanks in no small part to the 40 I have singled out these two short years.

This list, like last year's, is not meant to be exhaustive. Okay, granted I did not get to the quantity of the 21 Brave Thinkers that I did last year, but the quality is just as deep. Regarding the lesser amount, I don't blame the people -- I blame the technology (of course). I wish I had better tools of discovery that would allow me to find more of the good work and efforts that are out there. I know I am overlooking some BTs again this year. But so be it -- one of the great things about blogging is there is no need to be finished or even to be right (although I do hate it when I push publish prematurely -- like I did with this -- when it is still purely a draft).

I know I can depend on you, my dear brave thinkers, to extend and amend this work into the future. I do find it surprising how damn white & male & middle aged this list is. And that I only found two director to include this year. Again, it must be the tools and not the source, right? Help me source a fuller list next year; after all, it is as Larry K tweeted to me about regarding who are the most brave these days: "Those whom you don't know but who continue, despite the indifference of all, to create work that is authentic,challenging and real." How true that is!

Last year I asked and stated: "What is it to be "brave"? To me, bravery requires risk, going against the status quo, being willing to do or say what few others have done. Bravery is not a one time act but a consistent practice. Most importantly, bravery is not about self interest; bravery involves the individual acting for the community. It is both the step forward and the hand that is extended."

This year, I recognize even more fully that bravery is a generosity of spirit, as well as a generative sort of mind. It is extending the energy inside ourselves to the rest of the world. I often get asked why I blog (or why so much), and I have no answer for those folks. It can't be stopped, for I believe if we love the creative spirit as much as the work it yields, if we believe we create for the community and not for the ego, how can we not extend ourselves and turn our labor into the bonds that keep us moving forward. In other words, no one can afford to create art and not be public (IMHO). If you want a diverse and accessible culture of ambitious work, you can not afford to simply hope it will get better -- you have to do something (or get out of the business, please).

So without any further adieu, here's my list of the nineteen folks who have done more on a worldwide basis to start to build it better together, to take what remains of a crumbling and inapplicable film culture & infrastructure, and to try to bring it into the present. They all share a tremendous generosity and open spirit, embracing participation and collaboration. This is no longer a world of scarcity and control. These nineteen have begun the hard work of designing a new world of film based on surplus and access -- and the resulting community that grows from that -- and their actions and attitude give me hope for what is to come.

12. Thom Powers Founder of Stranger Than Fiction, programmer at TIFF, co-founder ofCinema Eye Honors, this year Thom expanded his base still further as one of the founders of the DOC NYC fest. Few have done as much to further the community and appreciation of film in NYC. He has helped to build an energetic and passionate doc community, and never stops thinking about how to extend it further. A man with a mission if there ever was.! Errol Morris on "Tabloid"! Nov 23rd 2010, 16:43 by More Intelligent Life, A.G. | NEW YORK

"I AM always at the mercy of my stories," said Errol Morris to a packed auditorium at New York University. A documentarian who has long devoted himself to rigorously revising the inaccuracies of history ("The Fog of War", "The Thin Blue Line"), Mr Morris was there to screen his newest documentary, "Tabloid". The film considers the odd life of Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who became a media sensation in the 1970s for allegedly kidnapping and raping the love of her life, a Mormon named Kirk. The story is fascinating and salacious, but in Mr Morris's hands "Tabloid" becomes a larger story about how we get our information and what we let ourselves believe.

Pre-empting critics who might dismiss "Tabloid" as less serious than his previous documentaries, Mr Morris offered that the film's underlying theme is love, and asked the audience, "what's more important than that?"

Syrup-voiced and charismatic, Joyce became the fodder of a media frenzy when she hired a team of investigators, aviation pilots and bodyguards to track down her boyfriend Kirk, who suddenly disappeared. According to international gossip rags, Joyce then abducted Kirk from a Mormon compound in London and drove him at gunpoint to a cottage in Devon, where she held him hostage for a week ("manacling her Mormon") and sexually abused him. What followed was a globetrotting tale with twists and turns more melodramatic than anything Aaron Spelling could have come up with: Indian disguises, leaked S&M photographs, a near- death accident, some dog cloning.

But viewers are left wondering whom to believe. The Joyce we meet is agoraphobic, lonely and wounded from her invaded privacy. "You could tell a lie long enough that you believe it," she admits solemnly on film. And Mr Morris never lets his audience feel too comfortable with a given story. ("Veracity here is never prescriptive," he has written.) What's taken as collective truth can be the product of individual lies, and privileged perspectives are often the most myopic. It's only by the end of the film that we realise there is no "true" story at all. It's "sick, sad and funny, but, of course, it's more than that," observed Mr Morris. "It is a meditation on how we are shaped by the media and even more powerfully, by ourselves."

The screening was occasionally interrupted by mysterious yelps of "Lies!" and "Not her!" Only after the credits rolled and Mr Morris came out to field questions did we learn that these outbursts came from Joyce herself. Mr Morris invited her to come on stage, and the audience gasped and clapped, absolutely seduced. She made her way down the aisle in a shocking-pink suit (fit for "Dynasty") and sparkly shoes. On a harness was one of her five cloned pit-bulls.

In person, Joyce came across the way she did on screen: gregarious, soulful and practiced in theatrical oration—pausing for effect and repeating words for emphasis ("I've been living under this burden for years. Years!"). She complained that the film got certain things wrong about her and that it didn't indict Mormonism enough. She explained that she was always just looking for love ("aren't we all, ladies?") and resented the word "obsession". She was intimate and chatty: "It hurt me when you guys laughed."

Mr Morris stood beside her this whole time, dignified, quiet, eyes at the floor, completely opaque. Finally, Thom Powers, the artistic director of the DOC NYC Festival and the evening's moderator, interrupted Joyce's monologue. But nobody wanted to part ways with her. True to Errol Morris, "Tabloid" is a compelling film, but time with Joyce McKinney indicates that it couldn't help but be so.

"Tabloid" by Errol Morris is travelling the film-festival circuit.

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010. All rights reserved. Permanent Address: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=forgotten-dreams-2010-11-18 Forgotten dreams? A call to investigate the mysteries of humanity By Lawrence M. Krauss | Thursday, November 18, 2010 | 21 comments

The new DOC NYC documentary film festival just ended, and it began last week with a bang, featuring distinguished filmmaker Werner Herzog’s new 3-D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The haunting and remarkable 32,000-year-old drawings filmed deep in a cave that remained undisturbed for tens of thousands of years and in which, since its discovery less than a decade ago, fewer people have walked than have walked on the moon, call out across the eons to us. They challenge our modern sensibilities, and our very notion of what it means to be human.

These are treasures of antiquity that celebrate the long and circuitous development of our modern human spirit from early stirrings in primitive hominids. All of us should celebrate these revelations, so it is disquieting to ponder amidst the cultural delights New York was home to over recent days that instead of basking in the beauty and wonder that these stories unveil, the majority of Americans instead would prefer to believe that none of this rich tapestry ever actually happened.

Rendered in charcoal in ancient times when an Ice Age permeated all of what is now Europe and Neandertals still walked the earth, the paintings are at the same time remarkably modern, reminiscent of Picasso or Weber. Another fact staggers the imagination. Dating of the charcoal suggests that the paintings were added to over a period of 5,000 years—far exceeding the span between the age of the ancient Greeks and Roman civilizations and the modern era, in fact over a period whose length coincides with what many people choose to believe is the age of the universe.

In poll after poll, concentrations ranging from 30 percent to 60 percent of Americans continue to believe that humans have existed in their present form unchanged, as created by God less than 10,000 years ago.

Richard Dawkins has noted that confusing 10,000 years with the actual age of the Universe (13.7 billion years) is like confusing the distance across the United States with the distance spanned by a meter stick. Such colossal innumeracy and scientific illiteracy is indeed worrisome, but I would argue that the saddest aspect of such scientific ignorance is that it demeans the human sense of wonder that thinking about the universe should provoke.

Reality trumps fiction every time. The actual story of our human struggle from near extinction in what is now Ethiopia to the southern tip of Africa—through hundreds of thousands of years of slow and fascinating development, from the first inklings of cognition to the development of sophisticated tools and symbolic representations of reality, from language to the forgotten dreams of our ancestors who drew images of the animals they hunted on the dark inner walls of a cave in what is now the French countryside—is both inspiring and magical.

Just think of the intellectual poverty suffered by those who miss the rich cultural and intellectual opportunities afforded by witnessing our past when they decide the real story of our development must be replaced by an abbreviated and redundant myth. It is a disservice to the spirit of adventure and curiosity that we should nurture in our children to rob them of the opportunity to be inspired by nature, and for some of them, to go on to make profound new discoveries.

There is poetry in the real world and it diminishes the human spirit to deny it or reject it. What goes for evolution is true for the Big Bang, which left a beautiful and rich pattern on the sky that we observe with our many telescopes, each galaxy or cluster providing a clue to a cosmic puzzle that we are still trying to unravel to decode the secrets of our own cosmic origins.

The same can be said for the new wave of climate change deniers who are steadfastly refusing to consider not only the data on current climate change, but the historical record of our amazing past from Antarctic ice sheets going back almost 500,000 years.

Albert Einstein once said, "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious...It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” Watching Herzog’s film made me wonder what will be the legacy we leave for any future generations living 32,000 years in the future? Will we provide evidence of the peaks of modern minds that could produce the art of Rodin and Picasso, or will those who prefer to bury their heads in the sand hold ultimate sway, leading us back into a dark age of ignorance, fear, and with it, violence, in our dreams of greatness will be destroyed and forgotten?

We owe it to ourselves and our children to celebrate the richness and mystery of being human in all its aspects, from the biological creatures we are, to the social and cognitive wonders that have made it possible for a creative and imaginative species to be caught across the ages in the lens of a creative artist who helps force us to reconsider our own place in the cosmos.

About the Author: Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist, directs the Origins Project at Arizona State University, which will hold a major festival celebrating Science and Culture in April 2011.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

October 2, 2010 Werner Herzog’s Forgotten Dreams Posted by Rollo Romig

Photograph: Jean Clottes/Chauvet Cave Scientific Team

At the Directors Guild Theatre on Saturday night, Werner Herzog presented the New York première of his documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” about the earliest known paintings, from at least thirty-two thousand years ago, which were discovered in a cave in south-central France by Jean-Marie Chauvet in 1994. As ever, the film is permeated with Herzog’s singular presence. (One archaeologist mentions that he used to be a circus performer; “Were you a lion tamer?” Herzog asks hopefully. And, naturally, Herzog ventures boldly into a section of the cave with dangerous levels of CO2.) His familiar hushed narration feels, in this case, as though he’s trying not to disrupt the fragile environment of humankind’s first atelier. It’s a haunting vision, revealed piecemeal by the drifting glow of flashlights. And it’s in 3-D!

After the screening, Herzog discussed the film with Judith Thurman. “Judith Thurman was the person who, writing a long, beautiful article in The New Yorker about the Chauvet cave, triggered this film,” Herzog said. (Read Thurman’s story, “First Impressions,” from 2008.) He was also driven by more primordial inspiration: when he was a kid, he said, he became obsessed with a book about cave paintings that he’d seen in a shop window, and worked long hours as ball boy at a tennis court to earn the money to buy it.

Thurman pointed out that the cave paintings themselves seem to have been rendered by the prehistoric artists in 3-D, in the way the artists made use of the rolling contours of the cave walls, and layered drawings to suggest movement. “I’m a skeptic of 3-D,” Herzog said, “but when I saw the paintings, I knew I had to use it.” 3-D is best used, he said, not to create a complete world but to focus an audience’s attention on cloistered space. In the film “Avatar,” Herzog said, “everything you see in the frame is completely articulate. Outside the frame, there’s no space for your own fantasies.” Films that require the audience to imagine characters’ mental landscapes and motivations get “caught in the strictures of 3-D.” “I have a dictum,” he said. “Yes, shoot a porno film in 3-D. But not a romantic comedy.”

When an audience member asked about the spiritual implications of the film, Herzog answered with the caveat that his own spiritual practices have strict limits. “I do not do yoga, for example,” he said. “I find it an abomination.”

Thurman asked Herzog if the cave paintings had ever appeared in his own dreams. “I never dream,” he said. “I’m one of the rare examples where all of the shrinks of the world are proven wrong.” Thurman remembered that Herzog has said that psychoanalysis is one of history’s greatest evils, even worse than the Inquisition. Herzog shrugged.

Another audience member told Herzog that she felt betrayed. Herzog, you see, had admitted after the screening that a segment involving albino crocodiles wasn’t strictly factual; for one thing, they were actually alligators. “You can never trust me,” Herzog replied. “I have edited the film. I have chosen camera angles, which is a deception of sorts. I have manipulated things. Don’t ever trust a movie.” By her standards of truth, he said, she should be equally disappointed by the factual accuracy of Michelangelo’s Pieta. “My answer is, trust in the ecstasy of your imagination,” he said. “Trust in the greater truth.”

Herzog’s film will open the new DOC NYC film festival on November 3rd.

! Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams to Open DOC NYC Film Fest 9/29/10 at 12:05 PM

Photo: IFC

Looking for a chance to see Werner Herzog's much-anticipated cave-based 3-D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams ("Radioactive albino crocodiles!")? You'll have one at the brand-new DOC NYC film festival (sponsored, in part, by New York Magazine) which kicks off its seven-day run in New York on November 3 with a gala screening of the film. Also of interest: Errol Morris's Tabloid — about former Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney, who allegedly kidnapped her Mormon husband in 1977 after he left her to rejoin the church — and a slate of more than 40 new docs. The fest's just-announced early lineup, after the jump.

Galas Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog) Opening Night - Werner Herzog gains exclusive access to film inside the Chauvet caves of southern France, capturing the oldest known pictorial creations of humankind in their astonishing natural setting. He puts 3-D technology to a profound use, taking us back in time over 30,000 years.

Tabloid (Errol Morris) - The director of The Thin Blue Line and the Academy Award®-winning The Fog of War tells the story of a former Miss Wyoming whose quest for one true love led her across the globe and onto the pages of tabloid newspapers. Special Event In Conversation: Errol Morris - Errol Morris changed audiences’ perceptions of documentary film with works such as The Thin Blue Line; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control; and the Academy Award-winning The Fog of War. In this live conversation, he discusses his career with Ron Rosenbaum, a longtime friend, author of The Shakespeare Wars and cultural columnist for Slate.

Tribute to Kevin Brownlow Kevin Brownlow started out at the age of 18, pioneering the genre of the hybrid documentary as the co-director of It Happened Here that imagined England controlled by the Nazis. He went on to become the preeminent historian of silent film, authoring books such as The Parade’s Gone By and War, the West, and the Wilderness and directing authoritative documentaries on Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith and many others. In this special tribute, DOC NYC is pleased to welcome Brownlow - a few days before he receives an honorary Oscar - for an extended conversation and presentation of highlights from his career.

Viewfinders Competition Armadillo (Janus Metz) U.S. Premiere - Winner of Cannes Critics Week, Armadillo is a harrowing portrayal of the current conflict in Afghanistan. The film follows a contingent of Danish troops into the chaos of combat in a way that stirs debate over the rules of engagement.

The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan (Henry Corra) - During the Vietnam war, McKinley Nolan mysteriously disappeared - rumored to be either a traitor, captive or American operative. Now his family goes searching for answers.

Discoveries of a Marionette (Bjarte Mørner Tveit) U.S. Premiere - Norwegian director Bjarte Mørner Tveit draws upon a rich personal archive of 8 mm film left by his grandfather Alf, who was secretive about his experiences as a globe-trotting sailor.

Five Weddings and a Felony (Josh Freed) World Premiere - Director Josh Freed turns a Flip camera on his own relationships as a twentysomething. Peeling away neurosis and narcissism, the film is a compelling portrait of modern love.

Kati with an I (Robert Greene) World Premiere - Over the course of three tumultuous days, Kati - a teenage girl in Alabama - has to confront big life choices over love, family and her future. As Kati’s half- brother, director Robert Greene gains an intimacy that makes viewers feel part of the family. Pink Saris (Kim Longinotto) - In northern India’s state of Uddar Pradesh, the crusading Sampat Pal Devi dispenses street justice like a self-appointed Judge Judy, leading the “Pink Gang” of female enforcers.

The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical (Sarah McCarthy) U.S. Premiere - For one emotional night, a group of children living in a slum in Mumbai, India, get a chance to experience a different world as they perform The Sound of Music with a classical orchestra.

Windfall (Laura Israel) - After wind turbines are proposed for installation in upstate New York, the community’s excitement turns to suspicion over what the project entails. This eye-opening story exposes the dark side of wind energy development and the potential for financial scams. Metropolis Competition Lost Bohemia (Josef Birdman Astor) World Premiere - Director Josef Birdman Astor, a resident of the artists’ studios above Carnegie Hall, gives an insider’s account of the protracted battle to save the apartments and pays homage to their rich heritage. mindFLUX (Ryan Kerrison) World Premiere - This profile of visionary theater director Richard Foreman draws upon interviews with F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, Suzan- Lori Parks and others to pay tribute to his career.

Mother of Rock: Lilian Roxon (Paul Clarke) U.S. Premiere - Witness to New York's music scene of the 1960s and 70s, Lillian Roxon was a trail blazer of rock criticism while mingling with the likes of John and Yoko, the Velvet Underground and Janis Joplin.

Puppet (David Soll) World Premiere - Taking us behind the scenes as theater director Dan Hurlin collaborates with master puppeteers for his play “Disfarmer,” Puppet explores why the this art form has been misunderstood in America.

Ride, Rise, Roar (David Hillman Curtis) - A David Byrne concert film that blends riveting onstage performances with intimate details of the creative collaborations that make the music and performance happen.

To Be Heard (Roland Legiardi-Laura, Edwin Martinez, Deborah Shaffer, Amy Sultan) World Premiere - Three teenagers Karina, Pearl and Anthony cope with challenges of life in the inner city and find transformation from the radical poetry workshop Power Writing that gives them tools for expression.

Kaleidoscope Family Matinees Make Believe (J. Clay Tweel) - A group of dedicated teen magicians amaze audiences by performing seemingly impossible feats while pursuing the title of Teen World Champion Magician.

Turtle: An Incredible Journey (Nick Stringer) U.S. Premiere - Presented in 3-D, a loggerhead turtle born on a beach in Florida, rides the Gulf Stream to the frozen north, swims around the entire North Atlantic to Africa and returns to the beach where she was born.

DOC NYC [Official site]

By: Lane Brown

Find this article at: http://www.nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/09/herzogs_cave_of_forgotten_drea.html

NOVEMBER 4, 2010, 2:00 PM ET Werner Herzog Introduces ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ in 3D By Lavinia Jones Wright

Last night, the legendary German auteur Werner Herzog presented his newest film, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” in 3D, to kick off the brand new DOC NYC festival.

New York’s avant-garde silver fox David Byrne and his pal, Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent), donned bulky 3D specs along with the assembled crowd of NYU film students and cinephiles in NYU’s Skirball Center to take Herzog’s three- dimensional tour of France’s Chauvet caves.

Discovered in 1994, the caves contain perfectly preserved paintings done during the ice age, over 32,000 years ago -– the earliest known images of mankind. Herzog is one of only a handful of people who have been granted access.

“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” includes the cheeky commentary you expect from Herzog as well as the breathtaking beauty. When at one point in the film a scientist demonstrates Cro-Magnon spear-throwing technology, Herzog remarks, “I think you would not kill a horse throwing that way.” Early in the film, he sets the caves’ striking images of warring bison, mating lions and galloping horses to the sounds of a human heartbeat.

In Herzog’s version of a twist ending, the director imagines that crocodiles have given birth to albino offspring due to the nuclear power plant nearby, then ponders futures crocodiles’ perceptions of Chauvet’s cave paintings. Fans who saw Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” will note a trend in the director’s new reptile obsession.

In the Q&A that followed the screening, Herzog played the jovial provocateur, commenting that he is wary of labeling himself an artist, as he sees the art world as corrupt and misguided with its brokers and general interest in turning a profit. The statement drew applause.

Defending his use of 3D technology, which some film enthusiasts regards as a gimmick, Herzog declared, “A film like this absolutely must be in 3D.” He noted that while he’s very skeptical of the technology and its trendiness and overuse, it would have been impossible to capture the beauty of the stalagmites, stalactites, calcified bones and paintings of the Chauvet caves in any other format. “You need fireworks like ‘Avatar’,” he conceded. But the studios’ real interest in 3D movies? Herzog says it’s all about the profits. “3D films are impossible to pirate,” he said.

Next up for the prolific director? Herzog will narrate a shortened version of Russian filmmaker Dmitry Vasyukov’s four-hour-long black and white documentary about hunters in Siberia.

By STEPHEN HEYMAN An interview with the “Lost Bohemia” filmmaker and former Carnegie Hall resident Josef Birdman Astor.

Until very recently, atop Carnegie Hall, there were 133 work-live studios that housed a collection of this city’s forgotten artists, many of whom were elderly, some a little crazy. There resided the Broadway star Jeanne Beauvais; Donald Shirley, an 83-year-old jazz pianist who played with Duke Ellington; Editta Sherman, a 98-year-old portrait photographer; and Star Szarek, an 85-year-old homeless ballerina — she refused to believe she was a day older than 25 — who practiced in the stairwell, using the building’s 19th-century banister as her barre. Another resident was Bill Cunningham, who you know today as the New York Times’ irrepressible bike-bound documentarian of street style but who got his start as a milliner. (Mme. Beauvais was one his models.) “It was so bohemia you couldn’t imagine,” Cunningham said in April of the studios’ midcentury heyday. “Someone always running out in some state of undress.” “Lost Bohemia,” which premieres on Friday at the Doc NYC film festival, is both a portrait of the space and a record of its demise at the hands of the Carnegie Hall Corporation, which announced in 2007 that it would demolish the studios to pave the way for a $200 million educational and rehearsal space. The film, directed by Josef Birdman Astor, himself a resident, feels like a memento mori addressed to the occupants of all the world’s unlikely creative cocoons: Remember, “All good things.” One can always make a facsimile of the Russian Tea Room; this place is gone forever.

“Lost Bohemia” will be shown on Friday at New York University’s Kimmel Center and then on Monday at the IFC Center. For tickets and showtimes, visit docnyc.net.

Spare Times: For Children, for Nov. 5-11 By LAUREL GRAEBER Published: November 4, 2010

NYICFF Weekends @ IFC (Saturday and Sunday) It’s a lot of initials, but it stands for something wonderful: the New York International Children’s Film Festival has expanded its year- round screenings program from monthly to weekly at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village. This weekend features two documentaries, presented with the festival Doc NYC: on Saturday at 11:30 a.m., “Turtle: The Incredible Journey,” to be shown for the first time in 3-D, chronicles the life of a loggerhead turtle from birth through a 6,000-mile voyage. On Sunday at 3:30 p.m. “Make Believe” follows six teenage magicians on a trip to Las Vegas to compete for the title of Teen World Champion. 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street , (212) 349-0330, gkids.com; $16; $13 for members.

A version of this schedule appeared in print on November 5, 2010, on page C42 of the New York edition.

! ! ! ! NOVEMBER 9, 2010, 12:12 PM Using Poetry as a Way to Survive

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Photographs courtesy of To Be Heard Productions From left, Anthony Pittman, Karina Sanchez and Pearl Quick recite spoken word poetry in the film “To Be Heard.” A series of recent documentaries about education have offered clear-cut narratives about how to save America’s schools, through policies like increased school choice, or freeing schools from their bureaucratic shackles. But a new education film that made its premiere this weekend has a different aim: it wants to show how hard change actually is.

The feature-length documentary, “To Be Heard,” gives an intimate look at three high school students and friends from the Bronx over four years, inside and outside the classroom. There’s Karina Sanchez, who is abused by her mother but is expected to be a second mom to her six younger siblings; Pearl Quick, who struggles with obesity and supports her family by working in a bookstore; and Anthony Pittman, a former gang member whose father is in prison and whose mother is out of ideas.

The depth of their problems makes it clear that no teacher, class or school can solve them. But the film makes the argument that something more subtle is possible. By giving the students a route to self-expression, a poetry class helps them deal with the reality of their lives.

“It doesn’t go from rough to lights and rainbows,” Ms. Quick, now 23, said of her life as shown in the film. “It shows that we are still struggling, but this is the great part of it — that we still write.”

In the film, which made its debut Saturday and won a grand jury prize and the audience award at DOC NYC, a New York documentary film festival, the students hone their voices through a class called Power Writing, which is no ordinary Department of Education offering.

Acting as visiting artists, three educators — a former science teacher, a filmmaker and poet, and an advocate for arts education — teach an optional three-hour-a-week class at University Heights High School in the Bronx. Their goal is to teach students how to wield words as weapons in spoken word poetry. Honesty and making trouble in the world are among the class’s guiding principles. There are no grades, and the rough language of the streets is welcomed.

“The most simple and basic way you empower yourselves is through self-awareness,” Roland Legiardi-Laura, a self-described old ’60s lefty, tells a classroom full of students. “You’re in this room to teach yourselves how to be heard in the world.” Mr. Legiardi-Laura and his fellow teachers hold sessions in their homes, take students to visit museums and colleges, and encourage them to participate in citywide poetry competitions. They develop personal relationships well beyond what is traditional, offering help when students are in trouble.

The teachers acknowledge that their approach is controversial, but do not apologize. “The most important thing we’ve done,” Amy Sultan, one of the teachers, says, “is to create a safe space, and we take that safe space into the world. And they come to see that the safety is really within them.”

For its first half, the film, which will be shown next year on public television but does not yet have a commercial distributor, seems it might have a typical, Hollywood-style ending. Mr. Pittman has been expelled from school for threatening an administrator, but then triumphantly wins a citywide spoken word poetry competition.

But when we next see Mr. Pittman, he is in shackles in a courtroom, headed to jail. Ms. Quick, full of hope, gets rejected from her dream college. Ms. Sanchez graduates from high school, but her mother kicks her out.

And yet the students, who recite their poetry in studio scenes interspersed with the footage of their lives, grow increasingly bold in how they use verse to articulate who they are, saving them from being portrayed as victims.

“I live with the hopes of one day looking into the eyes of my future and not seeing pain and anguish,” Ms. Sanchez recites. “To see a day worth waking for and a life worth living. I live to write my own life story, for no one else knows what it is to walk in my shoes.”

Now 23, the three students all remain in their rough neighborhoods. Ms. Sanchez is mother to a 4-month-old. Mr. Pittman, who has twice broken parole and returned to prison, has a baby girl. After years of struggle, Ms. Quick is enrolling in City College.

But they are also changed. Each is continuing to write, finding in the words their escape and their ability to connect with each other. And none of them is giving up.

“I just hope that people look at us and don’t see three kids from the Bronx that went through something, but really pay attention to our lives and really hear what we have to say,” Mr. Pittman said Saturday of his hopes for the film. “This is what people go through all the time, and we just want people to understand that life isn’t always about what they make it.”

From left, Ms. Quick, Ms. Sanchez and Mr. Pittman share a hug at Brandeis University in the film.

Every Tuesday, education beat reporters for The New York Times take you inside the New York City schools system. Have a tip? Send it to [email protected].

Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 ! ! Josef Astor's 'Lost Bohemia' at the DOC NYC festival chronicles eviction of Carnegie Hall artists BY JOE NEUMAIER AND DAVID YI DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS Monday, November 8th 2010, 4:00 AM

Josef Astor's DOC NYC festival film, 'Lost Bohemia,' watches as artists are removed from the apartments above Carnegie Hall.

As New Yorkers prepare for the closing of the iconic Ruby's Bar at Coney Island -- one of nine businesses on the famous, underappreciated Boardwalk forced to vacate by Nov. 15 by new landlord Central Amusement International -- a documentary showing Monday at IFC Center recalls another part of the city's past.

Josef Astor's "Lost Bohemia," part of the DOC NYC festival, chronicles the eviction of the artists and writers who lived in the apartments above Carnegie Hall. Many had lived there for over 50 years in towers built a century ago. Famous residents have included Marlon Brando, playwright Paddy Chayefsky, tenor Enrico Caruso and dancers Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan. Eighty-year-old poet Elizabeth Sargent was the last to go, kicked out of the towers in August after 40 years.

What began as a casual project by Astor -- a 20-year resident of the towers -- to capture one of the last artist communities in New York took on new urgency in 2007, after Astor and others received notices on their doors.

"There's so much tradition here, and it was coming to an end," says Astor, 51. "I thought, 'This film is the only historical record of this place.' It was shocking."

The space is in the midst of a $200 million renovation. Most tenants were relocated to high-rise apartments.

"These artists are a part of the fabric and character of the city -- they're a reason New York became what it is," Astor says. At the new sites, he says, "they're like fish out of water." At Coney Island, a venerable playground with colorful traditions like the annual Mermaid Parade, another change has history-minded New Yorkers concerned.

Though it closed several weeks ago for the season -- before owners knew the shutdown would be permanent -- Ruby's reopened Saturday for a rally to save the charismatic 70-year-old bar. "What Jackie Onassis said after the old Penn Station was ripped down -- 'Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees?' -- applies to Coney as well," says Jeremiah Moss, whose blog, Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, has kept track of such losses since 2007.

"Though Penn was, of course, a beautiful piece of architecture and Coney is something else, it's still an organic New York place," says Moss.

Plans reportedly call for new chain restaurants to take space on the Boardwalk. "In small towns, people get together to say they don't want a Walmart or won't allow places to be torn down. Why can't we do that here?" asks Moss.

Andrea Goldwyn, director of public policy at the New York Landmarks Conservancy, says maintaining older businesses helps keep the city a special destination.

"We've been working with Coney to keep historic buildings a vital part of the revitalization [there]," says Goldwyn. "The beach and amusements are great. But those old buildings are unique and specific. What make New York special is that it has a mix -- we've got new, but we've also got old."

As Moss laments, "There has to be some middle ground." The L Magazine

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FILM Kati with an I: "Movies can show things that social media culture can't." Posted by Mark Asch on Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:23 AM

Next week, beginning on Wednesday, the nonfiction film festival DOC NYC comes to downtown Manhattan. Among the films making their New York bows is the festival favorite Kati with an I about an Alabama teen on the cusp of her high school graduation. Last week the film received a Gotham Awards nomination in the category of Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You (previous winners have included You Won't Miss Me, Sita Sings the Blues and Frownland; all five of this year's nominees play at MoMA in November). We asked director Robert Greene a few questions about the film over email.

Your film follows Kati "with an I" through three tumultuous days at the end of high school. Kati's your half- sister—at what point did she become an inspiration for a feature film?

Well, Kati and I didn't grow up together but she always ended up as the subject of my camera experiments, student films, class projects, etc. (many fragments of which made it to this film). She was even the photo subject of an ex- girlfriend's award-winning stills. She has something the camera likes. So when she was about to graduate, I called my pal, the great cinematographer Sean Price Williams (who had filmed her before as well) and talked him into capturing Kati's graduation and the days leading up to it. We were never sure it was going to be a film. It just as easily could have ended up a graduation gift. A story developed and the film happened, almost like magic. At the time we had no idea how fateful those days were.

For a long time, documentary films, filmmakers and audiences have been dogged by the question of whether people act differently when they know they're being filmed (Fred Wiseman is said to follow his subjects with an empty camera for a month or so before he starts filming, to acclimate them). What's different about filming people who were born in the 1990s, and have been on camera their whole lives? (Although I suppose the family relationship complicates the question somewhat...)

There is a different kind of honesty, I think, with kids that are constantly obsessed with projecting their identities as images. When you put the camera on them, you are definitely getting a performance. But with modern teens, this performance is constantly happening whether you're there with your camera or not. With all the ways teens mediate their own experiences, they've become expert "subjects," able to tap into emotions and longings that we may have been more protective of in the past.

Somewhat along those lines, what do you think is the value of a professional document of adolescent drama, when teens are so caught up in documenting and publicizing their emotional experiences themselves?

Our job (if that's what you'd call it) was to penetrate the facade, if you will, and get past the typical narcissism inherent in the act of constant self-documentation. If you hold a shot for some time or film the mundane in a certain way, other truths will emerge. Our story is built on some real tension over three tumultuous days. But what we were able to see, and what the audience hopefully sees, is a more universal, sort of "invisible" sadness that one experiences when they're being dragged into adulthood. Movies can show things that instant social media culture can't.

Your film has been compared to Gus Van Sant for its lyrical approach to adolescence—and I've lately seen a number of films whose makers have applied a shoegaze-y arthouse plangency to the lives of more pop- oriented working-class kids. I wonder, is there a difference in sensibilities you're conscious of reconciling?

Well, meaningless lyricism is useless and boring. And no one, including "pop-oriented" teens wants to see it. If a film is shoegazing for it's own sake, then these kids are showing great wisdom in not paying any attention. I'm also really wary of making a film in which the subjects of the film would never watch it. That's one reason why it's really important for me that Kati calls it "her film." On the other hand, most of the "pop-oriented" depictions of teenage life are a waste of time. When was the last film or TV show that you saw that made you feel like a teen again or helped you really understand what that mindset is? That's what we were after. ! Domingo, 12 de diciembre de 2010

! ! Cine > La cueva de Chauvet, en 3D y por Herzog

La caverna de las ideas

En pleno auge del 3D en las salas de cine del mundo, el director alemán Werner Herzog volvió a realizar una de esas ideas demenciales, fantásticas y de un lirismo crudo, pero conmovedor: consiguió el permiso del Estado francés, cobró apenas un euro de honorarios, aceptó todas las limitaciones técnicas que le impusieron y descendió a la cueva de Chauvet, donde se encuentran las pinturas más antiguas de las que se tiene registro, para filmar un documental en 3D. El resultado es un viaje único, en el que Herzog fusiona el relato místico y la divulgación científica. Radar lo vio en el Festival de Documentales de Nueva York y asistió a la charla posterior. Y, a la espera de un lugar entre tanto 3D de pochoclo, cuenta un poco cómo es esa epifanía sostenida.

Por Luciano Piazza

Hace 32 mil años, un hombre caminó por un valle en el sur de Francia, se internó hasta lo más profundo de una grieta entre las rocas, iluminado por una antorcha, tal vez poniendo en peligro su vida, llegó hasta una pared con una curvatura ideal para dar sensación de movimiento, y pintó cuatro maravillosos caballos con carbonilla. Un par de instantes geológicos más tarde se encuentra la cueva intacta con la colección de pinturas rupestres más antiguas conocidas hasta la actualidad. Entre otros interrogantes que se abren dentro del campo de la arqueoantropología, llega Werner Herzog con una pregunta tan fundamental como –tal vez– imposible de responder: “¿Cuáles eran sus sueños?”. Así como el director alemán logra fijar la imagen de un barco arrastrado montaña arriba en el Amazonas, o el paisaje acuático de la Antártida, entra a la cueva de Chauvet en busca de lo que tal vez sea la primera representación de la forma humana en la Historia.

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (La cueva de los sueños olvidados) fue concebida cuando Herzog leyó un artículo en el New York Times sobre la cueva de Chauvet, en Ardèche, Francia, descubierta en 1994 y que permanece cerrada al público. Solamente está autorizado a ingresar un grupo multidisciplinario de científicos, a través de quienes hemos conocido las fotos de las pinturas rupestres más antiguas del mundo. Se especula que las obras más antiguas de la cueva han sido creadas alrededor de 32 mil años atrás. Afortunadamente Frédéric Mitterrand, actual ministro de Cultura de Francia, es un fervoroso admirador de los documentales de Herzog, y estaba muy dispuesto a escuchar su propuesta. Para no herir ninguna susceptibilidad nacionalista, Herzog propuso que la película fuera propiedad de Francia y que él simplemente cobraría un euro en carácter de honorarios. Así fue que el gobierno francés le concedió la autorización a un documentalista alemán para ser el único que filme uno de sus tesoros arqueológicos más preciados. Le otorgaron un permiso que más bien parece una serie de obstrucciones: cinco días de acceso a la cueva, cuatro personas como máximo podían permanecer hasta cinco horas por jornada, sin poder utilizar luces que generen temperatura, ni tocar las paredes, ni nada que encontraran, y sólo podían transitar por el andamiaje montado por los científicos. Con todas estas condiciones, Herzog sólo se preocupó porque era imperativo utilizar 3D para percibir el relieve de las rocas.

Antes de empezar a trabajar junto a los científicos, antes de encontrar a su personaje favorito, incluso antes de empezar a narrar, Herzog sacia la ansiedad del espectador con una imagen de la cueva de una belleza que supera cualquier expectativa. Esa escena inaugural con la inconfundible música de Ernst Reijseger, el mismo que les puso música a las imágenes submarinas en la Antártida en The Wild Blue Yonder, logra detener el tiempo y anticiparnos un viaje para intentar comunicarnos con los últimos habitantes de Chauvet. Una vez que la huella de la cueva queda impregnada en la retina, Herzog comienza una narración a medio camino entre un relato místico y el rigor de la divulgación científica. Las imágenes de las pinturas se intercalan con los testimonios de los científicos. Y, como es de esperar, no le lleva mucho tiempo a Herzog para encontrar a un arqueólogo que era malabarista en un circo, a otro que era el presidente de la Asociación de Perfumistas de Francia y se dedica a reconstruir los olores de la cueva; y finalmente el arqueólogo experimental que usa reproducciones de las ropas de los hombres del paleolítico, y toca una flauta reproducción de época a través de la cual se imagina cuáles serían los sonidos que unía a un grupo de personas adentro de la cueva.

Cuando terminó la proyección de The Cave of Forgotten Dreams en la apertura del Festival de Documentales de Nueva York, Thom Powers, el director artístico del festival, empezó la conversación con el director dando un dato curioso: “Más personas caminaron por la Luna que las que pisaron esta cueva”. Más allá de que la frase le da un hermoso halo místico a la cámara dentro de la cueva, es extraño pensar que poca gente transitó una cueva que está repleta de pinturas en sus paredes y que en su piso se pueden encontrar hasta mil restos de cráneos. Precisamente el hecho de que tengamos una versión muy confusa respecto del paso del tiempo del Hombre en la Historia, es una de las preocupaciones centrales del documental. La versión del tiempo que nos hace sentir miniaturas está contenida en dos rinocerontes combatiendo entre sí: el primer rinoceronte fue pintado 5 mil años antes que el segundo. Apenas nos alcanza la imaginación para aventurar lo que ocurrió 5 mil años antes en el mismo lugar en el que estamos sentados. Esas fotos en 3D parecían estáticas hasta que nos llega el breve comentario de la arqueóloga, y desde entonces no es posible verlas sino como un viaje en el tiempo a través de la rugosidad de la piedra. Con una entonación que no es difícil imaginar, Herzog lanza la sentencia que resuena a lo largo de todo el documental: “Nosotros estamos encerrados en la Historia, y ellos no”.

Una de las escenas que logra capturar una intuición “del abismo del tiempo” es cuando una arqueóloga explica que algunas pinturas se ven intervenidas por garras de osos, y los análisis determinan que se intercala la pintura del hombre y las marcas de los osos sucesivamente por miles de años en un mismo sector de la pared. Las interrogantes se multiplican en torno a la vida de los artistas. “¿Qué leían ahí? ¿Con qué profundidad veían a estos animales? ¿Veían a sus espíritus? ¿Era su entretenimiento, su televisión?” Herzog, con cierto placer por la indeterminación, le gusta repetir casi como un mantra: “No lo sé, no tenemos ni idea”.

Como si fuera un relato construido por Herzog, en el fondo de la kilométrica cueva, en un lugar casi inaccesible para las cámaras, se encuentra lo que tal vez sea una de las primeras representaciones de la forma humana: la figura de un chamán o hechicero, mitad hombre y mitad bisonte, muge mientras parece abrazar a una mujer, representada sólo por unas piernas (con sus caderas) y el triángulo de vello púbico. La Venus de Chauvet está ubicada en la “Cámara del fondo”, un lugar inaccesible por la fragilidad de los objetos que existen entre el sendero de los científicos y la ubicación de la estalactita en la cual está pintada. Es frecuente en su cine que Herzog tenga que silenciar o no mostrar escenas. Quien haya visto Land of Dark and Silence posiblemente no se pueda olvidar de la escena inaugural en la que dos mujeres ciegas y sordas van a volar por primera vez en su vida. Un hombre está sentado entre ellas y les transmite a través de sus manos lo que está viendo por la ventanilla de la avioneta. El espectador queda afuera de la conversación en la que las mujeres transmiten la emoción de la sensación de volar. La omisión más famosa es la de Grizzly Man, en la que Herzog silencia lo que acaba de atestiguar con el audio que queda registrado cuando el oso ataca a Tim y a su novia. Aunque no sea posible comparar directamente las omisiones, nos podemos imaginar un hilo negro que recorre sus películas, pasando por la cueva debajo de la catarata en Guayanas y llegando hasta la Venus de Chauvet.

Una de las confusiones recurrentes respecto de su figura es que suelen interpelarlo como filósofo. Si bien debe ser una de las confusiones más agradables a las que está sometido, considerando que muchas veces creen que es un cazador de locos, responde con mucha naturalidad, y parece no estar cansado de aclarar su oficio: “No soy un pensador formal, no estoy trabajando en el pensamiento abstracto. Pienso a través de escenas, a través de imágenes de diálogos”. Luego aclara que siempre ha trabajado y aprendido de la experiencia, desde una concentración de impresiones y percepciones que ocurren más allá del oficio. El resguardo de esa experiencia en el relato de su primer ingreso a la cueva sirve para ilustrar la idea. Se jacta y se alegra de no haber llevado siquiera una cámara de fotos: “Esos momentos de gran intensidad y de nuevas percepciones nunca los voy a grabar, ni me gustaría registrarlos con la cámara. Porque cuando filmás algo se vuelve desechable, lo podés dejar en el sala de proyección, lo podés grabar en un DVD y mandarlo lejos de vos. Por eso hay ciertos momentos en que uno está solo con lo que experimenta. Y prefiero mantener esos momentos bien distinguidos y libres, por más que trabaje como realizador de cine”. ! ! ! AN INTERVIEW WITH DOC NYC CREATIVE DIRECTOR, THOM POWERS By Mary Anderson Casavant on Monday, November 1st, 2010

For most curators, programming the Toronto Film Festival would be a full plate, but Thom Powers’ appetite for documentary knows no bounds. In between programming and promoting Stranger than Fiction, his weekly documentary series at the IFC, he and Raphaela Neihausen, his wife and business partner, have co-founded DOC NYC, a New York based documentary festival.

It’s a festival of riches for documentary lovers — five days of documentary screenings, panels and stars (Werner Herzog and Errol Morris will be in attendance). A celebration of documentary media of all kinds, in addition to the many screenings there are also panels on the current state of radio and interviews with photographers. I spoke to Powers this weekend to find out more about the festival. For a full schedule of all events from November 3rd – November 9th, click here.

Filmmaker: What spurred you to create a new documentary festival in New York?

Powers: It spins out of our experience of doing Stranger than Fiction for five years and seeing what a great community has built up around it. One thing that I’ll be quick to acknowledge is that New York has many great showcases for documentaries, including the Margaret Mead Festival and MoMA’s doc fortnights. We thought there was room for a sort of fresh approach to curating a festival and that it was an opportunity to muster extra resources through partnerships we’ve made with places like New York University and New York Magazine.

Filmmaker: Is there any crossover between this festival and Toronto?

Powers: I think any fall festival looks to what Toronto is premiering because it’s long been a showcase of some of the most interesting work of the year. Some of the crossover has more to do with it just being “Toronto” than the role I play.

Filmmaker: Part of the festival is a tribute to Kevin Brownlow and the screening of his films. Why did you choose him as a central part of the festival?

Powers: Kevin Brownlow is a major figure among film historians for his groundbreaking books and films. His book The Parade’s Gone By is the major work on silent cinema. His documentaries, several of which are being showcased, are classic works that helped us gain insight into cinema past. He is receiving an honorary Oscar along with Jean-Luc Godard and Francis Ford Coppola, so we thought it was too great an opportunity to pass up, since Brownlow who is seventy-two and based in London was coming to the United States.

Filmmaker: There are two competitions, the Viewfinders Competition and the Metropolis Competition. Why these two categories?

Powers: When you’re showing 44 films and events, it’s important to create frameworks so the audience has a little bit of a guide…The Viewfinders section is meant to showcase stories from around the world, and one thing I think that’s significant is that each of these films has a real distinctive voice. There’s nothing that feels like the work of another director. The Metropolis Category was created because there are so many great stories about New York. Every year as a programmer at Toronto, I have to make choices between too many great New York films, so this is an opportunity to supply a showcase.

Filmmaker: Are there any films you’d like to highlight?

Powers: If you don’t know who Kevin Brownlow is, get yourself to the IFC Center on Monday or Tuesday to remedy that. Another I would highlight because it comes from overseas and is making its U.S. premiere is Discoveries of a Marionette which draws on gorgeous Super 8 shot by the director’s grandfather. It reminds me of the films of Doug Block and Alan Berliner.

Filmmaker: I noticed several radio panels in the schedule.

Powers: We have this event called “The Medium Formerly Known as Radio,” which reflects how much work is being done on podcast now. Dean Olsher, creator of The Next Big Thing on PRI, is going to be showcasing some of his favorite works with Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. I think this is an effort to bring together the worlds of documentary practitioners within radio and film. Until now, they’ve mostly been kind of segmented.

Filmmaker: One of my favorite screenings at Stranger than Fiction has always been the Orphan Film Symposium, which features neglected moving images, such as home movies. I was very happy to see it included.

Powers: To me, they are some of the more unique things you can experience. It’s a film going experience that you can’t ever duplicate. You’ll never be able to download it on Netflix. If you haven’t experienced it, you are really missing out.

Filmmaker: There have been a number of documentaries about energy issues this year, including several that were included at Stranger Than Fiction. Why did you pick Windfall for DOC NYC?

Powers: Energy has become a subgenre of documentary films. It reflects the degree to which our planet is consuming energy at a more rapid pace than anytime in its history. There were at least three documentaries at Toronto this year that related to energy, Windfall being one of them. I selected Windfall for DOC NYC because of its upstate New York locale.

Filmmaker: What’s the best way to see films at DOC NYC?

Powers: We’ve tried to keep tickets at a fairly reasonable level. Ticket prices are the same as at Stranger Than Fiction, $16. For IFC members, it’s $13. If you want to go whole hog, there’s something called the Waverly pass for $500. On Wednesday, we have a free state of the industry panel at 5. You can’t get better than free.

Filmmaker: There are sort of two kind of festivals, “discovery fests” where films premiere and find distributors (Sundance, Toronto, etc.) and another that is mostly a showcase of work that debuted at other festivals and where the films mostly have distribution (the New York Film Festival, for example). Into which category does DOC NYC fall?

Powers: The phenomenon of films being sold out of festivals is undergoing a transformation even at festivals like Sundance and Toronto where more deals take place after the festival than during the festival. Also there’s an increasing trend for filmmakers to take more of distribution into their own hands and to sell films through iTunes and DVDs on their website. So I think it’s hard to judge in this period of transformation what a festival can do as a platform. What a festival can do that is always going to be beneficial is to make enough noise about those films through publicity, awards, etc and that’s what we’re setting out to do now.! Get Email Alerts | Mobile Subscribe Follow Like indieWIRE Network: Search indieWIRE Find

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DOC NYC | Kevin Brownlowʼs Closing Night Appearance at IFC Like | Center Daniel Loria (November 10, 2010) DOC NYC closed its most recent edition last night with another guest of honor. Kevin Brownlow, the renowned silent film historian, preservationist and documentary filmmaker, presented his 2004 documentary, “Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic,” and was on hand for a mid- screening Q&A session with DOC NYCʼs Artistic Director, Thom Powers. Related Articles 1 Tracking The Oscar Precursors: A Complete Brownlow is perhaps the most esoteric name on the list of Guide To Award Season honorary recipients of this yearʼs Governors Awards from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. While 2 Academy Awards Announce 10 Scientific and Jean-Luc Godard stole the headlines when the recipients Technical Achievement Honorees of this yearʼs Honorary Oscars were revealed, Brownlowʼs BAFTA Announces Foreign-Language Film inclusion was given the proper attention in this yearʼs DOC 3 Nominees NYC program with a seven film retrospective series that culminated with a pair of personal appearances from the 4 FUTURES | 'Idiot with a Tripod' Filmmaker filmmaker. Jamie Stuart Thom Powers listens during the Q&A with Kevin Brownlow. [Photo by Daniel Loria] The recognition is warranted for the author of numerous 5 Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers | Friday's classic books on silent film history. His interest in the subject led him to undertake several restoration efforts of important classics such Four Filmmakers as Rex Ingramʼs “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (1921), Raoul Walshʼs “The Thief of Baghdad” (1924) and Abel Ganceʼs “Napoleon” (1927). Brownlow extended his vast knowledge of film history to filmmaking, directing over a dozen documentaries on stars, directors, and studios of Hollywoodʼs celebrated past.

“Film is my religion,” he told the audience at the IFC Center, “and there so many great pictures.” His interest in cinema and the people behind it influenced him to seek out a career as a filmmaker.

“I set out to become the second Orson Welles but something went wrong with this ambition,” he explained. That ambition led him to a writing career, where he would research and document the careers of his favorite filmmakers. Brownlowʼs rigorous research gave him the reputation of a definitive and dependable authority on silent cinema. This work ethic is visible in all of his films, relying on an eclectic collection of resources - from archival material to interviews with some of todayʼs most famous directors.

Some of the biggest challenges in Brownlowʼs career have come from his restoration projects. He cites his experience with MGMʼs 1925 silent epic, “Ben Hur,” where he worked to restore the filmʼs Technicolor sections to their original brilliance. Brownlow highlighted his working relationships with film and university archives in order to facilitate his work. Archival access is central to Brownlowʼs work, an approach echoed by contemporary projects like The Orphan Film Symposium, which co-sponsored the directorʼs appearance at DOC NYC.

Despite being one of the leading authorities in film preservation, Brownlow appeared unsure to prioritize a single issue of film preservation above any other. Ever cautious to not overlook any aspect, the film historian sat back and reflected, “Iʼm not sure, Iʼll have to think about it and let you know.”

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Advertise with us All These Wonderful Things October 26, 2010 DOCNYC 2010: Thom Powers Previews the Inaugural Edition of the New Nonfiction Festival in New York By AJ Schnack

In just 9 days, New York will see the launch of DOCNYC, the new festival birthed from the folks behind NYC's Stranger Than Fiction series (Toronto International Film Festival Documentary Programmer Thom Powers, STF Executive Director Raphaela Neihausen, IFC Center head honcho John Vanco and IFC Center Director of Programs Harris Dew). It's perhaps the biggest documentary festival launch in over five years and it's grabbing the prime real estate in early November that's soon to be vacated by primo UK Doc/Fest Sheffield.

The first edition is marked by tributes to doc superstars Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, a retrospective of work by one of this year's Honorary Oscar recipients, Kevin Brownlow, and two competition sections - Metropolis, which focuses on New York-set stories, and Viewfinders, which includes the US Premieres of Janus Metz' ARMADILLO, Kim Longinotto's PINK SARIS and Bjarte Mørner Tveit's DISCOVERIES OF A MARIONETTE and the World Premiere of Robert Greene's KATI WITH AN I (following a sneak preview earlier this year at True/False). We talked to Thom Powers (who was, full disclosure, my co-chair for the first two editions of the Cinema Eye Honors and who serves on Cinema Eye's Advisory Board) about the inaugural festival, his broader ideas for a "nonfiction festival" and what's exciting and scaring him nine days out.

ATWT: I guess I want to start with the other stuff, the non-film elements, because that's one of the things I think is so exciting about DOCNYC and what you're doing, because it's not just films and it's not just panels about films.

Thom Powers: It's not. Film I would say is an 80 or 90 percent core of what we're doing this year but the longterm goal of this festival is to enrich the other aspects over the years. And the heart of this is the daylong symposia that we have called Doc Convergence. That's kind of where I laid down an initial structure for ways in which I want to invigorate this festival with all kinds of different documentary voices, not just filmmakers. At Doc Convergence we have photographers, including Pulitzer Prize winner David Turnley, we have cartoonists, such as Joe Sacco, Linda Barry, we have people from the world of performance and also writing, such as Lawrence Wright, who did "My Trip to Al Qaeda", which was turned into a film by Alex Gibney, and Moises Kaufman, who's done these documentary- based theatrical works, including The Laramie Project, that was turned into a film.

ATWT: That's the kind of thing that I think works in New York. People have a appreciation of that, they have the New Yorker Festival and Times Talks and things like that. I would think that in some other parts of the country it might be hard for people to wrap their brains around the larger idea of documentary, but it seems like a natural fit for New York that you would have all these conversations that have this umbrella topic of what constitutes nonfiction in a larger sense.

Thom: Yeah and I have to give credit to the Creative Capital retreats that I attended a couple years ago for helping to inspire some of this. And Creative Capital's Executive Director Ruby Lerner is on our Advisory Board and they do this private retreat e their members, for recipients of their grants and for other invitees, where they bring together artists working in all kinds of different fields to do presentations of their work, compacted into a couple days. It's a real mind opening experience, the kind of thing that leaves you absolutely creatively energized at the end of the day because you're breaking out of the boundaries that you sometimes think of this work in. So definitely in conceiving Doc Convergence they were an influence. And also the concept came directly out a conversation I had with Laura Poitras, the director of THE OATH, where she was saying, "there's so many times after a festival that I feel exhausted because so much of the conversation is just about business and I really want to have more conversations about the creative side." So that's why we created these two days - Doc Convergence and State of the Art - that are really meant to focus on the creative side.

ATWT: Yeah, I noticed there's not a distribution panel.

Thom: Well, we do have one free State of the Industry panel on the first day of the festival because, look, that's important too.

ATWT: Right.

Thom: But definitely the ratio of creative discussion vs. business discussion is obviously higher toward the creative.

ATWT: Well, I'm obviously excited about that State of the Art day because you're not just focusing on directors but all the different craftspeople.

Thom: Absolutely, there's all these different, important people who make contributions and so often at festivals it just becomes about the director and the editors, cinematographers, producers are out of the conversation. And for this day, for State of the Art, we want to bring everyone into the conversation about the new trends happening in documentary film today.

ATWT: I think it's also - it's what we saw with Cinema Eye and what's nice about this event and the larger documentary community - is bringing the entire creative team that makes the films and not having the discussion around the art of nonfiction be so director-centric. Thom: Absolutely.

ATWT: Tell me about the Kevin Brownlow events and was that something you thought of before he was named as one of this year's Honorary Oscar recipients.

Thom: This is sort of a late brainstorm after I learned, late summer, that he was going to be honored with the Honorary Academy Award just a few days after the festival and I was thinking that now was the prime moment when we can gain attention for this extraordinary figure whose contributions to the general public have been largely unsung. Certainly Kevin Brownlow, to anyone you'd talk to in the world of film history, his reputation looms large. There are many people in the archive community who consider themselves SOK's (Sons of Kevin). So, I hastily got in touch with him and we've worked out all the details at the last minute, so he's going to be coming here for the last two nights of the festival. We're gonna screen several of his documentaries that explore Cinema history as well as two groundbreaking, kind-of-hybrid films, IT HAPPENED HERE and WINSTANLEY.

The nights that people absolutely should not miss are the nights that he's going to be here. Monday night, November 8th, when he's going to present a double feature of his films, I'M KING KONG, about Merian C. Cooper, one of the great early pioneers of documentary, who made CHANG and GRASS, and the second part of that bill is THE TRAMP AND THE DICTATOR, about the making of Charlie Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR. Brownlow has been such an important scholar of Charlie Chaplin's work. So we're going to have him in conversation for both of those titles.

And then the second night, he's gonna show his film on Cecil B. DeMille, which is kind of timely because there's a big, new Cecil B. DeMille biography out that's getting a lot of attention amongst followers of Hollywood history. And so Kevin will be here to talk about that.

ATWT: There's just over a week before the inaugural edition of DOCNYC kicks off. What are you most excited about and what are you still concerned about with 9 or 10 days to go?

Thom: What am I most excited about? You know, it's always exciting to be showing new work by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, and to have New York audiences encountering these films so soon after their creation is gonna be a real thrill. But, I'm very excited to be putting forward the slates in the Viewfinders and Metropolis competitions, several of which are World Premieres, especially in the Metropolis section, and that's always a thrill to see people encountering work for the first time. The Metropolis section, which is the section of New York stories, there's a film like LOST BOHEMIA, which looks at artists who are living above Carnegie Hall for several decades and who were finally evicted as the landlord decided to do something different with that space. That's the kind of film that's going to have so much excitement playing in New York City. Or the film, TO BE HEARD, another World Premiere, it's about Bronx teenagers whose lives are transformed by great teachers in a poetry workshop. I'm really looking to the electricity of having those young people in the audience for that film.

ATWT: And anything you're nervous or anxious about?

Thom: I'm anxious like a new parent is anxious about everything involving the future of their offspring. One of the gratifying things has been to run into people in New York who tell me how much they're looking forward to this. The thing about this kind of thing is that we have a small but very dedicated team. We're working literally around the clock in our own little bubble and I can't wait until November 3rd when we open that up to the crowds to come share what we've been planning.

Posted by AJ Schnack on October 26, 2010 in Cinema Eye Honors, Creative Capital, Doc NYC, Errol Morris, IFC Center, Janus Metz, Kim Longinotto, Laura Poitras, Stranger Than Fiction, Thom Powers, Toronto Film Festival, Werner Herzog | Permalink Digg This | Save to del.icio.us! ! Doc Talk: Why We Need Documentary Film Festivals By Christopher Campbell Posted Nov 3rd 2010 8:02PM

While busy getting excited and prepared for this week's inauguration of the brand new Doc NYC festival of documentary storytelling (for which I will serve as a juror -- see my preview and highlights here), I was reminded that the Cinematical-favored Big Apple Film Festival is also going on at the same time. Fortunately there's not a lot of conflict for the strict doc fan -- I think Big Apple has one or two docs this year - - and those of us who love both fiction and non-fiction are only troubled by the fact that we have even more terrific films available to us already-spoiled New York cinephiles. Boo hoo. Privileged First World urbanite moviegoer problems, right?

Meanwhile, as an ever-increasing documentary nut, I still can't help but feel I'm sort of missing out by only being one person, because other major documentary film festivals are also happening this week (doc maker/blogger AJ Schnack also recognizes that this is one of the busiest weeks of the year for the form), including the Sheffield International Documentary Festival (aka Sheffield Doc/Fest) in the UK, running from Nov. 3rd through 7th, and the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (aka CPH:DOX), from Nov. 4th through 14th. Oh well, can't attend them all. And anyway, even though Doc NYC feels relatively small in its first year, it is jam packed with so much appealing and necessary films that really I wish I was multiple people for this event alone.

I have to be extremely happy that this will already be my third film festival this year that's focused specifically on non-fiction works. I'm not counting the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, though I almost want to because it's documentary portion is so much larger, and more significant, than its dramatic. There was also my first trip to the doc smorgasbord known as Silverdocs and my recent attendance of the NYU-hosted Reel China Documentary Festival, which obviously is limited to selections from the relatively unrepresented modern documentary movement flourishing in the PRC (my faves included Venice-winner '1428' and the three-hour 'Mouthpiece,' while I hear the very well-attended 'Disorder' was the real hit of the weekend).

Wikipedia lists more than 60 documentary film fests around the world, most of them seeming to have been founded in the past decade or so. Yet it doesn't seem to be a very comprehensive list, from what I can tell from other directories and crowded calendars of fests exclusively dedicated to non-fiction, ethnographic film and other even more narrowed scopes. Of course, we can also look at the non-exclusive fests, many of which are becoming more and more impressive in their documentary programming. When he spotlighted the 25 best film fests for documentary last year, AJ Schnack featured a lot of hybrid events, and even named Sundance his #1 choice. Toronto and SXSW are also highly placed as great showcases.

So if the non-exclusive events are so great at programming, premiering and otherwise promoting documentaries, are the thousands of general film festivals not enough? Not as long as the popularity and abundance of non-fiction works increases. And the possibility of first-run theatrical distribution for doc decreases. Though it would seem satisfactory that more and more documentaries are finding curious audiences through video-on-demand services and sites, especially if a majority of works are on the low-production-value, talky-not-showy, suitable-for-the-small-screen end of the spectrum, there are plenty of films more appropriately viewed on a big screen.

These theatrically necessary works include gorgeously cinematic stuff (much of which I can't stop championing in this column) like 'Last Train Home,' 'Restrepo,' the Disneynature releases, the better concert films out there and pretty much anything recent from Werner Herzog, whether it be in 3-D or not. Of course the more we see these kinds of films in theaters, the more we'll hopefully encourage more well-shot, well-produced docs to be made. Multiplexes probably won't book them, and many of the small regional fests can't show all that are worthy, so while it may sound like there are already a lot of events exclusive to docs out there, there can always be more. Doc fans may not be the largest group, but we are surely spread out, and there's no good reason audiences can't be built around something once it's organized.

Then there's a matter of genre. Documentary is not a genre of film, it is a mode of cinema that has a number of its own separate classifiable types. And most of these genres see enough new examples each year to warrant niche festivals of their own. SXSW is pretty good for rock docs, but what about a lengthy event devoted simply to concert films and other music-subject docs? In Cleveland, maybe? I'd also love to see fests catering more widely to specific tastes, sort of the way Human Rights Watch does to issue docs and DOC NYC does contrastingly to doc storytelling. Maybe something for those of us who'd prefer and wish to see more direct-cinema docs without narration and talking heads. And where's the documentary equivalent of classic cinema fests like those hosted by TCM?

Maybe some of those exist already and I just haven't heard of them. Which may be for the best in my case because I'll just become more frustrated that I can't attend them all. Then again, there could be something under my nose I'm unaware of and can attend. I had no idea about Reel China until I was mandated (very happily) to attend for school. Now I want to know about similar events spotlighting the latest non-fiction films from other major doc-producing nations that otherwise don't find their way to the States. And who knows when or if I'll ever get to attend what I consider the Cannes of documentary, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam? That one's happening this month, too, by the way.

Ever been to a documentary film festival? Wish there was one near you? Have one to recommend either for regional or international fans of non-fiction cinema? Drop me a comment.! ! DOC NYC Stakes Its Claim in Fertile Territory By Kathy Brew

When it comes to being able to see documentaries in a city like New York, more often than not, there's an abundance of riches. In addition to theatrical releases that open at venues like Film Forum, Cinema Village and The Quad, there are the ongoing series at media arts organizations like Maysles Cinema, Flaherty NYC and DCTV, as well as the nonfiction festivals that occur throughout the year--MoMA's annual Documentary Fortnight, the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, not to mention other annual festivals such as the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films and Tribeca, as well as a plethora of smaller niche festivals that always include a strong offering of documentaries. So why another festival and one devoted to documentary?

According to Thom Powers, the creator and host of Stranger Than Fiction, the acclaimed Tuesday night documentary series that takes place at the IFC Center, "In our five years of programming Stranger Than Fiction at IFC, it became apparent that audiences were craving a fresh focal point fordocumentary film. The concentrated energy of a festival has a different force than our weekly series." (Powers is also the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, so he has much experience with the zeitgeist of "concentrated" festival energy.)

And so began the inaugural year for DOC NYC, which took place November 3 through 9 at the IFC Center and at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan's West Village. According to its website, "DOC NYC is a new festivalcelebrating documentary storytelling in film, photography, prose and other media" that "targets a demographic of the curious, successful and creative." For its first year, DOC NYC presented close to 40 films covering a range of themes and topics, as well as panels, spotlights, tributes, midnight rock docs, two day-long symposia, family programming and more. In a sense, something for everyone.

The festival was bookended by two gala screenings featuring New York premieres of the newest films by two of the genre's major auteurs-- Werner Herzog, whose Cave of Forgotten Dreams was the opening night film, and Errol Morris, whose Tabloid came toward the end of thefestival. Herzog's most recent search for what he refers to as "ecstatic truth" takes us back in time to prehistoric paintings from over 35,000 years ago that were recently discovered in the Chauvet caves in southern France. The film is one of the few instances where the use of 3D really serves a purpose--you're afforded a sense of being in the space with the contours and drawings on the cave walls, and it is totally awe- inspiring.

On a less sublime side, Tabloid tells the story of a former Miss Wyoming whose quest for her true love led her across the Atlantic and onto the pages of tabloid newspapers. As Morris remarked in the post-screening discussion, Tabloid is "a return to my favorite genre...Sick, sad and funny...a meditation on how we are shaped by media."

In conjunction with these Spotlight screenings, the festival presented a selection of each director's past documentaries, along with conversations with both filmmakers. In the land of digitalubiquity, where one can view almost anything online these days, this is one factor that still makes film festivals so relevant and special: the physicality of being there, of hearing directlyfrom the source, allowing for greater engagement between filmmaker and audience. Many of the other screenings had filmmakers and subjects present for post-screening discussions as well.

Occasionally, when a character comes off the screen and onto the stage, there's an added sense of uncanniness and verisimilitude. As Powers notes, one of the highlights for him was "certainly my most memorable Q&A ever with Errol Morris for Tabloid, when the film's subject, Joyce McKinney, made a surprise appearance on stage. By now, that YouTube clip has been viewed by almost more people than have seen Tabloid." Here, the main character Joyce McKinney, announced her presence and took to the stage to tell her side of the story, including the fact that she didn't feel that her story was properly told. This festival highlight, along with many others, were captured by a team of volunteer videographers and posted on the DOC NYC YouTube page.

So as not to contradict myself, but it's like the next best thing to having been there. Fortunately for those of us who can't travel to every festival, this seems to be more and more the case. The recent IDFA festival in Amsterdam has many clips from festival conversations available on its site as well.

Amidst all of the other screenings, DOC NYC featured two different competition sections: Viewfinders, which celebrated eight films by both established and emerging filmmakers who bring a distinct directorial voice to their work; and Metropolis, which showcased six films that tell New York stories. The Viewfinders prize went to Windfall, a revealing look at wind energy, directed by Laura Israel. To Be Heard received the Metropolis Grand Jury Prize, as well asthe Audience Award. Directed by Roland Legiardi-Laura, Edwin Martinez, Deborah Shaffer and Amy Sultan, the film follows the lives of three Bronx teenagers whose involvement with a radical poetry workshop transforms their lives. The winners received a 35mm and Digital Cinema Package (DCP) provided by The Documentary Film Group at PostWorks New York and Laser Pacific Los Angeles. ASpecial Jury Prize went to Josef "Birdman" Astor's Lost Bohemia, the story of the last days of the artists' residential studios above Carnegie Hall.

I saw a few of the other Metropolis offerings, all of which seemed to focus on creative artists: Mindflux, a portrait of the visionary theater director, Richard Foreman, directed by Ryan Kerrison; and Puppet, directed by David Soll, which interweaves a broad look at the marginalized history of American puppetry with a more intimate look at the work of Dan Hurlin as he prepares to mount his show Disfarmer.

Besides all the varied screenings and tributes with luminaries and emerging filmmakers (there was also a tribute to filmmaker and historian Kevin Brownlow, with several screenings with Brownlow in person), another benefit of festivals is all the other programs--symposia, special events, etc. DOC NYC had a very ambitious array of offerings that included a day-long symposium on DocConvergence, with panels that brought together documentary makers from diverse disciplines--film, photography, radio, comics, performance and more; a daylong symposium entitled State of the Art, featuring panels on directing, producing, cinematography and editing; a free panel on the State of the Industry, which focused on trends, innovations and surprises of the year,; an Orphan Film Symposium; a showcase of standout films by students from NYU; and more.

And herein lies the downside of the upside of festivals, and perhaps something that might be exacerbated by a festival in a place like New York City, with all the other distractions the city has to offer. With a wider New York platform, there is also the danger of overwhelming viewers with too many options competing against each other. While the sidebar events that I attended were strong and interesting, the attendance for them could have been more robust. For a city like New York, it's difficult to create the same kind of festival buzz as you can in a more contained location, such as Rotterdam or Nyon. But having said that, DOC NYC is a welcome addition to the landscape of documentary film offerings. And it's great that they're thinking of the genre in a more expandedform, opening up the discussion to an interdisciplinary approach. It'll be great to see what unfolds next year.

Kathy Brew is an independent filmmaker, media arts curator and writer, who also teaches at The New School and The School of Visual Arts. She and her accomplice, Roberto Guerra, are currently completing a documentary on the acclaimed designers, Lella and Massimo Vignelli. DOC NYC Documentary Film Festival Begins Wednesday, November 3rd, To Feature An Incredible Line-Up « The Criterion Cast 1/7/11 8:00 PM

DOC NYC Documentary Film Festival Begins Wednesday, November 3rd, To Feature An Incredible Line-Up By Rudie Obias on November 2, 2010, 11:00 pm

The DOC NYC Documentary Film Festival is a new film festival in New York that celebrates storytelling, photography and other media in New York City. This year the festival will feature new films from filmmakers Errol Morris and Werner Herzog.

DOC NYC will also have a retrospective of the filmmaker Errol Morris featuring some of his films like A Brief History of Time, Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line plus a Q&A with the documentarian.

The CriterionCast is proud to cover this festival for our readers in New York City. The festival starts on November 3rd and will run through November 9th. It will be spread throughout two theaters in New York City, The IFC Center and NYU Kimmel Center.

Some of these films are simply extraordinary, if you live in New York City, then I highly recommend that you check this film festival out.

For a complete list of films being showcased in the festival, go to DOCNYC.net

Schedule:

Wednesday, November 3rd

State of the Industry 4:00 Buy (FREE PANEL) IFC Center PM Tickets 90 minutes

http://criterioncast.com/2010/11/02/doc-nyc-documentary-film-festival-from-nov-3rd-nov-9th/ Page 1 of 9 ! "#$%&'!()*!+,-.! Carlos J. Segura | Nov 02, 2010 From November 3 through to November 9, 2010, it’s all about the doc in New York City at the inaugural edition of DOC NYC, a film festival for the documentary hound that will feature more than 40 films, along with panels and discussions with filmmakers featured at the festival. DOC NYC will screen its selections at IFC Center and NYU’s Kimmel Center, both conveniently located within a few blocks from each other in the Village.

One of the beautiful things about this festival is that it’s all-inclusive in terms of audience outreach. If you’re looking to be able to include your whole family into your DOC NYC experience there’s the “Kaleidoscope” section, which features films suitable for all audiences with matinee screenings taking place on the weekend of Nov. 6 – 7. On the flip side you can catch the “Midnight Rock Docs” section where you’ll find a bit of U2 in 3D and some David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, in, of course, “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.” Screenings take place at midnight, naturally, between Nov. 5 – 6.

Other sections include the “Special Events” section where featuring a world premiere of a Bruce Springsteen concert; next, you’ve got the “Metropolis” section where the aim is to showcase work that highlights New York City’s residents and culture in exciting ways; “Viewfinders” features a selection of both new and rising filmmakers with subjects and settings running the gamut from rural India in “Pink Saris” all the way to upstate New York in “Windfall”; finally, you’ve got the “Spotlight” section which is dedicated to past documentaries by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog; top this off with live interviews with both directors at the festival and the “Galas” section, where you’ll find their latest documentary work, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” and “Tabloid.”

At the risk of dissuading readers from reading on I am sorry to report that at the time of writing this Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” is sold out. No surprise there. The prospect of seeing this in 3-D is a draw, for one, and it must be said the 3-D is used to good effect. For one the setting itself, the Chauvet caves of Southern France, where Herzog goes to explore 32,000 year old drawings in the caves—said to be the earliest known images created by man—is a fitting selection for 3-D. It better attunes the audience to the way Herzog seems to perceive it judging from the narration constantly running through the film, though, the explorations of the cave and the narration are inter-cut with some talking heads. Perhaps for the devoted fan the narration, which often takes on a stream-of- consciousness direction, which is delivered by Herzog in a very flat tone, there will be no issue with the at times awkward pairing of narration content and delivery. In fact this very personal approach to the documentary may be what Herzog’s fans will come away happiest with. For the more casual viewer there is still much to marvel at since, after all, you are staring at 32,000 year-old drawings in 3-D.

For my money, and perhaps soon for yours since there are still tickets available, Errol Morris’ “Tabloid” deserves to be sold-out too because, though it may not be in 3-D, it’s just as eye-catching. Morris pokes quite a bit of fun at the tabloid-style graphics we’re all so familiar with, often throwing them onto introductions of subjects and using the real thing, stock clippings and articles accompanied by photos, to tell the story of Joyce, “a former Miss Wyoming with an IQ of 168.” Certainly in the “Rashomon” tradition, “Tabloid’s” plot is one which I don’t dare give away much of, though, I’m not sure you’d believe me anyway; let’s just say it’s a story of a woman becoming obsessed with a man to the point where she’d do anything to get him. The rest involves Mormonism, sexual deviancy, kidnapping and so much more! What’s most surprising about the film is that while it is salacious, juicy, and funny it’s also surprisingly touching. Morris is smart enough to wait long enough to gain your interest, sympathy, and attention. Once this is done you’ll find yourself feeling a little sad for Joyce, regardless of how reliable her interviews are.

If these galas are at all indicative of the quality of the rest of the festival, and based on what the other scheduled screenings have to offer, one may safely say this looks like one festival that may be here to stay. Of note: members on the board of advisors include Jem Cohen, Barbara Kopple and Michael Moore. For more information go to: www.docnyc.net. !

DOC NYC BY CHRIS CABIN ON NOVEMBER 3, 2010

Some 10 days following their first-run engagement of Boxing Gym, the latest, brilliant cinema vérité study of process and motion from the American godfather of the style, Frederick Wiseman, IFC Center sets itself as the host of the inaugural edition of DOC NYC, a festival dedicated to the form which taps directly into the primal urge at the spinal base of cinema: to watch. But unlike the indefatigable oeuvre of Mr. Wiseman, there was little available, from the eight films that I previewed out of the 40 works on hand, that sincerely explored that urge. Rather, the glut of the works available were those indebted to the more modern tendencies of the form, that of the political, the nostalgic and, at best, the truly peculiar.

This is to say that DOC NYC is less a primer for how the documentary form has come along in the century or so it took to get from the Lumiere brothers' L'arrivée d'un Train à La Ciotat to Michael Moore's morbidly wrong-headed Fahrenheit 9/11 than it is a survey of what has been popularized by the genre. Seeing as it was negligibly absent from the lineup of this year's New York Film Festival, something like I Wish I Knew, the latest hybrid film from Jia Zhang-ke, would have made a provocative and fascinating statement on how the rules that once dictated the documentary form have been reappraised over the decades. But the festival, which counts Mr. Moore and Barbara Kopple among its board of advisors, has begun with baby steps, sticking with those films that purport to depict reality with what has been decided to be a sufficient aggregate of purity.

If there was, however, one film that looked ahead and contemplated the ideas inherent in depiction, it came, as one might have guessed, from the inimitable Werner Herzog, whose entire career has amounted to a query on the contrast between what's real and what's "real." The latest in a line of stupendous nature-based conundrums from the German eccentric, Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams spends the larger portion of its 95 minutes inside the Chauvet caves of southern France which contain the earliest cave drawings and art known to man, dated over 32,000 years ago. Rediscovery is a pervasive theme: Herzog films the insides of the caves, the scientists and anthropologists who study inside it and the regions outside using 3D technology, whose reinvigorated popularity has become, depending on who you talk to, either a nuisance or a galvanic tool. The effect is beguilingly academic, at times, and completely fascinating from start to finish, contrasting the movement and depth of the 3D image with the earliest known artistic representations of movement, sound and emotion. Have we come any further in the passing millennia? Mr. Herzog keeps quiet, remaining focused on his subject and its inherent mysteries.

One of the final mysteries Herzog evokes is what, if anything, albino alligators, who populate a neighboring arboretum, dream of. This particular question remains without an answer as well while the dreams of a more popular species, that of humans, is given a heavily nostalgic once-over in Josef Birdman Astor's Lost Bohemia, a short, unimaginative look at the imaginative creatures that inhabited and, as of earlier this year, were kicked out of the studio apartments above New York City's Carnegie Hall. Astor, who lived in one of these studios as a photographer with legends like Bill Cunningham and more obscure legends like Editta Sherman, the so-called Dame of Carnegie Hall, interviews his neighbors and follows the legal battle that ensues when the inhabitants are evicted and the studios are set to become office space. Populated by images of past residents (Marlon Brando, Paddy Chayefsky, Marilyn Monroe and Isadora Duncan among others), Lost Bohemia crudely romanticizes New York eccentrics without a modicum of balance or, for that matter, an awareness of the economic and social turns that have left this as the best and in some cases only living situation for artists.

A similar, though far less earnest and strained, nostalgia is rooted in the community of Meredith, NY in Laura Israel's Windfall, a timely, interesting but ultimately perfunctory look at the pros and cons of wind power technology. Once a great farming community, Meredith has now become a quiet place for artists, small tradespeople and the few farmers who have won out to live and raise their children. This peace, however, becomes threatened when companies begin peddling the promises of wind power and start signing deals with residents to build humongous (over 400 feet tall) wind towers around their property. Nicely shot by Brian Jackson, Windfall slowly develops into a study of small-town government and the often unsung hurdles of energy alternatives, which anchors a national debate in nuanced, humanistic detail. And yet, I can't help but wish that it had focused far more on the processes and the people that make Meredith run than it does on the national debate and the nuisances of wind power (loud noise, shadow flickering). As informative and heartfelt as it is in spurts, Windfall ends up looking, sounding, and communicating to the audience in ways not unlike a well-crafted PSA.

What Israel does correctly is communicate her thoughts on a cause by detailing how that cause figures into a singular paradigm of communal thinking; her only major failing is that she becomes too obsessed with the technical details of the science which could never be fully discussed in a film that clocks in at 83 minutes. The experience of living with the technology and its effects on the community becomes dulled, as does the film itself. In contrast, Janus Metz's riveting Armadillo was about as experiential as modern documentaries get. Something of a companion piece to Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's Restrepo, Metz's film falls into the bedlam of southern Afghanistan with a platoon of Danish troops, also known as hussars and members of the ISAF. The expected staples of modern warfare are all there (the chug of heavy metal, the open camaraderie, the emotional yearning for family and women, and the tragedy of fallen friends), but, in its second half, Armadillo begins to confront ideas concerning ethical procedure (namely rules of engagement) when soldiers gun down Taliban fighters in a small ditch during a skirmish.

Armadillo is, essentially, another war documentary, but the small ways in which it is different from Restrepo and its ilk are just as important as its attempts to give the audience an idea of the psychological bombardment inherent in warfare. Along with its study on the rules of engagement, it also gives the audience an idea of the globalized effort to end the Iraq Occupation, a harsh rebuke to those who trumpet the bravery of American troops and push isolationist agendas at the same time. If only Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon, Paul Clarke's enjoyable but terribly unfocused look at one of the founding ladies of modern music criticism, had worked similar nuance and ethical quandaries into its trip through the rock and art scenes of the late 1960s and early '70s. Clarke gets some great anecdotes about Roxon's days at Max's Kansas City, the infamous NYC rock club, with Andy Warhol from talking heads (Iggy Pop, Lisa Robinson, Alice Cooper, and Rob Milliken included), but it is ultimately Roxon who is lost in the tide of romanticized remembrances of drugs, alcohol, promiscuous sex and sudden death in dingy, pre-Giuliani New York that Clarke finds far more interesting than the eponymous heroine of his film. The result is that Roxon, a completely unique talent, becomes just another brilliant loner who died before her time—in this case, from an unexpected asthma attack.

Clarke's inability to focus completely on Roxon and diversion of more attention to the art and music scene of the 1960s in New York, a totem of thoughtless nostalgia that had been tired out before the millennium rang in, suggests that the director was quite simply outmatched by his subject. A more even pairing could be found in Tabloid, the latest, expectedly strange entry from Errol Morris who, along with Herzog, is honored with a miniscule, four-film retrospective during DOC NYC. The title of Morris's latest, a solid recovery from the middling Standard Operating Procedure, refers to another form of questionable depiction, that of the pair of U.K. scandal sheets that turned the story of Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who was arrested for allegedly kidnapping and raping her former fiancé, Kirk Anderson, while Mr. Anderson was serving as a Mormon missionary in southeast England, into a national dialectic.

McKinney, whose interview with Morris takes up the greatest portion of Tabloid's tight 83 minutes, takes her rightful place amongst Morris's stable of great American oddities, including Fred Leuchter, Stephen Hawking and Floyd "Mac" McClure. Depicted by one paper, the Daily Mirror, as a sex-hungry maven with a beauty queen demeanor and another as a misrepresented innocent being skewered by the hellhounds of media, McKinney remains, to this day, resolute in her belief that Anderson was a victim of Mormon hypnosis and brainwashing when he reported the kidnapping. The author of an unfinished memoir ("A Very Special Love Story") and the recipient of a pack of cloned pitbulls from South Korea, McKinney herself, as with many of Morris's subjects, is another form of depiction, as unsteady, delusional and prone to omissions in her recounting of the events as any sleazy rag could ever be.

The great difference between Tabloid and Standard Operating Procedure stands as what often constitutes the difference between great art and everything else. No, Tabloid is not a great film, but it's a very personal one, intimate even, and it remains dedicated, above all else, to its subject. For many films at DOC NYC— indeed, most documentaries that are released every year—the problem arises when the filmmakers don't know where to focus, are too overwhelmed by political and social ramifications to see the real subject and become more interested in crafting a message. Such thinking suggests that most subjects deal in absolutes, which leads to boring, mediocre work; the political overwhelming the artistic rather than the artistic informing the political. What makes Herzog and Morris legends and what makes younger filmmakers like Metz so promising is that they seem indifferent to completion, in direct opposition to absolutes and happiest in arguments that are still punctuated with a question mark rather than a period.

DOC NYC runs from November 3 – 9. For more information, click here. ! Documentaries Share Print

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New York Welcomes DOC NYC!

Wednesday November 3, 2010

The first edition of New York's new documentaries festival, DOC NYC opens today, November 3, and runs through the the premiere event, the NY premiere of Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is sold out!

In addition to a carefully selected program of premium documentary films, the festival features storytelling, photography and other documentary art forms. The program is fabulous!

For a first-rate overview, read film critic Eric Hynes' commentary in the Village Voice. Prev Next

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Looking back at the DOC NYC - New York's Documentary Festival 2010 By Tanja Meding 11/21/2010 07:05:00

New York City has a new festival! DOC NYC - New York’s own Documentary Festival. According to the festival's website, the first edition this year was first planned as a five-day festival, but just a few weeks before the opening got extended to a seven-day run!

Conceived, curated and produced by executive director Raphaela Neihausen and artistic director Thom Powers (also the documentary programmer of the Toronto International Film Festival and curator of the famed IFC Center documentary screening series STRANGER THAN FICTION), the festival is co-presented by IFC Center and NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, where Powers also teaches.

DOC NYC aims to celebrate non-fiction storytelling, presenting a program filled with screenings, panel discussions, a 2-day conference on all things documentary plus one-on-one conversations with veteran filmmakers such as Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, who are also the focus of two Gala screenings and work-shows.

The program is packed with recently completed documentaries, some of which just premiered in Toronto, allowing the NY audience a chance to catch them before they go into further distribution or move on to the next festival.

And fitting to the festival's mission “to guide audiences toward inspiring work”, German veteran filmmaker Werner Herzog's latest documentary CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS opened the festival.

Herzog is a storyteller fascinated by people that dare the impossible and looks at the world with a sense of wonder, curiosity and poetry.

Amongst his many works - fiction and documentary - he repeatedly worked with volatile actor Klaus Kinsky, and amongst others made AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD (1972) , FITZCARRALDO (1982) and then later in 1999 made MY BEST FIEND, a documentary about his love-hate-relationship with this unique actor. He also followed the trails of bear expert Timothy Treadwell in GRIZZLY MEN (2005) and went to Antarctica, to film ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2007), which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2009.

For his latest documentary, CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, he worked in stereoscopic 3D for the first time, capturing the oldest known paintings in the world – in the Chauvet caves in Southern France, musing about the world as it once was – and wondering what these magnificent paintings may tell us about a time long gone.

The caves were only discovered in 1994, but are currently the oldest known cave paintings dating back 30,000 to 32,000 years. To preserve them for the following generations and to allow scientific research, they are closed to the public and access is only granted to a very select group of scientists for short periods of time. Herzog was fortunate enough to receive exclusive and unprecedented access to the caves, and offers us to see these breathtaking paintings that otherwise we would otherwise never get a chance to experience. .

Unlike many 3D stereoscopic animation productions which often use the space in front of the screen to surprise and delight the audience – Herzog's stereoscopic film draws you in and pulls you deep inside the caves, back into the past. Painted upon the uneven rocks in the cave, the paintings themselves already have a three dimensional feel to them – in addition to the stereoscopic effect, the limited lighting available in the caves plus the projection onto a big screen, all add to the feeling of being there, on site.

As usual, Herzog himself narrates the film with his trademark voice and just like in previous documentaries, he includes encounters with scientists, philosophers and self-proclaimed experts giving the film a poetic and mystical quality.

However, after all these beautiful images and musing about human's artistic and cultural accomplishments, Herzog closes the film by throwing us back into reality. Leaving the caves and their most beautiful natural surrounding, Herzog takes us to a nearby nuclear power plant. He suggests that the plant has caused water and air temperatures to rise and therefore alligators living in a nearby hot house have mutated into albinos.

Further research by journalists after the premiere of the film indicates that this is not the case and that the albino alligators arrived in France from the US. However, Herzog's point is well taken – even if he may have taken a little too much poetic license for a documentary film: the rise in temperature and the impact of today's pollutants will have an impact and effect on the caves and their paintings and so Herzog leaves us with a resonating reminder: to take good care of our cultural heritage. I

FC Films will theatrically release CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS next spring.

DOC NYC got off to a great start – the opening night was sold out, and all screenings and special events were very well attended. And so this new festival is another proof that there is an appetite and audience for the genre!

For more information on DOC NYC, please visit www.docnyc.net.

For more information on CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, please visit: www.ifcfilms.com. ! OCTOBER 27, 2010 DOC NYC FEST: WERNER HERZOG'S 3D DOC 'CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS'

Werner Herzog returns to the documentary format in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a 3D look at the recently discovered caves in Chauvet, France, which is open only to researchers. The film will be one of the gala presentations at the DOC NYC Fest. The Nov. 3, 7pm screening has already sold out--not surprising since it will include a Q&A with Herzog--but persistent viewers can always try standby.

First off: The 3D. Herzog's crew filmed in 3D, and the results are mixed. For the scenes within the cave, the 3D works effectively, adding a sense of hyper-reality and contours to the drawings. In other spots, it looks terrible--3D and shaky camera movements do not mix.

In his narration, Herzog lets us know what his crew was up against: just four of his crew could enter at one time, and cold panel lights were all that could be used to illuminate the paintings. The crew was restricted to a metal walkway, so as not to disturb the cave bear prints, bones, and other artifacts lying on the ground. While the limited access can be frustrating, in one case it works in the movie's favor. On a stalactite, a drawing of a woman's legs and pubic area is married with that of a buffalo, revealing a primordial sense of mythology that lingers today: the half animal, half person. However, the crew can barely access the area, giving us just a glimpse. Later, they return to get a better view with a camera attached to a pole, although it captures just slightly more detail. The sequence recreates the same feeling of unlocking a puzzle that the researchers themselves must feel. As we look with Herzog about the rest of the vast and remote chamber, which cannot be extensively explored because of the high levels of carbon dioxide, the audience senses the possibility of the unknown. It's not a "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," but of fleeting ones, with understanding and access just beyond our grasp.

Herzog seizes on these mystical aspects. At one point, he asks everyone in the cave to be quiet, leaving us with the sound of dripping water, echoes, and a heartbeat. This Herzog touch elevates the movie a step above documentaries of its type, but at times it can feel forced, as when he asks an interviewee rather contrived questions about his dreams concerning the cave.

Herzog's ambitious look at the Chauvet caves does not entirely deliver, but it's a worthy diversion that offers a peek into a little-seen artifact of human history.

Posted by Sarah Sluis on October 27, 2010 in Today's Film News | Permalink! ! ! ! ! !"#$"%&'#$(#)!$*%%+$ ! DOC NYC 2010: Cave of Forgotten Dreams BY ED HOWARD ON OCTOBER 29TH, 2010 AT 2:54 PM IN FESTIVALS, FILM

! ! Werner Herzog's latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is an exploration (in 3D!) of the Chauvet Caves, an area that Herzog identifies, romantically and poetically, as the place "where the modern human soul was awakened." It would seem like a typically Herzogian grandiose description, if not for its essential accuracy: These caves contain the oldest discovered pictorial depictions to emanate from the human hand. The caves are thus an obvious symbol for the birth of human creativity, for the development of the uniquely human urge to document one's world and to communicate about it. For an artist like Herzog, this is an irresistible conceit. At one point in this film, a scientist remarks that the difference between the Neanderthal and the more modern, more human successor, the Paleolithic man, was precisely this flowering of creativity in carved icons, cave paintings and even crude musical instruments, like a flute carved out of ivory. Herzog's film resulted from a rare opportunity to explore these caves, which are jealously protected and sealed off from casual inquiry; normally, only a select few scientists ever get to see the cave interior, and even then only in limited ways.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams would thus be a valuable document even if its only appeal was its unique and intimate footage of these seminal souvenirs of early human creation. The cave paintings at Chauvet are exceptional not only for their age or their historical importance, but for their beauty and grace, the strange window they offer into the development of man's ways of looking at the world through art. They are in many ways astoundingly modern images: One scientist compares the paintings to Picasso, an apt reference point, and the unusual depiction of animals in motion through multiplying effects and motion lines suggests that the paintings are unlikely ancestors of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. The paintings, carefully preserved by the cave's isolation, depict horses and bison and mammoths, as well as now-extinct varieties of lions, bears, and rhinos. They are beautiful, and when Herzog's camera glides along the cave walls, accompanied by the achingly spiritual music of cellist Ernst Reijseger, Herzog's musical collaborator on many of his most recent films, it's nearly impossible not to be moved and awed by these creations of man's long-ago ancestors. And when one scientist uses analysis of handprints to track a single individual to several spots within the caves, it produces a chilling sensation of traveling through time, peering over the shoulder of a Paleolithic man as he paints his simple but evocative illustrations on these walls.

These ideas are at the center of Herzog's approach to this location. Rather than simply documenting the images and the research going on in this cave, Herzog is after something more metaphysical and existential. He's interested in the way that such artifacts provide a link with the past, a way to travel back in time in a limited way— though, as he describes it at one point, it's more like having a phone book listing, with no way to access the deeper thoughts and dreams of the people who made these images. Which doesn't stop Herzog from being fascinated anyway, wondering what these paintings say about humanity's understanding of and place in the world. He nudges gently at these themes in his voiceovers—which are not as verbose as they sometimes are; he leaves plenty of space and silence for contemplation of the cave paintings themselves—and in his interviews with scientists who seem especially cognizant of the deeper implications of their work. One young scientist describes being so moved upon his initial encounter with the caves that, after five days of working there, he had to leave, to think about his experiences in the outside world. Herzog's images of these caves are no substitute for the real thing, but they do go some ways toward capturing just what it is about this place that might elicit such awe and respect.

Another interesting aspect of this film is Herzog's decision, previously unprecedented in his career, to film in 3D. In some ways, it seems like a choice ingeniously prompted by the material itself. One of the characteristic features of the art in the Chauvet Caves is that the artists crafted it in response to the contours of the cave walls. These images are curved and stretched along walls that are seldom flat or canvas-like, and those early painters took advantage of these uneven surfaces to lend vitality and the illusion of motion, especially when coupled with the shifting shadows of handheld lights, to their static drawings. Herzog enhances this aspect of the cave paintings with his 3D imagery, often filming so that the walls seem to curve out of the screen, not in obvious ways, but subtly, just a moderate shift in the depth of the image. At times like this, the 3D conception of the film is effective, even inspired, as the cave ceiling hangs overhead, increasing the claustrophobic sensation of spelunking, or the camera crawls along the curves and bulges in the walls to examine the images that wind along them.

But the 3D cinematography is also distracting and aggravating—in ways that have little to do with Herzog's particular approach to the medium and everything to do with the inherent limitations of the technology. Outside of the caves, the 3D not only fails to be compelling, but actually turns relatively prosaic sequences into exercises in disorientation and annoyance. When the scientific team Herzog is travelling with treks to the caves for the first time, the camera tracks along with them as they walk along a narrow trail, and though there's no 3D effect to speak of here, the jumpy camerawork is headache-inducing, particularly when Herzog decides to turn the camera upside- down to get a skewed perspective on the researchers as they walk. Frequently, the outdoor scenes are dizzying in the worst way: blurry and dimly lit. It's a neat effect when, while filming a gorgeous vista, the flies in front of the camera buzz around overhead within the theater, but it only seems to work on gnats: When Herzog tries a similar trick with some birds in flight, they're turned into indistinct blurs that are actually painful to look at. In other scenes, the background is dark and bland, as though seen through a filter, while a few selected objects stand out in the foreground as though fixed by a spotlight. Herzog's sweeping vistas are ill-served by 3D. A big part of his aesthetic is the observation of the natural world, and in Chauvet he finds some gorgeous locales, like a giant rock arc towering over a shallow river, but 3D makes these landscapes less, not more, exciting, detracting from their natural scope and breadth.

Some of Herzog's most interesting applications of 3D, on the other hand, involve his human companions: The technology seems better suited to small-scale touches than to grand vistas. Herzog of course can't resist a good visual gag about 3D's usefulness for depicting things jutting out at the audience: He interviews a scientist who demonstrates how the hunters of the Paleolithic era would have used their spears to take down horses, and one senses that Herzog only filmed the sequence so he could indulge his playful use of the kind of spear-flying-at-the- audience moment that's a staple of action and horror 3D. Even better is a composition where Herzog places a woman, a researcher, at the right of the frame, her head jutting out of the screen, her eyes shyly looking up at the camera and then darting away, as though she is profoundly conscious that her head is going to be blown up and bulged outward at cinema audiences. It's a great moment that implicitly acknowledges the artificiality of the 3D medium, which despite claims to greater immersion is, with its clunky glasses and unconvincing gimmickry, a less immersive and realistic medium than the 2D cinema.

It's a gimmick that is, by and large, unnecessary for a film that is as entertaining and thought-provoking as any Herzog documentary inevitably is. Cave of Forgotten Dreams begins as a straightforward evocation of a scientifically and anthropologically important place, and it expands from there to encompass fundamental questions about humanity's need to create art, about the changes wrought in human life over long periods of time, about the human relationship to nature. As usual for Herzog, raising the question is more important than providing the answer, a fact that becomes especially clear in a bizarre "postscript" offered as a coda to the cave exploration. In this postscript, Herzog abruptly detours to a nuclear power plant that, he reveals, had been lurking just over the hills from Chauvet, unseen and unsuspected throughout the film. This industrial complex, spewing smoke from giant towers, is contrasted against the unspoiled, carefully protected natural state of the Chauvet Caves, where researchers and filmmakers are prohibited from walking in most places in order to preserve the fragile beauty of the place.

The reactor, Herzog reveals, fuels a nearby tropical biodome with warm water runoff, providing an unlikely environment for crocodiles to thrive, producing mutated albino offspring. It's a sequence that resonates with the weird reptile fixation that ran through Herzog's recent Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, as well as an opportunity for Herzog to discourse in his typically apocalyptic manner on time, change and the mystery of art. It's obvious that Herzog sees, in the cold stare of the lizard and the crocodile, a perfect metaphor for his view of nature as a cold and alien habitat in which humanity exists only provisionally. The Chauvet Caves, in one sense, provide a powerful counterexample of humanity's extraordinary perseverance across the millennia. So Herzog's final voiceover, in which he whimsically imagines the crocodiles encountering the cave art and wondering at its meanings, much as Herzog and the scientists he interviewed had throughout this film, is an attempt to reassert a cosmic scale where humanity with all its art and accomplishments is but a faint blip in the darkness.

As usual for Herzog, it's bleak but shot through with dark humor, reflecting the playfulness that had led him, earlier in the film, to interview a man who dresses in reindeer skins and plays "The Star-Spangled Banner" on a bone flute, or to linger with a perfume maker who believes his trade qualifies him to sniff out the scents of hidden caves. Few filmmakers are as attuned as Herzog is to the absurdity and the poignancy of human endeavor, and thus few filmmakers are as well-suited to dealing with the very origins of human creativity and its enduring expressions. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, even weighed down by its unnecessary 3D gimmick, is a worthy addition to Herzog's vibrant documentary oeuvre.

DOC NYC will run from November 3 - 9. For more details, click here.! ! !

! Illuminating the Interior The DOC NYC Festival Debut Boasting Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, fest sets a high standard !"#$%&'$(%")& Any access documentary filmmakers have to big screens deserves support, but the inaugural DOC NYC promised much more. Guest appearances by Werner Herzog, Errol Morris and a tribute to Kevin Brownlow, along with some 40 films, galas, conversations and panels offered audiences an alternative to mainstream fare. The festival arrives at the right time: American documentaries in particular offer a better reflection of the state of the nation than anything at the multiplex.

Of the few films I was able to see by press-time, The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan, directed by Henry Corra, deserves special mention. Picking up on journalist Richard Linnett's eleven-year research, Corra, who also shot the film, delves into Nolan's open-ended case. Last heard from by his wife in 1967, and only two weeks shy of discharge, Nolan is rumored to have defected to the Viet Cong. Visiting Viet Nam in 2005, Dan Smith, a white Viet Nam vet who didn't know Nolan, heard from two young men that the black American he had seen was "McKeenly." The sighting serves as impetus for Nolan's brother, Michael, to join Smith in a trip to Viet Nam and Cambodia to locate McKinley or at least some trace. The trip is fraught for all concerned (Smith at one point notes that the war "took too much out of everybody"), not least McKinley's stepson, who joins the party for part of the trip. Corra uses short bursts of archival footage — bombing raids and their lethal aftermath in Viet Nam; Martin Luther King speaking of his "disappointment" in America about the war; RFK shaking supporters' hands shortly before he was shot; the Black Panthers; and campus protests — the rapid, familiar visuals as evocative as pop music from the era. The portrait of McKinley that emerges resembles a Graham Greene character: the permanent outsider, befriended for use and ultimately betrayed. Yet each piece of information begs more questions than it answers. Corra misses none of the mixed feelings of the participants, capturing the frustration and exhaustion of their efforts. The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan goes some way to revealing the complexities of how the war in Viet Nam shaped — and continues to shape — America.

Less satisfying was Puppet, David Soll's chronicle of the conception and execution of Dan Hurlin's 2009 tabletop puppet show, Disfarmer. Tracing the two-year preparations, Soll gives a sense of the odds against which the production comes together. The puppeteers juggle other jobs with rehearsals, subsistence wages and ego. Soll intersperses shots of Hurlin's first puppetry, including, as an infant in 1955, appearing in an early family show. He also interviews other puppeteers and various academics about the state of puppetry in general, which seems (primarily in New York) to be on the upswing. Among the academics are Eileen Blumenthal, author of Puppetry: A World History, and Victoria Nelson (The Secret Life of Puppets). Both women's comments touch on the cultural and religious aspects of puppetry, an art sometimes raised to a kind of priesthood elsewhere, though still (mostly) relegated to the children's corner in the States. Experienced live, Hurlin's work is distinctive, original and compelling, but it's less engaging on film. And then Soll can't quite decide what kind of film this is, a record of a performance or a look at puppetry in general. By the time it culminated in the Disfarmer performance, it seemed to have overshot the mark.

Also suffering from a certain level of repetition was Lost Bohemia, directed by Josef Birdman Astor. Nothing wrong with the premise: Astor set out to document his neighbors, the several artists who lived in the living/working studios above Carnegie Hall, built originally for the use of painters, composers, dancers and actors. From their sawtooth skylights to the cathedral ceilings and sprung wood floors, each of the original 160 studios was unique. Over the past 50 years, the household names who passed through included Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain, Paddy Chayefsky, Isadora Duncan, Rudolf Nureyev and George Balanchine, to name only a few. In the course of Astor's shooting, the Carnegie Corporation moved to evict as many residents as it could, decimating the unusual atmosphere of the building. Among the denizens was ballerina Star Szarek, perpetually 25 (though actually 85), who camped out in the hallways, the stair rails her barre; actress Jeanne Beauvais; photographer and sometimes model Editta Sherman; and Donald Shirley, a concert pianist, all of them residents of more than 50 years and well into their own third age when the corporation decided to oust them. There is also the Poet (who never appears on-camera, only in messages he records on Astor's answering machine), who talks about the kind of community you can't buy "and I hope you can't sell." Ultimately, it's hard to know if such a New York-centric film will have resonance beyond the city, but in any case Astor did well to document the last denizens of the studios, whose very inflections and expressions (looking at one of his record albums from the 1950s, Donald Shirley asks himself "what kind of a brand new fool are you?") have been nearly lost in the more homogenized city under the Giuliani/Bloomberg regimes.

Errol Morris's Tabloid belongs with his best work. American — and former Miss Wyoming — Joyce McKinney was a British tabloid sensation in the late 1970s in a case that involved kidnapping, bondage and the Mormons. She was touted as both virgin and whore, depending on which tabloid readers followed. Morris always does best with ambiguity and, particularly, with the peculiarly American ability to let fantasy set life's course. McKinney gives her own rationally irrational version of events, blithely noting in her little-girl delivery that the quest for the man of her dreams involved hiring a pilot and a bodyguard. Morris brings in journalists who covered the story, an ex-Mormon (who notes that McKinney's lover would have been wearing a set of "sacred underwear"), and, ultimately, the South Korean doctor who manages to clone (you knew it would get to cloning, didn't you?) one of McKinney's favorite dogs, Booger. McKinney's tale mixes Hollywood, Disney, leather restraints, cinnamon massage oil, canine multiples and celebrity. Relying on fewer tricky shots than in his recent films, Morris lets the story unspool in all its goofy glory, begging questions about reality — for McKinney and for us — that he wisely leaves ambiguously unanswered.

Unsurprisingly, Werner Herzog makes spectacular use of 3D in Caves of Forgotten Dreams. Discovered in 1994, the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave in southern France has the oldest known example of human image-making, dating back more than 30,000 years. Herzog begins outside, calling attention to the Wagnerian setting, the forbidding cliffs and nearby Pont-D'Arc natural bridge a kind of gateway to the ancient world. (The public is barred from access to the cave, though there are plans to build a replica amusement park.) Nestled in the cliffs is the surprisingly narrow steel door that leads to the caves themselves. Jagged speleothems, the fossilized bones of a horned ibex and of many bears surround the narrow walkway. As the camera travels along the undulating walls, the 3D conveys something of the walls' surface, which features incisions and a form of etching, the effect to convey a kind of three-dimensionality. The animals themselves are superb. Along with the more familiar grazing animals, the Chauvet caves feature predators — lions, bears, owls among them. Open mouths and a stretched-out posture convey movement, and additional legs are used to show movement and life.

Ernst Reijseger's florid score occasionally threatens to drown out the visuals, but there are also eloquent sequences in which the only sound is a human heartbeat. Although the eccentricities of those he encounters are less flagrant than usual, Herzog adds to the invaluable varieties of human experience to which all his films attest. And this includes his own deadpan commentary, about, for example, the meager efforts of one of the researchers to emulate Cro-Magnon spear-throwing: "I don't think you would have hit a horse."

Even when access was easier (before the cliffs shifted to lower the cave), daylight never reached all the way in. Some form of manmade light, torches initially, was always necessary to illuminate the interior. Herzog dances light over the stunning and sophisticated images, replicating the ancient flicker, gently suggesting that these images are a first gesture toward cinema. Without sentimentality and with his customary wryness, Herzog shows the fundamental place, in human history, of the play of shadow and light. The DOC NYC could not have found a better way to inaugurate this welcome festival.

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NOV DOC NYC: Dan Hurlin fights for an outcast artistry in 01 'Puppet' Posted By: Leslie-Stonebraker In Section: ON SCREEN »

DOC NYC, New York's Documentary Film Festival, takes place, Nov. 3-9. To prepare you for it, we will have a series of review of the documentaries being screened. For full details visit www.docnyc.net

Puppets have come a long way from the days of marionettes and fingers. Puppets can now engage in explicit sex—as they do in Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles, Trey Parker & Matt Stone's Team America: World Police or on stage in Avenue Q—or get away with crude humor and vulgarity as many ventriloquists do in comedy Sign up for the NYPress routines. Currently at HERE, Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff's The Fortune Teller combines twisted tales told through puppetry. Inanimate, yet innately human replicas give us permission to work out our neuroses, e-newsletter for weekly updates biggest fears and worst inclinations without some of the real-life repercussions. and exciting event info:

GO In Puppet (screening Nov. 6 & 9), filmmaker David Soll follows the Freudian journey of theater director Dan Hurlin as he gathers a team of puppeteers and spends three years producing his play Disfarmer.

In Disfarmer, a balding, bespectacled puppet, named Disfarmer, opens a door; he gets a beer from the fridge; he winds an old wall clock; he answers a clunky rotary phone. These short images open the film, and are cyclically repeated toward its closing. What is fascinating about actors—the many public details of their sordid lives—makes for the very strength that sets puppets apart. Puppets don’t have an alternate existence. They Calendar Bar/ Club/ Lounge are only what they have been created to be.

Sat Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri This small town photographer’s last days come to life in a more compelling way then they ever could have if played by actors. Indeed, the most enthralling images of Puppet are the brief glimpses of the puppeteers 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 transforming bits of wood and plaster into a fully formed, incredibly sad, small, and alone human being.

Puppets resurrect happy memories of childhood wonderment for the audience filmed entering Hurlin’s show. In many ways, puppeteering as an art form is nostalgic for the days of mechanical simplicity. The character of Disfarmer is the symbol of an era when portraits meant more than screaming children and digitally inserted backgrounds. In the play, the world about Disfarmer rapidly accelerates while he physically shrinks, articulating Search in Events both the unspoken fears of the puppeteers about their uncertain future and a basic human dread of irrelevancy and insignificance. Event Name

Too much screen time is given over to excavating the history of the maligned art form through talking head Category All interviews. One of the many interviewees argues that humanity has always meant making replicas, from the first golden representations of the gods to a child’s doll plaything. According to one expert, puppeteering runs afoul of the cultural taboo of crossing the line between the animate and inanimate. Creating life is the holy prerogative of the gods, which relegates puppeteers to the realm of Freud’s uncanny and the role of the sacrilegious priest. In Puritan America, it is only when cultures clash (the 1930s, 60s and now) that puppeteering experiences a Renaissance as an art form, and is seen as something beyond children’s entertainment.

Within the film, the New York Times twice devastatingly reviews Hurlin’s work as “a little precious.” With only one interviewee arguing too briefly against puppeteering to give anything more than a nod to the opposition, the viewer is invariably aligned with the protagonist’s puppets. The bad review comes across as a gross assault that even positive articles from Variety and the New Yorker cannot heal.

We need films like Puppet and artists like Hurlin to remind us that puppeteering is a magical act that can reflect honestly upon the human condition. At the melancholic close of the play, a tiny puppet Disfarmer simply evaporates behind his camera, disappearing forever. We should embrace the broader artistic potential of the puppet show before the form similarly cycles into oblivion.

Puppet, directed by David Soll, Screening Nov. 6 & 9 Runtime: 74 min.

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2010 DOC NYC: Errol Morris' Tabloid

11 - 13 : 09 : 47 Posted by Melissa Silvestri on Nov 02, 2010 Source: IONCINEMA.com Festival Coverage

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Rashaad Ernesto Green Prominently featured in the inaugural edition of the DOC NYC Film Festival, I have always enjoyed Paul Greengrass's work, because documentarian Errol Morris brings his TIFF-premiered title that reminds us of the watching his films make you filmmaker's curiosity for the fringe characters that populate this world. Joyce McKinney feel like you're inside the story. is better known in England as a 1970s tabloid fixture for her bizarre involvement in For Gun Hill Road, I employed documentary-style kidnapping her fiancé from Mormon missionaries, and tying him to her bed to have a camerawork, and shot in “proper” honeymoon. Her mixture of naiveté with a sordid past made her a juicy target densely populated areas that clearly reflected the for religious zealots to use her as the “devil” woman that tempts man with sin. In world I wished to portray. Tabloid, Morris looks at the strange and absurd tale of a former beauty pageant winner who broke the law all in the name of love.

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Review: Shoah Joyce McKinney had been Miss Wyoming in the 1970s, moved to Utah, and became (1985) Lanzmann has a very nice touch engaged to a pleasant young man named Kirk Anderson, who was a young Mormon with the subjects. He is somehow planning on becoming a missionary. He disappeared without a trace in 1977, and able to toe the line between McKinney, with the help of a private detective, found out he was in England pushing too hard on such sensitive subjects, and going to soft, and not getting completing the orientation of his faith into missionary work. McKinney, convinced the the story. The result is very powerful and informative Film Listings church was brainwashing him, set up a crack team of herself, a pilot, her friend Keith interviews. He also does right by the medium with his visuals. Sort By | | | May, and bodyguards to rescue Anderson. The plan was falling apart, so McKinney Thu Jan 13, 2011 resorted to May kidnapping Anderson at the church, holding him against his will in Review: All Good Things Ong Bak 3 Devon, and convincing herself that she was “saving” him. Anderson escaped, and Film Review: 127 Hours McKinney and May were arrested on kidnapping charges. Fri Jan 14, 2011 Review: Easy A The Dilemma Review: I'm Still Here McKinney is a strange and captivating individual. On one hand, she seems completely Every Day delusional that what she did was a savior gesture, and that she and Anderson had a The Green Hornet “romantic” weekend together while he was held against his will. She doesn’t seem INTERVIEWS Plastic Planet completely in touch with reality, and her life afterwards was hindered by agoraphobia Repo Chick and an inability to have a romantic relationship with someone else after Anderson. LATEST US INDIE WORLD DOCS But, she is still visibly hurt by the tabloid accusations of her being called “crazy” or Wed Jan 19, 2011 Cannes 2010 The Woodmans demeaned for her sexy appearance, and is an intelligent woman who is vulnerable to Interview: Derek being mocked or misunderstood. She can be unintentionally funny, referring to Morris Cianfrance (Blue Fri Jan 21, 2011 as “Mr. Filmmaker” with a sweet charm. Valentine) Dhobi Ghat Blue Valentine followed in the Don't Be Afraid of the The title perfectly captures the chopped-up editing of the film. Names are displayed in footsteps of Lee Daniels' Precious, in that both films Dark began their festival life in Park City and would make Dark began their festival life in Park City and would make large, L.A. Confidential-style captions, the subjects are interviewed against blank gray their international premiere in the Un Certain Regard The Housemaid walls, and news clips puncture the film constantly, giving Tabloid a speedy pace of section at Cannes where the international critics No Strings Attached breaking news. Tabloid never demeans its subject to the point of humiliation. Rather, it shared the same enthusiasm for the film as the Sundance audiences did. The Way Back gives McKinney proper respect, while remaining objective in its view of her. Whether

Fri Jan 28, 2011 she can be seen as an innocent victim who thought she was saving her fiancé, or a Interview: Matthew Porterfield (Putty Hill) Biutiful sexpot who flouted the law in pursuit of her own delusions, remains up to the Interview: Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture) audience to decide. Video Interview: Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours) From Prada to Nada Interview: David Soll (Puppet) Ip Man 2 QUICK LINKS Kaboom Tabloid, Errol Morris, The Mechanic FESTIVALS The Rite ShareThis comments(0) add a comment CALENDAR NEWS When We Leave (Die Fremde) Comments 2011 Sundance Film Festival (27th) Wed Feb 02, 2011 ADD A COMMENT You must be logged in to add a Into Eternity Supported by the nonprofit comment Sundance Institute, the Festival Fri Feb 04, 2011 has introduced global audiences to some of the most ground- Cold Weather breaking films of the past two decades, including sex, James Cameron's lies, and videotape, Maria Full of Grace, The Cove, Sanctum Hedwig and the Angry Inch, An Inconvenient Truth, Precious, Trouble the Water and Napoleon Dynamite The Other Woman and, through its New Frontier initiative, has brought The Roommate the cinematic works of media artists including Isaac Julian, Doug Aitken, Pierre Huyghe, Jennifer Sanctum (3D) Steinkamp and Matthew Barney. Fri Feb 11, 2011 2011 Int. Film Festival Rotterdam (40th) 2011 Oscar Shorts 2011 Berlin Int. Film Festival (61st) Big Mommas: Like Father, 2011 SXSW Film Conference and Festival Like Son (18th) Carancho 2011 Nouveau Cinema Festival (40th) Cedar Rapids The Eagle Gnomeo and Juliet COMMUNITY FILM RATINGS Just Go With It 100 To Die Like A Man 100 Shoah (1985) Never Say Never 100 Last Night Poetry 100 Live With It Vidal Sassoon The 100 Fambul Tok Movie 100 The Big Valley 100 La Prima Cosa Bella Wed Feb 16, 2011 100 Bye Bye Blondie Zero Bridge 100 A Beginner's Guide to Endings 100 Night Catches Us Fri Feb 18, 2011 100 NY Export: Opus Jazz Battle: Los Angeles 100 The Future Even the Rain 100 Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan's Hope I Am Number Four 100 Hemingway's Garden of Eden 100 Stuck Between Stations Putty Hill 100 A Good Old Fashioned Orgy Unknown 100 Fightville Vanishing on 7th Street 100 Jeff Who Lives at Home 100 Horrible Bosses Fri Feb 25, 2011 97 Hesher Drive Angry (in 3D) 96.5 The Rum Diary Hall Pass 96.5 HERE 96.5 The Girl is in Trouble Of Gods and Men 96.5 Like Crazy Shelter 96.5 Restless 96 Country Strong Wed Mar 02, 2011 96 The Oranges Uncle Boonmee Who Can 95 Take this Waltz Recall His Past Lives 95 The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) Thu Mar 03, 2011 95 Pariah 95 Homework Octubre 95 Una Noche Fri Mar 04, 2011 95 Sahkanaga The Adjustment Bureau 94 The Grandmasters 93.5 William S. Burroughs: A Man Within Apollo 18 90 Heli I Saw the Devil 90 Bernie The Imperialists are still 90 Rabbit Hole Get Email Alerts | Mobile Subscribe Follow Like indieWIRE Network: Search indieWIRE Find

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Reviews DOC NYC Review | Jews in Love: “Five Weddings and a Felony” Like | by Eric Kohn (November 4, 2010) Josh Freedʼs “Five Weddings and a Felony” makes its world premiere at DOC NYC, New Yorkʼs Documentary Festival, that runs from November 3 - 9.

First-person diary films are usually a tricky proposition. When filmmakers turn the cameras on their personal lives, Related Articles the results depend entirely on the creatorsʼ appeal. Most Festival Nirvana: Palm Springs Touts its Star- people have a hard enough time casting themselves in 1 wattage and Ozon's 'Potiche' at Opener the daily ritual of life without the interruption of the record button. Thereʼs a certain amount of hubris necessary for 2 REVIEW | United Absurdity: Kenneth Price's anyone willing to repeatedly push that button, look directly 'Americatown' into the lens, and smile. So when director Josh Freedʼs documentary “Five Weddings and a Felony” opens with 3 Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers | Friday's footage from his bar mitzvah, followed by his adult Four Filmmakers voiceover explaining his lifelong obsession with “My Dinner with André,” and then veers into his relationship 4 Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers | 'The troubles, it becomes quickly obvious that weʼre stuck with Ledge' Director Matthew Chapman him. His ubiquity is at once a strength and a weakness. A scene from Josh Freed's "Five Weddings and a Felony." [Photo courtesy of DOC NYC] 5 Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers | 'Family With his handy Flip camera constantly rolling, Freed demonstrates a filming obsession on par with Doug Block, whose squirm-worthy Portrait in Black and White' Director Julia family portraits make it difficult to look away even when they border on invasiveness. Freed also invades his own story and drags a few Ivanova people with him. Haplessly drifting from one seemingly well-meaning relationship to another, he launches on a long-term search for love—and for enough footage to complete his first movie. As he continually admires his friendsʼ abilities to find their mates and settle down, Freed begins to resemble a man-child of the Seth Rogen order, apparently incapable of anything save for instant gratification. As director and star, Freed evidently acknowledges his annoying behavior and casts himself as a comedic anti-hero.

That means that the early scenes of “Five Weddings and a Felony” can feel somewhat irksome, but Freed eventually finds his way to an intriguing scenario by establishing a few recurring characters. Unsurprisingly, most of them are women. After one girlfriend nudges him in the direction of filming his love life, he begins capturing pithy disputes, massive throwdowns and even pillow talk. He also nabs some free advice from his therapist-mother and interviews a former flame. However, his journey doesnʼt really kick into gear until he falls for Paulina, the sister of a woman engaged to his old friend. With Paulina, Freed discovers someone willing to tolerate his possibly effeminate ways. Saving him from further aimless wanderings, she also saves the movie.

As the title implies, the structure of “Five Weddings and a Felony” revolves around Josh attending five weddings (none of which are his own) and encountering one felony (a friend, busted for peddling pot and forced to confront his fiancée about it). The appeal of these scenes comes from the ongoing Seinfeldian chatter that Freed and his friends constantly engage in. The result is a survey of his life.

Perhaps for this very reason, a colleague described the general tone of “Five Weddings and Felony” to me as “documentary mumblecore.” Like many of the entries associated with the second word in that makeshift term, Freedʼs movie contains garrulous young white people endlessly babbling about relationship problems. That in itself calls into question the nature of the project: Freedʼs status behind the camera makes it hard to accept his behavior in front of it, and he becomes more an object of resentment than he probably intends. “Youʼre an asshole because youʼre selfish,” a friend tells him, acknowledging the recording device. Based on how we see him behave, itʼs hard to disagree, but in Freedʼs better moments, he retains enough charm to make the genre elements click. Itʼs a D.I.Y. relationship comedy set in the real world.

Then again, I never saw a correlation between the qualities defined as mumblecore and modern Jewish mannerisms. Freed revels in his Jewishness, at one point drawing a strained parallel between the philosophizing in “My Dinner with André” and the ancient Talmudic arguments he studied in high school. Paired with the equally whiny personalities that dominate Freedʼs bubble, his feature amounts to a snapshot of urban twentysomething Jewish culture.

As it happens, through some of those same avenues, Iʼm in a serious grey area with my decision to review this movie. I donʼt know Freed, but I know people that do, including one who makes a brief appearance as the documentarianʼs old pal. That said, Freedʼs reference points rarely hit home for me—thatʼs a world I left a long time ago—but it struck me that his camera goes almost too deep into a subculture of overeducated youth for anyone entirely removed from it to fully comprehend his particular blend of smarminess and self- doubt. His technique could be termed autobiographical ethnography: It probes the depths of young Manhattan Jewry and proves that, despite the nebbishy tics, theyʼre just like us.

For audiences more intrigued by the larger ideas pertaining to romantic confusion, the movie has enough inoffensive soul-searching to Advertise with us sustain the overall narrative. At times amusing but sometimes quite glib, its entertainment value often lies at odds with Freedʼs charismatic pose. Heʼs so overly confident that the story automatically gains some analytical points when someone puts him down. Those moments are too rare, but I find it valuable to note that while I wonʼt call myself a major champion of “Five Weddings and a Felony,” Iʼm impressed by the extent to which it undoubtedly entertains both its subject and anyone in sync with his sensibilities. criticWIRE grade: B

Editorʼs Note: An earlier version of this review gave the incorrect name to the subject Paulina. indieWIRE regrets the error

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COMMENTS Felon says on November 5, 2010 at 3:57pm Wow. Eric, while I donʼt disagree with certain points, such as Joshs effeminate ways and nebbishy tics, 1 however, I do think your writing is way to verbose and analytical and calling him overeducated is one of the Popular Today dumbest things you can say about a humble dude who graduated near the top of his class at Columbia. You 1 For Your Consideration: Early 2011 Oscar sound like you might be projecting your own life into this critique. Basically, youʼre a condescending critic in my Predictions opinion. The Doc may deserve a B, but that B was well earned. 2 Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers | 'The Ledge' Director Matthew Chapman likesto@#$�lons says on November 5, 2010 at 6:55pm 'King's Speech' and 'Black Swan' Lead BAFTA Dear Writer, 3 2 Long Lists You are an even bigger asshole than Josh. 4 Academy Awards Announce 10 Scientific and Her name is Paulina, not Paula, you undereducated, verbose curmudgeon. Technical Achievement Honorees

dmcnell says on November 5, 2010 at 10:11pm 5 Tracking The Oscar Precursors: A Complete Guide To Award Season Iʼve seen the documentary and would give it a D-. The first part is okay, but then just repeats itself over and 3 over. Very hard to sit through.

Walter Morrison says on November 6, 2010 at 4:10am Eric: Yo are right on the mark. your analysis is quite balanced and shows deep understanding of the milieu that 4 the documentary portrays. the negatives this documentary shows are not compatible with contemporary jewish society in America.

Claire says on November 6, 2010 at 7:27am Tough film to review. you achieved some balance. The selection of the wedding scenarios the director selected 5 to bring up some level of personal experiences is complicated by the fact that people do not show their true self at weddings

vladimir says on November 6, 2010 at 11:51am The reviewer Clearly knows the subject of Freerʼs movie. For a non-jewish person with little contact with 6 contemporary american jewish life, it provided a better understanding of the film. Thanks

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