From over 700 submitted films, 66 of the best new documentaries in the world have been selected for competition in this year's Full Frame documentary film festival. Filmmakers Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine) and Harry Shearer (This is Spinal Tap) will be discussing the role of documentaries in politics. MTV's Lauren Lazen and Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman will talk about the rising popularity of documentaries. Morgan Spurlock's critically lauded Supersize Me will be shown for the first time on the east coast. And it's all happening less than a mile from East Campus.
The nation's most comprehensive documentary film festival, Full Frame will bring everything from big Hollywood names to films that otherwise wouldn't be shown in the U.S. to Durham's own Carolina Theatre beginning tonight.
Journalist and documentary photographer Nancy Buirski founded the festival in 1998, to fill what she saw as a void in forums for documentary filmmakers to showcase their work. Buirski said she picked Durham because she saw the Triangle as "a community full of people interested in new cultural opportunities." She enlisted the help of friend Martin Scorsese as well as the Center for Documentary Studies to build a budget for this ambitious project. Since that first year, the festival has expanded to screen ninety-seven films before an audience of thousands.
Chair of the film selection committee and Duke professor David Paletz noted that he saw this year's films as fitting into distinct subject categories, including war, politics and American society. Some of the most interesting films, though, are those that refuse to be categorized, like Chinese filmmaker Weijun Chen's To Live is Better than to Die. Paletz was pleasantly surprised that Chen's film, which follows a rural Chinese family living with AIDS, chooses to focus on "the wonderful sense of life" of the family, rather than their impending deaths.
Other standout films include Texas Hospitality, which analyzes the last-meal requests of ten executed Texas criminals in relation to the killers and their crimes; Alone Across Australia (pictured above), the first-hand account of one man's trek on foot from coast to coast of Australia; and Chisolm `72, the story of the first Black congresswoman, Shirley Chisolm, who stunned America by running for the U.S. Presidency.
An especially pertinent film to current world events is Home of the Brave--Land of the Free, which features footage from a Norwegian film crew following U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Paletz commented that he found the film particularly compelling because it showed a view of the war that hadn't been shown on television at all. The film presents depictions of American soldiers whose good intentions "don't necessarily achieve good results."
A particularly crowd-pleasing film promises to be Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which follows the band as they ironically undergo group therapy for, among other things, the anger that has served as the catalyst for so much of their music.
In addition to the films in competition, the festival will also feature nine invited films from more established filmmakers, including Heir to an Execution, by Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's granddaughter Ivy Meeropol, and excerpts from Ken Burns' new work-in-progress, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.
Other exciting events at the festival will include a curated program on hybrid filmmaking, the new phenomenon of films that blend documentary footage with acted material. Hybrid will screen fifteen of these fact/fiction mergers, including Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas and Al Pacino's critically acclaimed Looking for Richard.
Two notable panel discussions are Docs in their Heyday: Coming to a Multiplex near You, a look at the boom of documentaries in the popular genre, and Documentary as the Swing Vote, which will examine the effect of information in documentaries on the voting public. There will also be special evening events with Harry Shearer, who, in addition to his film credits, voices several characters on The Simpsons, and controversial filmmaker Michael Moore.
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will run this weekend at the Carolina Theatre. Visit www.fullframefest.org for schedule and ticket information.
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