Full frame rewound

It’s 1 a.m. on Friday morning, and I’m nearly delirious. Sixteen hours ago I was parking my car across the street from the Carolina Theater and picking up my Full Frame press pass. Since then, I’ve watched a veritable monsoon engulf half of West Campus ankle-deep, tried to see The Last Cowboy but misread its screening time, and, stuck at the theater with nothing to do, asked about a dozen festival volunteers if there’s some sort of “press hospitality” room.

Now I’m stumbling a bit as I jog back to my car, parked on some side street chosen in haste. I’m still pondering the only film I caught Thursday, the opening day—a delicate movie about legendary songwriter Townes Van Zandt called Be Here To Love Me. The film provides a deep examination of all aspects of the singer’s life, introducing newcomers to one of folk music’s greatest craftsmen and satisfying old fans’ longings for a worthy tribute. As usual, I’m uncertain about the movie and can’t say whether I’m going to buy the inevitable DVD, my ridiculous but habitual method of judging films. When I finally get back to my room and crash, it’s past 2, and I’ve got a press breakfast in a little over six hours.

I guess I wouldn’t call myself a documentary expert, but I’m not a complete amateur. I’ve been a documentary film fan since last year, when I took Documentary Experience: A Video Approach and made my first movie—10 minutes of solid mediocrity. I’m getting better, though. This year my new film, about a llama breeder, is more than twice as long, and I’m thinking about submitting it to Full Frame next year. So my festival visit is comprised of many motives: scouting as a reporter and an aspiring filmmaker, as well as pure interest as a film lover. It’s the first time I’ve been to Full Frame—last year I had to sell my tickets to see “An Evening with Michael Moore” and this, the eighth year of the festival, with visits from legends Ken Burns and Martin Scorsese, seems to be a good introduction to its wonders.

Started in 1998 by the peppy Nancy Buirski and co-sponsored by The New York Times, Full Frame has developed into the premier documentary film festival in the United States. Over four days, the biggest names mingle with driven amateurs at a multitude of screenings, panels and seminars. After only a day I can already sense what makes this weekend such an escape for documentary lovers, from the quiet electricity emanating from a world premiere to the implicit membership in a shared cult of understanding between passionate attendees.

But come Friday morning I’ve slept through the press breakfast, and the gods of Reality still seem intent on turning this Full Frame experience into a week in Seattle. Still, I overhear a couple of festivalgoers rejoicing at the lack of sun, which I guess makes sense: if you’re going to sit in theaters all day long, you might as well not miss tanning time.

Outside the Carolina, eclectic purple-shirted volunteers are selling posters for various films endlessly. I’m really not sure where else I’d go to find a poster for How To Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy it) or, for that matter, how anybody outside the Full Frame universe would encounter said film—although I later discover that it’s actually screening at the Tribeca Film Festival. Oops. What I really want, though, is a big, fat, theater-sized one-sheet poster for Time Indefinite, the Ross McElwee movie that’s screening Sunday night. But the volunteers don’t seem to have one.

Pickings for screenings are slim Friday—I’ve already seen Southern Comfort, one of the night’s best offerings, and I’m not really familiar with any of the other films. Add to that the fact that I’m not a big fan of the Burns brothers, and I’m left to choose between a few films that don’t immediately grab my attention. Somewhat randomly I select Obstinato, a film tracing the evolution of an original song performed by banjo player Bela Fleck and bassist Edgar Meyer. I enjoy the film, even if I don’t hang around for the question-and-answer session with Fleck himself. Instead, I rip off a 7 on the grading card—given to every moviegoer for every film—hand it to a volunteer, and head out into the cold. Martin Scorsese arrives tomorrow.

That afternoon, the awards ceremony begins, following a large barbeque in the plaza outside the Carolina. It’s the first time all festivalgoers have been together all weekend long, and everyone’s mingling. I meet a student from De Anza College in California who’s spending his spring break indoors analyzing documentaries, and an older gentleman who has been coming to Full Frame for all eight years of the festival’s existence. In the crowd, I spot D.A. Pennebaker, director of the famous Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, and acclaimed playwright and Duke professor Ariel Dorfman. It’s this type of crowd that makes Full Frame such a phenomenon: famous directors become regular moviegoers, and you and I could be award-winning filmmakers by the time next year rolls around. That’s the beauty of documentary film. There’s no budget too small, no idea too grand to take on. All you need is a camera.

Murderball, the story of several Paralympic athletes, is the big winner in the awards ceremony—it takes the Audience Award and splits the Grand Jury Award with the Indonesian film The Shape of the Moon. The long list of thank you’s begins. Finally, hours later, as the re-screenings of various award winners wind down, as the sun finally sets on the 2005 Full Frame Festival, the auspices of the Big Tobacco buildings cast their lonely shadows over the few scattered film lovers still making their way from venue to venue. At last the stragglers journey to their cars. There are no more complaints about the cost of festival passes from starving artists, no more grand stories of film exploits from scraggly forty-year olds. All gone.

Back at my dorm room, days after having seen the film, I finally get it—Be Here To Love Me is a truly beautiful work, evoking the spirits of tortured songwriters like Nick Drake, who I’ve been fascinated with for years, now forever connected to Van Zandt in my mind by some tether of sadness and desperation. And I wonder: isn’t that all we can ask of films, to create those connections between the people we know and the people we would never know? Should art do anything else? Inspire, maybe, change lives, I guess, but certainly not much more than what Be Here To Love Me, what the festival itself, has done for me—establishing connections between the little things and life, celebrating reality and then forgetting it all the next day. And doing that all over again, again and again.