Like a circus for the documentary crowd, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival comes to town once a year. And from today until Sunday, it will be a documentary bonanza in downtown Durham.
Held at the beginning of April each year, the festival brings throngs of filmmakers and cinephiles to the Bull City. It is one of the largest and most highly regarded documentary film festivals in the country.
Peg Palmer, the festival's executive director, said Full Frame strives to create an environment that welcomes documentarians.
"Having filmmakers come here and see their film and think, 'Boy, my film looked great at Full Frame. That was really the standard for exhibition that I want to see'-that is very important to our festival," she said.
In addition to being welcoming to filmmakers, Full Frame also tries to create a unique environment in which viewers can experience documentaries.
"Watching a film with 500 other individuals and participating in a Q-and-A afterwards is very different than seeing these films in one's own home," said Director of Programming Sadie Tillery. "I hope that audiences are moved by the work on screen and are moved by presenting it in a community environment."
Palmer said that community experience is paramount to the festival. Full Frame uses six theaters in the vicinity of the Carolina Theatre, and all the filmmakers will be staying downtown at the Marriott Hotel.
"It's about as close to your living room as we could imagine getting," she said. "One of the important parts of our mission is to encourage conversation, and... the tightness of the landscape I think really encourages conversation around the films and sharing the content that brings it to life and makes more of it than if you were watching it at home."
The festival consists of four sections: special programming, new documentaries and two curated series. New Docs is the largest block of programming. With 18 shorts (20 minutes or less) and 41 feature-length documentaries, these films-all made within the past two years-are selected from more than 1,200 submissions. One of the noteworthy aspects of Full Frame's feature-length selections is that the selection committee does not shy away from shorter features. Some screenings include both a short and a feature or two shorter documentaries, coming in around the 60-minute time marker.
"I personally think 60 minutes is a great length for the documentary form," Tillery said. "It seems to me something we've always incorporated in our programming here at Full Frame. It's part of what makes Full Frame special-that we have the space to program these films that might not be programmed at a higher-profile event."
The new documentaries are the ones in competition. Awards for the juried films will be presented Sunday afternoon at the American Tobacco Historic District.
Full Frame gives out a career award each year, recognizing filmmakers who have made significant contributions to documentary film. This year's recipient is St. Clair Bourne, a legendary filmmaker who mentored the likes of Academy Award-nominated director Sam Pollard. Bourne, who died in December 2007, was closely associated with Full Frame and curated a series for the festival's 10th anniversary.
Though his influence resonates in many films, Bourne is best known for documenting the experiences of African Americans from the 1960s on. In conjunction with the award, Pollard has curated a series of films by Bourne, as well as ones that influenced him, such as Melvin Van Peeble's famous 1971 blaxploitation feature, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.
"He was a pioneering and groundbreaking documentary filmmaker," Palmer said. "His life spanned the '60s, '70s and '80s. [Bourne has] taken that time period and translated it into some of the most palpable films about that era that exists. He was an obvious choice."
Past recipients have included famed documentarians Ken and Ric Burns as well as two-time Academy Award-winner Barbara Kopple. Kopple will attend this year's festival and participate in a question-and-answer session about her 1993 Mike Tyson documentary, Fallen Champ.
With a rich selection of films, the four-day festival provides exposure to a cornucopia of narratives. Palmer said she thinks the Bull City's character makes it one of the best places to screen so many documentaries.
"Durham is a wonderful place because of our history," she said. "I think Durham is a place that is very open to documentary films because it is a city that celebrates diversity in ways that I think are remarkable."
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