Every year in April, the Center for Documentary Studies brings the Full Frame Film Festival to Durham for a weekend of film screenings, panels and discussions. This winter, the Full Frame Winter Series will show three of those documentaries in the coming weeks.
The series will kick off this Wednesday night with a screening of Buck, a film about former professional rope trick performer-turned-horse whisperer Buck Brannaman (who was six years old at the time). Director Cindy Meehl, whose film went over well in various screenings over the past year, got the idea to tell Brannaman’s story after she took one of her own disturbed horses to see him. Buck is Meehl’s first film, and was filmed in part right here in North Carolina.
The following week, the Carolina Theatre will screen the next film in the series, Danfung Dennis’s aptly named Hell and Back Again. Another film with ties to North Carolina, Hell and Back Again began when Dennis accompanied the Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment on an anti-Taliban mission in Afghanistan which resulted in the wounding of Sergeant Nathan Thomas. The film alternates between that fateful mission and Sergeant Thomas’ return to North Carolina, and attempts to capture as adequately as possible the struggles that a soldier faces at home as well as abroad.
Finally, the Full Frame Winter Series will wrap up on the first of February, with the screening of Project Nim, the acclaimed new project from director James Marsh (of Man on Wire fame). Though the final film in the series, unlike the prior two, has no ties to North Carolina, it will no doubt be of great interest to students at Duke and citizens of Durham alike. Marsh’s film follows the story of Nim, a chimpanzee taken at birth and raised by humans in an ambiguous psychological study that blurs the lines between test subject and adopted child. The results of the study, conducted in the 1970s in an attempt to teach the chimp language, are inconclusive, but the archival footage, reenactments and present-day interviews employed by Marsh try to tell a different story. The film explores the participants in the study itself, as well as their reactions to Nim’s unpredictable behavior, and its consequences for them and those around them.
All of the screenings for the Full Frame Winter Series take place at the Carolina Theatre at 7:00 p.m. and are free and open to the public.
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