DOCUMENTARIES WITH A POINT OF VIEW
Imagine watching Schindler's List and knowing the sadistic Nazi camp commandant played by Ralph Fiennes was your father. Inheritance is the story of Monika Hertwig, the daughter of mass murderer Amon Goeth. Hertwig has spent her life in the shadow of her father's sins, trying to come to terms with her "inheritance." She seeks out Helen Jonas, who was enslaved by Goeth and who is one of the few living eyewitnesses to his unspeakable brutality. The women's raw, emotional meeting unearths terrible truths and lingering questions about how the actions of our parents can continue to ripple through generations.
Inheritance airs on select PBS stations next Wednesday, December 10, 2008 at 9 PM. (Schedules vary, so check your local listings.) The film will also be available in its entirety online from December 11, 2008 to January 4, 2009 on the P.O.V. website.
Watch the trailer:
On Monday, December 1, filmmaker James Moll, Monika Hertwig and Helen Jonas reunited for a special screening of Inheritance at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, where they answered questions from audience members. We will have video from the event on the P.O.V. website for the film next week. In the meantime, you can read more about the film, hear from filmmaker James Moll on the making of the film, read an interview with Helen Jonas' daughter Vivian Delman about her experiences growing up as a child of a Holocaust survivor and see a slideshow of images from Plaszow, the site of the concentration camp where Helen Jonas and Monika Hertwig both lived during World War II.
We hope you get a chance to watch this provocative and powerful film. Be sure to come back to the P.O.V. Blog after you've seen it to share your thoughts and reactions with us.
It's almost the end of the year, which means that film award season is in full swing. The Academy Award shortlist for best documentary came out a few weeks ago, and the Satellite Award nominees for best documentary were announced at the end of November. This morning, the nominees for the Independent Spirit Awards were announced in Los Angeles. Among the nominees in the best documentary category are two P.O.V. films: Up the Yangtze by Yung Chang, which aired in October of 2008, and The Betrayal by Ellen Kuras, which will air during P.O.V.'s 2009 season.
Congratulations, Yung and Ellen! The Independent Spirit Awards take place on February 21, 2009.
Independent journalist Tom Roston checks in and writes about the world of documentaries in his column, Doc Soup.
Have you seen Four Christmases yet? It's the big holiday comedy that's plastered on every billboard and on a constant trailer loop — you probably feel like you have already seen the entire movie even if you haven't. (And hated it.) Why do I ask? Because the director is no other than Seth Gordon, the guy who made the fantastic King is Kong, the documentary about two rival Donkey Kong aficionados. Amazingly, Gordon made the leap from the no-budget doc he made on Final Cut Pro to a studio behemoth, thanks mostly to the faith Vince Vaughn had in him after seeing Kong.
I wrote a piece about Gordon for the Los Angeles Times this Sunday, where I touched on the genesis of his filmmaking: he was studying architecture at Yale when he spent six months in Kenya. He had a video camera and a desire to document the world around him, and presto — a career was born. I really enjoyed speaking with Gordon, who was still pretty wide-eyed about his whole Hollywood experience. (And, I should add, Four Christmases ain't bad.)
I didn't get to include some more detail about his feelings about going from docs to studio features in the article, so here's what he said on the subject: "The nature of making Kong was to be so self-reliant, which was invaluable in dealing with a much bigger machine. Working alone allows you to steer through so much."
He spoke about how he was able to better field all the departments involved in the $80-million movie because his DIY experience making a doc gave him "a specific point of view," he said. "It made me a better collaborator."
Freelance writer Amanda Hirsch, former editorial director of PBS Interactive, blogs about documentaries and the Web in her column, Outside the Frame, published every other Wednesday.
There are few things I love as much as food. It follows naturally, then, that one of my favorite online activities is looking at pictures of food. When the intellectual nonsense of the day becomes too much, I steer my browser over to the popular photo-sharing site Flickr.com and indulge in a little food porn.
Yes, that's right: food porn. The term is not my own — it's the name of an actual group, or sub-community, on Flickr, created by a woman in Seattle named Kate Hopkins (her Flickr name is "Accidental Hedonist"). Kate describes the group thusly:
Food Porn
For those who can't help but take pictures of food.
UPDATED PICTURE GUIDELINE:
All pictures should represent a moment of deliciousness in your life. A moment when you couldn't wait to take a bite of the food, but waited an extra second in order to take a picture of your impending bliss. Hopefully you can communicate that desire for that dish with your picture, but I'm not going to penalize anyone if their pic is lacking in anyway.
All I ask is that you try your best.
"Try your best": this is porn, Mr. Rogers-style, with amateur Julia Childs everywhere asking their dinner to say cheese. And like that other kind of porn, food porn pretty much has something for everyone, from fancy to funky, carnivorous to veggie-tastic. And, of course, there's chocolate. After all, says Flickr user Samer Farha: "Chocolate sells. Maybe more than sex does."
So is that why so many people are sharing their photos online? To sell something? In Samer's case, it seems that exposure for his food photos means exposure for his blog. But the urge to take — and share — food photos seems to generally spring from a deeper source. As Flickr user LingMuse puts it,
"A shared meal is a shared gift. I can't eat with everyone in the world. I can't dine with everyone on Flickr. But maybe if I share a photo of a meal, or of food I enjoy, I can engage in a kind of secular communion. 'This meal was great! Wish you were here!'"
When asked why she takes photos of food, another Flickr user, Glitzypursegirl, jokes, "The food moves less than my two-year-old son"; on a more serious note, she says that photographing food lets her "capture a moment of life before it is devoured or decayed."
For others, photography has simply become part of the experience of eating. Flickr user and avid food blogger kthread writes:
At this point, I often videoblog a recipe, take "food porn" images, then eat (it's sort of like pausing to remember to taste the seasoning at the end — taste, season, snap, eat).
While much food photography celebrates the very essence of a particular foodstuff, other images use food to express something that's more than gastronomical. LingMuse, for example, loves capturing food in a way that evokes patterns found in geology or the universe at large; in this photo, where others may see simply a delicious cut of beef (it even looks delicious to me, and I'm a vegetarian — ah, the seductive power of porn), she sees cliff walls in the meat's fibrous tissue:
Samer Farha also cops to the pleasure of using food for artistic experimentation and offers his depiction of a cross-section of melon as an example.
While images like this are interesting — and even beautiful — I love food too much to see it treated like an underfed supermodel, contorting for the camera. My favorite food photos are the ones that treat food like food — that evoke that moment of deliciousness and let me experience it vicariously, the way a lush photo of a Carribbean island lets me escape the dreary greyness of a Washington, D.C. winter.
What about you? Do you like food photos? (It's ok — we won't tell your mom.) How does photography enhance, or detract, from a sensual experience like eating food? Share your thoughts using the comments feature below.
Independent journalist Tom Roston checks in and writes about the world of documentaries in his column, Doc Soup.
So, as you heard here and probably elsewhere, the 15-film short list to be considered for the Oscar nomination for best documentary was announced last week. All I can do here now is throw out a big GULP; boy, was I wrong. In September, I cranked out my prognostications about what would be on the list and most of my guesses were off the mark. Here are the films that I predicted would be among the front-runners:
Man on Wire
Standard Operating Procedure
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and Man on Wire
Religulous
Shine a Light
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson
Encounters at the End of the World
American Teen
Bigger, Faster, Stronger
Trouble the Water
Chicago 10.
Of those, only Man on Wire, Standard Operating Procedure, Encounters at the End of the World and Trouble the Water made it to the list. I guess that's what happens when you follow the big lights — I was way too focused on the films that were big at the box office or at the film festivals. OK, lesson learned. The most glaring omissions were the Roman Polanski doc and Religulous; I have to wonder if that's some revenge voting. HBO engineered that tricky under-the-radar theatrical release earlier in the year so that the film would be nominated and also make a splash for its TV debut. And Religulous is just a big, obnoxious, money-making doc, based on one irritating guy's ego (Bill Maher). Still, despite its flaws, I'm shocked the Oscar committee chose to snub it and Polanski.
I want to add that somehow, I failed to mention The Betrayal (P.O.V. 2009) among my original guesses, but that was an oversight. I hope to do some better prognosticating for the next round, when the list is reduced to five. I will immediately put my other foot in my mouth and say right now that I bet those four — Wire, SOP, Encounters and Trouble, plus Betrayal — are the frontrunners to be the nominees.
Congratulations to all the filmmakers on the 15-film shortlist for the Oscar for Best Documentary! Upcoming P.O.V. film The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), by Ellen Kuras, which will air on PBS in 2009, was among the films included.
In January 2008, the P.O.V. Blog followed Ellen as she spent a day at the Sundance Film Festival, where she premiered her film The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) and promoted Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, for which she was the director of photography. Read about Ellen's busy day in Park City.
Many months later, we're thrilled to see all the recognition and press for Ellen and for her wonderful film. Congratulations, Ellen! P.O.V. is excited to be airing The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) on PBS in 2009.
The shortlisted documentaries for the 2009 Academy Awards are:
At the Death House Door
The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh
Encounters at the End of the World
Fuel
The Garden
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
I.O.U.S.A.
In a Dream
Made in America
Man on Wire
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Standard Operating Procedure
They Killed Sister Dorothy
Trouble the Water
The Academy Award nominations — including the five best documentary nominees — will be announced on Thursday, January 22, 2009. The winners will be presented with their awards on Sunday, February 22, 2009.
Independent journalist Tom Roston checks in and writes about the world of documentaries in his column, Doc Soup.
You've heard me talk about it before, but, finally, Ellen Kuras' The Betrayal is making it to the public this Friday, at the IFC Film Center so forgive me if I have little more to say. The movie, 23 years in the making, is about a Laotian immigrant family's experience in America; after its opening in Manhattan, it will then roll out to Brooklyn and then to points west in January. You'll also get to see it on PBS, thanks to P.O.V., next summer. I've told you about how poetic and lyrical the film is, thanks to Kuras' incredible skills with the camera (her day job is director of photography for the likes of Spike Lee, Michel Gondry, Sam Mendes and other greats). 
And I've talked about how dramatically moving it is (I defy anyone to sit through it without shedding a tear). But I recently learned from Kuras that there is something else to add about this powerful doc: the music.
Through her relationship with Thelma Schoonmaker, the revered editor for Martin Scorsese's films (Kuras has also worked with Marty), Kuras showed the doc to three-time Oscar winner Howard Shore. If you've been in a movie theater, you've heard Shore's music before — he composed for the Lord of the Rings triliogy, a bunch of Scorsese films, Philadelphia and The Silence of the Lambs, among many others. He's the definition of top-notch. And his work on The Betrayal is equally impressive, and well, Oscar-worthy. So, ahem, shouldn't his work on The Betrayal be considered for the best musical score Oscar? But, wait, has a doc's score ever been nominated? Not from what I can see. Is there a rule against it? Why would there be? Could this be the first?
