DOCUMENTARIES WITH A POINT OF VIEW
Sundance '08
WATCHING
MediaStorm presents Rape of a Nation, Marcus Bleasdale's photos from the D.R.C.
Growing Up Online Is the Internet changing the experience of childhood? Frontline looks at the way kids are spending their time online..
READING
Pirates of Sundance: Columbia Law prof Tim Wu recommends indie filmmakers look to BitTorrent for distribution. Via Slate.com
Rabbi "live-blogs" the PBS documentary The Jewish Americans on his blog The Unorthodox Rabbi (from PBS Engage)
AJ Schnack reflects on some of the music documentaries he saw at Sundance, including Patti Smith: Dream of Life.
WATCHING
Patti Smith talks about the new film Patti Smith: Dream of Life by Stephen Sebring (via Salon.com).
Classic moments from the Sundance Film Festival (via The Sundance Channel).
READING
Salon.com film critic Andrew O'Heir writes about his favorite narrative and documentary films from Sundance.
Michael Moore wants multiplexes to air more documentaries and foreign films. (from The Hollywood Reporter, via Cinematical)
Artists Telling Artists' Stories: Doc Makers Stretch the Limits of Non-Fiction (from sundance.org)
Cinematical's thorough coverage of Sundance includes reviews, news and on-the-ground tidbits.
This is the last of our live reports from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Cynthia Lopez is P.O.V./AmDoc's Vice President. This festival marked her eighth year attending Sundance. What follows is her personal diary of the high and low points of last week's Sundance Film Festival.
You just never know what's going to happen when you go to Sundance — and this year was no exception. As I shared past experiences with my colleague and first-time attendee Simon Kilmurry, I had no idea of the drama that lay ahead. But before I get to that, I'll start from the beginning.
Thursday, January 17:
We arrived at the Salt Lake City airport without any delays directly from PBS's annual Creative Summit held this year in San Francisco where executive producers, creative directors, marketing people and online producers come together to discuss the latest in best practices, trends in broadcasting, media research and demographic/audience information.
I picked up my industry pass at The Yarrow in record time — thank you Sundance and Cara Mertes! Later, I headed to our hotel, the Copper Bottom Inn, to return phone calls and to finalize plans for the P.O.V. annual party on Sunday.
We ate at Chez Betty, an intimate restaurant owned by Jerry Garcia. No, not the singer. If it's your first time at Sundance, then having a meal there is a must; it's often a site for celebrities, if you're into star-gazing.
Friday, January 18:
7:30 am: Finally, I was on my way to see my first Sundance Docs, a series of shorts at the Prospector Theater. Among them, I had two absolute favorites: Farewell Packets of Ten by director Ken Wardrop and Pilgrimage by Tadashi Nakamura. If you want to quit smoking you have to see these old ladies trying to have a conversation; it's a hoot! It made me laugh so hard; comedy this natural isn't easy to find. Pilgrimage, on the other hand, made me cry — which is difficult for me in 22 minutes! I am not that wound up. The film feels like an Asian hip-hop music video, and explores the tragic history of the Japanese concentration camps in California during World War II.
Read more after the jump...
Now that the big dance is over, I thought I'd take a moment to wrap things up. Once again, the biggest buzz at Sundance was generated by the documentary lineup. Nanette Burstein's American Teen was the rare exception in an otherwise sedate year for film buyers. What's nice about this of course, is that we can "focus on film," as the festival encourages — and for me, that means looking back on a few films that really stood out.
Patti Smith: Dream of Life (P.O.V. 2008-2009), Steven Sebring's hypnotic ten-year collaboration with the singer herself would land at the top of my list of films that I wish I had seen at Sundance. Yesterday, Sebring and Phillip Hunt Watch won a much-deserved Excellence in Cinematography Award for Dream of Life, with Grand Jury prizes in the doc category going to Man on Wire (World Cinema) and Trouble the Water. (A complete list of award winners is available here.)
Other docs from the festival that I'm anxious to see also got enthusiastic responses from Sundance-goers as well. I'm looking forward to catching American Teen, I.O.U.S.A., Bigger, Stronger Faster, Fields of Fuel, The Recruiter, and The Greatest Silence. Luckily, I live in New York City and will probably be able to catch these films at any of several theatres that screen indy docs. But since we're not all within arm's reach of that kind of venue, I'd like to remind you that you can see at least three of the docs from this year's Sundance Film Festival on P.O.V. — you can catch Nerakhoon, Patti Smith: Dream of Life and Traces of the Trade on your local PBS station in 2008 and 2009. Sign up for the P.O.V. newsletter for broadcast reminders and to connect to your local station.
Read more after the jump...
On January 21, Katrina Browne's Traces of the Trade had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Afterwards, she was joined onstage by her relatives, descendants of the DeWolf family, who appeared in the film and are now participating in audience discussions about their family's role in the slave trade. Browne's cousin Tom DeWolf is the author of Inheriting the Trade, his personal story of the family's journey. He answered a few questions about what it was like to attend the festival as the subject of a documentary that was being shown there.
Q: I'm curious about what it's like to be at Sundance as the subject of a documentary that is premiering there.
Tom DeWolf: It is both exhilarating and a little daunting. All of us who are part of Traces of the Trade are committed to its mission and the outreach we're doing with community groups, churches, schools, historical museums and the public at large. Seven out of the ten family members who went on the journey were able to make it to Sundance, along with several members of the film crew. Many of us join Katrina Browne, our cousin the filmmaker, at each screening to interact with the audiences after the film ends.
Q: Have you been recognized?
DeWolf: A few times. It is an odd sensation to have people recognize you because they've seen you in a film, but you've not met them before.
Read more after the jump...
The Sundance Film Festival Documentary Competition winners were announced on Saturday, January 26.
AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
Documentary Grand Jury Prize
Trouble The Water
Directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal
Documentary Audience Award
Fields of Fuel
Directed by Josh Tickell
Documentary Directing Award
Nanette Burstein
American Teen
Excellence in Documentary Cinematography
Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
Documentary Editing Award
Joe Bini
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Documentary Special Jury Prize
The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo
Directed by Lisa F. Jackson
American Documentary Competition Jury: Michelle Byrd, Heidi Ewing, Eugene Jarecki, Steven Okazaki and Annie Sundberg
WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize
Man on Wire (UK)
Directed by James Marsh
World Cinema Documentary Audience Award
Man on Wire (UK)
Directed by James Marsh
World Cinema Documentary Directing Award
Nino Kirtadze
Durakovo: Village of Fools (France)
World Cinema Documentary Cinematography Award
Mahmoud al Massad
Recycle (Jordan)
World Cinema Documentary Editing Award
Irena Dol
The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins (New Zealand)
World Documentary Competition Jury: Amir Bar-Lev (US), Leena Pasanen (Finland/Denmark) and Ilda Santiago (Brazil)
SHORT FILMMAKING AWARDS — AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARIES
Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking
My Olympic Summer
Directed by Daniel Robin
(tied with Dramatic Short — Sikumi, Directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean)
Honorable Mention
La Corona (The Crown)
Directed by Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega
American and International Shorts Jury: Jon Bloom, Melonie Diaz and Jason Reitman
Journalist and Doc Soup columnist Tom Roston is at Sundance this week, checking out all the doc-related happenings in Park City.
My dancing days are done! I'm back home from Sundance, and well-satiated by a great dose of documentaries. It's been a pretty remarkable festival for docs. Despite some pre-festival chatter that docs might get a cold reception, the films at Sundance showed a real diversity of subject matter and accomplishments in craft — and ranged from mainstream docs with high production values (Made in America and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden) to lower-budget films that still tell a strong story. The non-fiction form was clearly alive and kicking in Park City; you could even overhear news about the latest doc acquisitions on the ubiquitious shuttle buses. Among the under-the-radar (until now) docs that were getting the best buzz are Nerakhoon: (The Betrayal), Trouble the Water, Anvil!: The Story of Anvil, Stranded: I Have Come From a Plane That Crashed in the Mountains, and The Order of Myths.
It was interesting to observe the selling of Nanette Burstein's doc American Teen, bought on Tuesday by Paramount Vantage for a reported $1 million for world rights, except for the U.K. It's a natural fit — Paramount Vantage and MTV are both owned by Viacom — but it was a deal that took a long time to hammer out. About 36 hours before the announcement, I was told by one "Indiewood" head involved in the negotiations that American Teen had sold to Sony Pictures Classics, but that never came to fruition. There was lots of talk about the film's fate last weekend, proving once again that documentaries are now the fodder of the same heated conjecture and behind-the-scenes sniping and dealing as fiction features. (Nerakhoon director Ellen Kuras suggested to me that this evolution may not be such a great thing, but we'll get into that another day.)
Read more after the jump...
WATCHING
Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita Frontline looks at the stem cell research debate.
Comedian Mark Malkoff lived in an IKEA store for six days and six nights.
READING
Sundance 2008 Deals
Frequently updated list of films that have found distribution at Sundance (From Spout blog)
P.O.V. alum Alex Rivera (The Sixth Section, 2003) is one of Variety's 10 Directors to Watch.
Taxi To the Dark Side director Alex Gibney talks to The Reeler about his film, which looks at the U.S. military's use of torture.
Sundance shrinks from the web as online video explodes (from Wired)
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was marked at Sundance with two special events. The first was a panel discussion moderated by Orlando Bagwell (Ford Foundation) with panelists U.S. Rep. John Conyers (Chair of the House Judiciary Committee), Dedrick Muhammad (scholar and researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies), and Katrina Browne (director, Traces of the Trade).
I'll say from the outset that the time allotted to the panel was way too short. A discussion on the legacy of slavery and the myths of history deserves far more than one hour. In fact, by the time people got settled, heard introductions and watched some film clips, there was only half an hour for presentations and discussion — shamefully short for an emotional and very important topic, and a bit of a disservice to moderator, panelists and audience.
Dedrick Muhammad, Katrina Browne, and U.S. Rep. John Conyers spoke about the legacy of the slave trade at Sundance on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
That said, despite the short time, the conversation was illuminating. Traces of the Trade painfully excavates the legacy of the slave trade through the story of the De Wolf family — the largest slave trading family in the U.S. Katrina, a De Wolf descendent, was shocked when she discovered this legacy. So, to cut a long, fascinating and brave story short, she invited relatives to go on a journey to examine the legacy of the trade and the inherited complicity that has seeped through subsequent generations.
Read more after the jump...
P.O.V. correspondent Kris Wilton spent the day with cinematographer-turned-documentary-director Ellen Kuras at the Sundance Film Festial on Sunday, January 20.
Ellen Kuras is a legendary director of photography who has worked with an impressive array of directors, including Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Michel Gondry on some of the most stunning films of the last twenty years. She's the unprecedented three-time winner of the Best Dramatic Cinematography award at Sundance — for Swoon (1992), Angela (1995), and Personal Velocity (2002) — and she's back in Park City in a big way this year with some exciting new projects. She's here to premiere her directorial debut, the feature-length documentary Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), which was co-produced by P.O.V. | American Documentary, and will air on P.O.V. in 2008/2009. She is also busy promoting one of the festival's hottest tickets, Gondry's latest effort, Be Kind Rewind, which stars Jack Black, Mos Def and Mia Farrow, for which she was the director of photography. (This is Ellen's third collaboration with Gondry: she also shot his music documentary Block Party and the Academy Award-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.)
Ellen Kuras being interviewed at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
You might think a day in the life of this dynamic, award-winning cinematographer/director would be a non-stop whirlwind of parties and business meetings, but half of this day was actually spent shepherding family and crew members around Park City and worrying whether everyone was having fun. Over the course of the several hours I spent with Ellen, her colleagues and family described a person who is focused and driven, who can juggle multiple projects and get the impossible done, but who is above all, kind, generous and devoted to taking care of the people around her.
At the end of a panel hosted by Women in Film on Sunday afternoon, fellow speaker and actress Patricia Clarkson showed the audience that she was wearing an extra festival badge that Ellen had given her that said "Ellen Kuras." "How cool would it be to be Ellen Kuras for a day?" Clarkson asked. The answer, I found out after spending some time with her, was "Very exhausting, but very cool!"
Here's a rundown of a day with Ellen Kuras at Sundance.
7:30 - Ellen is sharing a house with her brother Jeffrey Kuras and sisters Carolyn Landolfo and Pam Kuras (who was the accountant for Nerakhoon) in Park City. As soon as she gets up, she makes coffee for everyone and spends some time chatting with her sisters. She makes sure that everyone knows the plan for the day before getting in her car to pick up Nerakhoon co-director Thavisouk Phrasavath.
10:00 - Ellen and Thavi are interviewed live by the Sundance Channel about Nerakhoon. Following the interview, she goes back to the house to mobilize the troops. Everyone gets into the car and Ellen plays chauffeur, dropping family and friends off on Main Street, the heart of the festival, before rushing onto her next stop.
Read more after the jump...
Journalist and Doc Soup columnist Tom Roston is at Sundance this week, checking out all the doc-related happenings in Park City.
I'm writing this post while waiting on line for Morgan Spurlock's latest doc, the much anticipated Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? (Sample chatter from other people waiting in the queue: "I love Morgan." "Me too, but I was still thinking of going to eat at McDonald's before this.") Things have been busy here in Park City! I've been meaning to write about the past 36 hours of happenings, but they're piling up like a ten-foot snowdrift.
Here's a quick taste: I saw Anvil: The Story of Anvil by Sacha Gervasi, an incredibly funny and actually very deep documentary about the eponymous heavy metal band from Canada. It plays like This is Spinal Tap — but for real. I also saw Ellen Kuras's Neerakhoon (The Betrayal), about a Laotian family that emigrated to the U.S. Kuras' film is epic — the imagery and pacing reminded me of the work of Terrence Malick. (See pics from the premiere of Nerakhoon on Monday.) I also sent two emissaries to watch Flow: For the Love of Water by Irena Salima and asked them to report back to me. They said the film was a searing dissection of the business of water, and then they made me feel really bad about the bottle of water I was clutching in my hands.
Read more after the jump....
Steven Sebrings's film Patti Smith: Dream of Life premiered at Sundance on Sunday. Steven is a fashion photographer and he has been working on the film for the past twelve years since meeting Patti on a shoot for Spin magazine. Shot entirely on 16mm (unheard of these days), the film is an impressionistic portrait of an artist, a far cry from the standard artist bios one is used to. Full of Smith's poetry, vintage performance and themes of loss and life, Steven brings a visual style that complements Smith's own work. The overall tone is elegiac, and ultimately hopeful. Patti pays tribute to artists who have been a part of her life and an inspiration to her work: Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Dylan, William Blake, Jim Morrison and, of course, her late husband Fred "Sonic" Smith.
During the Q&A Smith and Sebring talked about their collaboration. According to Smith and Sebring trust is the essential element in their relationship that has developed through their many years of working together. The film was enthusiastically received by the audience. Patti's son Jackson (now 25) who was sitting behind me, had the loudest laugh in the theater as he watched himself as a thirteen year old on screen wearing a knight's helmet (you had to be there!) that had been given to him by the band on his birthday.
Patti Smith performing at Sundance
The evening culminated in an amazingly intimate concert by Patti and her band at the overheated Kimball Arts Center — probably the coolest event of the festival (more photos). She gave a dynamic performance including "Gloria" and a wonderful cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which she called a "great American folk song." The film now goes on to screen at the Berlin Film Festival and should have a theatrical release later this year. The film will have its television premiere on P.O.V. in 2009.
We hosted our annual P.O.V. brunch on Sunday — a welcome relief from the hectic pace of screenings, parties and general mischief that seems to be the Sundance routine. First to arrive was Steven Sebring and Patti Smith — an artist who changed my life at a formative stage. Steven's film Patti Smith: Dream of Life is an elegiac composition that beautifully integrates Patti's life as a mother, rock musician, artist and poet, activist and ultimately, as she says, "as a worker." It's been a highlight to meet Patti and spend a few minutes with her. Some of the band — Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty — arrived a little later. The band members have yet to see the film, so the premiere will be the first time. (More on that later.)
The Smith family — Jesse, Patti and Jackson — with filmmaker Steven Sebring
The brunch is a chance to catch up with P.O.V. friends and filmmakers whose work will or has been a part of P.O.V. in the past. P.O.V. alums in attendance included Thomas Allen Harris, Yvonne Welbon, Paul Stekler, Tasha Oldham and Alex Rivera. Alex's debut feature Sleep Dealer is creating a buzz at the festival.
It was a thrill to be able to announce that Traces of the Trade, Katrina Browne's wrenching examination of the legacy of the North's leadership in the slave trade, through her own family's complicity, will be part of P.O.V.'s 2008 lineup. Katrina brought her production team, including Elizabeth Delude-Dix and Jude Ray, and several members of the family including Tom DeWolf, who has written a new memoir based on his experience in the film, Inheriting the Trade (Beacon Press).
Read more after the jump...
Filmmakers Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath premiered their film, Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), earlier today at the Sundance Film Festival. The film chronicles the epic story of a family forced to emigrate from Laos after the chaos of the secret air war waged by the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Kuras has spent the last 23 years chronicling the family's extraordinary journey in this deeply personal, poetic and emotional film. P.O.V. correspondent Kris Wilton was there with her camera to document the event.
Filmmakers Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath embrace after Nerakhoon screening
Nerakhoon will have its national broadcast premiere on P.O.V. later this year on PBS. View the entire photo slideshow on P.O.V.'s Flickr channel.
Journalist and Doc Soup columnist Tom Roston checks in with more news from the Sundance Film Festival.
The first screening I attend at Sundance is a real happening. Saturday afternoon's premiere of American Teen is filmmaker Nanette Burstein's return to Sundance after six years. (Burstein had previously produced The Kid Stays in the Picture, about Paramount producer Robert Evans, which was at Sundance in 2002.)
For American Teen, Burstein spent a year with the kids of a high school in Warsaw, Indiana. Festival programmer John Cooper introduced Burstein as one of our great documentarians who's redefining the genre. The theater was packed and very excited. It's great to see that there's finally a documentary that adds a complex wrinkle to all the teenage junk we can catch 24/7 in reality television land. American Teen is really special: it intimately captures the lives of these kid and then goes a step further by animating their inner lives with some cutting edge animation.
Filmmaker Nanette Burstein (far right) and teens from American Teen at Sundance
It seems like everyone was there — Fox Searchlight president Peter Rice; Michael Barker, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics; and head of U.S. Theatrical for ThinkFilm, Mark Urman, among others. I can't say exactly when documentaries started pulling in all the top dogs of Indiewood, but it's happening in full effect this year.
I spoke with Urman before the movie started and he told me he was excited for it, but he was still humming over Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which he said was fantastic. He indicated, however, that he probably wouldn't be buying its domestic rights for ThinkFilm. "It's complicated," he said. Sure enough, HBO announced this morning that they purchased the rights to the film, which examines the Polanski's sex scandal involving a young girl that occurred thirty years ago.
So, back to the American Teen screening. The lights went down and the movie began. It was especially amusing to watch the lives of these kids — sex, zits and all — unfold on screen as a mother and teenage daughter sitting in front of me repeatedly whispered to each other, aghast and amused at the intimate details revealed in the film.
When the credits rolled, the crowd justifiably went nuts, hooting and hollering. Burstein came up and answered questions with the kids from the film. The highlight was the "geek" in the group, who admitted to not having had a date in the year and a half since the film was shot. "That'll change!" yelled one woman in the crowd to the cheers of the audience. I'm sure these kids will be getting a good/weird taste of celebrity in the days to come.
Journalist and Doc Soup columnist Tom Roston is at Sundance this week, checking out all the doc-related happenings in Park City.
They should call it the Sundoc Film Festival. I get on my flight to Salt Lake City yesterday, and the guy in the row in front of me is wearing a baseball cap and sweatshirt that both say, "Bigger, Stronger, Faster," aka the title of Christopher Bell's documentary about America's win-at-all-costs pressures, as told through his brothers' spiraling into steroid use. Turns out, the man in front of me is the Christopher Bell's dad. He keeps quiet, but proud mom is with him and very forthcoming about a big party Delta Airlines is sponsoring for the film, and how ESPN and other media outlets will be there. It's a strange thing, though, when your son happens to be a documentary filmmaker who has turned his lens on your own family; it can be a mixed blessing. When she describes her other sons' steroid use, she says, "That's not who they are," while slowly squeezing the back of the seat. My conversation with her made me want to see Bigger, Stronger, Faster and decide for myself.
After I land, talk by the baggage claim is about the first three sales acquisitions to be announced — yup, they're all docs. HBO snapped up Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell's The Black List: Volume One, a set of interviews with notable African-Americans; Fortissimo Films nabbed CSNY Déjà Vu, about Crosby, Stills Nash & Young, directed by Neil Young; and Zeitgeist Films bought Up The Yangtze by first-time documentarian Yung Chang, which tells the story of the building of the Three Gorges Dam in China and its economic and personal impact on two young Chinese workers.
It's tempting to think that such fast sales (they were all announced on Thursday, the first day of the festival) were already in the works. And, sure enough, the makers The Black List had a previous relationship with buyer HBO, and that the company had been tracking the film progress. I was told by one person close to the film that the purchase came about "quite naturally."
All three films sound intriguing, but I am most interested in seeing Up the Yangtze. Alas, tonight's screening happens to be at the same time as Gonzalo Arijon's Stranded: I've Come from a Plane that Crashed in the Mountains, the documentary about survival and cannibalism in the Andes that I was planning to go see. Ah, decisions, decisions.
Oh, wait: and this just in: another acquisition was announced this morning, and this one looks to be a totally fresh, on-the-ground purchase; The Weinstein Company bought international rights to Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which gets at the roots of the director's exile that began in the 70s. The film just screened last night.
Things move fast here at Sundance. I'm off for more docs, more parties and more news. I'll be checking back in throughout the week with more tidbits from Sundance, so stay tuned!
Every Friday, journalist Tom Roston checks in and writes about the state of the documentary world in his column, Tom Roston's Doc Soup.
Hey, so enough talk about 2007, the year that was (or wasn't, depending on your perspective): The 2008 documentary season really begins this week with the Sundance Film Festival, which kicked off yesterday. With no less than forty documentaries in the fest this year, it's a documentary-lovers dream. The only danger is to overindulge. I'm used to catching about 20 or so movies during the festival, but this will be the first time I am going to almost exclusively be watching docs. Not sure how that's going to feel, but I'll make sure to bring a lot of Kleenex. That said, when I consider the Sundance films I've already lined up to see, there's an impressively diverse range of subject matter, filmmakers, and tone. Here are just a few of the documentaries that I've got on my radar:
American Teen
Director Nanette Burstein, who co-directed 2002's The Kid Stays in the Picture with Brett Morgen, returns with this in-depth look at four Indiana high school kids. Apparently, this really gets deep into the life of teens, and I am willing to bet Burstein's film is going to be a much-needed antidote to the reality TV programming that gives us a very warped (and artificial) vision of kids today.
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
It's hard to ignore a doc about Thompson, the outrageous drug-addled journalist. It's even more difficult when you see that it's directed by Alex Gibney, the man responsible for the Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and this month's Taxi to the Dark Side. That's three films about three very different subjects. This film merges interviews, film clips, and readings and, like most things Gonzo, should be quite a ride.
Read more after the jump...
WATCHING
Howard Rheingold, Web guru, launched a new video blog this month (from BoingBoing)
Blue Vinyl
P.O.V. alum Judith Helfand's 2002 doc aired on the Sundance Channel this month.
New Hampshire Primary 2008
GuardianFilms' documentary team reports from the U.S.
READING
Robert Redford talks about the Sundance Film Festival's longstanding commitment to documentary film.
Oprah Winfrey To Form Television Network With Discovery Communications (from The New York Times)
For two weeks each January, the film world turns its attention to Park City, Utah. The Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the U.S., brings out the stars, the buyers and filmmakers from around the world. This year's festival will begin on Thursday, January 17.
For documentary filmmakers, having a film selected for the prestigious documentary competition or the world cinema documentary competition is an exciting opportunity to showcase their work to a film-loving audience. Here's a roundup of interviews with some of the documentary filmmakers at Sundance '08. Stayed tuned to the P.O.V. Blog for more coverage from Park City and exclusive interviews from the festival.
Read more after the jump...
WATCHING
e2
A PBS series about the economics of being environmentally conscious.
Beyond the Multiplex: The Year's Best Docs
Critics from Salon.com and IFC take a look at Oscar-worthy documentaries.
READING
The 100 Greatest Websites EW lists their favorite movie and TV websites
Nerakhoon: The Betrayal Director Ellen Kuras
indieWire interviews veteran DP and first-time director Ellen Kuras about her new documentary film.
What's in a Font?
The Atlantic interviews Gary Hustwit, director of Helvetica, about his film on the ubiquitous typeface.
Watching
The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965
P.O.V. Film Screenings
Next week: Waging a Living in Burtonsville, Maryland.
New Yorker: Naked Campaign Shorts
Illustrator Steve Brodner draws the candidates.
Reading
A New Award for Nonfiction
Filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack announces the birth of a new award for docs.
Patti Smith: Dream of Life Director Steven Sebring
indieWire interviews the first time documentary filmmaker.
