Today was a beautiful day. The sun was blazing, sky was clear. Cameron and I decided to go for a bike ride. We knew that the river drives (two main roads that go along either side of the Schuykill river in Philadelphia) were closed yesterday due to flooding, but it seemed like such a perfect day that we decided to go along our normal route on the east side of the river. We had almost reached the falls bridge when our ride ended. The bike path and the road that ran beside it had become one with the river. It was like a scene from An Inconvenient Truth had found its way into our real lives. Joggers, rollerbladers, cyclists, and dog walkers were stopped in their tracks. We turned around with the rest of them, and headed back towards home. A drip, then another. Suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, it was pouring down enormous rain drops. We found shelter in the waterworks, the neoclassical fortress that welcomes you to Philadelphia. People came running from all directions, forming a community of shelter-seekers. The rain poured down and splashed in the river, and lightening bolts darted across the sky, but the sun continued to shine, and a rainbow appeared over the art museum. I was reminded of the “postmodern sunsets” from Don Delillo’s White Noise. But it was beautiful.

technorati tags:Philadelphia, Global Warming, Rain, Flooding, An Inconvenient Truth

Now that Silverdocs is over, I am going to start using this space to write about my personal experiences as a documentary filmmaker–the hardship and rewards, moral and ethical questions, festival gossip, etc. Whenever life permits me the time to actually see documentary films, I’ll also continue to write brief reviews. I may occasionally digress into other subjects, but know that it is only a temporary diversion. This website is dedicated to the discussion of documentary filmmaking.

The 2006 Silverdocs AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Film Festival Sterling Feature Grand Jury award went to JESUS CAMP by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, who also took last year’s award for their film BOYS OF BARAKA. ( Read more about the film in my CINEMA MINIMA review ). Honorable mention went to CHAIRMAN GEORGE, a film about a Greek-Canadian who sings in Chinese and wants to perform at the Olympics, by Daniel Cross and Mila Aung-Thwin. The best short was the Polish film SEEDS by Wojciech Kasperski, and the best music film award went to ROLLING LIKE A STONE, by Swedish directors Stefan Berg and Magnus Gertten.

“The Creator and the creative process go hand-in-hand,” says Daniel Smith in the introduction to JL Aronson’s film DANIELSON: A FAMILY MOVIE (OR, MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE HERE). The film explores the faith and sounds of this fresh, enigmatic Christian indy rock band, made up of Daniel Smith (who refers to himself as Danielson because he is the son of the lord), his brothers and sisters, his wife, a childhood friend, the friend’s wife, and his sister’s husband. The splendid Sufjan Stevens toured with the band before making his first critically acclaimed album, so he is also featured heavily in the film. Stop-motion animation, cartoons, home archives, interviews, verite scenes, and concert footage combine to create a portrait of a true artistic original. Listen to the band and see the movie.

World Premiere of ADDICTED TO OIL: Thomas L. Friedman Reporting, directed by Kenneth Levis followed by a conversation with Thomas Friedman

“We are funding both sides of the war on terror,” Thomas Friedman begins, one side through tax dollars, the other by buying oil. The New York Times opinion columnist touches on all his favorite subjects in this treatise on renewable energy—globalization, the environment, the Middle East. One of his central premises is the theory of the inverse relationship between the price of oil and the pace of freedom, explained using the examples of Bahrain and Lebanon. In Bahrain, when the oil started drying up, democracy began to blossom; Lebanon has never had oil and has always been freer than other Arab nations. The film looks at the various possible sources of renewable energy—solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol—and shows the progress that is being made on each. Government and corporate impediments seem to be a major problem. Friedman points out that Brazil makes enough sugar ethanol to power their own country and sell surplus to the US, but the US government has placed a 100% tariff on it. The tariff on crude oil is 0%. Friedman works to reposition renewable energy as a patriotic, capitalistic issue of geopolitical import, rather than something girly, marginal, and vaguely French. “Green is the new red white and blue,” he concludes.

Thomas Friedman serves as the New York Time’s moderate editorialist, but if you have every wondered about his political loyalties, his speech made it clear that they lie squarely with the Dems. “We can’t give up on Bush,” he said in the Q & A session after the screening, “we don’t have two and a half years to waste.” But, he says later, when asked what individuals can do to help solve the problem, “the most important thing is, we have to elect someone who tells the truth.” “It’s amazing,” he says “what happens when you challenge people to do the impossible, and what doesn’t happen when you tell people to go shopping.”

ADDICTED TO OIL: Thomas L. Friedman Reporting will have its television premiere on the Discovery Times Channel on Saturday, June 24th, at 10 pm EST. If you don’t already have solar panels on your roof and drive a Prius, you better watch.

On Friday, June 16, 1976, Tsietsi Mashinini led a student uprising against the Apartheid government in Soweto, the depressed black townships of southwest Johannesburg. Days of unrest ended with tear gas and open police fire, which led to the deaths of over 500 people. But a movement was born. Director Portia Rankoane was 13 years old at the time, and Tsietsi was her hero. But through the years, his name slipped out of the public discourse, and he died in exile under somewhat mysterious circumstances. In commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the June 16th uprising, Portia Rankoane looks at the events that led up to and followed that day through archival footage of the protests and interviews with Tsietsi’s family and friends, including his ex-wife who now lives in the DC area. Unfortunately, the producer explained, they finished editing the film about 3 hours before they got on the plane in South Africa to head to Washington DC for the premiere, and this was evident in the cut that we saw. Still, the film told a powerful, important story. The audience, which included many South Africans, a Liberian woman, and a man from Sierra Leone, was extremely grateful for this African perspective on a story from colonial South Africa.

Gore’s speech, about the empowerment that comes with the ability to write and create media, echoed a lot of the themes addressed in our film, The Alphabet Book, so I was determined to try to slip him a copy of our trailer at the cocktail party which followed his presentation. It’s not at all in my nature to try to do something like that, but I honestly thought that he’d be interested. I made several aborted attempts to approach him before finally managing to shake his hand.

The guy was amazing. As I told him a bit about our film, he sipped his wine and listened with what seemed to me like an honest interest. The he started asking questions. “Did they use a phonetic Alphabet?” he asked. “Yes, and this was a conscious decision made because they wanted to be able to transition easily to English.” I explained. “You know what Ataturk did, right?” he said. We discussed how Ataturk had decided that the Turkish language should be written in a Latin rather than Persian script, and overnight, Turkey had joined the West. Then he recommended a book called “The Alphabet and the Goddess” which talks about how the introduction of alphabets has altered human cognition. I was completely awed by his willingness and ability to talk in such depth about an obscure subject to a total nobody at a cocktail party. He accepted the DVD of our trailer, promised to take a look at it, and suggested that I submit a piece to Current TV.

Former Vice President Al Gore, whose film An Inconvenient Truth is now in theaters, presented the keynote speech at the Silverdocs AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Film Festival.

Gore opened with a few self-deprecating jokes, then launched into a whirlwind history of how media has been used to affect political change from the Guttenberg to the Internet (well, pre-Guttenberg actually—he noted the fact that the Koreans and Chinese had actually been using movable type for centuries). Gore was witty, inspiring, and highly intellectual. My jaw dropped hearing a main-stream American politician refer to Habermas and Adorno in a public forum. He clearly knew his audience. The speech, which focused on the idea that in order for democracy to thrive the people have to be a part of the national conversation, passed through the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the American Revolution, the Second World War, and Mussolini’s assertion that radio was his most powerful weapon, before arriving at 1980, when America elected an actor as president. “All questions of fact become questions of power,” Gore said, quoting Theodor Adorno. At times, such as classical Greece, Renaissance Europe, and revolutionary America, the people have been empowered by the fact that they were a part of the conversation. But the age of print dominance ended in the 1960s, and “television, until now, has been more medieval monastery than Guttenberg.” In Medieval times, only monks could read and write, but after the invention of the printing press, those skills became widespread. Likewise, television has always been a medium practiced and controlled by a select few. But we are now at a crucial moment where people finally have access to the tools needed to participate. As documentary filmmakers, Gore concludes, “we have an opportunity to fix the democracy crisis and restart the conversation in America, to recreate a marketplace of ideas through documentary film.”

JESUS CAMP by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

Driving along a middle-American road lined with fast food restaurants and gas stations, a conflict is introduced via radio—President Bush announces that Sandra Day O’Conner has just resigned from the Supreme Court; the station changes and a Christian evangelist proclaims that now is the time to reclaim America for Christ.

Next we are at a meeting of evangelicals led by Becky Fisher, a Pentecostal children’s minister. Becky invites the children to come to a summer camp. Before camp begins, the film follows three precocious alpha-children who become main characters along with Becky herself. Becky talks a bit about why she ministers to children: “they are so open, they are so usable in Christianity,” she says, “I want to see young people as committed to Jesus Christ as they are to Islam.”

At camp, the children sing songs about Jesus, speak in tongues, and are introduced to some of the major political questions of our time from an evangelical perspective. The kids cry for aborted babies and learn that according to the Old Testament, Harry Potter should have been put to death. The children evangelize themselves, imploring strangers at a bowling alley or in the park to accept Jesus. One child preacher proclaims “I really feel that we are a key generation to Jesus coming back.”

The film is truly eye-opening for those of us who have lived our lives on either coast and rarely encounter members of the 30 million strong American evangelical movement. The most striking element is the real passion and fervor of these children, which is visible in their faces and audible in their eloquent words. The depth of their faith is clear.

Credits for this film go almost entirely to talented women. The cinematography is intimate and skillful, the editing tight and clean, if a bit heavy-handed. The directors, who explained in the Q&A that they didn’t know any born-again Christians before this, managed to maintain an open rapport with their characters while allowing the audience to laugh at them, an impressive feat. In fact, they explained, the characters feel that the film is helping them get out their message about Jesus Christ.

Silverdocs Day 1

Silverdocs: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Film Festival opened Tuesday, June 13, 2006, with the East Coast premiere of BOFFO! TINSELTOWN’S BOMBS AND BLOCKBUSTERS by Bill Couturie and a gala at the Discovery Channel’s Silver Spring Headquarters.

Many of the documentarians in the audience lamented the ironic fact that Silverdocs had to open with a film about big blockbuster movies, featuring mainstream stars such as Danny Devito, George Clooney, and Jody Foster. Still, the film offers some words of wisdom for aspiring filmmakers of all stripes. Made in honor of the 100th anniversary of Variety Magazine, BOFFO! TINSELTOWN”S BOMBS AND BLOCKBUSTERS takes a humorous look at big studio movies and why some succeed while others flop. Why Jaws? Why The Godfather? And why not so many other films that we no longer remember? “When an airline crashes, they usually say it was a series of failures” Morgan Freeman explains in a deep, deadpan voice. But the general conclusion seems to be that no one really knows.

The screening was followed by a reception in the lobby of Discovery Headquarters, attended by filmmakers, journalists, and other guests of the festival, and complete with a welcoming band, hors d’oeuvres, and free-flowing cocktails.

Wednesday’s schedule lists 10 feature films, including the DC premieres of JESUS CAMP by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, directors of the highly acclaimed BOYS OF BARAKA, and AMERICAN BLACKOUT, by Ian Anaba, with Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the film’s main character, in attendance.