7TH ANNUAL AFI-DISCOVERY CHANNEL SILVERDOCS DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
On Monday June 15th, Sky Sitney, SILVERDOCS’ director of programming and newly appointed artistic director, will usher in the seventh iteration of the event that AJ Schnack, the director of this year’s Centerpiece Screening Convention, calls “the most important documentary festival in the United States.”
Silver Spring, Maryland is the Candyland, one might say, of documentary filmmaking and factual television in the US, for it is the town that The Discovery Channel built. SILVERDOCS also partners with the American Film Institute to gather together not only massive local audiences from the Washington, DC-area, but most of the shining lights of nonfiction cinema that reside in this country, and quite a few others that will come from abroad.
The festival will open with Kristopher Belman’s More Than a Game (still from film pictured), already being touted as this generation’s Hoop Dreams. On Monday the 22nd, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry will close the film program. In between those two events, 120 other films will exhibit representing 58 countries selected from close to 2,000 submissions. There are several competitions including the Sterling US Feature, the Sterling World Feature, Best Music Documentary, shorts honors, and other special recognitions. To read about all the films in competition, click here.
Concurrently, there will also be the five-day International Documentary Conference providing a chance for industry guests and other visitors to listen to the international nonfiction community discuss latest trends in craft, funding, distribution and audience engagement. This year’s program will focus on young up-and-coming filmmakers and media artists as they have an opportunity to explore “Storytelling In An Always On World.” Tom Bernard, Sony Pictures Classics co-president and co-founder, will deliver this year’s keynote, the title of which is “The Future is Strange.” That’s reassuring, somehow.
There will be many famous faces milling about: Muhammad Ali will make an appearance on Tuesday the 16th to present Pete McCormack’s Facing Ali. On Wednesday, the aforementioned Centerpiece Screening will world-premiere. Convention is an ensemble effort from a crack team of documentary superstars, all of whom gathered in Denver last summer to portray the collective efforts of their subjects to mount one of the biggest events of the past decade, the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Shooting under Schnack’s orchestration were directors Laura Poitras (My Country, My Country), Paul Taylor (We Are Together), Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar (A Lion in the House), and Daniel Junge (They Killed Sister Dorothy). Schnack says, “SILVERDOCS is a festival with which I have a strong history, so it’s a real honor to be chosen as the Centerpiece Screening for this year’s festival. Also, it’s hard to imagine a better place to premiere a film about the planning and hosting of last year’s Democratic National Convention than at the doorstep to our nation’s capital.” A panel discussion with the entire Convention team will precede the film’s début, and a Town Hall Meeting will take place afterwards with filmmakers, subjects and other special guests, moderated by NPR’s Tell Me More host, Michel Martin.
On Thursday the great Albert Maysles will be honored by the Charles Guggenheim Symposium, an award created to honor the legacy of Guggenheim, a four-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker. Barbara Kopple, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and other special guests will be there to pay tribute to Maysles. He told me that he was delighted to receive this award, “especially since it carries the Guggenheim name. Charles Guggenheim was a talented filmmaker and a good friend. It was a friendship I valued, as I do this award. Making documentaries, we both felt the knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and, therefore possibly, love one another. It’s been our way of making the world a better place.”
There will be many SILVERDOCS veterans returning this year; however, there will also be a slate of newly discovered talent appearing at the fest for the first time. Even though Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly’s beautifully-realized The Way We Get By has been going great guns on the festival circuit, garnering well-deserved rave reviews and prizes, they say that for them “SILVERDOCS is a terrific opportunity for our work to be seen by some of the top documentary filmmakers in the industry.” Artist Renzo Martens will be exhibiting his brilliant film for the first time in the US. Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty opened the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam last fall. “I am very pleased the film is finally going to be shown in the US. However much Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty may deal with Congo, it deals a million times more with us, our empire, the attitudes that allow us to maintain it, and an arts discourse that puts everything into question–except for the things we ought to question.”
There will be many other gems there as well, both classics and new fare; check the program listings and full festival schedule by visiting: http://silverdocs.bside.com/2009/schedule/week/type/film.
Look for more SILVERDOCS coverage on this blog in the coming week. I will be filing a report or two from Silver Spring, as well as a post-fest wrap-up with all the 2009 award winners, and more.
