IFP PARTNERS WITH UN AND HBO FOR ENVISION

This past weekend, the documentary as a tool for change was discussed at “Envision: Addressing Global Issues Through Documentary,” a forum co-sponsored by the IFP in partnership with the United Nations Department of Public Information.

In her introductory remarks, Joana Vicente, IFP’s executive director, said that the goal of the event was to unite the “filmmaking community with the activist [community].” It was a sentiment echoed by Kiyo Akasaka, the Under-Secretary-General for Communications at the UN who encouraged the activists and filmmakers in the attendance to partner with each other “to envision a better world” and “meet the needs of the world’s poorest people.”

During his keynote speech, the legendary activist and singer, Harry Belafonte cited media as one of the most powerful tools in the activist arsenal, noting that just this Spring, “little devices have connected people without apparent ideology other than a thirst for freedom, enabling people to rebel against repression.” Belafonte announced HBO as a new partner for Envision and introduced Sheila Nevins, the head of documentary programming for the channel.

Nevins presented that night’s film, The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical, a doc about a choir of children from the slums who were selected to perform at one of India’s most prestigious concert halls. Nevins praised the film’s message that “people can rise, but someone has to orchestrate it for them.” Capping the evening was a performance by the P.S. 32 Chorus, whose rousing elementary school enthusiasm left few dry eyes.

Envision spent its second day getting down to the brass tacks of how to implement change. Hugh Evans, the very young, very enthusiastic co-founder of the Global Poverty Project, encouraged the audience to join him in the pursuit of his goal “to live in a world where a child never dies due to a lack of a thirty-cent immunization.”

He reminded the audience, “in the age of fast, international travel, each one of us has a stake in preventing disease throughout the world.” It was a presentation that was as gonzo in its hope as it was convincing … Read the rest

LUCY WALKER, “COUNTDOWN TO ZERO”

By Damon Smith

Since her widely acclaimed first feature Devil’s Playground debuted at Sundance in 2002, London native Lucy Walker (one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film that year) has distinguished herself as a resourceful documentarian with a discerning eye for character detail. A study of Amish adolescents sampling the forbidden fruits of the modern world during “rumspringa,” an elective time spent away from the strictures of their traditional religious community, Playground was an insightful, humanizing portrait of a little-seen, faintly understood social milieu. For her follow-up in 2006, Blindsight, Walker again took on an uncommon challenge, trailing a group of sightless Tibetan teens attempting to scale the treacherous Lhakpa Ri peak of Mount Everest under the more experienced guidance of a blind climber. Even prior to venturing into documentary, and not long after she’d left NYU’s graduate film program, Walker’s talent was already apparent, as she earned two Daytime Emmy nominations for her work on the children’s TV program Blue’s Clues. More recently, at Sundance 2010, Walker was one of the rare filmmakers to unveil two features simultaneously at the festival. Waste Land is a profile of renowned artist Vik Muniz as he creates art out of garbage at the world’s largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, collaborating with other trash pickers. While this film, winner of an Amnesty International Prize at the Berlinale in February, merits all the praise it has received, her other equally compelling new doc, Countdown to Zero, has an urgency that cannot be ignored.

The threat of nuclear annihilation may seem like a relic of the past, a Cold War hangover that lingers in the minds of first-strike warmongers or high-strung, atavistic nuts, but Countdown to Zero (produced by An Inconvenient Truth‘s Lawrence Bender and funded by Participant Media and World Security Institute) makes a very compelling case for why disarmament should be at the forefront of our geopolitical thinking today. Speaking with an impressive roster of nuclear scientists, military strategists, authors, physicists, and former heads of state—including Pervez Musharraf, Tony Blair, and Mikhail Gorbachev—Walker outlines a number … Read the rest

WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER (SUNDAY MORNING LINKS)

By Scott Macaulay

Here are a few links I sent to my Instapaper account and have been reading this weekend.

* When we queried a few filmmakers for a column on software and apps in the new issue of Filmmaker, I noted the number of respondents who had migrated to the Android operating system. I recalled meeting an Android developer at SXSW this year, and he told me he was planning for the platform’s rapid rise. He also said that he was an Apple fan too, and he felt the competition would be a good thing for both platforms. There’s an exchange along these lines going on between Robert Scoble at his Scobleizer blog (“Why I Can’t Kick the iPhone Habit”) and Louis Gray (“Why I Turned in My iPhone and Went Android”). For those interested in the future of mobile platforms and how choice is playing out in the marketplace, they are worth a read. (Related from Barrons: “How Google’s Android Could Overtake Apple’s iPhone.”)

* Via Derren Brown’s blog, night owls are smarter than other people.

* I’m just starting Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, his book on videogaming, and noted Chuck Tryon’s blog post about the history of Roger Ebert’s relationship to the medium and what that has to say about media criticism. (For those who don’t know, Ebert has recently stirred up a lot of debate in the blogosphere over his since revised statement that “Video Games Can Never be Art.”)

* At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow notes Brazil’s copyright law, which levies fines against rightsholders who prevent fair use of their materials through implementation of DRM.

* This is from nine days ago, but if you missed it, the attempt by a law firm and group of producers, including those behind The Hurt Locker, to sue filesharers, has hit legal roadblocks.

* I recently watched Lucy Walker’s well-made and compelling documentary on nuclear weapons, Countdown to Zero. As a kid I was terrified by nuclear war — I still remember watching Fail Safe on TV. As a political science major in college Graham Allison’s … Read the rest

SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL WINNERS ANNOUNCED

The 36th Seattle International Film Festival end this weekend with audiences flocking to the 25 day fest as nearly 20% increase from last year. From May 20-June 13, the festival had shown 408 films. The awards ranged from the audience-selected Golden Space Needle Awards; the five juried Competition Awards, as well as the FIPRESCI Award for Best American Film. Borys Lankosz‘s The Reverse won the narrative Grand Jury Prizee , while Marwencol, directed by Jeff Malmberg, took home the doc Grand Jury Prize.

The winners of the Jury and Audience Awards are below.

SIFF 2010 Best New Director

Grand Jury Prize
The Reverse, directed by Borys Lankosz (Poland, 2009)

Special Jury Mentions
Turistas, directed by Alicia Scherson (Chile, 2009)

Gravity, directed by Maximilian Erlenwein (Germany, 2009)

SIFF 2010 Best Documentary

Grand Jury Prize
Marwencol, directed by Jeff Malmberg (USA, 2010)

SIFF 2010 Short Film Jury Awards

Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Short
Little Accidents, directed by Sara Colangelo (USA, 2009)

Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short
White Lines And The Fever: The Death Of DJ Junebug, directed by Travis Senger (USA, 2010)

Grand Jury Prize for Best Animated Short
The Wonder Hospital, directed by Beomsik Shim (USA, 2010)

Special Jury Mention for Short Animation
Cherry On The Cake, directed by Hyebin Lee (United Kingdom, 2009)

SIFF 2010 FIPRESCI Award for Best American Film

FIPRESCI Award
Night Catches Us, directed by Tanya Hamilton (USA, 2010)

Special Jury Mention
Jenna Fischer in A Little Help

SIFF 2010 Golden Space Needle Audience Awards

Best Film Golden Space Needle Award
The Hedgehog, directed by Mona Achache (France, 2009)

Runners-up (in order):
Mao’s Last Dancer, directed by Bruce Beresford (Australia, 2009)
Micmacs, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (France, 2009)
Cell 211, directed by Daniel Monzon (Spain, 2009)
Hipsters, directed by Valery Todorovsky (Russia, 2009)

Best Documentary Golden Space Needle Award
Ginny Ruffner: A Not So Still Life, directed by Karen Stanton (USA 2010) and Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker (United Kingdom, 2010) (tie)

Runners-up (In … Read the rest

“COUNTDOWN TO ZERO” | director, Lucy Walker

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 25, 11:45 am -- Library Center Theatre, Park City]

There’s one thing that I learned about nuclear weapons that would make it so easy for terrorists to entirely destroy a city that there was a decision to make: Is it a good thing to advertise security vulnerabilities? Am I alerting responsible citizens to civilization’s scariest fault lines in order to demand enlightened leadership to make the world a safer place, or am I giving terrorists their best ideas and causing the deaths of millions of people? It’s not hard to build a nuclear weapon. It’s not beyond a group of a dozen middling grad students, and you see that in the movie. But I found out how one person could blow up a city with their bare hands. And I had to decide whether to include it in Countdown to Zero.

How To Blow Up New York was a working title for the movie, and I admit I liked it, although I understood why it had such a short half life among the rest of the above-the-line crowd. And just in case you’re confused, I don’t really want to blow up New York. On the contrary. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, recalling the first ever nuclear test, quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It’s not something I ever want to say about my work. On the contrary.

I think about professional pride — my own, and how it might compare, say, to that of a wartime nuclear scientist at Los Alamos, or to that of a terrorist today. Sometimes I’ve chosen not to include some of the best scenes in my movies — the ones that would really juice up my career, like the most outrageous scenes of Amish kids doing crystal meth (I’m talking about my first film Devil’s Playground, which also premiered at Sundance). I try to adhere to my own Hippocratic oath, and to make sure that my films first do no harm. Non-maleficence in filmmaking means not including scenes that would … Read the rest

“WASTE LAND” | director, Lucy Walker

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 24, 3:00 pm -- Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City]

In Star Trek there’s the “prime directive,” Starfleet’s code of noninterference. What do filmmakers abide by? Should documentaries interfere with their subjects’ lives? But how could they not?

I don’t believe in objectivity. I observe the observer’s paradox every moment I’m filming. Your presence is changing everything; there’s no mistaking it. And when you’re climbing Everest with eight blind people (as I did for my last film Blindsight) there is no acceptable margin for mistakes.

So now when the artist Vik Muniz and I were conceiving Waste Land, the first decision is whether to make something happen so we can film the results — especially when that something is dangerous. I called it the Everest of art projects — making football-pitch-sized pieces out of garbage in the world’s largest landfill, then attempting to sell photographic prints back to the rich people who threw out the garbage in the first place to raise money for the poorest people in Brazil.

When I first met the catadores, or garbage pickers, they were shockingly cool. One of them finds Machiavelli’s The Prince, teaches himself to read, and ingeniously compares the politics of 16th-century Florence to today’s favela wars in Rio. They never went to school, get their books from the garbage, yet have a keener love of books than most graduates and a better grip on life than most people I know. They told me they chose to work with garbage because, unlike prostitution or drug dealing (their other career options), the only persons they are hurting are themselves. Is the same true of my work? Because once we began filming some of the catadores no longer wanted to go back to the garbage, and as the drama unfolds, is that a good thing or a bad thing, and whose responsibility is that?

Something I love about Waste Land is that the questions poke through the fabric of the movie as things get messy. As with Blindsight, when the decision to climb Everest is dramatically questioned on-camera as things … Read the rest

LUCY WALKER, “BLINDSIGHT”

By Nick Dawson

BLIND CLIMBER DACHUNG IN DIRECTOR LUCY WALKER’S BLINDSIGHT. COURTESY ROBSON ENTERTAINMENT.

The projects Lucy Walker has chosen to take on in her career demonstrate an admirable desire to tell difficult and important stories. The British documentarian was born and raised in London, and during her childhood lost the sight in one of her eyes. However, if anything this only further fueled her fascination with film and other visual media. She was a literature major at Oxford University before winning a Fulbright Scholarship which took her to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied film. During this time, she made a handful of student films and a video for the Cowboy Junkies. (Walker is also a music fanatic who used to DJ as part of the Byzar ensemble, and produced IFC’s 2001 series on rock stars who act, Crossover.) After winning Daytime Emmy nominations in 2001 and 2002 for her directorial work on the children’s animated show Blue’s Clues, Walker had a breakthrough success with her first documentary feature, The Devil’s Playground, a highly acclaimed and revelatory film about Amish teenagers. After a successful film festival run, it played on TV and garnered Walker three further Emmy nods; it is now a hit DVD.

At the center of Walker’s new documentary, Blindsight, are two compelling characters: Connecticut native Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind man to ever reach the summit of Mount Everest, and Sabriye Tenberken, an intrepid blind German woman who founded the first blind school in Tibet — where the blind are treated as outcasts who people believe are being punished for sins of a past life. The film is the tale of Weihenmayer’s attempt to take Tenberken and six of her blind Tibetan students to the top of Lhakpa Ri, a peak next to Everest. Blindsight is not only a touching and beautifully shot movie about the exceptional courage and determination of its principal subjects, but also gives a fascinating insight into the contrasting ways in which different cultures deal with the perceived impediments of blindness.

Filmmaker spoke to Walker about her … Read the rest