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

FULL FRAME FILM FESTIVAL |
By Ryan Koo

Now in its 13th year, the documentary-only Full Frame Film Festival (April 8-11) takes place in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. The city of Durham is historically a tobacco town, moving slowly but steadily towards an uncertain future: while its tobacco warehouses are being converted to swank lofts, downtown office space is readily available with a seemingly high vacancy rate. The festival is very much a cultural cornerstone for the city, and as a result Full Frame means a lot to Durham.

As of late, however, Durham also means a lot to Full Frame: while in previous years the festival’s most visible sponsors were non-locals like the New York Times, HBO, and A&E (from which the festival still enjoys some support), the main sponsors today are local institutions like Duke University and the City of Durham itself. As a result, the festival has slimmed down from its 2005 incarnation, when Martin Scorcese came to town and the festival packed twenty more films into venues spread around downtown. Despite less sponsors, less films, and less screening venues, however, 2010 ticket sales were reportedly just as brisk, and most of the films I attended played to packed houses.

Having all 100 of the festival’s selections within walking distance makes it a more intimate affair, one where you’re likely to spot festival linchpins D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus eating lunch, watching movies, and standing in line with the rest of the patrons. The main screening venue, the Carolina Theater — the last of Durham’s original theaters, built in 1926 — also fronts a sizable courtyard perfect for milling about, provided the weather is nice (which it was this year), and as such Durham’s festival feels much more centralized and relaxed than many. And of course there is the much-vaunted southern setting and hospitality, which make Full Frame an important festival not just because it’s documentary-only, but also because it takes place in a city that, not unlike independent film, is figuring out its future on the fly.
Documentaries have what PBS’s Yance Ford referred to on a funding panel as a “demographic … 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