Sundance Winners

Documentary Awards, Sundance 2007:

Grand Jury Prize, Documentary:
Manda Bala
Jason Kohn

Audience Award, Documentary:
Hear and Now
Irene Taylor Brodsky

Independent Film Competition, Directing, Documentary:
War/Dance
Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine

The World Cinema Jury Prize, Documentary:
Enemies of Happiness
Eva Mulvad and Anja Al Erhayem

The World Cinema Audience Award for Documentary:
In the Shadow of the Moon
David Sington

World Cinema Competition Documentary Special Jury Prize:
Hot House
Shimon Dotan

Independent Film Competition Documentary Special Jury Prize:
No End in Sight
Charles Ferguson

Excellence in Cinematography, Documentary:
Manda Bala
Heloisa Passos

Independent Film Competition Documentary Jury, Editing:
Nanking
Hibah Sherif Frisina, Charlton McMillian, and Michael Schweitzer

The Shorts Special Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking:
Freeheld
Cynthia Wade

Sundance Video Blog Number Something or Other

Academy Award Nominations, 2007

Documentary Feature:

Deliver Us From Evil
An Inconvenient Truth
Iraq in Fragments
Jesus Camp
My Country, My Country

Documentary (short subject):

The Blood of Yingzhou District
Recycled Life
Rehearsing a Dream
Two Hands

Sundance Rolls On

And on...

Sundance Video Blog Number 5

Number 5:

Sundance Video Blog Number 4

Part the fourth:

Sundance Statistics, 2007

Some Sundance Film Festival statistics:

films:
196 from 7,732 submitted (1 in 40, 2.5%)

documentary features:
42 from 1,362 submitted (1 in 32, 3.0%)

shorts:
71 from 4,445 submitted (1 in 62, 1.5%)

Even More Sundance Documentarians

Even more Sundancers speaking about their documentaries:

Jason Kohn talks about his film "Manda Bala."

Jessica Yu talks about her film "Protagonist."

Dan Sturman and Bill Guttentag talk about their film "Nanking."

More Sundance Documentarians

More Sundancers speaking about their documentaries:

Amir Bar-Lev talks about his film "My Kid Could Paint That."

Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine talk about their film "War Dance."

Charles Ferguson talks about his film "No End in Sight."

Daniel Karslake talks about his film "For the Bible Tells Me So."

Rory Kennedy talks about her film "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib."

Sundance Video Blog Number 3

Number 3:

Sundance Video Blog Number 2

I like this one. I hope they can keep this up....

Sundance Video Blog Number 1

Well, let's see how these go...

Sundance Starts

The Sundance Film Festival is starting and all indications are that it will be a huge year for documentary film.

This year there's a Sundance YouTube Channel, and profiles of directors with films in the U.S. Documentary Competition are already posted:

Irene Taylor Brodsky on her film "Hear and Now"

David Stenn on his film "Girl 27"

Marco Williams on his film "Banished"

Friday night the "Festival Dailies" start on Sundance Channel itself. All I need now is snow....

Saturday in the Chelsea Galleries

Yesterday I went to the Chelsea galleries.

Highlights: Henry Wessel at both Robert Mann and Charles Cowles. Also, of course, Elliott Erwitt at Edwynn Houk Gallery.

Lowlight: Tracey Moffat at Stux Gallery. Nice space, a photographer I have liked in the past, fun window display -- but in the end a laughably bad show that comes off as an undergraduate project propped up by a big budget.

And, yes, the branch of photography where a person stands before the camera with a surprisingly empty look on their face continues unabated. Any suggestions for ending this tradition are welcomed.

YouTube Update

For better or worse, the three videos I cut for New York Institute of Photography roll onward:

Project Redeye: Halloween Challenge has 1,279,259 views and is currently the 17th most-watched "arts and animation" video of all time on youtube.

Project Redeye: Holiday Challenge has 6,222 views.

About NYIP has 1,070 views.

I am not sure what lesson is to be learned from this. I'm considering whether it may make sense to create a youtube channel and post my own work there at some point.

It is, however, a "game" you win by getting frontpaged and getting a lot of views -- and if I'm thinking about that rather than other concerns, am I really making the best work possible? Also, having watched carefully the type of comments made on youtube.com, is it really a venue for the type of work I like?

Captain Obvious and The New York Times

I'm quoted in yesterday's New York Times. There's a column about online photography sites titled How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Now a Major Motionless Book by Alina Tugend, and in it I say something fairly straightforward:

This social aspect will be the next big leap in photography, Mr. Fisher predicted.

“A lot of people are right now pulling cameras out of their boxes that they got for the holidays,” he said. “They’re the wave of people right in the middle of the crowd. They’ve now accepted digital as a valuable thing. I think for many it will develop as their hobby or social interest as music once was — as their creative outlet.”

Of course, I've been saying that for 10 years, so I'm not actually late to the party....

One Last Thing

Have you ever been in the middle of telling a story and realized you don't remember the punchline? I was telling someone about how lucky I'd been this last term about seeing great documentary filmmakers talk about their work, and I was detailing some of the highlights:

Frederick Wiseman analyzing his editing choices in a talk at the Walter Reade Theater; D.A. Pennebaker, at The New School, discussing shooting the performances in Monterey Pop; Peter Davis discussing the controversy over "The Selling of the Pentagon"; Richard Leacock at IFC Center showing some rarely-seen films and telling all the stories that went with them.... (At this last event, my impression was that half the documentary filmmakers in New York were in attendance: Michael Moore stood by the back door; Albert Maysles rushed in late and Pennebaker, as he walked to the stage, made a crack about his wind-blown hair.)

While I was telling these stories, I began to wonder what the point was. I don't really believe standing in the same room with some of the greats lets any magic rub off of them and onto you, so it wasn't about that. Was it about the fact that they were all still working, and at as high a level as ever? (I believe they all have films in progress or about to come out.)

After some consideration, I think the point was this: seeing the real people who made the films talk about them made me demystify the way these films were created. Films are made out of choices at the camera and at the editing station; and these choices come out of the experiences and ideas of the people who make them. No more, no less.

Notebook on Santas and Elves

Happy holidays. Working on a few new things....

Above: an image from Santacon 2006.

1,178,284 or so

Well, the original Project Redeye video is now the "18th Most Viewed (All Time) in Arts & Animation" on YouTube.

So, here's Project Redeye 2: "Holiday Photo Challenge" edition.

New School Faculty Overrun Sundance

I am impressed:

Five faculty members from the Department of Media Studies and Film will have their work shown at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, to be held in January 2007. Another faculty member Lewis Erskine will serve on the Documentary Jury. The five films and their directors/media faculty include:

Everything's Cool, directed by Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold, examines a group of self-appointed global warming messengers who are on a high-stakes quest to find the iconic image, proper language, and points of leverage to help the public go from embracing the urgency of the problem to creating the political will necessary to move to an alternative energy economy. World Premiere.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, directed by Rory Kennedy and edited by Media Studies/Documentary Studies faculty member Sari Gilman, looks at the abuses that occurred at the infamous Iraqi prison in the fall of 2003 by using direct personal narratives of perpetrators, witnesses, and victims to probe the effects of the abuses on all involved. World Premiere.

Hot House/Israel, directed by Shimon Dotan, provides an unprecedented look at how Israeli prisons have become the breeding ground for the next generation of Palestinian leaders as well as the birthplace of future terrorist threats. North American Premiere.

Freeheld, directed by Cynthia Wade, tells the story of Lieutenant Laurel Hester, who while dying of cancer, fights to leave her pension to her domestic partner, provoking an enormous battle in New Jersey. World Premiere.