Monday Memo: Sundance Sales Start Early

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Malik Bendjelloul’s SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN became the first doc sold following the start of Sundance on Thursday.

The threat of litigation wasn’t enough to scare Magnolia Pictures away from Laura Greenfield’s THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES, which premiered at Sundance on January 19. Magnolia purchased North American distribution rights to the film on January 20, making it the second doc acquisition at the festival. The film centers on the efforts of time share mogul David Siegal and his wife, Jackie, to continue to build the U.S.’s largest single family home after the U.S. economy hits the skids. The film likely benefitted from the wave of publicity that followed the news that Siegal was suing Sundance and Greenfield for defamation just days before the doc’s premiere.

The other acquisition made early in the festival was Sony Pictures Classic’s purchase on January 20 of the North American distribution rights for SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN, the directorial debut of Malik Bendjelloul. The film is about the search for the Detroit-born 70s folk rock musician Sixto Rodriguez, who dropped out of the music scene and was rumored to be dead. SUGAR MAN reportedly earned several standing ovations at an early Friday morning screening, and is already considered by some to be the lead candidate for this year’s Audience Award.

HBO didn’t even wait for Sundance to get started to buy the U.S. broadcast rights to ME @THE ZOO, Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch’s portrait of video blogger Chris Crocker. The cable channel pulled the trigger on ME @THE ZOO (which takes its name from the first video ever uploaded to YouTube) on January 17, a full two days before the start of the festival. HBO also jumped on the remake rights for INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE by first-time filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and is planning to use the film as the source material for a half-hour scripted comedy show.




Titicut Follies: Torment at the Hands of the State

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Frederick Wiseman speaks at Stranger Than Fiction. Photo by Tony Voisin.

The pattern of dehumanization and humiliation documented by Frederick Wiseman in TITCUT FOLLIES (1967) prefigures the abuses committed by the U.S. military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by some 30 years. That knowledge makes the film, already disturbing enough on its own, even more difficult to consider; it seems the brutalization of the prisoners at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane plays out a power dynamic destined to be repeated time and again. Wiseman’s film is an unblinking catalog of the mistreatment that man can commit against fellow human beings who have been shorn of their free will. The most damning evidence of the complete moral failure by the state of Massachusetts to care for their charges came from the state itself, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court ordered the film banned and the negative destroyed on the grounds that Wiseman had violated obscenity laws and privacy concerns in making it. It took 25 years for that ruling to finally be fully overturned. What still remains to be resolved is how the cycle of prisoner abuse can be escaped. Following the screening, friend of Stranger Than Fiction Hugo Perez spoke with Wiseman. Click “Read more” below for the Q&A.




Monday Memo: Steve James Wins Big at Cinema Eye Honors

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Steve James at the Cinema Eye Honors awards ceremony. Photo by Simon Luethi.

Steve James is having a pretty good week. Despite being overlooked by the Academy, the accolades continue to pile up for his critically lauded film, THE INTERRUPTERS. First James cleaned up at Wednesday’s Cinema Eye Honors (CEH), becoming the first filmmaker to win the awards for both best direction and best nonfiction feature. Then on Thursday, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) named him a nominee for its award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary.

After taking the stage to accept his CEH award for best direction, James made sure to thank his subjects, two of whom were in attendance. “On this film, it was just an incredibly inspiring experience spending a year plus on the streets with the interrupters themselves,” James said. “Their courage and honesty and belief in this film, and the work that they do is one of the most inspiring experiences I’ve ever had in my life.”

The CEH crowd also honored Judith Hetherington, mother of late photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, with a standing ovation after she accepted the award for best short film for Hetherington’s DIARY. “He’s a huge loss, and to honor his life, his friends and family and all those that he touched are committed to helping other students, fellow artists and those in the Third World so that they can benefit from his legacy,” she said.




The Interrupters: Stopping Violence at its Source

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From left, Hugo Perez, director Steve James and subject Ameena Matthews. Photo by Simon Luethi.

The conflict mediators that work for the nonprofit CeaseFire are exceedingly literal in describing themselves as interrupters. CeaseFire’s model treats violence like a disease, and their work is centered on stopping the transference of violence at its source. For the interrupters, that often means their work puts them directly in harm’s way—sometimes directly between an armed assailant and their intended victim. In his film, THE INTERRUPTERS, director Steven James shows us that the mediators are driven to do their work by something deeper than a simple desire to do good. Many interrupters carry around with them the weight of their crimes, committed in former lives as stick up kids, gangbangers and thieves. For those, conflict mediation is a way to attempt to exorcise the demons while staying true to the code of the streets. For other interrupters, the work is an attempt to save a younger generation from the pain they had to suffer growing up hard on the block. There’s no easy solution for solving the problem of endemic violence that besieges the Chicago South Side neighborhood of Englewood. Residents have been suffering from an unraveling of the social fabric for far too long. The lack of employment opportunity accompanying the U.S.’s wider recession is not news to them, it’s a reality that they have been forced to deal with for years. Following the screening friend of Stranger Than Fiction Hugo Perez spoke with James and film subjects Ameena Matthews and Cobe Williams. Click “Read more” below for the Q&A.




Michael Moore Addresses Oscar Doc Changes at Cinema Eye Honors

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Michael Moore at the Cinema Eye Honors award ceremony. Photo by Simon Luethi.

At Wednesday’s Cinema Eye Honors (CEH) awards, filmmaker Michael Moore, attending as a presenter, took a few minutes to speak to the audience about his push for changes to the Academy’s method of nominating and voting for documentary feature films:

When I got on the board of governors, I said I’m here representing our branch of documentary filmmakers. I’d like to do two things. I’d like to introduce a democracy movement to this branch and end the old system of committees, secret committees, byzantine numbering systems, and just make it open and let everybody vote. After a year and a half of studying it and discussing it, the 20-member executive committee of the documentary branch voted unanimously to finally end this system that I think, personally, has kept so many great filmmakers from even being nominated. We sit here in the room tonight with Frederick Wiseman and Al Maysles. Or Steve James, the most famous case being Hoop Dreams. So this has needed to be fixed for a long time.

Beginning next year, everybody in the branch will pick the five nominees, and then the entire Academy will be able to vote for best documentary. They don’t have to show up on those two nights in the two theaters, when they show all five films. It ends up 200 people pick the Oscar winner. I said to the board of governors, when the presenter comes out on the stage, in my case it was Diane Lane, and says that the Academy has decided the best documentary this year is such and such film, it really isn’t the Academy, is it? It’s less than five percent of the Academy, and that really should change. We should be like the other branches, and we should have more involvement. And we should have more documentary filmmakers in the documentary branch. So the rules got passed, and now it will be opened up.




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Upcoming Screenings

Jan 31: GIRL WITH BLACK BALLOONS

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STF Winter Season Opening Night Winner of DOC NYC 2012 Metropolis Jury Prize “Like “Grey Gardens” reimagined by Chris Marker, “Girl With Black Balloons” maintains a hypnotic effect, evolving into ...
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Feb 7: UNFINISHED SPACES

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“Cuba will count as having the most beautiful academy of arts in the world.” —Fidel Castro (1961) Cuba’s ambitious National Art Schools project, designed by three young artists in the wake of ...
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Feb 14: ZELIG

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”[Allen’s] new, remarkably self-assured comedy is to his career what… Berlin Alexanderplatz is to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s and… Fanny and Alexander is to Ingmar Bergman’s ... Zelig is not only ...
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Feb 21: TOOTIE’S LAST SUIT

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“Tootie represented a kind of soulfulness in the community, and a certain type of style, and everybody loved him.” – Wynton Marsalis TOOTIE’S LAST SUIT explores the complex relationships, rituals, ...
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Feb 28: THE PROMISE: THE MAKING OF DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

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Description from TIFF 2010 catalog by Thom Powers: The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town takes us into the studio with Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band for the recording of ...
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Mar 6: SMASH HIS CAMERA

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“Famously and successfully sued by Jackie Onassis, and slugged just as famously and successfully by Marlon Brando, denounced from the pulpits of punditry for decades, Galella has been a man easy to ...
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Mar 13: THE MAN NOBODY KNEW: IN SEARCH OF MY FATHER, CIA SPYMASTER WILLIAM COLBY

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A son’s riveting look at a father whose life seemed straight out of a spy thriller, THE MAN NOBODY KNEW: IN SEARCH OF MY FATHER, CIA SPYMASTER WILLIAM COLBY uncovers the secret world of a legendary ...
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Mar 20: GIRL MODEL

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Description from TIFF 2011 catalog by Thom Powers: Girl Model shows a rarely seen side of the fashion industry. The film brings a novelist’s eye for emotional and psychological complexity to its ...
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