To purchase tickets or season pass, click on film page “buy ticket” link, then select 8:00pm.

Mon. Dec. 12 @ 8pm
PINA (in 3-D)
Q&A with dance critic Deborah Jowitt

Wim Wender’s (Wings of Desire, Buena Vista Social Club) dazzling foray into 3D began as a collaboration with legendary choreographer Pina Bausch, an attempt to re-imagine her dance on the big screen. When Bausch died suddenly in 2009, Wenders forged on, turning the project into a moving tribute to her groundbreaking work with the Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble. With longtime members of the troupe re-creating classic pieces, PINA delivers an exhilarating journey deep into Bausch’s world.

Tues. Dec. 13 @ 8pm
BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN
Q&A with directors Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky

BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN follows the story of reluctant activist Daniel Goldstein as he struggles to save his home and community from being demolished to make way for a professional basketball arena and the densest real estate development in U.S. history. Along the way, he falls in love, gets married and starts a family while living in a vacated building located at the heart of the project site. Over the course of seven years, Daniel spearheads the movement against the development plan as he and the community fight tenaciously in the courts, the streets, and the media to stop the abuse of eminent domain and reveal the corruption at the heart of the plan.

Wed. Dec. 14 @ 8pm
SEMPER FI: ALWAYS FAITHFUL
Q&A with director Rachel Libert

As a drill instructor he lived and breathed the “Corps” and was responsible for indoctrinating thousands of new recruits with its motto Semper Fidelis or “Always Faithful.” When Jerry’s nine-year old daughter Janey died of a rare type of leukemia, his world collapsed. As a grief-stricken father, he struggled for years to make sense of what happened. His search for answers led to the shocking discovery of a Marine Corps cover-up of one of the largest water contamination incidents in U.S. history.  SEMPER FI: ALWAYS FAITHFUL follows Jerry’s mission to expose the Marine Corps and force them to live up to their motto to the thousands of soldiers and their families exposed to toxic chemicals. His fight reveals a grave injustice at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune and a looming environmental crisis at military sites across the country.

Thurs. Dec. 15 @ 8pm
IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT
Q&A with directors Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman

In December 2005, Daniel McGowan was arrested by federal agents in a nationwide sweep of environmentalists involved with the Earth Liberation Front– a group the FBI has called America’s “number one domestic terrorism threat.” Charged with burning down two timber facilities years earlier, McGowan faced life in prison for his actions.  Part coming-of-age tale, part cops-and-robbers thriller, IF A TREE FALLS tells the dramatic story of Daniel McGowan and the ELF. And along the way it asks hard questions about environmentalism, activism, and the way we define terrorism. Buy tickets or season pass here (click on 8:00pm)

Mon. Dec. 19 @ 7:30pm (Note 7:30 start)
BUCK
Q&A with director Cindy Meehl

For Buck Brannaman, the charismatic figure who inspired The Horse Whisperer, horses are a mirror of the human soul. This richly textured and visually stunning portrait follows Brannaman as he teaches people to communicate with animals through instinct, dramatically transforming horses-and the humans working with them-through understanding, compassion and respect.

Tues. Dec. 20 @ 8pm
UNDEFEATED
Q&A with directors Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin

Like a real-life Friday Night Lights, this emotional film paints an enthralling portrait, whether or not you care about football. Volunteer coach Bill Courtney takes over a beleaguered high school program in urban Memphis where players are more likely to go to jail than to college. Filmmakers Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin follow the team’s season with masterful camerawork, vivid characters, and gripping plot twists.

Thurs. Jan. 12 @ 8pm
THE INTERRUPTERS
Q&A with director Steve James

Hoop Dreams director Steve James delivers another non-fiction epic set on the streets of Chicago, following an organization called CeaseFire, comprised largely of former gang members who are trying to break the cycle of urban violence. James, teaming up with producer Alex Kotlowitz, author of the acclaimed book There Are No Children Here, immerses us into a world that feels like a real-life version of The Wire.

Stranger Than Fiction: Shoba, you grew up with these movies. When you watch this film, what is your reaction? What is it in this film that resonates with you? And you were talking earlier about other parts of Yugoslav film history that aren’t included in this film that were meaningful to you.

Shoba: This movie is absolutely realistic, there’s nothing much to add to the story. There remain so many interesting movies which have nothing to do with Communism. Numerous movies, in film noir style, movies for children that I grew up with. There were so many things happening. My entire childhood was like in the movie. Tito wanted to see a movie a day, it was like that for us, for children as well. There’s also the dark side of Yugoslavian cinema, of which not much was really said. There were movies that were banned, directors who were imprisoned, like Lazar Stojanović, who made the film Plastic Jesus. Literally after one screening, the film was banned for 30 years, which was not even that radical. This was in 1974, 1975. It was a time when Yugoslavia was at a crossroads. Everybody knew that Tito, sooner or later, would die, and that something will happen. Things were going in that direction. There were little nationalist uprisings in Croatia, Serbia and other republics. People already had ideas about what was going to happen. Artists are the first to react to the situation, and, of course, artists were reacting. And some of those situations were brutal.

STF: David, let me ask you as an outsider to this world, but as a lover of cinema, what were the things that struck you about this film?

David Leitner: I was aware of a lot of the history of that cinema. I was struck on so many levels. I think the reason I’m up here is because I wrote a note to Thom after I learned that the film had been programmed, because it’s a brilliant film. The film is very sly, it wraps a tremendous amount of subtle history in what I call candy coating—a beautiful film score, it’s very well directed. But embedded in this film is the history of the 20th century, and it’s an ugly history. It’s a history that, having been born in the middle of the last century, I can’t escape. In East Germany I saw film studios just like this, where the timbers holding up the flat still had bark on them. I saw the critiques that were threaded through this, and I also saw the sense of loss, the elegy in this, and was extremely moved. The Battle of Neretva is an incredible battle in the war against Germany, and I think it could be made into another kind of film. Tito was a brilliant antifascist, and a brilliant military leader. Now, that doesn’t mean he had to extend his stay and become president for life. There are so many critiques of him in this film. I don’t know what it is with dictators and cinema. I think Lenin said, “For us, cinema is the most important of all the arts.” And it was every single one of them. In our time, it’s Saddam Hussein, it’s Kim Jong Il with his film collection. Stalin inherited Joseph Goebbels library, he watched a film every night. I don’t know what it is, but it has something to do with the 20th century, because cinema doesn’t have the same power that it did. This is the time of social media, when everyone has an HD camera embedded in their phone. In those days, it wasn’t interactive. The projector projected the image out to you, and you received the messages meant to be received. This film is telling that story too, in a very sly way.

STF: Shoba, I wonder what some of your personal favorite films are from that era.

Shoba: It’s really hard to say. Every Sunday morning we would watch some kind of show about the Yugoslavian army, and its strength, and then it would go to a partisan movie. But honestly, as a kid, that represented reality. Actually, Western movies were shown at night, there was always this weird combination of Western movies and Communist, partisan movies. It’s hard to pick your favorite, but mine was Walter Defends Sarajevo. The main character kills like 6,000 Germans within 10 minutes, which is a funny thing. I remember movie propaganda was so strong. I remember as a kid running through the streets and collecting the movie fliers which had been thrown out of airplanes. Cinema was so huge. But the way movies were filmed in Yugoslavia, every single republic had its own studio for movies, and every republic had a movie quota. It was a government plan.

Leitner: Did each republic have a studio?

Shoba: Pretty much. For example, every major republic capital had it’s own film laboratory and distribution house.

Leitner: At that time, there had been many attempts at European unification. Tito tried it by forcing a number of ethnicities, nations to band together. During the Yugoslavian period, was some kind of nationalism tolerated in these films?

Shoba: All Communist movies were pretty much about unity, about brotherhood. But no single nation was deprived of it. They didn’t avoid showing religious leaders in movies, like priests or bishops. It was also very visible which partisan brigade was Serb or Croat or Montenegran. There was always this kind of representation, that was important to show in Communist cinema.

Leitner: People were allowed to have pride in their nationalist background.

Shoba: Absolutely, that was key in how everybody must be represented.

STF: Shoba, in your return visits to Sarajevo, you frequently go to the Sarajevo film festival. Can you describe what that festival means for contemporary cinema in Sarajevo.

Shoba: Sarajevo did have it’s own film studios, which were unfortunately totally destroyed in the war. We had all of the facilities that you see in Avala in Belgrade, although Avala was much bigger. But it was all destroyed, all the equipment was destroyed. We had to start from scratch. Then, by the will of individuals and interest, movies started being made again after the war. Right now we can’t speak about some kind of film industry, but we can speak of a really strong movie scene, and really good films. We have the best original festival in the Balkans, that’s for sure. Every year many important movies are shown there. I’m just afraid that there’s no development to organize production, movie studios. Not like it used to be.

Leitner: Is there an independent movie scene?

Shoba: Well, everything is independent. You as a filmmaker in Bosnia, you have to struggle a lot to make a film. You have to beg, and go around to try and find sponsors all over Europe and the world, which is complicated. The state itself does not fund films properly, they give some limited funding. Just renting the equipment is more than 50% of the film budget normally.

Stranger Than Fiction: Marty, you came to this story because Paco is an extended family member. Can you describe that connection?

Marty Syjuco: My brother Jamie, who appears in the film, he’s married to Mimi, Paco’s sister. So Paco’s my brother’s brother-in-law. I didn’t know him very well when all of this was happening, he was about ten years younger than me. I met him at my brother’s wedding in Cebu. When all of this started happening I was already living in Manila, and then I moved to New York. We all knew they got the wrong guy, and we thought the courts would figure it out, correct their mistake. It was really only when the Supreme Court elevated the sentence to death—I was here in New York, and I was shocked. I remember telling Michael about that, and it was Michael’s idea to pick up the camera and start documenting the story.

STF: Michael, I know you’ve both just returned from Spain, where the film had it’s Spanish premiere. And you’ve recorded a new ending to the film which we were hoping to show tonight, but because of technical difficulties we weren’t able to do that. But can you bring us up to date on where the story is and what the screening was like in Spain?

Michael Collins: This ends with the Spanish prison really treating Paco pretty poorly. After we premiered six months ago, we had people from the Spanish embassy, luckily, that came to the New York screenings, and down in Washington, D.C. Paco said that things started to change, they started to treat him much better. They were basically treating him like he was a terrorist. They were trying to break him, and get him to admit his guilt for over a year, which was really strange. Now they’re treating him like someone they’re eventually going to put out on parole. They’re giving him more privileges than he’s ever had before, and it seems like they’re preparing him for the outside. But it’s a process that could take years. He’s more hopeful than he’s ever been. We went to spend some time with him when we were there, and his sister came, and we shot some more.

STF: And you were able to show him the film.

Collins: We were able to show him the film, which was kind of intense—watching him watch the film. Also, we were afraid it would be kind of traumatic. He hadn’t seen a lot of the stuff, he was in prison and was watching all of the media coverage. We had 50 hours worth of media that we harvested from. But he said he felt so empowered afterwards, he said that night he slept better than he’s ever slept. He has a lot of patience, he knows it will take a long time for him to get out. But he was in a country where everyone thought that he was a monster, and now to get sort of out there in the world, he feels sort of vindicated.

STF: What are the prospects of showing this in the Philippines?

Syjuco: Well, I’m Filipino and the end goal is to bring it to the Philippines, where it can have the most impact, not just for Paco, but the 40% that are languishing in prison that weren’t given a fair trial. That’s the percentage they say are in the prisons who could be wrongfully convicted, just like Paco. There are literally thousands of Pacos out there, not just in the Philippines. That’s where I do want to bring it. After Spain, that’s our next goal, hopefully sometime next year. It’s going to be a little challenging because there isn’t really an audience for documentaries there, but maybe the Filipinos in the room can help us spread the word.

Audience: How did you get access to Mrs. Chiong, and how did you frame the project to her?

Collins: We were in touch with her from the beginning, and she would not talk to us for a long time. Finally, she said she wanted to air her side, and counter all of the lies that the Larrañagas are telling you. And that’s how she eventually let us through the door. She had three interviews with us over the six years we were in production, and I actually shot one of them. When you bring the camera to her, she doesn’t have a filter, she just kind of shows off a little bit. It was really strange. She knew that we were spending all of this time with the family, telling their story. She’d just never been challenged by the media before, and she couldn’t stop herself. We have so much more footage of her, kind of off-the-wall stuff. But we were very careful. She’s the first victim in this thing, her daughters went missing, and I think the challenge, aside from getting access to her, was also how to handle her as a character. Starting this project, and being so angry at her and hearing all the lies that she was telling people that were going to cost these seven guys their lives, I had to figure out a way to transform that to compassion a little bit. And treat her like the grieving mother that she is who just made some bad decisions.

Audience: How do you maintain objectivity as a filmmaker?

Collins: As far as our roles as filmmakers and participants, that’s a tough line to blur. Marty’s a member of the family, it was important to put it into the film. It becomes your life, I’m not going to lie. I love this family, Paco is like my family. You have to deal with that. But when you’re in the editing room, you have to make choices that are fair to everyone who’s involved. We took two years to edit this, and it was so complex. We brought in a really experienced editor to help us at the end, Eric Metzgar. It was important to have other people on our team who weren’t so closely connected help us sort through that.

STF: Given that it’s such an interconnected world now and the film has been in the news, have their been responses in the Philippines, word that may have traveled there?

Syjuco: So much time has passed since Paco’s story was the “trial of the century,” and people are now starting to allow themselves to think that perhaps there’s another side to this story. We thought there was going to be a little more backlash in the Philippines, but I think it’s because it hasn’t screened there yet. It’s on the internet, but we’ve been very careful about posting things online. We don’t give out DVDs, they are not yet available for sale, but they will be soon!

Audience: Where, if anywhere, did DNA evidence factor into forensics in the case?

Collins: They didn’t collect any. We interviewed the medical experts, the forensic pathologist, the medical examiner, we’ve seen all of the records. There’s a lot of detail that we couldn’t put in the film, but the prosecution basically blocked the dental records from being presented. They said that they found half of one sperm, maybe, but that they found it with a blacklight. So it’s not even conclusive. Honestly, it’s a joke. Paco’s family really wanted to do DNA testing, and they said, we’ll pay for it, exhume the body. So they’re hiding something. There’s no evidence that she was even raped.

Audience: Is Paco’s story dead in the Philippines?

Collins: A Philippine story just came out yesterday about Paco, but it was their international reporter based in London. In the Philippines it’s old news, it’s 14 years ago. People remember it, there were some journalists who wrote about it for Philippine newspapers who came to the Tribeca Film Festival. It seems like people are ready to look at it a second time, to look at it from a new angle. A generation has almost passed, so people are open.

Syjuco: Now with online bloggers, the news and the media it’s a different world now. That’s why, hopefully with the film as well, Paco can have a second chance in life. He was 19 when he was arrested, and he’s turning 34 this year, so it’s almost 15 years.

Collins: We just launched a website, www.freepaconow.com. It’s being translated into Spanish, but it’s also in English. You can go there and sign a petition and send letters to officials. He is now, hopefully, on the path to parole. Like we said, it could take years and every single day that he’s there is one too many. We have a facebook page and are on twitter as well.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]

Stranger Than Fiction: What brought you to the story, and what led you to take control of it? I would think once the news broke, the revelation had been made, that there would be lots of people who would want to tell this story.

Douglas Newman: We got to the story soon after it broke. I was in college at Brandeis University, and was assigned The Education of Little Tree in class. My father, in passing, mentioned remembering reading something in the New York Times about it being a hoax. I mentioned it to my professor, who kind of blew me off. The long and short of it was that I went to a different professor who said, you should do a project on it. Laura, who was a graduate student writing a book about fake ethnic biographies—yes, there are enough to fill a book. Then about twelve years later, after working in documentaries, I approached Marco and Laura, and said, let’s do this for real. No one had done it, and there were a lot of challenges that made it so that no one had done it.

STF: Can you talk about those challenges?

Newman: One is a lack of people who want to talk. It took us a long time to get people who were willing to talk. Another is a lack of archival footage. We squeezed every bit of archival footage of Asa and Forrest that existed, those were the two biggest challenges.

Marco Ricci: Well, also, his life is confusing.

Laura Browder: It’s a very tangled web. We had to do some simplification, just to be able to tell the story coherently. His life was a mess, he moved around a lot, he had these different identities…

STF: Talk about the search for archival footage, because what you did pull up is kind of amazing stuff.

Newman: I think our biggest find was in somebody’s basement, it was a two-inch tape of his campaign commercial for governor. We found stuff at a local Alabama television station that they didn’t even know they had. Because I had gotten it years back, and then Marco and I went down to Montgomery and searched their archives and we didn’t find it, and he didn’t know he had it. The liberty essays, the audio, we used a couple at the end, we got from one of his friends who had the cassette tapes.

Ricci: There were months of detective work that had to go into this.

Audience: Did you guys get in touch with his family? What happened to them?

Browder: His family was also very elusive. His wife would never return phone messages, his kids would never return phone messages. We did track down one relative eventually, who was a very interesting person, but didn’t want to be interviewed on camera because he didn’t want to be identified with a violent white supremacist.

Ricci: We had a screening in his hometown, and a lot of his grandkids were there. We met them and they really were appreciative to—and his son too, to an extent—but they were appreciative of the portrayal because ours is not as condemning as he was in the papers, I don’t think. We tried to present a fairly rounded piece. So we met them there and they were appreciative of the handling of it, which meant a lot to me.

STF: Can you talk about getting those interviews with the former Klansmen? Or for all I know they’re current Klansmen. What was the process?

Ricci: Douglas had met this guy Wayne Greenhaw, who was sort of the intro. But a lot of it was just like, we would go down three or four times, and then they would talk to us. Like Ray Andrews, he stood us up a couple of times, and then we paid him like 300 bucks or something, and he invited us to go out to some restaurant in the hills.

Audience: Do you, or does the Cherokee tribe, think he is part Cherokee?

Browder: For a very long time, The Education of Little Tree was on sale in reservation bookstores. We actually talked to the leader of a Cherokee cultural organization who still loves the book, and had her grandparents give it to her to read when she was younger. Has he been authenticated by the Cherokees? No.

Ricci: Well, what is Cherokee? That’s very dicey. Are you on the rolls, is it blood, is it cultural? There are tribes in Alabama who are totally not Cherokee compared to the tribes in Oklahoma, but they believe they’re Cherokee. It’s a really loaded question.

Newman: He’s not culturally Cherokee and he’s not on any rolls.

Audience: Do you think this was something where people enact another ethnicity to reinforce their feeling of whiteness?

Browder: Yes, absolutely. There is a long history of white supremacists embracing Native Americans as a pure, doomed race. In that sense, Asa Carter fell squarely into that tradition. That misty footage you saw at the beginning of the movie, that was from the first supposedly all Native American movie, The Silent Enemy, which starred a former colored janitor from North Carolina who had reinvented himself as a Native American. Asa Carter was kind of the flip side of that.

Audience: Did his wife and children know what he was doing?

Newman: She knew, his kids certainly knew. I think they really were kept kind of behind the scenes, I don’t think they went with him anywhere. But they definitely knew.

Audience: How exactly was the fraud uncovered?

Newman: It was actually uncovered twice, three times maybe. It keeps getting uncovered. People forget, and then it pops back up. It was originally uncovered in 1976 in a very small article buried on like page 26 in the New York Times by Wayne Greenhaw, who’s in the film. He wrote something when Josey Wales came out, wondering if Forrest Carter was really this guy Asa Carter. No one paid attention to it. His publisher denied it, his camp denied it, and everyone seemed to be fine with it. Then Dan Carter, when the book started becoming really popular, right around Dances With Wolves, that’s when Carter wrote a full page op-ed piece in the New York Times. Then Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote something, and that’s what got people’s attention. It’s funny because it was on Oprah’s book list until 2007.

Browder: The history of Asa Carter is the history of our cultural amnesia, really. We kept finding out that he wasn’t who he appeared to be, and then we forgot again, because we wanted so badly to believe as a nation in this mystical, magical Native American identity that he wanted to portray.

STF: After spending all this time on this character, what are your personal feelings on Asa Carter, Forrest Carter?

Ricci: We’ve had arguments for hours about it. But obviously as a director, you sort of fall in love with your characters. Not that I’m in love with Asa, but he’s certainly a fascinating guy, and I have my own thoughts on the truth of his journey, but I think I’ll keep them to myself, because I think that’s what’s enjoyable about it. If you talk to people who knew him, they would insist that he was a transformed guy.

Browder: He was successful because he was a cypher, he was sort of a Rorschach blot that audiences could project their fantasies onto. We all hope and wish that our audience will do the same thing.

Ricci: One thing you have to give him credit for was that he was really smart and talented. No doubt about it. If you look at the stuff he wrote in the 50s, it’s awful, but he knew what would get people emotionally.

Audience: Was he aware of the violence that his speeches could cause?

Ricci: I certainly think he was aware. He certainly was a believer in segregation, no doubt about it. It was war to him, he was fine with that at that point in time.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.]