| HOME SCHEDULE FILMS FILMMAKERS PANELS CONTACT |
|
|
|
Featured Films
Secrecy (US 2008, color, 81 min)
Peter Galison and Robb Moss, directors
“Secrecy is like forbidden fruit. You can’t have it; it’s classified. That makes you want it even more.” So says one of the subjects of Secrecy, the 2008 collaborative effort between historian of science Peter Galison and filmmaker Robb Moss. Combining stunning visual effects, a fast-paced narrative drive, and interviews with a wide range of government analysts, Secrecy examines the tension between security and freedom that defines our current political moment – and sets the stage for the political action thread of our festival. Screening time: 6:00 pm, Monday, October 19 followed by Q&A with Peter Galison and Robb Moss . Quarry (US 1970, b/w, 35mm, 12 min)
Richard P. Rogers, director The Windmill Movie (US 2009, color, 35mm, 82 min)
Alexander Olch, director, and Susan Meiselas, producer
In Quarry, the evocative early short by late filmmaker and Harvard professor Richard P. Rogers, working class teenagers enjoying a carefree day at a quarry in Quincy, Massachusetts, are filmed with a lyricism tinged by the subtle but inescapable awareness of encroaching loss. Richard Rogers is The Windmill Movie’s introspective subject, whose struggle to make a film of his life was inextricably tied up with the struggle to make sense of his life. Following his death in 2001, Rogers’s widow, renowned photojournalist Susan Meiselas, entrusted Rogers’s former student and protégé Alexander Olch with the 200 hours of raw footage; the result is a moving (self-)portrait honest in its display of human flaws. Screening time: Quarry and The Windmill Movie will be shown together at 8:30 pm, Monday, October 19, followed by Q&A with Alexander Olch and Susan Meiselas . The Kinda Sutra (US 2008, color, 8 min)
Jessica Yu’s recent short combines interviews and animation to ponder that age-old question, “how are babies made?” A selection of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Protagonist (US 2007, color, 35mm, 90 min)
The four subjects of Jessica Yu’s elegant Protagonist were selected from among hundreds for life stories that follow a particular narrative arc defined by Euripidean tragedy. The men are real, their stories are real, the tales evoke a familiar human psychology. And yet the strict scripting and the formal structure of the film (the tales are intercut with a recurring Greek chorus of specially crafted marionettes that evoke the deeper tragedy of human life) create a literary quality that defies our notions of conventional documentary film. Screening time: The Kinda Sutra and Protagonist will be shown together at 8:30 pm, Tuesday, October 20, followed by Q&A with Jessica Yu. . Grey Gardens (US 1976, color, 35mm, 100 min)
David and Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer, directors
The Maysles Brothers’ names (Albert and David) are synonymous with “direct cinema,” the U.S. version of the cinéma vérité movement, a sharp turn toward a new kind of realism in documentary filmmaking popularized during the 1960s. A keen awareness of the presence of the filmmaker, the use of the non-intrusive hand-held camera, and a willingness to let the subjects of film speak for themselves created a style in which both ordinary people and celebrities could reveal themselves in ways both touching and wacky. Grey Gardens, one of over 60 films made by Albert Maysles, has become a cult classic, in large part because of the personalities of Little Edie Beale and her mother Big Edie, two women who live in isolation in a decaying mansion in the Hamptons, where they dream about a glorious past and an unrealized future. Screening time: 6:00 pm, Wednesday, October 21 followed by Q&A with Albert Maysles . Grey Gardens (US 2009, color, 104 min)
Michael Sucsy, director, for HBO
The Maysles Brothers’ Grey Gardens has spawned several adaptations and cult responses, including a Tony-award-winning Broadway musical, and, most recently, Michael Sucsy’s HBO film-about-a-film. This compelling movie has just received four Emmy awards, including Outstanding Made for Television Movie; Outstanding Lead Actress for Jessica Lange, who plays Big Edie Beale; and Outstanding Supporting Actor for Ken Howard, who plays Phelan Beale. Drew Barrymore, playing Little Edie, was also nominated for an Emmy, as was director Michael Sucsy. Screening time: 8:30 pm, Wednesday, October 21 . All Water Has a Perfect Memory (US 2001, color and b/w, Spanish/English subtitled, 19 min)
Mexican-born filmmaker Natalia Almada’s experimental short, All Water Has a Perfect Memory, reflects on the differing memories of family members following the death of Almada’s two-year-old sister in a tragic drowning accident. Screening time: 6:00 pm, Thursday, October 21 . El General (Mexico/US 2008, color, 83 min)
The 2009 El General, for which Almada won the Director’s Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, draws on family audio recordings of Almada’s great-grandfather Plutarco Elias Calles, a general in the Mexican Revolution and later president of Mexico, to create a portrait of the man that history knew as a dictator from within the perspective of a family. Screening time: 6:30 pm, Thursday, October 22 followed by Q&A with Natalia Almada . . La Corona (US 2008, color, Spanish, subtitled, 40 min)
Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega, directors
Filmmakers Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega went behind bars to capture this rousing story of a beauty pageant staged by the inmates of a Colombian women’s prison. By exploring this South American “slice of life,” the film raises provocative questions about gender, criminal justice, self-esteem, and survival. La Corona premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar before airing on HBO. Screening time: 8:30 pm Thursday, October 22 followed by Q&A with Amanda Micheli . Wellesley Actualités, 1920s-1950s. A special selection of newsreel shorts, courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive and curated by May Haduong ’00, moving picture archivist. Screening time: 6:00 pm, Friday, October 23 . Choosing Children (US 1984, color, 35mm, 46 min)
Debra Chasnoff, Wellesley College ’78 and Kim Klausner, directors
Choosing Children, Chasnoff’s landmark film about lesbian parenting, will be shown in the recently restored 35mm print made possible by the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation. Preceding our showing of this film, Chasnoff will be awarded the New Directions in Documentary Film Festival’s award for Alumnae Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking. Screening time: 6:30 pm, Friday, October 23 . Straightlaced (US 2008, color, 66 min)
Debra Chasnoff, Wellesley College ‘78 Straightlaced, Chasnoff’s most recent film, is a production of Groundspark, the organization for social change she founded 30 years ago. Featuring candid interviews with young people, Straightlaced investigates the degree to which gender roles and homophobia continue to define and confine American teens. Screening time: 7:15 pm, Friday, October 23 followed by Q&A with Debra Chasnoff . Girls’ Shorts Program A specially selected collection of edgy short features by, for, and about . . . girls. Screening time: 9:00 pm, Friday, October 23 . Seeds of Summer (Israel 2007, color, 35mm, 63 min)
A stirring insider’s look at female combat training for the Israel Defense Force, filmed by a former soldier whose first experience of falling in love was with her own commanding officer seven years earlier. Screening time: 1:30 pm, Saturday, October 24 . First Comes Love (US 1991, b/w, 22 min)
One of Friedrich’s best loved films, First Comes Love views American matrimonial ritual from a perspective that is part nostalgic and part ironic, part ethnographic and part experimental. Preceding our showing of this film, Friedrich will be honored by the New Directions in Documentary Film Festival for Continuing Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking. . From the Ground Up (US 2008, color, 54 min)
In her latest film, From the Ground Up, Friedrich contemplates “with few words and no polemics” globalization’s effects through an investigation into the transnational coffee trade stretching from Guatemala to South Carolina to New York City. Screening time: First Comes Love and From the Ground Up will be screened together following the award ceremony for Su Friedrich at 5:30 pm, Saturday, October 24. A Q&A with Su Friedrich will follow the films. . Man (US 2008, color, 14 min)
Myna Joseph, Wellesley College ’98, director “If Man is in any way a reflection of reality, then parents, you might want to lock up your daughters.” So reads the press release from the Sundance premiere of Class of 1998 alumna Myna Joseph’s debut short film, which debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and went on to screen at Cannes. Joseph will be present for a Q&A following the second film showing this evening. . Stay the Same Never Change (US 2009, color, 94 min)
Artist-provocateur Laurel Nakadate’s feature film debut, much acclaimed at Sundance and the New Directors/New Films Festival at Lincoln Center, melds fact with fiction to get at the real experience of contemporary teen-aged girlhood in the “heartland” of America. Screening time: Man and Stay the Same Never Change will be screened together at 8:00 pm, Saturday, October 24, followed by Q&A with Myna Joseph and Laurel Nakadate . South of Ten (US 2006, color, 10 min)
In the Air (US 2009, color, 22 min, special preview)
Liza Johnson, director Reflecting on the ability of communities to endure and survive, with a gaze that is at once observational and poetic, Johnson travels first to post-Katrina New Orleans and then on to a circus school in her Appalachian hometown. This screening of In the Air is a special preview of Liza Johnson’s most recent film. Screening time: 1:00, Sunday, October 25, followed by Q&A with Liza Johnson . Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (US 2009, color, 57 min)
Awarded Best Documentary at this year’s Hollywood Black Film Festival, Smith’s film documents the groundbreaking work of Jewish anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who helped transform the field of anthropology and shape African American Studies as we know it today. Smith’s film explores the multiple intellectual paradoxes posed by Herskovits’s work, most notably the question of “who has the authority to define a culture?” Screening time: 2:30 pm, Sunday, October 25 followed by Q&A with Llewellyn M. Smith
|
| site design by ivey doyal |
