After a sold-out screening in 2007, The International Documentary
Challenge returns to Hot Docs in April 2008! Registration for the 3rd
annual Doc Challenge, held March 6-10, 2008, is now open.

The Premise: Filmmakers from around the world have just 5 days to
make a short non-fiction film. Hot Docs Canadian International
Documentary Film Festival, the Presenting Partner, will once again
host the theatrical premiere of the finalists and the awards ceremony
during the Festival. After the premiere of the finalists, showcases
of regionally produced films will be held, including an IDA sponsored
screening in Los Angeles, a SILVERDOCS sponsored screening in
Washington DC, a Big Sky Documentary Film Festival screening in
Montana, a DOC sponsored screening in Toronto, a Northwest Film Forum
sponsored screening in Seattle, a Film Action Oregon sponsored
screening in Portland and many more! Additionally, a Best of DVD will
be released and television distribution will be pursued by a
distribution partner.

IMPORTANT DATES:
Early Registration Deadline: February 11, 2008
Final Registration Deadline: March 5, 2008
Doc Challenge: March 6-10, 2008
Hot Docs Premiere of Finalists: April 2008

Complete details and entry forms can be found online at
www.docchallenge.org

Check out Hot Docs here: www.hotdocs.ca

The Doc Challenge is produced by Doug Whyte of KDHX Community Media
and sponsored by Hot Docs, the International Documentary Association,
the Documentary Organization of Canada, SILVERDOCS, the Big Sky
Documentary Film Festival, Film Action Oregon and the creators of the
48 Hour Film Project.

The International Documentary Challenge.
Real Life. Filmed Real Fast.

Fate of the Lhapa color, 63 minutes
A touching portrayal the last three Tibetan shamans (lhapas) living in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal. With no other descendants to carry on their healing practices and a younger generation attending schools, acculturating, and modernizing, these “sucking doctors” are practicing an endangered tradition.

Sean Scully at Work - three short films color, 42 minutes
In 1997 Robert Gardner visited friend and well-known American painter Sean Scully in his Barcelona studio. He documented the making of two paintings, Testigos and Passenger, and the opening of “Sean Scully 1987-1997” at Salas del Palacio Episcopal in Malaga. This DVD, an important document of an influential modern artist, brings together the three short films made during that summer.

West of the Tracks color, 554 minutes
DER is proud to announce the North American release of Wang Bing’s acclaimed West of the Tracks, a document of the slow, inevitable death of China’s obsolete manufacturing system. Between 1999 and 2001 he meticulously filmed the lives of the last factory workers in China’s Shenyang province, a class of people once promised glory during the Chinese revolution. Now trapped by economic change, the workers become deeply moving film heroes in this modern epic. The film is an engrossing portrait of Chinese society in transition.

The Toronto Doc Forum is currently accepting project submissions from producers worldwide via its online entry form.  Deadline is Monday, January 28.

The TDF is North America’s most effective international market for documentary and non-fiction projects.  A limited seating event for 450 delegates, the event draws over 140 of the world’s key buyers for its two-day schedule of thirty pre-selected project presentations, April 23-24.  The TDF’s format has proved highly successful for the projects presented, as well as its other delegates who value the TDF’s sociable setting for their business and market intelligence needs.

New for 2008! TDF has broadened its genre focus to include history, science, the environment and health, and will now accept mini-series and series proposals. The TDF has also introduced a private meeting option to the selected projects.

In addition to the project teams and their partners, approximately 300 Observer seats are made available for other industry professionals.  Observer seat deadline is March 13.  Application is now open via Hot Docs’ online registration form.

For more details on the Toronto Documentary Forum (TDF) and its programmes please visit www.hotdocs.ca.

There are many things I’ve discovered as a result of my job as the director of a documentary film distribution company (www.der.org) that I would never have known about because they were someone else’s passion, not my own.

One of those discoveries came about when a southern ethnomusicologist, Oliver Greene, brought us a film he had made titled Play, Jankunú Play - The Garifuna Wanaragua Ritual of Belize. Oliver (www.der.org/films/filmmakers/oliver-greene.html) is an assistant professor of Music at Georgia State University who teaches courses in traditional and popular world music from places like Trinidad, Tobago and Brazil. He has a deep knowledge and enthusiasm for his subject, and while his film was very informative, it needed a little tightening, editorially speaking and he was very open to our critique. He took the time and made the effort to craft a better film, which we then agreed to distribute. (www.der.org/films/play-jankunu-play.html)

It was this film and the enthusiastic conversations I had with Oliver Greene over the course of our negotiations, that enticed me into experiencing the world of Garifuna (pronounced ga-RI-foo-nah) music first hand. It was last summer and the word was out that Andy Palacio, the musician who appears in the film and who almost single handedly is credited with saving Garifuna culture and music from extinction, was scheduled to perform with his Garifuna Collective, here at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The summer concerts in the evening in the courtyard at the museum are delightful events, where you can bring a blanket to spread on the grass and sit with family and friends, or reserve one of the tables and enjoy a beer or a glass of wine. As my newly hired Director of Production was also a musician, a drummer, I figured the company would buy a block of tickets to this event and I and my staff would be able to experience Garifuna music first hand. We were also scheduled to meet Andy Palacio and give him DVD copies of Oliver’s film.

The evening was perfect, warm, dry with a gentle breeze. The courtyard was comfortably full, and everyone was in an upbeat mood. The music was fabulous. The kind of infectious music that makes it virtually impossible to sit still, even for a normally sedate museum going crowd. Within a few minutes of Andy’s groups singing and playing, we were all standing and swaying and clapping to the music. The band played up a storm and the energy was electric. I never thought I’d experience an event like this at the MFA. While they played countless encores, at some point it all had to end. There were long lines of people waiting to get autographed copies of Andy’s latest album “Watina” which was acclaimed as the best world music release of 2007.

So it was with great sadness that I read in the obituaries in Monday’s (1/21/08) NYTimes that Andy Palacio, a guy who only months ago had been full of the energy that music gives to life, had died in his native Belize at the age of 47. He died of respiratory failure after a stroke and a heart attack.

But his spirit and talent remains to be experienced through his recordings, and the film Play, Jankunú Play. I am grateful that our company, in some small way (thanks to Oliver Greene), is able to help keep his memory alive.

We’ve launched a new section of our blog entitled Film Reviews. The first post is about moving Katrina documentary The Axe in the Attic. Please check back often, don’t forget you can always signup for our newsletter to be notified of new articles and upcoming events.

My business is distributing documentary film, so one could say watching films is “work” for me. Most of the films I see in a theatre setting are at film festivals when I’m scouting for new titles to acquire, but last night was one of those times when my partner and I went to a premiere of a new documentary just for an evening out - dinner and a movie.

The film in question, The Axe in the Attic, had been getting a lot of “buzz” locally, as much for the back story, how/why the film was made, as well as who made it, even before the screening last night as the opening film for the International Human Rights Watch Film Festival at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Filmmaker Ed Pincus had his heyday in the 1960’s and 1970’s when he was part of the fast growing cinema verité or “direct cinema” movement. There was a nexus of creative filmmaking activity, right here in New England back then that involved the founder of my company John Marshall, his friend, French filmmaker Jean Rouch, Fred Wiseman, DH Pennebaker, the Maysles and others. It had been a good 20 years since Pincus had picked up a camera. He’d “retired” to reinvent himself as a farmer in Vermont. It took the much younger filmmaker, Lucia Small, to coax Pincus back behind a camera. Small’s last film, My Father the Genius, had a very successful festival run and she was ready for another project.

It was back in August of 2005 as Lucia watched the shocking events of the Katrina catastrophe unfold on her TV screen, that she grabbed her camera and started filming the TV…Then she and Ed banded together a few months later, on a road trip, to somehow get beyond the sound bites, and the hardened, iconic images that the media imprints on our brains, to connect with the people behind the tragedy.

The last film I had seen about the Katrina disaster was Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. It was a film that tried to give us the big picture, to connect the dots so we could better understand why events unfolded as they did and as a result, while his film successfully did that, I felt something was missing. Some callous folks may say “oh, not another Katrina film”, lets put all THAT behind us and “move on”. What The Axe in the Attic does is connect us in a very emotional, real way with the human destruction, the irreparable aftermath, the toll on health, and the psyche, not only for those who continue to shoulder the brunt of it, those whose homes, families and lively hood were obliterated, but also the toll this event has taken on the rest of us, we who bare witness. And it is the filmmakers, who in their naivete start out, trying to be objective, who represent the rest of us in this messy, heart wrenching film.

Pincus and Small were totally unprepared for what they encountered, the massiveness of the destruction, the continuation of the staggering ineptitude of our government, and that the poor Americans affected by this are now in far worse straits and it ain’t getting any better for many of them. The stories we hear are both new and old. The fact that FEMA is still out there doing their dirty work is almost beyond comprehension.

For me one of the most powerful moments in the film occurs in their car when Pincus has his camera aimed at Small as she drives. She is talking and she stops and you feel the wave of helplessness wash over her, and you feel with her the sense of powerlessness that seems to underscore much of the film. Not that people aren’t trying, not that the human will to survive and overcome isn’t presented, it is, the struggle goes on every day for thousands of these folks, now scattered to the winds. But in that moment, in the film, it is as though Small channeled those feelings directly into my heart. She seems to unravel before our eyes.

The story ends with a black screen, and an epilogue, that catches us up to the moment as to the whereabouts of some of the key characters whose voices were heard throughout the film. It is not a happy ending. We are left only with our feelings and thoughts and the desire to do whatever we can to repair this festering wound to our fellow citizens and to our country.

Visit the film’s website: www.theaxeintheattic.com

reviewed by Cynthia Close, Executive Director

SUBMIT YOUR STUDENT FILMS TO DOC IT! AND SIGN UP YOUR CLASS FOR DOCS FOR SCHOOLS

Submissions for the second annual Doc It! are now being accepted. The programme’s goal is to stimulate non-fiction filmmaking among youth, as well as to provide a showcase for their perspectives on the world around them. All works screened in the DOC IT! programme are eligible to win juried prizes, and the DOC IT! Audience Award. Students have until February 15 to submit their film!

Submitted films must be documentaries and must not exceed 12 minutes in total length. Fiction, animated fiction, mock-documentaries, etc. will not be considered. The principle creative team for each project, including the director, must be between the ages of 14 and 18 (as of 2008), AND/OR be enrolled in a secondary school for the 2007/08 academic year. Upon selection, Hot Docs will require age verification.

More information and Doc It! submission forms can be found at www.hotdocs.ca.

Now in its third year, Docs for Schools provides FREE daytime screenings during the festival for Toronto-area high schools and youth organizations. An overwhelming success, last year more than 15,000 students and educators participated in the programme. Screenings are offered both at Festival venues and in schools, and whenever possible filmmakers are in attendance to participate in question-and-answer sessions with students.

To get involved, please contact Leah Venturina or 416-203-2155 ext.249.

Many of you have asked to be regularly notified of new releases and filmmaking related events. Now you can signup on our Resources page, or do it right here:

You can signup for the D.E.R. newsletter or the Doc Doctor’s Clinic, or both. If you are already a Doc Doctor list subscriber, you’ll be prompted to update your account with us. It’s quick and easy! We look forward to keeping you informed.

www.fifeq.ca

Hello to everyone!

Previously known as the FFEM, the FIFEQ (Quebec international ethnographic film festival) celebrating its fifth anniversary in 2008 and is also bringing together five Universities from across Quebec for the first time, namely those of Chicoutimi, Laval, Concordia, McGill and Universite de Montreal.

On the 25th, 26th, and 27th of January 2008, we invite professors, professionals, film and visual anthropology enthusiasts to join us at the festival, during which we will be screening numerous films, holding photography exhibitions, discussion sessions, and much more, all of which will be free of charge.

Dedicated to the promotion of ethnographic films, the FIFEQ will screen films created by new filmmakers from both Canada and abroad as well as from renowned figures in the discipline of visual anthropology and the social documentary genre.  The festival is both a celebration of the discipline of visual anthropology, as well as a reflection on the debates and ethical issues surrounding the utility and relevance of employing visual media when studying cultures and societies.

For a full listing of our activities and films please visit our website, at www.fifeq.ca.

Looking forward to seeing you!

The 2008 FIFEQ Team
For further enquiries please contact:

ethnographik@gmail.com
–
Catherine Lavoie-Marcus
Coordonnatrice, FFEM 2008
514-279-0387