The American Public Health Association is holding the eighth annual APHA Film Festival at its annual meeting and exposition in DC this fall. My piece Shifting the Public Health Paradigm, produced last year for the Center for Health Equity and Social Justice at the Boston Public Health Commission, will be showing on Wednesday, November 2 at 12:30pm. (For all of you who happen to be attending the conference and happen to be free at that time!)
NAPT funds MY LOUISIANA LOVE
We're so excited that Native American Public Telecommunications has just funded My Louisiana Love, a film by Sharon Linezo Hong that I am editing and co-producing. We're hoping this will mean a public television broadcast in 2012 or 2013.
My Louisiana Love traces a woman's quest to find a place in her Native American community as it reels from decades of environmental degradation. Monique Verdin returns to Southeast Louisiana to reunite with her Houma Indian family. But soon she sees that her people's traditional way of life - fishing, trapping, and hunting in these fragile wetlands - is threatened by a cycle of man-made environmental crises.
Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil leak are just the latest rounds in this century-old cycle that is forcing Monique's clan to adapt in new ways. Monique must overcome the loss of her house, her father, and her partner - and redefine the meaning of home.
Clarifying the Mission at Stand for Children
I had the pleasure of working with Maria Daniels , Communications and Marketing Director for Stand for Children, on a short video for their staff retreat. This great organization works to ensure that all children, regardless of their background, have equal access to a good education. We made a video that presented Stand for Children's national vision - what animates their work in many different states, and where they see their work going.
Music for INDELIBLE LALITA
Last Sunday we recorded music for my upcoming film, Indelible Lalita. The score was composed by my husband, Jorrit Dijkstra, and performed by Geni Skendo (flutes), Carla Kihlstedt (violin, voila, and voice), and her husband Matthias Bossi (piano, organ, percussion).
I'm really excited to cut the music into the film. It turned out to be a minimalistic but meaningful mix of long tones with Indian-style drones from the tampora and shruuti box.... definite influence from the great filmmker/composer Satyajit Ray. In the many months (years!) of editing this film, I had never thought that music would play much of a role - but in the end I feel that this score brings out the film's complex themes and raises it to a new level.
I loved the bends and twists in Geni's flute lines, and was thrilled by the late addition of some very cool instrumental voice from Carla. Audience members will have to listen hard to hear the delicate breaths and breaking tones; it may have more subconscious effect than conscious.
Thanks to all the musicians for a great day, and to our engineer Brian Cass of Sounds Interesting Studio in Middleboro, MA.
Zeega Ho!
I'm totally in awe of the three Harvard affiliates - Jesse Shapins, James Burns, and Kara Oehler - who have just won the Knight News Challenge to develop a software called Zeega to make collaborative multimedia documentary-making easier. Sixteen projects by "journalism futurists" were chosen out of 2,500 submissions. The group will receive a stunning $420,000 of support.
The Harvard Gazette had a nice article about the prize announcement. Congratulations to Jesse, James, and Kara! We'll all be watching to see how your project develops.
Report from the Flaherty
It’s our first big chunk of downtime at the Flaherty Seminar.We’ve seen some great work so far and started some interesting discussions.
Two discoveries for me are the work of Tan Pin Pin, who makes very authored films “exploring Singapore’s histories, contexts, and limits,” and that of Lillan Schwartz, a lovely woman in her 80s who was a pioneer in computer-generated art.
Pin Pin’s “Invisible City” moves between several subjects who are all passionate about uncovering and preserving aspects of Singapore before its modern present.Through the humor and tragedy, and the emerging details of the pre-colonial, polyglot past, we are left most of all with a deepened understanding of the human drive to memorialize.
Quebecois filmmaker Caroline Martel presented a work-in-progress of “Wavemakers,” a piece which also assembles a vast amount of detail in service of a higher filmmaking vision.In this case, it is the colorful history and technique of the Onde Martenot, one of the first electronic musical instruments.I really appreciated Caroline’s humane search for the “vital impulse” that inspires these engineers, composers, and musicians to find a way to translate sound into music.
Having been put into a dreamy space by Caroline’s film and a live Onde Martenot performance by one of the film’s subjects (Suzanne Binet-Audet), we were truly ready to receive Lillian Schwartz’s beautiful computer-generated films from around 1970.We watched some of them with ChromaDepth 3D glasses, which Lillian recently discovered have the effect of heightening the depth perception she was aiming to create in the films (having suffered from an eye condition which limited her own depth perception).
We’ve spent a lot of time in films and discussions, but I can’t say we haven’t also found some diversion – square dancing, Bill’s bar (named after Flaherty regular Bill Sloan), pickup soccer games, and a big bonfire on Monday night.As fellows we also enjoy daily lunches with the visiting filmmakers, including today with Sam Pollard.Among other topics, we discussed the distinction between conscious and sub-conscious acts of exclusion in filmmaking.
It’s been a great time so far.Some of us in the filmmaking contingent, though, are hoping that the remaining program will involve more inventive uses of sound, so that we can more deeply explore this year’s Seminar theme, Sonic Truth.There has been a preponderance of films about music, or films that contain mostly music and interview in the soundtrack.This has really limited discussion of sound recording and sound design technique.
57th Flaherty Opens
I've arrived at the 57th annual Flaherty Seminar and just finished our first round of orientations for Fellows - about 28 interesting people coming from all over the U.S. (though Brooklyn is a little over-represented!) and Latin America. As I write, the other 100+ filmmakers, critics, and programmers are arriving - and our first happy hour begins soon. I'm looking forward to watching dozens of documentary films this week... and to the legendary discussions to follow.
One of the interesting topics of discussion today was whether Robert Flaherty - canonized as the first important documentary filmmaker - really was a documentary filmmaker at all. Of course everyone knows that he staged many of his scenes, Nanook wasn't actually married to his "wife," etc. But did Flaherty even consider himself a documentarian? Scott MacDonald, who led a session for us on the history of Flaherty and The Flaherty, pointed out that he really considered himself an experimental narrative filmmaker.
These categories obviously get redefined over the years, and are not always relevant. But it reminded me of a spirited part of the Celebration of Ricky Leacock I attended at MIT last week, in which Michel Negroponte lamented that the worlds of documentary filmmakers and avant-garde art filmmakers no longer overlapped so fruitfully as they once did. That Leacock, known so well for his contributions to Direct Cinema/Cinema Vérité, was truly open and appreciative to art films. These days I often meet "artists who work in film" who harbor a real disdain for documentaries, and documentarians who have had little exposure to fine art films - even though there is real overlap in the broad range of work in both categories.
(Something else Leacock and Flaherty shared, besides a collaborative relationship and an openness to art filmmaking: a love of women! Discussions of Flaherty's "international exchanges" that produced children all over the world echoed the stories about "the many women who loved Ricky"...)
Anyway, it's with a very open mind that we as Flaherty fellows are launching into this intense experience. I was excited to see a presentation by Caroline Martel of her installation investigating the connections between industrial films and mainstream narrative films - since I've also been exploring other forms for my film work, including installation.
