CRAWFORD--This is the political documentary of the year, vital, engaging, folksy, a deeply-committed look at what happens to the 705 residents of Crawford, Texas, when George HW Bush moves to town. Just in time for the RNC!

"... A breathtaking film, a must-see of this year's docs." -- Richard Linklater

"A poignant account ... populated with colorful, contrasting characters." -- Variety

"It's about the town's compelling characters, not just about GWB, and looks at both sides. One of the best documentaries among many I had seen this year." -- Programmer Al Milgrom -- "Specifically good for 'budding' doc filmmakers."

Newcomer independent filmmaker David Modigliani intersects the personal and political in this prizewinning portrait of an indigenous America, seldom before seen by the media. Modigliani will present the film nightly with a Q&A following.

Runtime: 80 minutes

Location Name:  Oak Street Cinema

Address: 309 Oak Street S.E., Minneapolis , MN 55414

From Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney comes a probing look into the uncanny life of national treasure and gonzo journalism inventor Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Fueled by a raging libido, Wild Turkey, and superhuman doses of drugs, Thompson was a true "free lance,” goring sacred cows with impunity, hilarity, and a steel-eyed conviction for writing wrongs. Focusing on the good doctor's heyday, 1965 to 1975, the film includes clips of never-before-seen (nor heard) home movies, audiotapes, and passages from unpublished manuscripts. Narrated by Johnny Depp.

Address: 145 East Ojai Ave., Ojai, CA

Contact: 

2009 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival

Early Deadline - July 1, 2008
Regular Deadline - September 1, 2008
Final Deadline - October 20, 2008

The Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, the premier venue for nonfiction film in the American West, is seeking submissions for its sixth annual event. From February 13-22, 2009 the festival will screen 100 films, including world and U.S. premieres, classics, rare and experimental works on Montana's largest screen at the historic Wilma Theater in downtown Missoula, Montana. In addition to ten days of screenings, the event will feature many public and VIP events including panel discussions, galas, receptions and networking round-tables.

The competitive event is open to non-fiction films and videos of all genres, subject matter, lengths and production dates. Awards and cash prizes will be given for Best Documentary Feature (over 50 minutes), Best Documentary Short (15-50 minutes), Best Mini-Doc (under 15 minutes) and best documentary about the American West (the "Big Sky Award").

callforentries@bigskyfilmfest.org
www.bigskyfilmfest.org

Big Sky Documentary Film Festival
131 South Higgins Ave. Suite 307
Missoula, Montana 59802
(406) 541-3456
info@bigskyfilmfest.org

Address: , Missoula, MT

Tel: 406.541.3456

The fourteen acre community garden at 41st and Alameda Ave. in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of it's kind in the United States. It was started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992. Since that time, the South Central Farmers have created a miracle in one of the country's most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now bulldozers are poised to level their 14 acre oasis.  Director Scott Hamilton Kennedy captures this extraordinary story from the moment the farmers receive notices of eviction, through their two-and-a-half year battle in the courts, to the final verdict and shocking aftermath. 2008 SILVERDOCS winner, The Garden tracks the serpentine trial, backroom deals and political scandals, as well as the unexpected emergence of a political voice for the immigrant farmers who refuse to remain silent.

Address: 145 East Ojai Ave., Ojai, CA

Contact: 

Inaugural film contest offers aspiring filmmakers the chance to springboard their careers through the Doorpost Film Project, a new contest that will offer monetary awards totaling $300,000 to a fresh wave of talent who produce compelling short films.

The inaugural contest, which has two competitive rounds culminating with a Film Festival in Nashville, Tennessee in September 2008, provides a grand prize totaling $100,000 and second and third place awards for $30,000 and $20,000 respectively.
Interested filmmakers may register online at www.thedoorpost.com;
Early registration closes April 1. Filmmakers may then upload their submitted films between February 1 and May 1. During the first round, each submitted film goes through a two-level judging process: online viewers and a panel of prominent film industry professionals. A group of 15 finalists from round one will each be provided $10,000 to compete in the second round of the contest which begins in June 2008.

The Doorpost Film Project is aimed at discovering and developing filmmakers capable of producing films that inspire and influence, rather than simply entertain. The Doorpost invites hopeful filmmakers to tackle topics of love, greed, redemption, pain, forgiveness, freedom or energy in a non-genre specific short (under five minutes), accepted in any format. The $100,000 award will be given to the entrant who demonstrates unique promise as the most captivating, contemplative and visionary filmmaker of the future.

Location Name:  The Doorpost Film Project

Address: 3948 3rd St South, Suite 390, Jacksonville Beach, Florida 32250-5847

Tel: 866.845.9954

Telenatura 2008. Call for entries

Telenatura, International Television Festival on Conservation of
Nature and the Environment. The festival will take place in Pamplona (Spain), from
October 28th to 31st, 2008.

Telenatura welcomes programs on conservation of nature and the
environment, finished after January 1, 2006.
Deadline: September 10th, 2008

Entry form available at:http://www.unav.es/telenatura/index3_eng.html

Address: , Pamplona

The Second International Meeting on Documentary Co-Production.

This conference is directed to film and television producers, commissioning editors, national and international television, filmmakers, cultural managers, and other professionals related to the genre.
Three days filled with conferences, one on one meetings, and screenings. Confirmed guests include Cara Mertes of the Sundance Institute.

For complete information check the website at www.docmeeting.com.ar

Address: , Buenos Aires

Series features Renee Tajima-Pena’s Calavera Highway (2008), and

Lee Wang’s God Is My Safest Bunker (2008) screening with Laura Waddington’s Cargo (2001) and James T. Hong’s The Form of the Good (2006)

 

 

Robert Flaherty Film Seminar schedule

 

Friday, September 12 at 7pm*

Calavera Highway (2008), 88min

Directed by Renee Tajima-Peña

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña’s Calavera Highway is a humorous and heartfelt road trip into the fine lines that define and divide family. When Armando and Carlos Peña hit the road to return their mother Rose’s ashes to Texas, they embark on a profound journey, confronting a past haunted by her estrangement from her family as well as the specter of their missing father. “The filmmaker, who is married to Armando, tenderly tells his family’s remarkable migrant story and in the process captures what it means to live with and love one’s ghosts.”—Full Frame Documentary Festival, April 2008

*The film will be introduced by Lucila Moctezuma of the Tribeca Film Institute.

 

Saturday, September 13 at 4:30, 9:15pm*

The Exiles (1961) 72min

Directed by Kent MacKenzie

The Exiles is a day-in-the-life of Native American friends that observes these urban exiles living in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill neighborhood in pre-Civil Rights 1950s. Having left their reservation behind, the group find themselves mired in a blighted and alien urban environment, cast in the margins and clinging to traditions, while struggling to find a future amongst alcoholism and a racially exclusive world. The New York Times remarks, “[T]he restoration and long-delayed commercial release of The Exiles, a 1961 film about a largely forgotten corner of that deceptively bright city, is nothing less than a welcome act of defiant remembrance.”

* The film will be introduced by Robert Flaherty Film Seminar Executive Director Mary Kerr.

Saturday, September 13 at 6:50pm

Casa de Lava (1994), 110min

Directed by Pedro Costa

This documentary-inflected, dream-like narrative follows Mariana, a young Portuguese nurse as she accompanies a comatose Cape Verdean migrant construction worker back to his barren, economically depressed island homeland. As she struggles to fit in and piece together the man’s elusive history, a larger, shared discourse of displacement surfaces, accompanied by the ghosts of a complex post-colonial history.

“To watch the films of Pedro Costa is to behold a cinema at once ineffably modern yet unassailably classical, and that is but one of their glorious paradoxes.”—LA Weekly

 

Sunday, September 14 at 4:30pm*

God Is My Safest Bunker with Cargo and The Form of the Good, 92min total

God Is My Safest Bunker (2008), 58min

Directed by Lee Wang

With Cargo (2001), 29min

Directed by Laura Waddington

and The Form of the Good (2006), 5min

Directed by James T. Hong

These three exquisite films explore the vestiges of war in a world where borders are no barrier to refuge or economic survival. God Is My Safest Bunker investigates the conditions which draw thousands of Filipino migrant workers to work in the volatile Iraqi war zone. “By interviewing former Halliburton supervisors and three undeniably exploited Filipino workers, director Lee Wang convincingly illustrates how the post-draft military has used low-rate workers from South and Southeast Asia to keep the costs of war—human and economic—down and largely out of sight.”—New York Magazine

Cargo is a poetic exploration of displacement aboard a cargo ship headed for the Middle East.

“Cargo is nothing less than dazzling. Visually it’s superb (the dream like images, the work on time, the astonishing colours) but most of all, through her use of voice over, she lends these men an exemplary humanity and dignity.”—Les Inrockuptibles (France)

The Form of the Good is a meditation on Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave with the war on terror. “Hong knows the power of cinema to sway and convince, and he’s out to expose it, and you for ever believing it. His films question not just how cinema approaches truth (through manipulation, he argues), but the very concept of truth itself.”—Filmmaker Magazine

*A Q&A with God Is My Safest Bunker director Lee Wang will follow the screening.

 

Sunday, September 14 at 6:50pm

The Land and Black Sea Files, 88min total

The Land (1942) 45min

Directed by Robert Flaherty

With Black Sea Files (2005) 43min

Directed by Ursula Biemann

An exploration of geography, labor and the all-encompassing winds of capital and technology unite these two works. Flaherty’s The Land is a solemn portrait of the American farmer as the U.S. emerged from the Great Depression and became entangled in WWII. “Indeed the whole is impregnated with a sincerity that cannot but impress. Flaherty may be naïve: in his naïveté, however, he really says what he feels and avoids making hasty conclusions.[...] The secret of these pictures is to include time. They resemble fragments of a lost epic song that celebrated the immense life of the land; nothing is omitted, and each episode is full of significance.”—Siegfried Kracauer quoted in The World of Robert Flaherty

This film is screened with Black Sea Files, which conducts territorial research on Caspian oil geography, as human migration fuels the ever-growing flow of oil to the West.

 

About The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar

 

The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar is named after Robert Flaherty (1884-1951), who is considered by many to be the father of the American documentary. Flaherty’s groundbreaking documentary of Eskimo life, Nanook of the North is among the most noted films of the silent era. He was also the creator of such classic poetic films as Moana, Man of Aran, and Louisiana Story. The Seminar began in1955—before the era of film schools—when Flaherty’s widow, Frances, convened a group of filmmakers, critics, curators, musicians, and other film enthusiasts at the Flaherty farm in Vermont. For more than fifty years the Flaherty Seminar has been firmly established as a one-of-a-kind institution that seeks to encourage filmmakers and other artists to explore the potential of the moving image. The films of such directors as Robert Drew, Louis Malle, the Maysles brothers, Mira Nair, Satyajit Ray, and Robert M. Young were shown at the Seminar before they were known generally in the American film community. New cinematic techniques and approaches first presented and debated at the Seminar have routinely made their way into mainstream American film.

 

For more information on The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar please visit their website at:

www.flahertyseminar.org.

 

BAM Rose Cinemas (30 Lafayette Ave.)

Tickets: $11 per screening for adults; $7.50 for seniors 65 and over,

children under twelve, and $7.50 for students 25 and under with valid I.D.

Monday–Thursday, except holidays; $7 BAM Cinema Club members

Tickets available by phone at 718.777.FILM

Call 718.636.4100 or visit BAM.org

 

 

Location Name:  BAM Rose Cinemas

Address: 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY

OPEN YOUR HEART & LISTEN
World Festival of Sacred Music- Los Angeles (Sept 13-28, 2008)
1,000 artists, 16 days, 40 events in venues all across Los Angeles
www.festivalofsacredmusic.org

For more information and application please contact:
Judy Mitoma
Festival Director, 2008 World Festival of Sacred Music
Foundation for World Arts
(310) 206-1335
email: cip@arts.ucla.edu

Mark Eby
Producer, Azbri Productions
(310) 962-2463
email: wfsm@azbri.com

Address: , Los Angeles, CA

Location Name:  The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, The Museum of Modern Art

Address: 11 West 53 St., New York

Tel: 212.708.9400