Editor’s Note: In the world of fiction, places like Yoknapatawpha County and Dublin have afforded a rich mother lode of stories and compelling characters for their respective authors, William Faulkner and James Joyce, to return to over and over again. For filmmaker Jonathan Stack, the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is that sort of strangely mystical place that has inspired him to produce no fewer than seven documentaries. Mr. Stack talks about the power of place and time in creating his oeuvre. I have often said that in the real world of documentary filmmaking, stories rarely end, just
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When the central government of a nation state chooses to spend money to subsidize independent documentary screenings, it’s clear that its economy is booming. Such is the joyful case with the first Doclands film festival and market held in Dublin, Ireland. The much-vaunted Celtic Tiger has delivered energy, color and a shiny patina of hipness to the Temple Bar area of Dublin, home to the National Film Theatre and headquarters to Doclands. Unprecedented growth has undoubtedly created its own pressures: Traffic in Dublin seems at gridlock, except that there is no grid. As with every economic
The annual New York Film Festival, in business at Lincoln Center since 1963, customarily screens up to four documentaries. But the festival this year was busy with a feast of Asian narrative cinema, leaving space for only one documentary—Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I. A film of great joy and affirmation, the film nonetheless deals in part with poverty and homelessness within a sub-class of “glaneurs” -- those who glean in the fields for overlooked crops after the harvest. Given the plethora of festivals in New York that do serve up ample helpings of documentaries, as well as the healthy
The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) was really three events, all of extreme interest to documentary filmmakers. First there was the Festival, where from 9 a.m. til past midnight, some 200 films, from more than 1,600 submitted, were screened in eight theatres. There was also the Docs For Sale market, with 300 titles available for viewing by prospective buyers on 30 monitors that were never idle. And finally, there was the Forum where over a period of three days, filmmakers seeking finance pitched 58 projects before an audience that included more than 50 commissioning
When a film series is named after an anthropologist and staged in a museum, you expect certain things—like an air of earnestness and a near-constant sense that you are being educated. So it is with the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, the United States’ oldest ethnographic fête. At this year’s event at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, when I wasn’t watching a grainy, silent, 1898 film of the surgical separation of Siamese twins, I was observing mollusks copulate and elderly Bulgarian peasants awaiting death. Not the lightest fare, but still the makings of a fairly
Over the past few years, our community has seen a veritable tsunami of documentaries that examine the sex industry and its various strands—adult entertainment, prostitution, stripping, et al. Leading the charge are docs on porn. Shooting Porn (1997, Ron Larsen and Caryn Horowitz) took on the gay porn industry, while Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (1999, Gough Lewis), The Girl Next Door (1999, Christine Fugate) and Wadd (1999, Cass Paley) each profiled porn stars. The National Film Board of Canada aired Give Me Your Soul (2000, Paul Cowan) last October, Showtime plans to air The Other Hollywood
Legalized prostitution, one of the twin pillars of sin in Nevada—the other being legalized gambling—is under siege these days. With Mormons encroaching from over the Utah border and Nevada leading the nation in population growth, state officials have worked to restrict legal prostitution to the rural areas, where for over 150 years, a steady flow of clientele—from cowboys to miners to truckers—has made the desert brothels its way stations. When Doug Lindeman first surveyed this territory in the 1980s, he was a journalist working on a story about how the AIDS pandemic had impacted legalized
Last April, Live Nude Girls Unite!, an edgy documentary about labor issues in the strip-tease industry, premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival and won a Bay Area Golden Gate Award and the Audience Award. Since its theatrical release last October, it has been on the radar screen of independent film programmers, and has become a must-see for workers looking to organize. Over the course of an ID interview with Julia Query and Vicky Funari, the film’s co-directors, it became evident that, as Query attested, the success of the film is due to its “sexy and serious” nature—that a
Editor’s Note—Sometimes inspiration comes from the most unlikely sources—a plastic bag floating through a plaza, a little girl climbing up a tree to view a funeral. Bill Kramer happened upon an obituary that led him to the shady netherworld of pornography, escort service and the American dream. In the midst of my ongoing frustration with the state of the Hollywood film machine and its lack of compelling characters and powerful storylines, I happened to read in a downtown NYC rag that gay porn star Jon Vincent had died of an apparent heroin overdose. The obit went on to state that two ex-wives
In late 1997, The History Channel approached our company, MPH Entertainment, to develop a documentary mini-series dealing with sex throughout history. The History Channel's goal was to create a smart, compelling overview of this immense and often controversial topic by clearly separating fact from fiction. We really wanted a show that was provocative without being sensational or exploitive. The History of Sex aired in the fall of 1999 and was a critical success, along with becoming the History Channel's highest-rated program of all time. Not surprisingly, The History Channel wanted a follow-up