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Green themes and aesthetics at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival

On the one hand, we were in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; one the other, we were witnessing the most significant US Presidential Inauguration in history. And in between the sadness and euphoria, the Sundance Film Festival was celebrating its 25th anniversary, opening in the last dying days of the Bush Administration and closing in the bright shining rays of the Obama Era. There was much to relish in the middle. With hope and change having electrified the nation since the day after Election Day, Cara Mertes, Sundance's Documentary Film Program Director, and her crew

The weather and the economic news outside may have been dreary last week, but the mood inside the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC, was warm and optimistic at the 11th annual Realscreen Summit. In spite of the recession, close to 1,100 people from across the United States and around the world gathered February 1 to 4 to listen to the heartbeat of the nonfiction industry, participate in master classes, network with colleagues and pitch their projects, and sit in on panel discussions. According to Realscreen Magazine publisher Claire McDonald, the number of exhibitors increased this year, as

Over the next ten days, we at IDA will be introducing-and in some cases, re-introducing-our community to the filmmakers whose work has been nominated for an Academy Award for either Best Documentary Feature or Best Documentary Short Subject. As we did in conjunction with the DocuWeek TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase that we presented last summer, we have asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films-the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far, and the impact of an Academy Award nomination. So, to kick off this

Eloquent and poetic yet devastatingly real, The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) is a deeply moving, personal film culminating from two decades of ideas and images created by Ellen Kuras, ASC ( 4 Little Girls; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), who began working on the project at the dawn of her career. She is the producer, director and cinematographer of the 96-minute documentary. The Betrayal takes the audience on a harrowing journey with the Phrasavath family from Laos, which was split asunder at the end of the Vietnam War. The father had fought on the US side, which made the family targets for

You don't have to make a doc about the environment to do something good for it.

I first saw Agnès Varda's 1982 short documentary Ulysses several years ago, and was instantly struck by its simplicity and power. Varda revisits a haunting photograph that she had taken on a beach in Calais, France in 1954 and investigates its significance in her life and the lives of the models she had chosen. In the top left corner of the picture, a naked man stands on the shore with his back to us. At his feet sits a boy of 6 or 7, his face turned towards the camera. Balancing out the composition on the bottom right corner is the body of a goat with its eyes wide open. Varda's interviews

Twelve docs, five days, one bird poop.

Some post-Sundance pick-ups.

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