In August 1910, Sir William MacKenzie whose transcontinental railway, the Canadian Northern, was then in the initial stages of construction, commissioned the writer to undertake an expedition to the East Coast of Hudson Bay to examine deposits of certain islands upon which iron ore were supposed to be located. All told I made four expeditions on Sir William's behalf, during a period of six years, along the East Coast of Hudson Bay, through the barren lands of the hitherto unexplored peninsula of Ungava, along the west coast of Ungava Bay and along the southern coast of Baffin Land. This work
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The IDA is on the move-quite literally. And if you happened to be on the East Coast on June 28, you probably heard IDA members, trustees and guests marking the opening of our new East Coast office. June 28th was also an evening in HBO's annual Bryant Park outdoor screening series ( The 1999 HBO Summer Festival) . To celebrate, IDA trustee Sheila Nevins graciously hosted a reception on the terrace of the New York Public Library overlooking Bryant Park. What a great place to enjoy an early summer evening in New York! After the rousing reception, we all settled in for an outdoor screening of what
Editor's Note: Since I began editing the magazine, back in October 1996, and even before, Contributing Editor Gordon Hitchens has been generously offering the magazine his valuable reportage from the many festivals he attends, including those for which he acts as U.S. assistant (Yamagata every other year, and Berlin each February). My friendship with Gordon goes back more than 30 years, when he published an article of mine in an issue of Film Culture that he was guest editing. Twenty years my senior he can be an irascible character at times, but no one can doubt the invaluable service he
P.O.V. has declared its 1999 season to be one in which "filmmakers focus their lenses on freedom": the term is given broad latitude as the films in its lineup range from explorations of oppression past and present to individual journeys against the odds and expectations of society. And as in previous years, the series includes selections from this year's festival favorites—Emiko Omori's Rabbit in the Moon and Barbara Sonnebom and Janet Cole's Academy Award@ nominee Regret to Inform—mixed with some lesserknown gems. The series' opener is Michael J. Moore's Sundance entry The Legacy: Murder &
The Los Angeles-based Pan African Film & Art Festival was launched in 1992 and in a short time, thanks to the tireless efforts of executive director Ayuko Babu, has emerged as major player in the growing nexus of African Diaspora-oriented festivals in the United States and around the world. As curator of the film festival (other individuals curate the music and visual arts components), Mr. Baby labors year-round maintaining working relationships with sister festivals in Chicago, Newark, Atlanta, Houston and Oakland. The Mecca of black film arts festivals, where programmers and producers from
Sometimes, the act of watching films is like going to a place where you've never been and discovering that you feel right at home. That's what happened to Paul Pena, the star of Adrian and Roko Belic's Genghis Blues. This popular documentary—already mentioned in these pages for its Sundance premiere—won both the Grand Prize for Best Bay Area Documentary and the Audience Award at the recent San Francisco International Film Festival (April 22-May 6). At closing night ceremonies, when Genghis Blues was announced as prizewinner, Roko Belic brought Pena onstage. The blind musician, whose journey to
Over the past few years, I've reported in these pages about the possibilities for documentarians in the developments of cyberspace (see my last piece, I.D., July-August 1997). What's interested me is the technology being developed to bring sound and image in combo to surfers of the Internet, most specifically making documentaries available to anyone who stumbles onto them. The road to this has been slow, with the speed of moderns and phone line capacities quickly being eclipsed by fiber optics and other methods to bring information to users on an almost instantaneous response basis. In my last
"Berlin is changing," reflected Ulrich Gregor, Co-Director of Berlin 's Internationale Filmfestspiele, also Director of the International Forum of New Cinema. After forty-nine years at the same location , the event in February 2000 will move to the much heralded new area Potsdamer Platz, for decades the locale of the infamous Berlin Wall. "Potsdamer Platz is the key to the new city," says Gregor. "Previously it marked the border between east and west; now it is neither east nor west, but the new center. So it's very important for our festival to have a presence there." Amidst all the hoopla
The DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival, held April 8-11 in Durham, North Carolina, managed in its second year to present the documentary in a humanist tradition. Associated with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, it has grown a lot since the inaugural weekend event a year ago. It's a day longer, with more submissions (now up to about 300), and double the number of festival passes (now 450). Major documentary filmmakers, including D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Lee Grant and George Stoney, along with many other producers, sat on panels, spoke after films and mixed at
Cinema du Reel was founded in 1978, just about the same time as the opening of the world's premiere art museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, where the film festival takes place (this year, 5-14 March). Dedicated to promoting documentary cinema's ethnographic and sociological impact (what is called "visual anthropology"), the 1999 Cinema du Reel was marked by a strong European presence, and a considerable num ber of woman filmmakers. Suzette Glenadel, the festival's General Delegate, viewed at least a thousand films from which 21 were chosen for the French section and 29 for the international