The MadCat International Women’s Film Festival has put the call out for their next Film festival. They are looking for films directed or co-directed by women produced ANY year. MadCat accepts ALL GENRES – experimental, documentary, animated, narrative, hybrid, etc. The Festival favors work that pushes the genre and expands notions of visual storytelling.
Submission Fee: $10-30 sliding scale. Pay what you can afford. International entrants may disregard the fee. For more details go the their website or call 415 436-9523.
Late Deadline: May 21, 2007.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on April 26, 2007 in
Current TV—a global television network broadcasting user made content—currently features this short documentary that follows a guerrilla gardener as he seeks to make one London neighbourhood a greener place.
Posted by Rob Maguire on April 17, 2007 in
Vlogger and filmmaker extraordinaire Brett Gaylor has launched a website for his newest project The Basement Tapes, the world's first mash-up documentary, and he wants YOU to contribute to the mash. The doc is about copyright issues, the music industry and that whole fandangled culture of remix, snack, mash, and bang-up. Gaylor will be challenging copyright laws and big bad corporations with the doc, which is set to come out in March 2008, by including all kinds of media that the powers-that-be maintain is their "intellectual property." It's quite likely that the film could launch a nasty law suit, but hey, that sounds like good PR for an indy doc! Gaylor is currently at the South by Southwest filmfest discussing the issues around open source, public knowledge, remix culture and corporate-friendly copyright. Check out the podcast here.
For those interested in mash-up, visit Gaylor's project site, OpenSourceCinema.org, and contribute to the meta-mash, which will eventually be included in the documentary film. And if you're a lawyer reading this, or someone interested in the constantly misinterpreted laws around copyright and fair use, check out the Creative Commons site, a veritable warehouse of information on these issues.
Posted by Ezra Winton on March 20, 2007 in
This article first appeared in the print issue of Canada's indispensable POV Magazine, Issue 65, Spring 2007. To order a subscription of POV, visit the Documentary Organisation of Canada's (DOC) site.
In Alanis Obomsawin’s deceptively simple first film, 1971’s Christmas at Moose Factory, children’s drawings of the holidays are explained and given context by the disembodied voices of the artists themselves, whose faces fade in at the conclusion. In the most recent offering from her now 35-year career with the NFB, the heartfelt tribute and cautionary tale Waban-aki: People From Where the Sun Rises, Obomsawin devotes a great deal of screen time to modern-day basket makers, artists, and canoe builders, who explain the history and tradition of their craft as they practice it. If one wishes to locate a “deeper” stratum of meaning below Obomsawin’s forthright and impassioned sense of social commitment and social justice, it might well reside in this emphasis on the tangibility of Canada’s Native peoples, the material traces of their past and the material immediacy of their present—both of which, as Obomsawin so unforgettably depicts, the Canadian government has worked hard (and expensively) to efface...
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Posted by on March 17, 2007 in
Peter Wintonick reports in this month's issue of POV magazine that a new project is well under way in Canada's doc community. The Green Code Project, as it's known, applies environmental codes to every stage of making a documentary film to ensure that the process is as progressive as the product. "The code will consist of a set of modest, voluntary, environmentally friendly eco-actions, guidelines, standards and principles that encourage ecological friendly sustainability." Wintonick likens it to a "micro Kyoto Accord" for docs. The idea was started by Quebec documentarians Sylvie Van Brabant and Marie-France Cote and quickly gathered the support of government institutions including the NFB and other production companies across Canada. Docs are famous for their social-issue focuses and their no-nonsense anti-fluff approach to telling hard-hitting political stories, so it makes sense that the process of making docs should take into account and try to reduce ecological footprints. The feature film industry is one of the most wasteful and eco-disgraceful industries out there, with hundreds of bins of first and second growth Mahogany heading to the landfill every day (one of many examples), so it is encouraging to see a group of committed artists organizing and urging their community to break from this kind of practice.
Now that docs are on their way, let's hope this trend makes its way to Hollywood, where the CBC reports 127,000 tonnes of ozone and diesel are pumped into the California air each year alone. For more information on this initiative, visit the Green Code Project site.
Posted by Ezra Winton on March 13, 2007 in
As much as Hollywood tries, it is not the best in the business of making progressive political art. And so it was no surprise that at this year's Academy Awards the evening was once again neutered of any political context, or of any real comment on the state of American society and the damage that empire is inflicting on the planet and on itself. And since there wasn't a Michael Moore to be booed off stage by paid stage hands and sideline "plants" (not the audience, as was widely reported), the rich and groomed were generally at ease, even during the segment highlighting outstanding work in the genre of feature documentary, thanks mostly to the daft and dismissive remarks by Jerry Seinfeld.
It seems that Seinfeld doesn't have much respect for the art of documentary making, and his commentary has not gone unnoticed in the doc community. John Sinno, producer of the Academy Award nominated IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS sent Art Threat an open letter to the Academy that we publish here with his permission.
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Posted by Ezra Winton on March 4, 2007 in
It's Oscar season again, and on February 25, little man-statues will be given out to the beautiful and famous in Hollywood, and as the Guerrilla Girls remind us, the recipients will be mostly men. While this annual celebrity cluster bomb reveals the clinically vapid celebritrons, the endlessly pretentious red carpets, the perfectly sculpted franken-lips, breasts, eyelashes and everything else, a handful of talented, politically convicted auters will be inconspicuously milling about.
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Posted by Ezra Winton on February 16, 2007 in
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