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See what the legendary Albert Maysles has to say in our first Full Frame Day One UnionDocs video!

A series of interviews with directors from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in
Durham, North Carolina. We asked directors (including the legendary Albert Maysles) about their takes on film festivals, being a filmmaker in 2008, what makes a good story, being daring, and when to end your film.

The result is some amazing insights into making a documentary film: the highs, the lows, the last minute editing sessions, the struggle for funding, inspiration, and what makes a compelling, sucessful film.

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In reflecting on Full Frame, I’d like to revisit a screening that’s already been somewhat discussed here. In pairing Albert Maysles’ latest film about Sally Gross (The Pleasure of Stillness) with the first film from Aurelien Foucault (Of Shadows and Men), the festival programmers created a dynamic that echoed through the rest of Full Frame. The convergence of master and novice, established and innovative, predictable and daring. That’s part of what made the festival so exciting, to see the potential everywhere mixed with stunning proven results.

We saw it also in films like Salim Baba, which was a beautifully-shot short about a man in India who drives a cinema cart to support his family. The cart is a mobile screening booth, with the film projected on the back wall of a little box, and children peeking through windows on the sides, under the cover of a curtain to keep the light out. To watch as the Indian man and his young sons take scrapped celluloid and re-configure it to make their own films, painstakingly taping the frames together with unwieldy scotch tape - that’s what’s exciting about filmmaking, what’s always been exciting about it.

When asked, many filmmakers we spoke to during the festival cited the digital revolution in filmmaking as such a great, revolutionary, daring part of filmmaking in 2008. The idea that every person can go out and buy a camera and edit a film on their laptop while sipping coffee in a cafe. Yes, it’s amazing! It’ll be even more amazing to watch what unexpected things people do with the medium now - ways of reappropriating the technology and the artform for something revolutionary. Glimpses of these possibilities were seen in films like In A Dream, which melded animation and film footage with an incredible family history and great cinematography to create a beautiful artifact. Or Man On Wire, which used dramatic representation and humour to re-enact and re-examine an act of daring humanity writ large.

This enthusiasm and encouragement were constantly present at Full Frame. Unlike other festivals, where the air shimmers with fevered competition, this was a great opportunity to just hang out with film fans and filmmakers alike and watch a bunch of great films together. Also, Durham, NC provided the perfect setting for this festival - relaxed, friendly, and home to some superb red velvet cake (Blue Coffee Cafe).

It’s impossible to try to encapsulate everything in a handful of sentences though. The UnionDocs podcasts made and photos taken during Full Frame lend another perspective to the madcap adventures that were undertaken in the pursuit of film appreciation.

On an ending note, some quips that were wonderfully memorable:

“To have a hand is to make good things.” - Laotian saying, quoted in The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)

“I never thought I’d look at the twin towers and think of anything but 9/11, and your film changed that.” - audience response to James Marsh’s Man On Wire

“I didn’t want to make a sexy, National Geographic version of Kolkata.” - Tim Sternberg in Q&A about his film, Salim Baba

“…all it takes is two guys, a camera, and a computer.” - Aurelien Foucault on how to go about making your first film

Still trying to soak in all the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival madness…it was truly a whirlwind of amazing films, incredible stories, and eye-opening advice about how to make documentary films.

Some of the answers to our questions that the directors provided for our podcasts were fascinating and really got me thinking. I’d like to try and answer a couple of them for myself now…based on my full frame experience.

What does it mean to be daring in documentary film? We had a lot of great answers to this: from being subversive, truthful, something PBS won’t fund….

I think right now being daring in documentary film means taking advantage of all some new techniques out there in addition the traditional methods to tell a story in the most powerful way possible.

Two of my absolute favorite movies at the festival did this in extremely entertaining ways- while still respecting the reality of the story.
Lucio is the tale of a Spanish anarchist turned international forgery expert and used interesting animation with newspaper clips and drawings, interviews, old pictures, 1940’s movie footage, and digital reproductions of intricately drawn checks and passports to tell the story.

Man on A Wire used recreations, archival video, news clips, and cut together multiple hysterical recollections of the same story about Phillipe Petit, a man who tightrope walked across the World Trade Center (eight times in a row!) in 1974. The result was a fast-paced, touching truth is stranger than fiction drama.

And it also means experimenting with narrative itself: Observando el Cielo was a simple and elegant montage of images of the night sky in motion. At first, I felt kind of bored for the lack of any kind of narrative, since I had been so inundated by them for the past couple of days at the festival. But by the end the rhythm of the images moved me into a nice peaceful and meditative state. Sometimes a film can be a painting.

The other theme we got from directors in our interviews was the ambivalence of being a filmmaker in 2008. On one hand, with affordable HD cameras and home editing stations, it seems like the accessibility of this medium allows more first time directors to produce. However, it is still so difficult to get funding–even doc God Albert Maysles said it. One solution is more seed money grants based on emerging fimakers- such as the one offered to current UnionDocs residnet Nathan Fisher at the Full Frame Festival.
Overall, amazing films. Great food. Fun people.

Rainy weather though. Oh and UNC lost. Can’t have it all I guess.

Thanks Full Frame!

The winners of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival were announced Sunday at a big Southern barbeque, with sweet tea, bluegrass, and clogging.

• Anne Dellinger Grand Jury Award – Trouble the Water
  • • Special Jury Award – Man on Wire
• Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short – City of Cranes
• Full Frame Audience Award – Man on Wire
• Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award – Lioness
• The Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award – In A Dream
  • • Honorable Mention – Up the Yangtze
• Full Frame Inspiration Award – At the Death House Door
• Full Frame President’s Award – Summerchild
• Full Frame Spectrum Award – The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
  • • Honorable Mention – Up the Yangtze
• Full Frame Women In Leadership Award – Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai
• Full Frame/Working Films Award – Please Vote for Me and Trouble the Water
• The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights – Trouble the Water