Docudrama
by kmikeym
Primary, Crisis, and the Full Frame shorts DVD I watched were all released by the same company, Docudrama, an independent video label from New Video, dedicated exclusively to bringing cutting-edge and critically acclaimed documentaries to DVD and VHS. Docudrama is amazing, and feel free to buy me anything from their catalogue.
New Video is a publishing, marketing and distribution company that focuses on bringing television, documentary, independent films, and children's programming to DVD and VHS. They started as a video store in NYC in 1981, grew to five locations and sold to Vestron, Inc. Then in 1993 they relaunched as a home video distribution company.
New Video now consists of four labels. A&E Home Video, The History Channel Home Video, Scholastic Video Collection, and Docudrama, formed in 1999, a label exclusively focused on documentary films. Docudrama seems like the "major leagues" of documentary distribution.
Posted on June 24, 2004 | Comments (0)
48 Hour Film Project
by kmikeym
Check this out:
The internationally acclaimed 48 Hour Film Project brings its wild, sleepless weekend of filmmaking to Portland on August 20-22. The 48 Hour Film Project asks filmmaking teams to make a movie from scratch--teams write, shoot, edit and score original music--all in just 48 hours. On Friday night, teams draw their genre from a hat, and receive a character, prop and line of dialogue that must appear in the film. On Sunday night they race to the drop off location with a finished film.
The project is open to pros and amateurs alike. All films will be screened a the Hollywood Theatre on August 25th and 26th. The winning Portland film will compete at the national screening for valuable prizes.
(wonder if we could do this, maybe pool our music and film resources together to form an awesome "team"?)
Posted on June 23, 2004 | Comments (2)
Full Frame Film Fest
by kmikeym
This past weekend I watched a DVD of short documentaries collected from the first five years of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. I hadn't heard of this festival before, but I had heard of one of the shorts, Lucy Tsak Tsak, directed by Andrey Paounov*, is a very short (3 minutes) but conceptually great piece about a woman who worked in the Bulgarian film industry. I also think I remember hearing something about Mojave Mirage, about a phone booth in the desert that got famous on the Internet. The subject was interesting, but it should have been 15 minutes, not 36.
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival was formed in 1998 by Nancy Buirski, a former photo editor at the NY Times, and has an amazing board of directors including Martin Scorsese, Ken Burns, and a bunch of documentary names I'm not that familiar with. In just a short time this has become the premier documentary film festival in the United States.
There is also a Volume 2 out from 2003 which I haven't seen yet.
*Andrey Paounov recently completed Georgi and the Butterflies which is not yet listed on his IMDB page. There is a little more info on the berlinale-talentcampus.de website.
Posted on June 23, 2004 | Comments (1)
cinema verité
by kmikeym
I recently discovered the cinema verité genre with the wonderful documentary Primary. I have been looking for a word or term to describe the type of smaller focus documentary that I enjoy (like Growin' A Beard and Something's Brewin' In Shiner) when I started reading about cinema verité, a sort of observational documentary, and I definitely find it much more appealing than a documentary with a voice-over and a lots of titles (heh heh, sorry John).
I was talking with Curt about Primary and he asked, "Is that by Robert Drew?" and I wasn't sure, but we quickly confirmed it was and then Curt said, "Yeah, I met him in New York. His daughter was my advisor at UAF." These are the things that blow my mind.
Posted on June 19, 2004 | Comments (1)
Combover
by kmikeym
Combover is exactly the kind of documentary I love. I mean, I haven't seen it yet... but the personal obsession is so amazing. Looking forward to this.
Posted on June 16, 2004 | Comments (0)
Hunting of a President
by kmikeym
Looks like The Hunting of a President might be good. A lot of people were involved, and it looks like this is a pretty big production deal. I don't really get who made the film... I guess the guys that wrote the book. Weird.
Posted on June 16, 2004 | Comments (0)