Topic: documentary film
Most likely to....? Once brothers, "Prodigal Sons" Marc McKerrow (left) and Kimberly Reed (director) meet at their high school reunion in Montana. (Photo courtesy First Run Features)
Reed Redeems Promise of ‘Prodigal Sons’
If Kimberly Reed took a not particularly unique path into filmmaking, she certainly took an interesting road out of it. A native of Helena, Montana, she came to U.C. Berkeley in the late ’80s, discovered film and went on to earn a master’s degree at S.F. State while working in the seminars department at Film Arts Foundation. After transitioning from male to female, the challenge of adjusting to a new identity impelled her to trade her location (San Francisco for New York) and career (digital editing for magazine publishing). Call it necessity, call it a detour, but it’s in the rear-view mirror now. She makes a triumphant return to both filmmaking and the Bay Area with her first-person documentary Prodigal Sons, a raw and altogether remarkable debut that opens this month around the country.
topics: activism, authors, bay area, diy, documentary, documentary film, film arts foundation, frameline, independent film, sf international lgbt film festival
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Lensing Laos: Malcolm Murray and Michael Meyer prepare a shot in a village north of Luang Prabang for "Camera, Camera." (Photo by Sonephet Keosouvan)
Tourists Show, Tell For Murray’s Laotian ‘Camera’
When Laos revised its visa structure to allow visitors to stay for more than one week, Westerners with digital cameras surged over the border. Sensing that the pervasive pocket technology affected their travel experience, Malcolm Murray embarked on an unusual documentary that sees the country through tourists’ eyes. “I wanted to talk to people about what kind of picture they were taking, and look through the lens of amateur travel photography,” he says. “Using a macro lens, we shot the screen of people’s cameras. We have a mic on them, and they feel anonymous because we don’t see their face. But we see their photographs, in a sense. People opened up really quickly and revealed things they didn’t even mean to reveal.”
topics: digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, documentary film
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Road to recovery: Helen S. Cohen (left) and Mark Lipman (not pictured) film the recovery of Dr. Grace Dammann (right) at Green Gulch Farm in Muir Beach. (Photo courtesy filmmakers)
Cohen, Lipman Follow Recovering Friend Through ‘Forest’
On May 21, 2008, Dr. Grace Dammann was injured in a head-on car crash on the Golden Gate Bridge. She spent 45 days in a coma and 13 months in the hospital, gradually working her way back from the edge. When the doctors finally released her last June, Helen S. Cohen and Mark Lipman were ready with a camera. “We jumped in literally the day she went home,” Cohen recalls, “and filmed the arduous process of wheelchair to car to wheelchair to ramp to home” at Green Gulch Farm in Muir Beach. The husband-and-wife team has been rolling ever since, but the shape and structure of their film remains very much up in the air.
topics: activism, authors, bay area, diy, documentary film
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The road to 2010: Critics and industry look back on the year and decade and look forward to the new year's releases, in particular, Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon," which screens locally in January. (Copyright Films du Losange, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
Thoughts on the aughts: best/worst trends of the year and decade
A decade as odd as this one, with George Bush and Barack Obama as its bookends, deserves to be examined. While the U.S. moved from rebuilding decimated skyscrapers to the rebuilding of an entire economy, film moved from the multiplex to the mailbox to the cell phone. But did the pictures really get small? We tried to find out by surveying Bay Area film-industry professionals as well as everyday fans on the trends that moved them. We found love for animation and hate for the ascendancy of the first-person narrator-star in documentary films. We saw pleas for more collaboration and less ego. We encountered disdain for CGI and hope for independent exhibitors and filmmakers. The comments below were selected from many we received; needless to say, we couldn’t publish everything. If you feel we missed anything in particular, we encourage you to issue a few opinions of your own in the "comments" box at story’s end.
topics: activism, actors, animation, bay area, cinephiles, critics, critics year end polls, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary film, drama, environmental films, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, tv, world cinema, youth
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Throw it in the bag: Justine Jacobs' and Alex D. da Silva's "Ready, Set, Bag!" takes a DIY route into theaters. (Photo courtesy filmmaker)
Filmmakers stuff "Bag!" with self-distribution dreams
Oren Jacob was out with friends one night when the conversation turned to high school summer jobs. “I used to be a grocery bagger,” one person recalled, “but never made it out to the regionals.” Oren phoned his wife on the way home. “I know what our next film is about,” he said. Justine Jacob had just completed her debut with Alex D. da Silva, Runners High, about inner-city teens training for a marathon, and figured Oren had stumbled on a lighter, quirkier variation of the sports doc. Instead, “we found a competition that has been going on for over 20 years, an organization (the National Grocers Association) with a purpose to advocate for independent grocers that cater to their communities, and an industry filled with integrity where individuals love their jobs and serving their customers,” Justine says. “We knew we had more than a competition film.” Three years later, the filmmakers are rolling out Ready, Set, Bag! themselves. Rule No. 1: Crushables go on top.
topics: bay area, directors, distributors, diy, documentary film
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Green screen: Kristine Enea takes aim at Malik Looper, Executive Director of Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ), a group constructing San Francisco's first completely off-the-grid building at Heron's Head Park in India Basin. (Photo by Pam Calvert)
Legal eagle eye Kristine Enea zooms "Off the Grid"
The very short list of lawyers-turned-documentary makers includes Frederick Wiseman, Abby Ginzberg and a handful of others. The tally of filmmakers elected to public office is even shorter. Now contemplate for a moment making two documentaries while running for San Francisco Supervisor and holding down your day job. It’s no exaggeration to say that Kristine Enea is charting a unique course, one that combines activism, journalism, new media and politics. “People are craving information,” she declares, “and the boom in documentary filmmaking is evidence of that.” To hear someone with such deep connections outside the film community make that observation is particularly gratifying, and bodes well for independents (albeit less so for television news).
topics: activism, authors, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary film, san francisco film society
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On his toes: Frederick Wiseman observes movement in "La Danse: Le Ballet de L'Opera de Paris." (Photo courtesy Zipporah Films)
Workin’ it: "La Danse" and "Everything Strange and New"
Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary operates as a potent antidote to the gnawing worry, fed by the grim global economic news, that the social fabric and civilization as we know it are at a precipice. If that accomplishment is somehow insufficient, La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris does double duty as a coolly furious rebuttal to the entropy that is the natural state of practically everything. Rust never sleeps, no question, but neither (it seems) do the dancers, choreographers and artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet. For an equally truthful and more familiar perspective on workplace satisfaction in the Age of Diminishing Expectations, there’s Frazer Bradshaw’s Oakland-set, understatedly eloquent Everything Strange and New. Wiseman’s doc (opening today at the Balboa and Elmwood) and Bradshaw’s feature (ditto at the Roxie) aren’t what you call typical holiday fare, though they assuredly provide An Education for Brothers and Avatars on The Road or Up In the Air.
topics: bay area, directors, documentary film, independent film, world cinema
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