Lots to of changes to report at the Cinema Eye Honors. Held in the spring for the first two years of its existence, in 2010 the awards dedicated to nonfiction film will take place in January. The calendar move will change the identity of the event from a footnote to the long awards season to a potential pre-Oscar indicator. Also, filmmaker Esther B. Robinson and newly installed San Francisco Film Society programmer Rachel Rosen will join Cinema Eye Founder AJ Schnack as co-chairs of the event, and former co-chair Thom Powers will now chair the Nominations Committee. Finally, the nominees for January’s awards will be announced at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in England in November, thus somewhat internationalizing the affair.

Coverage of past Cinema Eyes.

On a panel discussion before its world premiere screening at SilverDocs last night, AJ Schnack used the phrase “Robert Altman-esque” to describe the construction of his new film, Convention. This is accurate as a reference to the stylistic tropes we classically think of when we think of Altman — shot by nine filmmaker/camerapersons, Convention tracks the interwoven stories of a number of semi-interrelated characters as they produce, participate in, protest, protect and/or report on the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver — but the film also shares what Roger Ebert, in his review of Nashville, refered to as Altman’s “humanism”, the way he “sees people with his camera in such a way as to enlarge our own experience.” The multiple cameras and the multi-faceted streams of vision that they bring to Convention accomplish two major feats in terms of altering the scale of perspective: they condense nearly an entire city’s goings-on during the biggest international event in its recent history into the managable microcosmic experiences of a few of its thoroughly “normal” citizens, while at the same time opening up spaces in the lives of strangers that the viewer can sink into, and thus sync up to a communal sense of Something Happening. It seems so simple, and yet it’s so rare that you actually find yourself in a theater, having a moment of collective transcendance that makes you think, “This is why movies exist.”

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On Sunday at True/False, filmmaker/blogger AJ Schnack screened the first thirty minutes of Convention, his verite-style film documenting the 2008 Democratic National Convention with an eye on the Denver locals (politicians, city administrators, journalists, protesters) who were in the mix. Shot by Schnack in collaboration with nearly a dozen documentarians (including the Oscar-nominated directors Laura Poitras and Julia Reichert, and Daniel Junge, who directed the Oscar-shortlisted They Killed Sister Dorothy), the film’s making-of process was almost as much of a serendipity-dependent feat of execution as the event captured on screen.

As his, uh, primary inspiration, Schnack cites Robert Drew’s Primary, a Direct Cinema landmark documenting the Wisconsin primary race between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The first American nonfiction picture filmed with sync sound, its IMDb profile reads today as a who’s-who of 60s documentary film: Drew as audio recordist, Albert Maysles and Ricky Leacock behind the camera and D.A. Pennebaker in the editing room. Time will tell if Convention’s slate of collaborators seems as starry 50 years on, but in the present it stands out as a film built out of and on top of connections made on the film festival circuit. If, in the context of the incestuous world of indie film, that hardly seems all that noteworthy, it is relevant that the production seems to have harnessed the scrappy, obsessive energy of that rather insular community and put it to the service of documenting an event that could potentially have meaning to a much larger segment of the population. …Read more

• The Hollywood Reporter has already summed up this year’s festival despite there still being a few more days left. The trade calls both the fest and its films “surprising, quality-filled and not as depressing as some expected.”
• Despite this year bringing quality, though, it didn’t necessarily bring buyers. The L.A. Times has a look at how this year was a buyer’s market, particularly noticeable in the low purchase prices and alternative distribution models. And many of the titles picked up, including The Winning Season, Adam and Black Dynamite, were apparently bought for their “broad” audience appeal over their quality.
• AJ Schnack at All these wonderful things writes on the terrible lack of documentary acquisitions so far this festival.
• Marc Webb, whose feature debut, 500 Days of Summer, premiered at this year’s fest, has already made a deal for his second film. He’ll direct The Spectacular Now, another coming-of-age drama also to be scripted by his 500 Days writers, for Fox Searchlight.
• indieWIRE has the 2009 shorts winners. Jury Prizes went to Short Term 12 and Lies while Honorable Mentions include The attack of the robots from Nebula-5, Protect You + Me, Western Spaghetti, Jerrycan, Love You More, I Live in the Woods, Omelette and Treevenge.
• Most of the coverage of Sundance yesterday consisted of report and commentary on the “Dude vs. Film Critic” non-fight. Karina’s mostly first-hand account can be found here.

AJ Schnack is publishing a series of year-end email interviews with non-fiction filmmakers. So far, he’s talked to Man on Wire director James Marsh, Trouble the Water’s Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, and Jeremiah Zagar of In a Dream; today’s interview is with Patrick Creadon, director of Wordplay and the Oscar shortlisted debt doc, I.O.U.S.A. Amongst other things, Creadon talks about a potential pitfall of having such a timely film on the festival circuit: his story balooned so fast that between its Sundance premiere and its theatrical release in August, I.O.U.S.A. was screened in four different versions.

This reminds me of something that I’ve been meaning to post about for awhile: there’s yet another version of I.O.U.S.A, a 32-and-a-half minute version which has been posted on YouTube. This authorized re-edit, according to its YouTube description, was “designed specifically for watching and sharing on the web - for free.” So have at it — I’ve embedded it above.

AJ Schnack has posted the Academy’s shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature nomination. As expected (at least, by me), Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, and Sundance winners Man on Wire and Trouble the Wire all made the cut. It’s also nice to see a few smaller films on the list, including In a Dream and They Killed Sister Dorothy. But there are also a few notable omissions, including Religulous and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, both of which had their semi-secret shortlist qualifying runs at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street in the nosebleed section of New York City. Coincidence?!?? Probably! (For what it’s worth, Expelled, Religulous‘ political polar opposite, also failed to make the cut.)

The full list can be found here. Expect chatter and analysis in the days to come (probably not least from the snubbed Bill Maher).

Striking while the “Bill Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist” iron is hot, AJ Schnack has published a post on his blog by Sam Green, the co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Weather Underground. Green, who says Ayers has “become a good friend” of he and his co-director Bill Siegel, talks about the frustrations of watching his subject become a Republican talking point. As Green points out, the McCain/Palin argument connecting Obama to Ayers compltely omits any explanation for how a “terrorist” can become a “Distinguished Professor” thanks to thirty years of cultural evolution. “To have all of his work, and what he’s about, so publicly misrepresented must be extremely painful,” Green writes. “There really is nothing, or at least nothing significant, at the heart of the Ayers-Obama connection.” More here.

Let’s talk documentaries. First up, an interview with AJ Schnack, founder of the Cinema Eye Honors, a new annual awards ceremony honoring the craft of non-fiction filmmaking, a genre often judged more on its subject matter than its artistry. Next up, an interview Jason Kohn, director of Manda Bala, the winner of this year’s top Cinema Eye prize. Kohn talks about weaving together the film’s disparate elements, searching for the line between good and evil, and crafting a “non-fiction science fiction film”.

 

 FilmCouch 63 [30:24m]: Play Now | Download

FilmCouch 63

Tonight’s the night documentary fans have been waiting for for almost exactly two months: the first ever Cinema Eye Honors for excellence in non-fiction filmmaking will be awarded tonight at the IFC Center in New York City. I will be there, and since my live-Twittering of last month’s Oscar party was such a success with my millions of fans (well, okay––maybe just with Paul), I will be reporting back from the festivities in real time via 140-character, text messaged-updates. You can subscribe to my Twitter feed to get the updates on your phone, IM or computer, or just keep refreshing this page––the badge above will update every time I do. For more info on the Cinema Eyes, check out co-organizer AJ Schnack’s blog, and IndiePix.net.

UPDATE: I’ve taken down the Twitter badge and posted a full transcript of the live blog after the jump.

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There are a lot of eyebrow-raising moments in this interview with Chicago 10 director Brett Morgan, in which he announces that his next project will be a Courtney Love-approved documentary about Kurt Cobain. Some of it is cringe-worthy, some of it is intriguing, most of it is somewhat WTF? On the good side, it sounds like the film will incorporate some material we haven’t seen before:

…we’ll have the music of course but [also] his home movies. He did stop action animation, which I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen but I saw it and it’s fucking great. I mean it was crude and I’m gonna probably refine it, you know…

…but on the bad side…

I mean one of the things I think with all my movies, if I won the lottery last night you know, one day I’d love to open up a theme park like Disneyland with rides based on all my movies because I think that like when I did The Kid Stays in The Picture, to me it was like the Disneyland ride about Bob Evans. If Disneyland had a ride called Bob Evans The Kid Says in the Picture it’s that? When I did Chicago 10, I kept thinking this is a Chicago experience. This is like Space Mountain with like police coming out at you and whatnot. The same thing with Kurt Cobain, it’s what the Seattle music experience should be in a way. It’s going to be like this 3 dimensional visceral sort of sublime you know movie…ultimately I think the goal for that film is to make sort of a Catcher on the Rye for the next decade?

I love it that that last part is phrased as a question. Anyway, as wary as I am of the notion of a documentary modeled after a theme park ride seeking to usurp the greatest novel ever about teen alienation, I think I’m a little bit more troubled about a few statements Morgen makes which sound vaguely familiar. More after the jump.

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AJ Schnack has some notes on the lineup for the 2008 True/False Film Festival, which I’m super excited to be attending for the first time this year. While the line-up features several holdovers from previous festivals (including Sundance hits American Teen and The Order of Myths, and Cat Dancers and Audience of One, both of which screened at SXSW in 2007), and a “Secret Screening” that sounds suspiciously like one of my favorite films from last year, there’s also, according to AJ, “more than a dozen” films having their US premiere at the festival. Some of the titles that caught my eye after the jump. True/False begins on February 28 in Columbia, MO.

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At a reception here in Park City on Sunday afternoon, filmmakers AJ Schnack and Margaret Brown were joined by Indiepix’s Danielle DiGiacomo and the Toronto Film Festival’s Thom Powers to announce the nominees for a new batch of awards honoring excellence in non-fiction filmmaking: the Cinema Eyes. Schnack, who previously announced the formation of the awards on his blog, explained that the name was inspired by Dziga Vertov’s Kino Eye. The gang then announced the nominees for 8 juried awards, plus an audience award, which the public will be able to vote for at Indiepix.net. You can take a look at the full nominee list here.

Based on sheer volume of nominations, it looks like the big winners here are Manda Bala, Into Great Silence, and Zoo––all films that made a great impression at Sundance in 2006 and 2007, all of which failed to land on the Academy’s short list. This would indicate that the nominations have already succeeded in representing the point of view of the doc community, and as a corrective to the widely disappointing Academy finalists. The awards themselves will be handed out on March 18 at the IFC Center in New York.

An email from AJ Schnack reveals that he, in partnership with the Toronto Film Festival’s Thom Powers and Indiepix.net, are launching a new range of awards for “excellence in non-fiction filmmaking.”

Prompted in part by general disappointment in the doc community over the Oscar shortlist, a panel of twelve film festival directors have produced a short list of 15 films, which will be eligible for nominations in nine categories. There are four films common to both the Oscar shortlist and this new list: Lake of Fire, No End in Sight, Sicko and Taxi to the Dark Side. The nominations, and the official name of the awards, will be announced at a press conference at the Sundance Film Festival, which you can be sure the Spouties will try to attend. In the meantime, you can peruse the panel, the shortlist, the categories, and AJ’s blog post about how the awards came to be.

• While I was out, AJ Schnack wrote a couple of amazing, insightful posts about the minor tragedy that is the Academy’s Best Documentary shortlist. Those posts have produced a flood of generally well-thought out responses: see, for starters, Danielle DiGiacomo, Dan Eisenberg, and shortlisted director Tricia Regan on Agnes Varnum’s blog.
• Twitch reports the very good news that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, which was banned in its home country of Thailand, is coming to DVD in the US on January 15.
• The Reeler joins us in berating Variety for that stupid headline about “art films”: “It’s obviousness-stating time for Pamela McClintock and her headline-writing colleagues…And if you’ll kindly turn to page 10, editor-in-chief Peter Bart has the latest on Watergate.”
• At NewCritics, I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski, a new tome dedicated to the fan cult surrounding the Coen Brothers’ epic stoner comedy, has Dennis Cozzalio feeling a little like Garbo: “I closed the back cover wanting…to have been left alone with my own perceptions, about the movie and the cult. In this way, the Coens reticence to offer DVD audio commentary or any kind of ascension to the various theories floating around about their work, this film included, can be seen as the ultimate respect for fans of their movies—they are willing to let us do all the heavy lifting when it comes to assessing what those movies mean to us.”
• Death of a President, that terrible faux-doc about what hypothetically might happen if a hypothetical George W. Bush was hypothetically assassinated, just won an International Emmy. Sometime Spout Guest Blogger Chris Campbell accidentally ambled past the ceremony.