Friday, February 13
2009 is Looking Good!
What an incredible past few weeks it’s been. I, along with several volunteer screeners, have been watching dozens of films submitted to us from around the world. But that is the easy part. After viewing comes the discussing, evaluating, mixing and matching, and sometimes just plain weighing of what we can realistically present in the three days of screen time available to us. With that in mind, it made for some pretty tough choices, some hard decisions.
But the decisions have all been made now, and the schedule has been set. In 2008, the da Vinci Film Festival presented 56 films. It was thrilling to offer a venue for so many filmmakers, but a negative aspect of showing so many films was that many of them got lost in the shuffle. Festival audiences were often forced into choosing between two films playing in different theaters. There is something that seems basically wrong about that; the unseen film deserves more than a coin toss to determine its fate.
This year, we have reduced the number of films to 34, with almost all of them playing at least twice throughout the weekend, which means that if we did the scheduling correctly, it should be theoretically possible for the dedicated viewer to see the entire slate.
And what a slate it is! We have some astonishing films to show you, again representing the wide diversity of independent film. There are narrative shorts, documentaries, some feature films, work by young filmmakers, and a few wonderfully experimental films. Here are just a few of the films we’ve programmed.
Courting Condi is a documentary unlike any I’ve ever seen. It’s part “Mockumentary,” a la “Spinal Tap” or from the Christopher Guest school, but it uses its comedic premise to present a straight-ahead factual documentary about Condoleezza Rice. Here’s the set up: For actor and musician Devin Ratray, Condoleeza Rice has always been “The Woman.” Smart, pretty, powerful, and possessed of a similar love of music, he knows that he and she were made for each other. Although she is out of his league, he has to give it a shot; so with filmmaker Sebastian Doggart in tow, Devin hits the road to pursue his dream. Traveling the country, he explores Condi’s roots in the pre-Civil Rights south, her college career in Denver, and her climb through many glass ceilings, including her stint as provost at Stanford Unversity. But as he follows her career, Devin also begins to see a journey through the heart of darkness as Condi gradually sells off her ideals in order to court and stay close to the brokers of power. In the end, the film is often hilarious, tragic, clever, serious and heartbreaking, as Devin’s journey becomes America’s journey into confusion and disillusionment. All this, and several original songs and music videos too!
The new landscape of independent film is largely defined by the amount of relatively affordable technology at the disposal of filmmakers. Perhaps no film submitted to the festival demonstrates this better than Bohemibot. Produced at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the film looks spectacular. Combining live action and CGI generated backgrounds, the film looks like it could have cost a couple of million dollars. A science fiction film about two warring nations on an alien planet, the film adds another layer of complexity by telling its story almost entirely on the strength of its imagery. The characters all speak an alien language, with no subtitles, yet the story is easy to follow.
Cantata in C Major may be the winner of most oddball film in the festival. Comprising more than six hundred film clips, the film generates its own music score as the audio from the clips is processed through a music synthesizer, which is then transcribed into musical notation, with the completed score appearing in a separate window as the film clips play in the main window. The experience is quite surrealistic. It’s perhaps the ultimate geek film; the premise is a hoot, plus, for film buffs like me, you get to play “Name That Movie” as the clips race by.
Animation is represented by the stunningly gorgeous Patience of The Memory. Animation, in my opinion, is the purest form of cinema there is. All film is illusion. There is no such thing as motion pictures; what you are seeing is a series of individual pictures, projected one after the other, at a rate sufficient to trick the mind into reading the images as a real time event. So when you view film at the level of individual images, animation then becomes a motion picture that is literally willed into existence one frame at a time, 24 frames for each second of film. In Patience, European artist Vuk Jevremovic uses every artistic style in the book to tell a story of birth, destruction, and rebirth, and the constant struggle of technology and nature (represented by a hart, which seems to act as the films spirit guide) to find balance. Frame by frame, Jeremovic creates wonderful pieces of art only to sketch, draw, paint or otherwise destroy them, only to replace them with another gorgeous image. The depth of his creative energy and imagination is astonishing, and there is a moment a few minutes into the film — where the hart coalesces out of a swirl of pencil scribblings, looks around, then dashes off screen — that is so beautifully executed that it took my breath away. The whole shot is only a few seconds long, but it is now in my scrapbook of visual memories. What a treat.
These are but a few of the treasures we’ve unearthed for the 2009 da Vinci Film Festival. To all the filmmakers who entrusted their work to our scrutiny, we thank you. Even if we weren’t able to select your film for this year’s festival, your efforts are more appreciated than you may know.
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