A week after the twin eruptions of cinephilia at the far corners of the state (Cucalorus in Wilmington and the Asheville Film Festival), the Triangle played host to a festival of its own last Sunday. In its fourth year, the Carrboro Film Festival is comparatively low-key, and strictly locals-only—all entrants must reside, or have at one time resided, or at least stopped for gas in or near Orange County (just kidding about the last part). Sure, the organizers may be a bit loose in their definition of “local,” but then, a loose, down-home atmosphere is part of the festival’s appeal.
In a compact, six-hour schedule—shorts only—27 films screened to a packed Carrboro Century Center. Hoots and whistles greeted the names of the usual suspects in the credits, as the familial Triangle filmmaking crowd gathered to celebrate their own. There was something for every taste—music videos, animation, comedies, dramas, the odd genre horror film, even a relic from the late ’70s that brought to light the considerable distance, for better and worse, between that era and our own.
The three filmmakers who won Indy Arts Awards this year, Nic Beery, Ajit Anthony Prem and Todd Tinkham, made a strong showing, with five films between them. Particularly impressive was Prem’s HELLO, SORRY, WHATEVER, a Cliffs Notes romantic tragedy built around snatches of dialogue consisting almost exclusively of the words in the title. Amory Casto, an actress from Wilmington who’s since moved to Austin, gives a deeper performance than one can reasonably expect from a short in any festival. Coupled with an impressive turn by her co-lead, Dan Kelly, the film reveals Prem’s deft hand with creating dramatic situations, and with spotting and harnessing acting talent.
Another outstanding performance, by local theater stalwart Mike Wiley, was recognized with the Craft Award for Best Actor. In EMPTY SPACE, Wiley inhabits several of the characters from his one-man stage show, Dar He: The Lynching of Emmett Till. Co-directors Rob Underhill and Aravind Ragupathi shot Wiley in a raw indoor space with a mattress and a chair, rather like a spare stage set, putting the focus squarely on Wiley’s performance. It’s the first time he’s brought his work to film, and he was impressed with the results.
“The film captured the grittiness and desperation of the characters,” said Wiley. “The proximity of the camera makes the experience in some ways more immediate. With close-ups and with the sound and the music, it puts it in your face more than I’ve been able to achieve so far on stage.” The screening was Empty Space’s premiere, and it won the audience award for best film.
The nonfiction contingent increased its market share over previous years, with more documentaries than ever, according to committee chair Selena Lauterer. Two docs addressed the hazards of mountaintop removal, the coal extraction process that’s scarring wide swaths of the Appalachians and endangering nearby communities. Another pair centered on the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative, housed in a former thrift store in downtown Greensboro. George Scheer created the unlikely art space and “museum” in his late grandmother Sylvia Gray’s shop, which was stuffed with 58 years’ worth of accumulated cloth scraps and odds and ends.
The art space has been attracting attention around the state since it opened a few years back, and was irresistible material for film students Cara Clark of UNC-Greensboro and Natalie Fava of Elon University. Clark’s film, SYLVIA AND GEORGE, completed a North Carolina trifecta of sorts, having played last weekend in Asheville and Wilmington. It’s informative, well-paced and lively, and earned Clark the Student Award.
A notable theme in the festival was the number of films that straddled the line between cinema and graphic design. Software packages like After Effects have democratized access to high-caliber special effects, providing a great many new tools to artists working in the “experimental” genre. Visually dazzling, nonlinear films swept the first- and second-place jury awards: ICHTHYOPOLIS, a campy, surreal blend of opera, collage and, uh, fish, by UNC-Wilmington professor André Silva, took first. BLOOD AND THUNDER, a music video by Philadelphia-based stop-motion animator Tobias Stretch, took second.
Widely available technology has also made it easy to add jazzy design elements to straightforward narrative films. Perhaps the best example of the latter was the third-place winner, FAIT, by Charlotte filmmaker and NC State grad Chris Crutchfield. It’s the story of an adorable little girl who entertains a stranger on a park bench with a shaggy dog story, which comes to life in the form of CGI text and symbols that appear to hang in the air all around them. The catchy visuals are reminiscent of a big-budget commercial, but they’re the product of a one-man, 10-day project.
A good reference point for the profound changes that filmmaking style and technique have undergone in the last 30 years was provided by BALLERINA, a short with an intriguing backstory. Shot in 1979 by Miami-based cinematographer Kenneth Peterson, it sat in a box for 30 years, and aside from a few small screenings, it hadn’t seen the light of day until now. The original prints of the film were destroyed in Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but a work tape survived. Peterson, who moved to the Triangle area 15 years ago, decided to submit it to Carrboro and hope for its first festival appearance.
Ballerina tells the story of an aging ballerina and her longtime admirer, who finds her living in an isolated manor decades after her career took a tragic turn. The film unfolds in a leisurely 20 minutes, and the shots are intentionally hazy and slightly dim. The unhurried pace and the distinctive soft focus clearly place the film in its era. “I was going for an almost film-noirish effect,” said Peterson by phone (he was away in California for the birth of a grandchild and couldn’t attend the festival). “I meant it to be dark and romantic in its look.”
Peterson has observed first-hand the vast changes in filmmaking techniques that separate his film from the other entries. Today, for instance, filmmakers can roll inexpensive videotape to their heart’s content, whereas Ballerina was carefully composed on scrounged “short ends,” scraps of film stock left over from larger productions—”150 feet, 100 feet, 350 feet, whatever we could get our hands on,” he said. “Shooting was different then. You didn’t have a preview screen on the camera. You had to have your act together—whatever came out of the lab is what you got, which was sometimes scary.
“Editing was a very physical process—you were marking the film with a grease pencil and cutting it with a razor blade,” he said. “Effects were done in camera. Now everything is done in post.” As for the blurry, dark, “romantic” effect, Peterson achieved it by using a stocking behind the camera lens. Keep in mind, the word “stocking,” as it’s used here, isn’t a technical term for a special piece of filmmaking equipment—it refers to a pair of women’s pantyhose, from which a circular section is cut, stretched tight and held in place behind the lens with a small rubber band.
Peterson fondly recalled the favored brand of stocking: “It was Fogal Noblesse noir,” he remarked, rolling the words off his tongue.
WILMINGTON, NC—After hearing for years about the hip, up-all-night film festival in Wilmington, I finally got to check out Cucalorus for myself this weekend. It’s a cozy affair, taking place mostly in small, intimate venues, and even though it’s developed a national presence in its 15 years, it’s totally unpretentious, with a youthful staff and a laid-back vibe.
The slate of films was nicely varied, with some foreign titles and a few high-profile selections set for theatrical release (including THE MESSENGER, a Woody Harrelson vehicle that opened in New York the same weekend, and PRECIOUS, winner of audience awards at Sundance and Toronto). The main thing to keep in mind at any festival is that no matter how glowing the write-ups, the offerings will be hit-or-miss. The surest way to raise the “hit” quotient, in my experience, is to head for the docs. [Here's Indy culture editor David Fellerath's account of the fest.]
BURMA VJ was there, a three-time award winner at last April’s Full Frame, as was FBI KKK, which screened at Full Frame as a work in progress in 2008. In a weekend of sadly abbreviated filmgoing (owing to some personal business I had to attend to), I did manage to catch a couple of excellent docs, THE GOOD SOLDIER and TRUST US, THIS IS ALL MADE UP.
Jimmy Massey in The Good Soldier
THE GOOD SOLDIER presents five veterans of American wars, from World War II to Iraq. In intensely personal interviews (interspersed with a great deal of file footage), they describe the experiences that led to their disillusionment with the military. Each for his own reasons, in the end they feel a sense of betrayal. But, to a man, you won’t find a hint of self-pity: It’s not the suffering they went through, so much as the suffering they inflicted, that troubles them most.
THE GOOD SOLDIER is the second feature-length doc by married couple Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys, after 1997’s acclaimed RIDING THE RAILS, about young people who hopped freight trains during the Great Depression. Though the couple lives in Brooklyn, their new film is thick with Tarheels, with three of the veterans hailing from North Carolina. Chief Warrant Officer Perry Parks, a former helicopter pilot who served in Viet Nam, is from Rockingham, and Captain Michael McPhearson, a Gulf War vet who’s now the director of Veterans for Peace, grew up on Fort Bragg and lives in Fayetteville.
Perhaps the most harrowing and incendiary testimony comes from Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey of Waynesville. He’d already served in the Marines for over a decade when he was sent to Iraq. In 2003, he relates, his company killed a carful of unarmed civilians, and that’s when he “lost it” and was discharged from the service with an official diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.
On rejoining civilian life, he cofounded Iraq Veterans Against the War, wrote a book about his experiences that was published in France and traveled frequently for speaking engagements. In the film, Massey describes his time in the service with a bluntness that’s sometimes shocking. He’s shown standing on the street in a silent one-man protest, holding a sign that reads “I killed innocent civilians for our government.”
Massey’s claims about civilian deaths in Iraq have been disputed by journalists and Marine Corps officials. Digging through published articles and interviews online, it’s hard to tell how much of his story is exaggerated or fabricated, or to what extent the military and members of the press have engaged in an orchestrated smear campaign.
In any event, the cumulative weight of the five soldiers’ testimony makes THE GOOD SOLDIER a disturbing, powerful film. Perhaps the most memorable line comes from Vietnam veteran Will Williams, who remarks that talk of the “greatest generation” is premature, that the greatest generation will be the one that finally does away with war altogether. The greatest generation, he says hopefully, is yet to come. Continue reading »
Tonight at 7, N.C. State’s Campus Cinema is showing Decasia, Bill Morrison’s hypnotic collage of decaying film stock from the early days of motion pictures. For lovers of the visual arts it’s a must-see, well worth a trip to Raleigh if you don’t live there.
For a preview of sorts, check out this short Morrison made two years after Decasia. Using the same methods and collaborating with the same composer (Michael Gordon of Bang on a Can), Light Is Calling is an 8-minute feast of images and sound that someone was thoughtful enough to post on YouTube in high definition (for best results, click through to watch the video on YouTube, then be sure to click the little “HQ” button at the bottom right of the screen to see it in high quality).
Consider this: At last year’s Full Frame, BIGGER STRONGER FASTER*, a fast-paced, rousing dissent from the conventional wisdom about anabolic steroids, won over a large crowd in Fletcher Hall. It had been a hit at Sundance, and seemed to have enough popular appeal to make a splash at the box office. Before screening at Full Frame it had been bought by sports mogul Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures, and after it opened in theaters on May 30th, it was well-received by critics, earning 97% positive notices on the online review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
After 12 weeks in theaters, BIGGER STRONGER FASTER* earned all of $308,575 (source: boxofficemojo.com). By contrast, IN BRUGES, a fiction film which was also well-received at Sundance but had modest box-office expectations, earned $7,800,000—$459,575 just in the opening weekend.
Even last year’s most critically acclaimed documentary, Full Frame Jury and Audience Award (and Oscar) winner MAN ON WIRE, managed just $2,962,242 in ticket sales, ranking it the 189th highest-grossing movie of 2008. That’s less than 1/10th what PAUL BLART: MALL COP earned in its opening weekend. Continue reading »
Walking up to the Carolina Theater today, at the start of another Full Frame, I couldn’t help but think how much the festival has changed over the years. My first encounter with it was in 2001, when it was called DoubleTake (the name was changed to Full Frame the next year, I believe). I was living in New York at the time, and came down in May to visit a friend who was living in Hillsborough. At one point he casually mentioned that he’d heard of a film festival going on in Durham, maybe it would be fun to check it out.
If I remember correctly—and the intervening years have not been kind to that faculty—a friend of a friend, who shall remain nameless, helped get me into a screening through, ah, diplomatic channels (all youthful reprobates named or unnamed in this blog post have since reformed and become productive citizens). I wish I could remember exactly what I saw (STARTUP.COM, I think), but I do remember feeling guilty enough to ask, on the festival’s last day, whether I could volunteer on the spot to clear my karmic balance sheet.
I was told it was too late to volunteer, but if I wanted to sign up the next year they’d be happy to bring me aboard. As I was leaving the Carolina, I noticed a folding table just outside the main doors, filled with merchandise, or posters, or some such, that was left unattended as staff and volunteers busied themselves with breaking down the festival. Seizing the opportunity to clear my conscience, I asked whether I could be of use. “Sure, stand here and watch this table, then help us load the van,” said a man who seemed to be in charge. I recall that he threw a DoubleTake T-shirt at me to make it official, and I also remember the unexpected value of my sentry service as a strong wind picked up that threatened to blow everything away.
That’s how easy it was to become part of the festival at that time—you could just walk up and ask. The festival seemed so small then, so informal. And it was suffused with what I can only describe as a “good energy,” which radiated from the kind and helpful volunteer corps, coordinated at that time by the infinitely gracious Ann Tharrington, and since led by other good-natured folks. I came back to volunteer the next year, and the next, until I finally moved to Durham from New York (not just to be closer to Full Frame, to be sure, but its presence on the event calendar here is no small draw! It truly is a world-class festival and adds tremendously to Durham’s cultural capital).
As the festival has grown, it seems not to have lost the charm of its earlier days, and the quality of the programming has likewise remained consistently high through the years. Word from some of those who have seen a sizable cross-section of the selections is that this is one of the stronger years in recent memory.
Lisa Creech Bledsoe on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": "Speed dating for the tech set," funny! Nice write up of an incredible event. I'm voting for Scrubby next year. Scrub-by, Scrub-by, Scrub-by!
Lisa aka @glowbird (the boxing chick)
DK on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": Just moved back to the Triangle from Seattle, which is where Ignite started. It kind of caught on and blew up really fast, and organizers had to keep upping the venue.
I think people have been looking for this kind of cabaret for a while. They like going somewhere and being a crowd together, and it's
Christine Fawley on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": A fabulous night highlighting the diversity of talent and intellectual pursuits here in the Triangle. An event like this could be held every month and still barely scratch the surface of the passions of our community.
We were honored to be included and appreciated the support and enthusiasm of the crowd as we delivered "20
