Prodigal Sons

Prodigal Sons is directed by Kimberly Reed. According to the film’s Web site,

Returning home to a small town in Montana for her high school reunion, filmmaker Kimberly Reed hopes for reconciliation with her long-estranged adopted brother, Marc. But along the way she uncovers stunning revelations, including a surprise relationship to Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, intense sibling rivalries and unforeseeable twists of plot and gender that force them to face challenges no one could imagine.

What that synopsis doesn’t tell you is more about Kimberly Reed, who became a woman in the 20 years since being at home. While not the primary focus of the story, it does play a key role in the film, which currently is in theaters.

The Gloucester 18

The Gloucester 18 is a documentary about the so-called pregnancy pact made among teenage girls at a school in Gloucester, MA. News of the pact drew reporters from all over the world to that small town. While Lifetime aired a fictionalized version titled The Pregnancy Pact in January 2010, John Michael Williams’ piece is the only documentary take on it.

Here is an excerpt from the film’s synopsis:

“The Gloucester 18″ is a groundbreaking documentary film that follows the Gloucester pregnancy pact from inside the lives of the pregnant teenagers and their families.

As the definitive investigation of the Gloucester pregnancy pact, “The Gloucester 18″ introduces the world to the girls behind the headlines, many of whom are speaking publicly for the first time. Beneath the unprecedented media fervor are the stories of teenage mothers searching for meaning and purpose to their young lives.

[...]

Through interviews with the girls, their families and the high school authorities close to the case, as well as a special interview with playwright and Gloucester resident Israel Horovitz , “The Gloucester 18″ documentary explores what really happened in this hyped and bizarre media circus, and its impact on a small fishing village.

The documentary premiered at a private showing in Cambridge, with a panel discussion following. DocumentaryTech notes that the film is gaining attention without going the festival route.

Flip Cameras

I see a lot of debates about the best cameras to use for film production. For a long time it was a debate between the film camera and a digital camera — my former school used Bolexes for the first couple years I was there. Now, the debate seems to center around DSLR shooting, “regular” cameras, and Flip and other similar cameras.

One of the key points that always comes up in those debates is this: You don’t need the fancy gear in order to make a documentary. Lo-Fi, High-Style Consulting’s founder follows this mantra: “It’s not the equipment that matters–it’s the story.” This post explains more.

Flip cameras are fun and function, all in one. I have one, and it fits right in my bag along with a digital still camera, phone, and everything else. The zoom is lackluster, but zooming on digital video sets up a potential for bad rendering later on. (In other words, don’t zoom!)

Programs and Applications Used for this Site

This post is in part for my own reference and maybe others, if you’re curious. I want to list the programs and applications that I use in the maintenance of the Documentary Site… stuff.

Mac: Of course

Dreamweaver: For the creating and updating of pages. Linked templates make fixing an error or making a change in the global navigation a breeze.

TextWrangler: A text editor that I often use in conjunction with Dreamweaver for transferring code and text.

WordPress: After trying Blogger and MoveableType, I have found WordPress to be the easiest to use and adapt. It functions on this end (the blog end) of the site.

Twitter: I am finding Twitter to be a great way to keep up with various happenings in culture, media, industry, and even individual documentary makers.

Hootsuite: A very useful (and free!) application for managing social media accounts. I use it for Twitter only at the moment.

Twitter Tools: Well, sort of. Twitter Tools allows you to interact with Twitter through WordPress through posting your tweets, adding a feed to your sidebar, or even posting tweets about your new blog posts. At the moment, this one isn’t doing its job of updating Twitter whenever posts go up.

Google Reader: An aggregator for various blog feeds and news keyword searches all in one place.

Recent Viewing

This is the sixth update toward my goal of watching 104 new documentaries this year. All three of these titles came from independent distributors, all were directed by women, and all focused on ideas of gender and sexuality.

Bi The Way, Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, 2008
This movie attempts to address the increasing level of bisexuality or bicuriosity among people. It frames the question as part of a road trip, with interviews with people throughout parts of the south and southwest (among other places). That frame gets lost somewhere in there. The questions the film raises are interesting ones, but this documentary isn’t coherent enough to hold it together.

Training Rules, Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker, 2010
Training Rules focuses specifically on Penn State Women’s Basketball Coach Rene Portland’s three rules: No drinking, no drugs, and no lesbians. This film interviews several lesbian and other women players who were driven off the team, who kept silent, or who quit the team because of Portland’s policies. It delves into the emotional and even the sports impacts these women faced as a result. It’s sad to think that homophobia prevented these players from enjoying their sport and their participation in a college as an athlete. Portland declined interview for this piece, though she resigned from PSU in 2007. This is one of the best docs I’ve seen on the subject of women and sport, period.

Venus of Mars, Emily Goldberg, 2004.
Transgender (I use this as a blanket term) issues are incredibly complicated, especially for those who try to pin gender ideas into either / or: either masculine or feminine, male or female. Venus of Mars focuses on Venus, an M2F who leads a rock band called All The Pretty Horses. An unidentified talking head sets up a key question for the film, the idea of “normal.” This “normal” is not how others define it, but how Venus, her wife, and their friends and family define it for themselves. Their definition remains fluid throughout.

Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, Richard Ray Pérez and Joan Sekler, 2004 edition
This one is connected with Robert Greenwald, so it presents a rather skewed perspective on what happened in Florida during the 2000 election.

28/104

Three Lessons in Listening and Research

I am so glad I listened to what someone said the other day.

I was checking my mail when one of the office workers said that he was the son of a farmer.

So I asked him, “From around here?” The town (and most of the state, for that matter) I live in is surrounded by corn and soybean fields.

His answer was yes. He seemed amenable, so I asked another question and soon figured out that he loved to talk about farming, growing up on the farm, and most things related to farming (except sheep). We spoke for a good 15 minutes, and I ended up being almost late to my own class. But I learned more about agriculture in those 15 minutes than I have learned in almost all of the reading I have done so far.

The lessons here:

1. Listen carefully because you never know where information related to your production might come from.

2. Be upfront about where your curiosity is coming from. I told him about our project, and fortunately that intrigued him enough to keep talking with me. I suspect, though, that this is a fine line. Some people might be completely put off by this idea, too. Learning to know when is an acquired skill.

3. Ask questions that show you’re listening. I asked questions that prompted him to keep talking, but not necessarily ones about my own interests in the subject. I learned more that way, interestingly enough.

101

This is my 101st post on this blog. Considering all the work going on this semester, I just wanted to take a moment to note this.

Big Sky Documentary Film Festival Award Winners

Big Sky Documentary Film Festival announces its award winners in this excerpted press release:

The Best Feature Award was given to Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan for Last Train Home. The emotionally gripping film draws us into the fractured lives of a single migrant family (the Zhangs) as they are caught up in this desperate annual migration to return home for Chinese New Year. Jurors Doug Pray, Jeanie Finlay and Cliff Froehlich noted that Fan offers “a beautiful, very human journey into vast modern China, migrant workers, the global economy, family politics, obligatory holiday travel, and the universal phenomenon of the sullen teen.” The Jury also awarded an Artistic Vision Award to Josh Fox’s Gasland, the first-person exploration of the devastating effects on human health and the environment of a natural gas extraction technique called hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

Joseph Aguirres Next Year Country received the Big Sky Award. The heartfelt story of three families facing drought in Eastern Montana is the seventh film to receive the honor. An award for Artistic Excellence was give to Lucien Castaing Talors and Ilisa Barbashs extraordinary film Sweetgrass which follows the last modern day cowboys to lead their flock of sheep up into Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. Judges of the Big Sky Award were Shirley Sneve (NAPT), Thomas Phillipson (Northwest Film Forum) and Tim Huffman (Crystal Video).

The Best Short Film Award was awarded to Danza Del Viejo Inmigrante (The Old Immigrants Dance) by Charlene Music. Of the film, jurors Gordon Quinn and Rick Prelinger wrote, “in simple, unpretentious and elegantly framed sequences, this alternately serious and playful film shows us the challenges that (the subjects) face, but more important, shows them as full human beings, with strength and spirit, sexuality and zest for life.” Additionally an Artistic Excellence Award was given to Kelly Anderson’s Never Enough a film about people with hoarding disorders that the jury called a sensitive and nuanced portrait of characters who might, in a lesser film, manifest as caricatures.

The Mini Doc Award, given to the best film under 15 minutes was presented to the 6- minute long Found by Paramita Nath. The visually rich film tells the story of Torontopoet Souvankham Thammavongsa whose parents lived in a Lao refugee camp in Thailand. An additional award for Artistic Excellence was presented to Tony Donoghues animated piece A Film About My Parish 6 Farms. The Mini-Doc category was judged by Richard Saiz (ITVS).

There were also four Programmers Choice Awards, awarded by the Big Sky programming staff. Michael Angus’ Salt and Robert Drew’s The Sun Ship Game both received awards for Excellence in Cinematography. Rainer Komers Milltown, Montana received an award for Excellence in Editing. And Briar March’s There Once Was An Island was awarded the Natural Facts Award for its artistic rendering of a vital environmental issue (climate change) and its effect of human life.

The Best Feature and Big Sky Award films will receive a guaranteed broadcast deal and licensing fee from Free Speech TV. Both shorts categories will receive a broadcast guarantee and generous licensing fee from The Documentary Channel. Several of the award winning films will play again at the Wilma Theatre over the closing weekend of the festival.

Beauty Mark

A film by Diane Israel, Kathleen Man, and Carla Precht,
Beauty Mark explores the cultural issues of beauty and weight and how they affect people.

From the synopsis:

Beauty Mark is for anyone who has ever felt invisible because they didn’t conform to our culture’s impossible, unhealthy, abnormal beauty standards. This courageous film examines popular culture’s toxic emphasis on weight and looks through the eyes of Boulder-based psychotherapist and former world-class triathlete Diane Israel– who tells her own story while interviewing other champion athletes, body builders, fashion models and inner-city teens about their experiences relating to self-image.

This deeply personal and funny film asks some tough questions … How do our families influence our relationships with our own bodies? How do popular culture “standards” get inside of our hearts and heads? In what ways can sports actually make us sicker instead of healthier? Former champion athletes, including David Scott, Ellen Hart Pena and Brenda Maller share their stories while notable luminaries such as playwright Eve Ensler, author Paul Campos and cultural critic Naomi Wolf provide their insights.

A Small Shoutout

I recently purchased Training Rules from Wolf Video. Training Rules is about a Penn State basketball player who deals with a coach who demands her players follow three rules: No drinking, no drugs, no lesbians.

I write here not to note the film, but to comment on Wolfe Video’s commitments. On its information sheet, the company states that it provides closed captioning on all its titles. Adding titles adds to the costs, an expense that many, many companies just don’t take on. Kudos to Wolfe for committing to it.