Lake Tahoe [IMDB][MFF], directed by Fernando Eimbcke, starring Diego Catano, Hector Herrara and Daniela Valentine…a story of Juan, a teenager who crashes his car on the outskirts of a sleepy Mexican town and tries to find a mechanic. During his quest he doesn’t seem to find what he is looking for, but meets an old paranoid dog owner who wants him to walk his dog, a young punk mother who is looking for a babysitter and a Kung Fu fanatic who’d like to watch a Bruce Lee movie with him. Their relationship to each other is quiet, perhaps as sleepy as the town, but during his mission to get the car running again he slowly finds some friendships and people he hesitatingly begins to care about.

Lake Tahoe was a genius mix of deadpan humor and drama that kept me interested from beginning to end. I loved the overall mood and atmosphere, the characters and how they interacted with each other. It was slow and quiet, but in a very good way. Very nicely paced, beautifully photographed, it managed to say a lot without using many words or music. Watching this movie reminded me of spending a relaxing vacation in another country…and I could have stayed a bit longer.

Our second screening was Stringray Sam, directed by Cory McAbee, starring himself, Crugie, Joshua Taylor, Willa Vy McAbee, Bobby Lurie, Frank Swart, Caleb Scott, Jessica Jelliffe, Ron Crawford, Michael DeNola, Michael Wiener and David Hyde Pierce [IMDB][MFF]. It actually was a story split in six Youtube-friendly parts…a sci-fi-western-musical. Another musical?! Yes! When I looked at the film-descriptions all it took to make me want to see it were Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and “homage to the cinema, rock & roll, comic books, and everything else cool from our childhoods.”

I didn’t expect it to become our second musical this year…and what a cool and fun musical! I absolutely enjoyed the songs, I loved director Cory McAbee in his role as Stingray Sam and guitarist Crugie as Quasar Kid, the Monty Python’esque collage-art…and how it managed to speak to the kid inside of me. During the Q and A Cory McAbee told his story when he was interviewed in Europe about one of his previous features The American Astronaut. The interviewer explained to him that many people in Europe were very angry with the American government and what they were doing at that time…that they feel like they don’t like Americans. His movie, however, included many things Europeans always loved and enjoyed about America and American culture. With this conversation in mind he wrote Stingray Sam including the Wild West, Cowboy, Sci-Fi, Musical, Space-Travellers that Europeans (or Germans in my case) always loved about American culture, but also highlighted the dark side with Tobacco and pharma companies, the privatised prison system, etc. Being European myself I can confirm that in Stringray Sam you can find the “cool” things we love about America, without ignoring the not so cool things.

It felt a bit strange to see six separate episodes in a row and not one full-length feature, but these episodes had cult-potential, were a lot of fun and I absolutely enjoyed them. I haven’t seen American Astronaut yet, but will have to check it out sometime.

After a short break we saw a documentary about Stanley “Stanless Steel” Pleskun in Strongman [IMDB][MFF] by Zachary Levy. A man strong enough to leg-press massive trucks and bend pennies with his fingers reaches his middle age and struggles with difficult personal relationships and a number of career disappointments. This documentary was filmed over the course of several years and presents a close portrait of Stan who wants to prove that he’s still got it, and that he is more than a kids’ party-attraction. Life, however, presents him with another reality…other strong men who bend bolts with much less of an effort or pull nails with their teeth…problems to stop smoking, breathing issues…family and relationship problems…and an alcoholic brother who developed a crack habit.

This film moved me on several occasions. It seemed obvious that Stan invested a many years and a lot of discipline to train and build up his strength, to become “the strongest man on earth”. I had the impression he might have found his motivation in an attempt to find a better life for himself than what his background was like growing up. His brother was presenting him an example of what not to become. I felt reminded of my own background… I, too, put a lot of work, time and discipline into my education to break out of my working class background and find a better living for myself. I don’t think I’m the strongest man, but there was a time I felt like I was the best software developer on earth. After a few disappointments I had to realize that was a big mistake. There were a few other moments in Strongman that reminded me of my own history in one way or another, turning this documentary into more of a personal experience than I ever anticipated. I really enjoyed this film.

Your Humble Narrator

In a slightly different matter: The film description in the festival booklet calls Strongman a cinéma vérité portrait. I think the director mentioned this documentary style during the Q and A as well. Not familiar with this expression I looked it up and found that it combines “[...] naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camera work, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects.” I might be wrong but I didn’t feel this applied to Strongman. Direct cinema on the other hand seemed to be a better fit. I read that both cinéma vérité and direct cinema have in common that they don’t use voice-overs, they both try to let the subjects speak for themselves, avoiding to make them dependent on the filmmaker’s interpretation, and they both try to avoid assigning social problems to a larger political or cultural context. Instead, they both try to capture truths and the everyday reality.

Furthermore I read that the difference between cinéma vérité and direct cinema is that direct cinema tries to put the camera and film maker as far into the background as possible. The camera is as a “fly on the wall” supposed to be as unnoticed as possible. Camera and crew should try not influence the situation at all to capture the “privileged moments” in which the person forgets about the camera’s existence and reveals truths you otherwise wouldn’t get to see.

Cinéma vérité, so I read, follows a different strategy…instead of being a “fly on the wall”, the film maker becomes a “fly in the soup”, actively participating in the situation and trying to provoke those “privileged moments”. Some examples would include reality-television or interview movies. Even fictional movies like the Blairwitch Project used this technique. I wonder if I understood it right… how would you as educated film people define the difference between cinéma vérité and direct cinema? It has nothing to do with Strongman, but I was curious because I wasn’t familiar with this word before.

Off to the next and last movie of the day, presented by director Bobcat Goldthwait himself: World’s Greatest Dad [IMDB][MFF] with Robin Williams, Daryl Sabara, Alexie Gilmore, Geoffrey Pierson, Henry Simmons, Mitzi McCall and Tony V. It’s the story about a middle aged author and poetry teacher Lance who fails to find somebody to publish his writing. He also seems to fail as single father of an abusive son Kyle. After an abrupt turn of events, Lance faces new challenges, fame and respect approaching from all directions.

Bobcat Goldthwait and Jed Dietz

Bobcat Goldthwait originally planned somebody else for Robin William’s role, and his character as poetry teacher was not at all related to the old Dead Poet’s Society at all, he explained during the Q and A. I enjoyed this film. It was very entertaining, funny, and sometimes also very dark which I always appreciate in a comedy. Similar to Sleeping Dogs Lie (a screening we saw a year or two ago), he managed to play with a darker, unspoken side of an individual’s psychology or social/cultural standards as a whole, while giving it all a very entertaining, lightweight appearance.

The following list is in order from my top pick down for both Friday and Saturday:

1. Modern Love is Automatic
2. Love Songs
3. Invisible Girlfriend
4. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
5. Strongman
6. Stingray Sam
7. Lake Tahoe
8. World’s Greatest Dad
9. Seventh Moon

Our day started with Modern Love is Automatic [IMDB][MFF], directed by Zach Clark, starring Melodie Sisk (as Lorraine) and Maggie Ross (as Adrian).

Modern Love is Automatic was a dark and dry comedy-drama about nurse Lorraine who, bored with with her environment and the people in her life, detached herself emotionally and socially from everything. Controlling every detail in her life it doesn’t seem surprising when she finds interest in a dominatrix magazine. When she finds her boyfriend cheating she decides to look for a new roommate and becomes a dominatrix at night. She finds aspiring fashion model Adrian, whose emotionality and bubbliness very much is Lorraine’s total opposite. But just as opposites attract, they very slowly develop a friendship in the background of their individual lives and Adrian’s boyfriend Mitch who is uncontrollably obsessed with Lorraine.

Zach Clark, Maggie Ross, Melodie Sisk, Daryl Pittman

This movie was easily one of my favorites this year. I not only loved the great performances, cool sets, colors and costumes, but also the pace and quiet as well as Melodie Sisk’s facial expressions that said more than could ever be said with words. Modern Love feels like a nice companion to my other favorites from the last two festival years when I saw Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland and Mary Bronstein’s Yeast. In these movies I was able to identify with the characters and their paralyzed social lives and relationships to an unusual extent. What can I say, I loved everything about Modern Love is Automatic. Even the bursts of doom metal worked really well in there. Definitely a movie I would like to see again sometime, and one I can highly recommend.

David Redmon

Our second screening this Friday was Invisible Girlfriend [IMDB][MFF], directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, with and about Charles Fihoil, a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic who lives in Monroe, Louisiana with his parents and children. He is in love with his invisible girlfriend, the spirit of Joan of Arc, and decides that DeeDee, his pen pal and New Orleans bartender, might be Joan of Arc in the flesh. The filmmaker follows him on a 400-mile bicycle journey to find DeeDee.

This was a wonderful documentary about a man who may be a bit crazy, but also very intelligent, insightful and caring. During his journey through rural Louisiana, which lasted about 12 days, he met several generous, kind and very down-to-earth people who gave him a ride or shared food and stories with him. I found it interesting how this journey was accompanied by a number of moments of death and decay that foreshadowed what he would find at his destination. Beautiful, sometimes funny, but also very sad, this film managed to create a non-judgmental portrait of Charles Fihoil and the people he met on his way. I really liked this film. I was also very impressed by some of the music choices.

Another documentary we saw this Friday was Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, directed by Jessica Oreck. This film portrayed a part of Japanese culture I was completely unfamiliar with before: Japan’s love and fascination with insects that is inherent in the whole society and all generations from young to old age. Insects are collected like trading cards or comic books, are part of quite a significantly sized industry of collectors and breeders. Insects appear in shape of dolls, toys, video games, candy, but also inspire art and literature, dating back to the beginning of Japan’s history.

Jessica Oreck and Sean Williams

Beetle Queen was partially in English, partially Japanese with English subtitles and filled with a great amount of insight, history and poetry about an ancient and still mysterious culture that may mostly be known to the Western world for their car and electronic brands, fashion and pop culture, their tv-shows or cuisine. I can highly recommended it to anyone who is interested in learning more about Japan from a slightly different angle. The cinematography comes from Sean Williams who also shot Frownland and Yeast I mentioned above. I would love to see it again and follow the history and poetry in more depth than I was able to comprehend upon my first viewing.

I have to admit: A few days ago, if someone had told me to watch a romantic musical, I probably would have would have smiled and dismissed it without giving it a chance. The musical genre was not one I was particularly interested in before. The few musicals I have ever seen were entertaining to a degree, but they didn’t manage to grab me. Why? I’m not sure… perhaps it’s something I wasn’t properly introduced to growing up in Germany. About every movie made in Germany of the 50s and 60s was incredibly silly and featured a lot of bad German Schlager music. Television was practically non-existent, and eventually the popularity died off and no musical films were produced anymore for a very long time. I can’t really think of any musical film produced in Germany since the days of the economic boom.

In the mid to late 80s (stage) musicals became very popular with Cats. Many others including Starlight Express, Phantom of the Opera followed later, and they are still popular in Germany, but as far as I know, there haven’t been any movies to speak of. Every time I saw a movie with dancing and singing people they appeared very foreign to me. Something I couldn’t connect to.

Perhaps the setting and background were too artificial…perhaps the music was too methodical or constructed…perhaps I was thrown out of the story every time one of the actors starts to sing instead of keeping his character. How believable is the evil villain, mad professor or action hero who suddenly begins to dance and sing?

John Waters and Jed Dietz

Being a romantic musical I never would have volunteered to pick Love Songs [IMDB][MFF] if it hadn’t been the John Waters pick this year. The annual “John Waters Pick” has been one of our traditions since we started attending the film festival. His movie selections did never disappoint in the past few years. Most of his selections, including Story of Women, Dog Days or Head-On offered an extraordinarily realistic view on love, people and the complexity of their emotional, social, sexual, human interactions…reflecting what life is really like, challenging what most movies try to suggest as reality.

Love Songs was directed by Christophe Honoré and stars Chiara Mastroianni, Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier and Clotilde Hesme. It’s a romantic musical, yes…but one I actually enjoyed very much! It felt very current and natural, the songs and music were beautiful and were very elegantly woven into the story. So fluent, it almost felt as if these moments could have happened in real life… although I have never seen someone walking down the street singing, have I?

Everybody looked great, very natural and likable, the story was beautiful, so was the atmosphere and mood. I still find myself surprised how much I enjoyed this movie. Another contemporary musical film I saw a while ago (Sweeney Todd) left me with the same impression I had of other musicals before, not so Love Songs. Perhaps it worked so well because it was in French and playing in Paris? I don’t know, but I really enjoyed its pace and rhythm. I think I might have to correct some of my views I used to have about musicals. Perhaps there is more out there I would enjoy if I gave it a try.

After Love Songs we had our first break of the day and we used the opportunity to celebrate our 5th filmfest membership anniversary with a pitcher of sangria. I should have eaten something first, because the wine quickly made me feel a little fuzzy-headed.

Of course this didn’t help when we entered our fifth and last screening of the day: Seventh Moon [IMDB][MFF] directed by Eduardo Sánchez, starring Amy Smart, Dennis Chan and Tim Chiou. The story takes place in China where Melissa and Yul enjoy their honeymoon. Their visit coincides with the sacred Seventh Moon festival, celebrating the full moon of the seventh lunar month, which, according to a Chinese myth, is a time when the dead are free to walk the earth. The couple, drunk after celebrating, start a late night cab-drive to Yul’s grandmother’s house in the countryside. This trip will of course end somewhere lost in the middle of nowhere where the horror is about to take place.

Directed by Eduardo Sánchez who with Daniel Myrick also wrote and directed the Blair Witch Project, Seventh Moon felt a lot like Blair Witch Project including its shaky camera work. Even without sangria I got motion sick when I watched the Blair Witch on the big screen. The same happened Friday night during the Seventh Moon. I survived about three quarter of the movie, but I had to close my eyes because I felt increasingly dizzy. A few minutes before the movie was over I had to leave the theater to breathe some fresh air and get stable ground under my feet which made me feel better. Unfortunately I missed the ending of the movie and the Q and A afterward, but my stomach wasn’t ready for it. Next time I should probably take some pills for motion sickness before I watch another shaky movie.

The following list is in order from my top pick down for Friday, May 8:

1. Modern Love is Automatic
2. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
3. Invisible Girlfriend
4. Love Songs
5. Seventh Moon

PS: Sorry about the bad quality of these photos. My camera didn’t take the low-light too well. I hope I got all the names right. Please correct me if I made a mistake.

The winners are announced today at the awards ceremony and party that begins at 7pm. Unfortunately we won’t be able to attend because we had the car for only one day, but we watched all 20 candidates yesterday, most of which I enjoyed a lot. Before getting to my conclusion I can already say upfront that this was a fantastic little film festival with a really nice and diverse choice of short and medium length films. We both were glad we could come. All of the films were nice for one reason or another, so I will try to make it shorter this time. :) I especially liked the “deeply personal” and the “unusual funny” candidates of the following films we saw yesterday:

Cause

Documentary (57 minutes) by Denise Prichard – Washington DC

Meet four Americans who have dedicated their lives to a cause — putting their ideals on the line, every day, every hour.

Britt, the Minuteman, living his life out at the U.S.-Mexico border, defending his America from invasion; Kayla, the PETA Activist, exposing the plight of animals, while sometimes exposing herself; Dennis, the Pro-Life Minister, crisscrossing his way through the country spreading his truth about abortion; and Concepcion, the Peace Activist, maintaining her twenty-six year long anti-nuke vigil just steps away from the White House.

This film, entitled “CAUSE”, peels back the layers to uncover the personal histories and motivations that make these individuals who they are, and what drives them to behavior some would call extreme. Going beyond the labels and what initially meets the eye, their stories weave together to form a collective thread and reveal that they have more in common than one would think. (from the official website)

Vignette

Experimental narrative (17 minutes) by Dustin Thompson – Forest, VA

Quick Feet, Soft Hands

Drama (25 minutes) by Paul Harrill

Set against the backdrop of our national pastime, Quick Feet, Soft Hands follows a young couple trying to pursue the American Dream.

Greta Gerwig (Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs) stars as Lisa, a young woman whose hopes of moving up are tied to Jim, a minor league baseball player.

As Jim falls deeper into a batting slump, the couple must cope with the day-to-day realities of being young and poor. And they must confront the prospect that they may never make it to the big leagues.” (from the official website)

I was quite amused to find that we actually missed only a minute or even less when we had to leave the screening back at the Maryland Film Festival. It was nice to see this film again, and I still have the same good impression. It’s a sad but very realistic slice of life applicable to many individuals, couples, relationships, hopes, dreams and failures.

Rogue Gnome

Animated music video (5 minutes) by Stephen Guidry – Arlington, VA

Richard Wants a Nickname

Drama (9 minutes) by Julie Haberstick – Arlington, VA

Nunna Mia e la Barca

Documentary (13 minutes) by Jacob Dodd – Richmond, VA

Nunna Mia e la Barca is a short film about an Italian grandmother, Nunna, who endured the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956. Despite living 50 years in the U.S., Nunna continues to preserve her Italian heritage. Through the act of preparing a meal and selflessly giving of her time, Nunna passes on the heritage to her grandchildren.” (from the official website)

Alchemy

Experimental (2 minutes) by Victoria Hanabury and Joshua Rachford – Charlottesville, VA

Birds

Drama (17 minutes) by Mark Betancourt and Marc Ryan – Washington, DC

I really liked this short film and its conclusion. They packed quite a large emotional spectrum into the 17 minutes. It was humorous and thrilling, personal and serious, and also very wise at the same time.

Mexico Painting

Video art (3 minutes) by Vin Grabill – Ellicott City, MD

Lustig

Drama (16 minutes) by John Black – Gainesville, VA

Lustig, set in the years after the end of WWII, tells the story of a man’s solitary journey for redemption. Carrying haunting memories from time spent in a concentration camp, the man seeks out the family of a friend he knew there. He brings a secret to their doorstep that only the strength and courage of the deceased allows him to reveal. In admitting his own cowardice, he creates the heroic legacy of a man. A man a young son will always remember.

The title “Lustig” is not the German word for “funny” here, but the name of the main-character in this film. It actually is a true story about Branko Lustig, a Croatian Jewish survivor of Ausschwitz, who produced a number of movies including Schindler’s List. He was the inspiration for this short film. I liked this film which was very moving, personal and very well made. John Black chose to have all dialog in German, but only the mother (played by Ilka Fischer) spoke German fluently without an American accent. While I could believe that the Croatian visitor wasn’t fluent, I didn’t buy her son’s and the Nazi commander’s accent. I found this a little distracting. That’s a shame because I really liked this film otherwise. I thought it might have been a better decision to keep the dialog in English instead.

Dance Party: The Teenarama Story

Documentary (57 minutes) by Beverly Lindsay-Johnson – Washington, DC

Untitled No. 9

Comedy (5 minutes) by David Butler – Annapolis, MD

This short film shows where you might end up if you let your life be guided the philosophy found in pop lyrics. Some of the philosophers quoted in this film include Paul McCartney and Wings, Janis Ian, Elvis Presley, Paul Simon, Don McLean, Bob Dylan, Three Dog Night, Melanie, Simon & Garfunkel, Don Henley, Carole King, Bread, The Rolling Stones, The Romantics, U2, The Beatles, Petula Clark, The Talking Heads, 10cc, Elton John, ABBA, Tracy Chapman, Bryan Adams, John Cougar Mellencamp, Jimi Hendrix, Harry Nilsson, Bruce Springsteen, The Drifters, Billy Idol, Rappers Delight and Baha Men.

Oh how I loved this film! It was one of my very favorites of the day. What a fantastic idea to tie all these song lyric fragments together to a “lyrical meditation on life”. And what a brilliant camera-work and delivery. I really liked Mark Redfield in this and would love to see more of him. It made me think of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation and Spalding Gray in Steven Soderbergh’s Gray’s Anatomy which I loved. But Untitled No. 9 was still different and very clever. I wonder what Untitled No. 1-8 may be like? David Butler’s site is butlerfilm.com.

My Best Friend Mark

Personal narrative (5 minutes) by Renee Shaw – Washington, DC

Las Historias Mas Sexy del Mundo No. 2

Comedy (15 minutes) by Eric Cheevers – Washington, DC

This was another of my favorites. Brilliant, funny, cool, hot, surreal, mesmerizing, fascinating, sexy…a kind of 70s Swedish soft-core porn meets Quantum Physics meets Matthew Lesko (the infomercial questionmark-suit-man played in this film) meets David Lynch’s red room meets a weird but great music performance by The Raveonettes. I read that the predecessor, Las Historias Mas Sexy del Mundo No. 1, won the Rosebud Film Festival in 2004 and I think No. 2 might win again this year. Unfortunately I didn’t find a clip on the web, but here is an an interview with Eric Cheevers and Scott Mueller, also also a few pictures. I loved it.

Unraveling Michelle

Documentary (85 minutes) by Michelle Ann Farrell – Bel Air, MD

I loved Unraveling Michelle. I haven’t read any reviews or watched any trailers before we watched it at the Rosebud Festival. I didn’t know anything about it at all. So the documentary started with a very funny guy working on indie-horror-comedy type movies. He just announced something like “I want to be a female filmmaker” and it sounded as if he wasn’t really serious about it. It could have been just another example of his wicked humor. The clips that portrayed the old filmmaker Joe O’Ferrell and his history looked too crazy and unbelievable to be true. There you saw the athlete, the addict, the film-maker and businessman, the dude and manly man. At first I wasn’t even sure if I was looking at the same person or just different actors representing him in his different life stages. I thought it was all staged, and that what we were about to see was a funny kind of mockumentary, but not a serious documentary about a sex change.

The first facial surgery approached. It was again very funny, in a similar dry Tom Greenish humorous kind of way, as he leaves the hospital looking painfully awful and his head wrapped in bandages, but still making jokes about it. When they lost their way he moved over to the driver’s seat in the state he was in, with bloodbags hanging off his face… and I still thought, that has got to be a joke… after all he is in the horror-comedy industry.

But as the story continued it became more and more clear that his/her journey was very real, and that the male Joe O’Ferrell was really about to become the female Michelle Ann Farrell. The documentary followed the transition from the beginning to the end and revealed so much in addition about her past and present life, the problems and challenges without losing a healthy sense of humor. I couldn’t believe how many really extreme changes she went through in her life. If I trace back my own life of the last 20 years I can find many drastic visual and physical changes that make it sometimes hard to believe the person from back then was really me. But Joe’s and Michelle’s roller coaster history exceeds everything I could ever imagine. I have to admire the strength and courage she was able to bring up and transform her life through all these stages.

This documentary was about a journey of a sex change, but there really was so much more. It was a very personal portrait of an extraordinary, interesting, humorous and very likable individual. It was also a milestone for both: Joe’s final masterpiece and best work in his filmography, as well as Michelle’s debut, marking the beginning of a great future. Very impressive — I just loved everything about this film… the film itself and its flow…it was really well done…the deeply personal portrait…the very unusual history with all transformations…the humor, and of course, last but not least, Michelle herself. :)

Headache

Experimental (8 minutes) by Robert Parrish – Arlington, VA

This film was entirely made with public domain clips taken from archive.org. I loved how cleverly it recycled old footage to tell a completely new and different story. We once saw a short film at the Maryland Film Festival that made use of public domain footage and thought it was such a great idea. Headache was very well done, but unfortunately I couldn’t find anything on the web.

Signage

Drama (12 minutes) by Rick Hammerly – Washington, DC

A receding hairline, the beginnings of crow’s feet, and a chance meeting with a young shirtless deaf man in a bar, force Lex to confront getting older in a youth-conscious world.

I loved signage — “when life calls the last shot” and the way it touched this internal battle of aging, self-doubts and insecurities that tend to increase proportionally with the gap between oneself and the youthful generation you still might like to be a part of or at least connected with. I loved how main character/writer/director Rick Hammerly made his story turn even more personal and internal, as there really is nothing wrong with him. He looks just fine and not old at all, and yet there are these self-doubts.

Freedom Dance

Animation (28 minutes) by Steven Fischer – Crofton, MD and Craig Herron – Baltimore, MD

A cartoonist keeps a diary in cartoon form during his adventurous escape from the deadly 1956 Hungarian Revolution. (from the official website)

tar guys

Video poetry (5 minutes) by Cathy Cook – Baltimore, MD

Widow’s Meal

Drama (8 minutes) by Arnon Shorr – Baltimore, MD

Conclusion:

When we arrived in Arlington Alice and I both were very surprised to find a very empty and dead-silent building. The garage was empty, all stores inside the building were closed, and at first we seemed to be the only visitors to a private viewing. Eventually a few more people showed up, but the theatre never filled up. I thought it was a real shame. The Rosebud Festival has already been around for almost two decades. The film selection was wonderful, and I couldn’t see why it couldn’t attract more independent film lovers. At only $8 for an all-day pass it was a real bargain and I’m already looking forward to Rosebud 2009. Thanks to everyone who made this festival possible, and thanks to Paul for the recommendation.

I’m curious to find out who won this year, but the winners haven’t been published yet. I will follow up with another blog as soon as I find out.

“With a dry wit and self-effacing humor, as well as an endearing eccentricity, Jon Hyrns gives voice to his life and dreams in Dominic J. DeJoseph’s hour-long documentary, narrating a journey that traverses much of the West Coast by 1930′s Pullman car. The camera is silent witness to a monologue delivered by 40-something Hyrns, whose job as a porter on a dying breed of luxury train endowed him with his nickname, Johnny Berlin. A sad-eyed wanderer with a quick tongue, who counts punk rock and pilgrimage among his main influences, Johnny still hasn’t figured out what to do with his life. In trying to do so, however, he has managed to do quite a bit, which he describes as he goes about his never-ending tasks of changing sheets and battling dust. Johnny is engaging on just about any topic, from his love for strawberry milk to his somewhat-lacking love life, and his tales of get-rich-quick schemes are particularly hilarious: a deadpan Johnny details the slightly morbid story of once trying to increase his father’s life insurance plan to garner himself a more robust inheritance.

With big dreams of finishing his novel about a man who decides to roll across the United States, Johnny is a gravel-voiced, diamond-in-the-rough character, assuming literary proportions of his own. The low-fi, talking-head documentary style of the piece allows the charismatic, melancholy central figure to take center stage. (from IndiePix Films)

“JOHNNY BERLIN PART 2: NOTES FROM THE DUMPSTER, picks up where JOHNNY BERLIN left off, right after Johnny’s tour of duty as a porter aboard a luxury train ended. In PART 2, we find Johnny lying in a hotel room bed, talking about how he gambled away almost all of the money he had saved for his trip while working on the train, and thus ended up destitute in Phnom Penh where he had visions of leaping off of a bridge into the Mekong River.

Filled with profundity, existential crises and anecdotes like the one above, JOHNNY BERLIN PART 2 is the continuing story of an oddball’s mid-life crisis and his attempts to overcome his dark obsessions in his own humorous, and often enlightening, fashion.

The film follows Johnny, alone, as he travels from Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia where he searches in vain for the graves of his uncles, Benjamin Franklin Simpson and Thomas Jefferson Simpson, to New York City where he goes on a failed job hunt. Along the way, he talks about his grandfather’s lost novel, “Autobiography of a Failure,” muses about finding himself after reading a New Yorker article by Tom Robbins on Buddhism, and ends up in a dumpster on the street filled with used books reminiscing about his homeless older brother whom he lost contact with years ago. (from the Johnny Berlin website)

All screenings including the documentary shorts program would now begin late after this incident, and we would have had to leave early to ride to the UB Student Center and be in time for Out Late. So we decided to give ourselves a break after two long movie-days and skip the documentary shorts, although we both were very interested in watching them. Sometimes you just can’t have it all.

Out Late was a great companion to Bi The Way we saw earlier on Saturday. Bi The Way highlighted the “whatever” generation, young people who find themselves equally attracted to both sexes, and alternately maintain either heterosexual or homosexual relationships. Out Late focused on the older generation who lived in heterosexual relationships, hid their sexual identity for most of their lives before they decided to come out very late as senior citizens.

There is no doubt that today’s society is still not as accepting and tolerant as it should be, but I was wondering: If these seniors had grown up in today’s age, in which same sex relationships are much more, and much more widely accepted than 50 or 60 years ago — would they have defined themselves as a “whatever-generation”, too, or would they have come out as gay or lesbian early in adolescence? Or vice versa: if today’s “whatever-generation” had grown up 50 or 60 years ago, would they have lived in a straight relationship for their whole life and come out today, to openly live an identity they suppressed and hid for so long?

There are so many questions I could think of. Both documentaries leave a lot of room for discussion and illustrate how complex and individual everybody’s journey really is. Out Late was an excellent and thought-provoking portrait of a fascinating group of seniors who took the risk, managed to turn their entire lives around and redefine themselves so late in life. It presented facets of human life I was very unfamiliar with before.

Homophobia still looms large in our society, causing many gay and lesbian individuals to remain in the closet into college or beyond. But this documentary follows five individuals who waited until they were senior citizens to openly declare their sexuality to family, friends, coworkers and neighbors — and paints a vivid, sometimes painful portrait of these people and the many factors that caused them to wait this long.

Their stories are nothing less than extraordinary: many lived straight lives complete with marriage and children, and now face the challenge of beginning again late in life — often losing some love and support in the process, but infusing their lives with new levels of honesty and pride. Perhaps most dramatically we meet Elaine, who came out of the closet at 79, and finds herself decades older than the other senior lesbians in her support group; LeAnna, a former military man who became a woman at age 60; and Cathy, who didn’t see the need to come out until spotting an anti-gay political sign in the lawn of her neighbors and best friends.

Out Late tells these stories in unflinching detail, asking all the right questions: why wait so long? Why now? And… what now? Just as importantly, with stories captured across North America, it forces society at large to ask the question: why are we still making this so hard for so many people? (Eric Allen Hatch) (from the filmfest-guide)

Behind this backdrop a different kind of sexual revolution took place and new generation evolved, one that eludes the sexual identity struggles and debates of the previous generations. Bi The Way did not try to present scientific numbers, but portrayed this new “whatever-generation” of open and free-thinking bisexuals, which I thought did it very well.

Bisexuality is often debated as not real, not true or not possible. One could only be either straight or gay, but not both. Bisexuals are sometimes accused of being really gay or lesbian who try to be socially acceptable, afraid of outing themselves or that they are just young and will be gay later. I always had a different opinion and was curious about which opinions would be presented in this documentary. I was also wondering if the young “whatever-generation” is really just a label for an identity that has been as present and natural as every other orientation in the history of mankind. And what about lust vs. love?

This documentary was not able to provide a lot of answers, but it did provide an interesting view of the young generation and their relationship to sexuality. It raised a few questions and illustrated how complex this topic really is. It doesn’t really matter if someone is born with a certain sexual orientation, or found one later in life, if someone is hetero-, homo-, bi-, pan- or asexual: there is more than the simplified black and white views people tend to define everything into. Between these two ends there is a whole spectrum of colors. And I think it is important that the whole spectrum is recognized and discussed without any prejudices or bad feelings. Films like Bi the Way can serve as an excellent basis for discussion. [imdb]

This jaunty little film puts forward the idea that sexual preferences may start in our DNA, but they are also formed by experience, ebbing and flowing as we grow up. With a loosely structured road trip appropriately at is core, directors Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker set out to explore how diverse members of the “Whatever Generation” in a variety of towns across America identify themselves sexually, and how they think about their sex life and sexual partners.

While no pretensions of academic anthropology are made, the filmmakers are also determined to avoid the monotonous prurience of so-called reality TV, and take us on a funny, intuitive ride fueled by natural human curiosity. Along the way, certain characters take center stage. Jonathan Caouette, a gay man fresh off his own film of self-discovery, Tarnation, is the parent of ten-year old Josh. The filmmakers keep coming back to Josh and his parents as Josh precociously ponders the question of who or what he’s going to be sexually. Their family structure is complex and unconventional, but undeniably full of love, and their interviews are forthright and charming. As his parents and other people in the film cheerfully talk about a variety of sexual experiences, labels fall away, and we begin to see that the filmmakers believe that the whole subject of human sexuality, far from being scary or taboo, can be discussed as openly as any other aspect of the human experience. (Jed Dietz) (from the filmfest-guide)

I.O.U.S.A is another in a series of documentaries to serve as a mirror to our society. This film visualizes the growing financial problems of the country that threaten to ruin all prospects of future generations. It will hopefully help the public to make more educated decisions about the leaders of tomorrow. Both the environmental issues presented in An Inconvenient Truth and the debt issues in I.O.U.S.A are not really new and not very surprising. These problems have been known for years already, but both these documentaries bring the issues to the point and back into the light with recent numbers, in a very comprehensible, compact, clear and rational way.

I.O.U.S.A was a success in many regards. The charts and diagrams were very successful in illustrating the magnitude of the problem and its historical course. You also learned about where the money came and comes from, the historical events and which effect they had on the debt of the country. It’s an excellent documentary and I look forward to the final cut of it.

All these documentaries make me wonder if times can really change for the better, or if it is already too late. Will they create nothing but a temporary wave of excitement, a fad that will soon pass and be forgotten? Or will people change and be more critical about their leaders? Will a film like An Inconvenient Truth help to reverse the ongoing damages to the environment? Will I.O.U.S.A help to reduce the debts? Will documentaries of this kind reach the right people or just preach to the choir?

Who knows… but I think these documentaries will reach a few people and keep the issues alive in the public consciousness and discussions. They give these problems a voice in the popular media, which would otherwise ignore them completely. Probably one of the essential documentaries of our times. [imdb]

What if someone had warned us about Katrina? Oh, wait, we had specific warnings, days in advance — but no leadership. In the midst of upheaval in our traditional news sources, we’ve had powerful warnings from filmmakers on a variety of topics: global warming (An Inconvenient Truth), chemicals in our daily life (Blue Vinyl), and the relationship of mass food production to the American obesity epidemic (Super Size Me), to name just a few.

National debt is yet another issue we have some notion about, but there’s very little mainstream news giving us details, much less guidance — and there’s certainly no leadership. Referencing the books Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin, director Patrick Creadon (Wordplay) entertainingly gives us a tour of the financial black hole we’ve dug for ourselves. With U.S. Comptroller David Walker as our docent, the film artfully describes how the debt has spiraled out of control, and the ever-mounting consequences for both ourselves and the next generations.

In a lively, remarkably funny style, Creadon shows us the details behind the horrifying level of debt we’ve accumulated — and the short-sighted mindsets that made it possible. Facts and concepts that are usually shrouded in mystery are made clear. The film is defiantly nonpartisan, and features interviews with a fascinating array of familiar and unknown iconoclasts. This is a film that treats audiences as adults as it gives us clear answers and new insights — and you’ll be appropriately indignant that you hadn’t heard the story before. (Jed Dietz) (from the filmfest-guide)

With Omar Davila, Josh Ayers, Romeo Navarro

Website at www.insidethecircle.com

Breakdancing’s come a long way since the days of the Electric Boogaloo, as this documentary set in the ultra-competitive Austin, Texas b-boy scene proves. Director Marcy Garriott’s eye-popping, gravity-defying doc recalls the drama and excitement of Hoop Dreams as it follows Josh and Omar, two teenaged b-boys with dreams of making it big. Formerly close friends, Josh and Omar now front competing crews hellbent on outdoing the other’s best routine on the dancefloor — and become tight-lipped rivals in the process. Meanwhile, just as Omar begins to garner some major international attention via the internet, crises with family and the law come to a head in Josh’s life. (from the filmfest-guide)

I really wanted to see this documentary because I have always admired breakdance since it first entered Germany’s consciousness with the Rock Steady Crew in the early 80s. I admired breakdance when I was active in the hip-hop/graffiti scene myself in the early 90s, and admire them even more today, all grown-up more than a decade later. After all that time I can still find myself speechlessly impressed about moves the world hasn’t seen before and should not be possible. Just today I was blown away by a video of a guy who literally did push-ups with both his legs straight and his feet in the air. Incredible.

So naturally I had to see Inside The Circle and was very pleasantly surprised, because this documentary turned out to be much more than just about breakdancing and some moves. It offered a wonderful behind-the-scenes look into the scene, the events and more importantly: the people, their lives, who they are, what they do, and where they came from. This film was also very successful and authentic in that it absolutely managed to reflect all the ideas, goals, the flavor and atmosphere and the dynamics of the hip hop scene as I remember it from my old days. I don’t really want to get nostalgic and mourn about old-school and new-school and what hip hop has become these days etc-etc.. but really: breakdancing and the people really stayed as raw, unpolished, true-to-themselves and from-the-streets as they always were… not slightly more polished, presentable, engineered or commercial.