From Indie To Glitz: Panel Picks For The 25th SCAD Savannah Film Festival

One of my producer friends has a saying: The world needs another film festival like it needs another strip mall. It’s a pretty spot-on nod to the fact that far too many organizations have a habit of programming from the same (Sundance/Tribeca/Toronto, et al.-inspired) playbook. If you’ve been to one local fest you’ve been to them all. Unless you’ve been to the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. For the largest university-run film festival in the US has a number of distinctive things going for it, most notably its above-all commitment to the next generation of filmmakers. While the Savannah College of Art and Design never shies away from bringing in the Hollywood glitz – Ron Howard is this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Directing recipient – it balances that glam with so many truly informative panels (and thus networking opportunities) that attending feels almost like being back in school. (That is, a really cool school with a curriculum that includes 22 Gala Screenings, 10 Signature Screenings, and 10 in-competition narrative and doc features, along with a slew of shorts.) And this year’s 25th edition (October 22-29) continues the noble educational tradition – even adding a few new “courses.” Which means I’ll likely be raving about the following handful of panels, along with many more. (While keeping a guilty eye out for the dozen-plus A-listers, of course – especially Opie, Eddie Redmayne and Janelle Monáe.)

To read the rest visit Hammer to Nail.

Doc Stars of the Month: Happy Oliveros, Carlos O. González and Victor Baró, The Last Out

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sami Khan (St. Louis Superman) and immersive producer-sound artist-director Michael Gassert’s POV-premiering (October 3, and streaming on PBS.org through November 16) documentary The Last Out “explores the shadowy nexus of pro sports and the migrant trail,” according to its accurate, yet humbly incomplete, synopsis. This riveting, multiyear portrait of collective self-sacrifice, which follows a trio of Cuban athletes who leave their home island to pursue the American (baseball) dream, is much more than the sum of any catchy logline. Above all, it’s a heartfelt look at three passionate young men — all from stable, loving, two-parent families — who would much prefer to stay put. But due to geopolitics and pro-sports hegemony when it comes to “America’s Pastime,” they are forced to swing at only the greyest of legal options. Indeed, every year hundreds of talented, US-blockaded aspirants like Happy Oliveros, Carlos O. González, and Victor Baró risk life and limb and exile to venture to Central America, lured by the (too often fool’s) gold of MLB contracts. If they manage to make it safely to Costa Rica, they can then hunker down in a no-frills camp set up by a slickster named Gus Dominguez, a Cuban-American sports agent and onetime federal convict who did time for player-smuggling over a decade ago (and perhaps even more astonishingly, agreed to participate in the film). And then they train, train some more, and hopefully audition for scouts. Eventually, they either make it to major-league heaven or, more likely and tragically, they are booted out to travel back home (or to the US-Mexico border) through hell. So, to learn all about being trailed by a camera on this harrowing path to the American dream, Documentary reached out to the intrepid threesome, who graciously agreed to serve as our October Doc Stars of the Month. Thanks to Samuel Didonato at Cinema Tropical for providing the translation during the conversation.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Bizarre love triangle: Fire of Love

NATURE / The extraordinary love story of volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died as explosively as they lived. Sara Dosa has a knack for capturing the interplay between humankind and the natural world, distilling it to its inseparable essence. Her 2014 feature debut, The Last Season, trailed two mushroom-hunting war vets deep into the Oregon woods; while 2019’s The Seer and the Unseen followed an Icelandic «seer» who acts as a liaison between the country’s elves, trolls and «hidden people» and us mere mortals, And now with this year’s exquisitely-crafted, Sundance-winning Fire of Love, the Indie Spirit Award-nominated director (and Peabody award-winning producer) allows us to get even more up close and personal: to witness members of our species literally – and willingly and beautifully – embrace consummation by force majeure.

To read the rest of my essay visit Modern Times Review.

Doc Star of the Month: Reid Davenport, 'I Didn't See You There'

Winner of the Directing Award for US Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Reid Davenport’s debut feature, I Didn’t See You There, is, according to the Stanford-trained filmmaker, a doc “about disability from an overtly political perspective”— i.e., the kind of cinematic project the TED fellow and one of DOC NYC’s 2020 “40 Filmmakers Under 40” has long been pursuing with his accolade-laden shorts (A Cerebral Game; Wheelchair Diaries: One Step Up; Ramped up, et al). And it’s equally an art film; informed by the personally lensed work of visionaries ranging from Chantal Ackerman to Kirsten Johnson to RaMell Ross, I Didn’t See You There is, as the director-DP also puts it, “an invitation to see through my eyes.” In other words, an offer any passionate cinephile would be unlikely to refuse. Indeed, Davenport is even willing to serve as our narrating escort on this mesmerizing, at times magical realist, journey, whisking and wheeling us via his camera-mounted wheelchair from today’s fast-gentrifying Oakland—where one day, in rather Lynchian fashion, a circus tent inexplicably pops up outside the filmmaker’s apartment—to sleepy Bethel, Connecticut (the shared hometown of Davenport and 19th-century impresario/freak-show progenitor P.T. Barnum), tracing and subtly interweaving personal and political history along the way. It’s also a film in which the director serves as his own protagonist, and thus presents the perfect excuse for Documentary to feature the filmmaker as our September Doc Star of the Month. I Didn’t See You There premieres theatrically on September 30 at the just-opened, New York City-based Firehouse Cinema, run by DCTV, followed by a broadcast premiere on January 16 on POV.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.