One of the most harrowing and compelling personal documentaries of our time, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE exposes for the first time the truth about the Killing Fields and the Khmer Rouge who were behind Cambodia’s genocide. More than simply an inquiry into Cambodia’s experience, however, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE is a profound meditation on the nature of good and evil, shedding light on the capacity of some people to do terrible things and for others to forgive them.
Winner of a dozen top documentary festival awards, including a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and the Grand Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary
Festival, this is a riveting film that takes audiences as close to witnessing evil as they are ever likely to get. It is also a personal journey into the heart of darkness by journalist/filmmaker Thet Sambath, whose family was wiped out in the Killing Fields, but whose patience and discipline elicits unprecedented on-camera confessions from perpetrators at all levels of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy. This is investigative journalism of the highest order.
“Stunning. One of the most gripping and moving films I have ever seen.” — Andrew Marr, BBC Radio

16Beaver is 16 Beaver Street, Floor 4, New York, NY.

LA COMMUNE, (Watkins, 2000, 345mins, DVD) is one of Peter Watkins most assertive measures against Monoform,* methods of media production and distribution. It is an event, a collaboration, and a beseeching — a warm, crafty endurance that produces questions like weeds throughout its nearly six hour run time.

Length is only the most discussed abbererant feature of LA COMMUNE, and perhaps the least interesting. Watkins employed techniques in casting, research, shooting, and editing that address form and delivery in radical ways, many of which surface in his other work, but are taken to a deliberately lengthy extent here.

“If Hollywood’s colonization of world cinema markets is an integral component of the media apparatus, as the film explicitly argues in the later sections (by means of the black title screens that narrate a bulk of the action), then making a film in deliberate defiance of the standards which embody the Hollywood ethic is a step toward reappropriating cinema. Every aspect of the filmmaking serves this end: the overwhelming use of non-professional actors; the director’s deference to the actors for much of the script; the offhand shift in temporal perspectives; the constant breaking of the “fourth wall”; the exclusion of all on-screen violence; the unusual amount of reading the viewer is forced to do. None of these techniques are new in themselves, but rarely have they been fused in one film, on the scale of La Commune.” –Jacob Collins, Evergreen Review

Vimeo’s launching an exciting new festival and awards show in New York City.  The event will run October 8-9, 2010 at IAC Headquarters and the SVA Theater.  They are assembling an impressive group of judges, including Morgan Spurlock, David Lynch, DJ Spooky, and Lucy Raven.  Check out their site to submit or nominate videos.  Submissions close in two weeks, and the top prize is $25,000 which goes towards producing new work.

The Paley Center for Media today announced a call for entries for its celebrated Art of the Documentary Pitch Workshop at PALEYDOCFEST2010, which will be held at the Paley Center in New York on Saturday, October 16, 2010 at 2pm. In this workshop/competition-now in its seventh year-a panel of documentary executives and producers discuss the process of developing a documentary and will hear and evaluate pitches from five preselected up-and-coming filmmakers who are hoping to sell either a nonfiction concept or a documentary work-in-progress. The winner of the pitch competition in October will receive a $5,000 grant, sponsored by SnagFilms, to be used towards the completion of their project.

Confirmed panelists at the workshop include: Andrew Mer, VP Content Partnerships, SnagFilms; Susan Werbe, Exeuctive Producer, HISTORY; Lauren Lazin, Filmmaker and Executive Producer, MTV Networks; Diana Holtzberg, Vice President – USA Operations Acquisitions, Project Development, Sales, Films Transit International; Simon Kilmurry, Executive Director, POV; and Molly Thompson, Programming Director, A&E IndieFilms.

This call for entries is to be selected as one of the five filmmakers who will participate in the workshop in October.Complete submission guidelines and entry forms can be found at http://paleycenter.org/pitch2010 or filmmakers can submit electronically through Withoutabox, a free online resource that helps filmmakers connect with film festivals, at http://www.withoutabox.com/login/8326 .

The deadline for entries:

• Earlybird deadline: July 20, 2010 ($20 / $15 for Withoutabox members)
• Regular deadline: Aug. 17, 2010 ($25 / $20 for Withoutabox members)
• Late deadline: Sept. 7, 2010 ($30 / $25 for Withoutabox members)
• Withoutabox extended deadline: Sept. 14, 2010 ($45 / $30 for Withoutabox members)

Past finalists include: Garbage Dreams directed by Mai Iskander; Prodigal Sons by Kimberly Reed; Whatever it Takes by Christopher Wong; Hi Tech Low Life by Stephen Maing; and Circo by Aaron Schock, our 2008 winner, which premiered at Silverdocs in June.

Wen's short film “Hair is Alive” screened at MoMA as a part of her work with the Union Docs Collaborative.

We’d like to congratulate 2010 Union Docs Collaborative participant Shawn Wen for earning a coveted, prestigious internship position at This American Life.  “As long as I’ve known about the radio show, I’ve known about the internship,” says Wen.  “It’s really wild to me that I got it, the chances were so small.”  This American Life offers only two six-month internship positions a year.  The 50-60 hour workweek includes an dizzying array tasks, from copy editing and administrative duties, to producing weekly promos and short interviews.  “I have no clue what it’s going to be like,” admits Wen, but she nonetheless feels her experience with the collaborative is not dissimilar to her future with This American Life.  The point is “to make work that we want to see in the world.  Both Union Docs and the internship are ways of exercising that.”

The Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival is an annual festival held in Navarra dedicated to forms of cinema generically grouped under the heading of ‘documentary.’ Programmed by Artistic Director Josetxo Cerdán, films come from around the world, with an emphasis on finding rarities in form and subject. The festival seeks to reward risk-taking and non-narrative approaches, and to uncover glints in Spanish and World Cinema.

PROGRAM:
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AMANAR TAMASHEQ, Directed by Lluis Escartin, 2010, 15mins, DVD
Best Short Film Prize Winner –PDV 2010
In Tuareg with English Subtitles

Lluis Escartín’s AMANAR TAMASHEQ communicates a highly political message by respectful and reflexive means, delivered in an intelligent and poetic combination of sound and image. Escartin lived with Tuareg rebels in the desert of Mali, and turned his camera on them in order to bring back their messages — to the degree that the mistranslations of language and history allow.

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LOS MATERIALES, Directed by Los Hijos, 2009, 67 mins, DVD
Jean Vigo Best Director Prize Winner — PDV 2010
English Subtitles

LOS MATERIALES explores an empty landscape around the reservoir of Riaño, in the province of León, in which the former town and nine other villages lie submerged as a consequence of a flood in 1987. The three members of Los Hijos, a young experimental filmmaking collective from Madrid, spent a year walking the area, and the resulting work is a spare, diffuse document of a village just below the surface of history. Subtitles replace dialogue, leaving the occasional background noise as the sole sound source, and the story reliant on written text.

“LOS MATERIALES defies our expectations on audiovisual language (specially the sound edition and mixing), on certain landscape aesthetic, even on the motivation or the ethic of filmmaking.”
–Blogs and Docs

“Interesting and fearless, lively and stimulating, the film’s purpose is the exploration of Riaño, not only to dismember its dramatic structure but its semantic field…. The recovering of village’s history turns out to be impossible, just suggested, almost abstract, while the movie’s plot drives to metacinematographic issues and ends -in a mysterious, strange and disconcerting turn- becoming a terror history.”
–Cahiers du cinema, España

Interspersed between gas station stops, bonfires on the beach, and a small town’s blues festival, the group considers multiple myths including: the metaphysical attraction to one of the most popular wedding gifts in America; the growth of ambiguity in the word “Whatever”; the experience of queer interracial desire; a experiment in collaborative filmmaking via a game of broken telephone; the logic that underlies the phrase “New York is the Big Apple”; politicians’ obfuscation of reality in approaching “The Third Rail”; and the drama of online persona, among others.

In Boston on July 11th, as a final stop for this documented group trip, Artists in Context and Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab will present a work-in-progress screening and discussion of “Documenting Mythologies.” Highlights from the project will be shown, including rushes from the New England production, and conversation will be structured on issues of myth, collaboration, and documentary arts practice. All participants in the UnionDocs Collaborative will be present and the event will be recorded and incorporated as a scene in the final project.

PRESENTATIONS BY

UnionDocs  Collaborative Program Directors

Christopher Allen
Kara Oehler
Jesse Shapins

2009-2010 UnionDocs Collaborative Participants

Andre Almeida
Tina Antolini
Ben Brown
Rahul Chadha
Hyatt Michaels
Katia Maguire
Will Martin
Jolene Pinder
Joshua Gen Solondz
Shawn Wen
Robbie Wilkins

PRESENTED WITH

Fri, 06/25/2010 – 8:00pm
DCTV, 87 Lafayette Street, NYC
$8 to attend

Doors 7pm ~ Open Bar 7-8pm ~ Event 8pm

Yes, think The Gong Show. With videos. Or better yet, think America’s Funniest Home Videos, but replace Bob Saget with World Famous *BOB*, add an open bar and our indie film community, and you got yourself DCTV’s first ever Video Gong Show!

To participate, bring your most bizarre, revealing, and hysterical found footage, home movies, or b-roll gone awry. Make us gasp and knee-slap, or our fabulous judges will shame and gong you away at the gauntlet.

And for the voyeurs among us, just come watch the hilarity unfurl as we celebrate the strangest yet most memorable moments a lens could possibly capture.
More info at: http://www.dctvny.org/events/videogongshow