Film Festivals

Sundance is growing. More submissions than ever--8,000 for 2008. More screenings. More countries of origin represented in both the feature and documentary competitions. More arms of the Sundance empire--institutes, labs, the Sundance Channel--at work. More categories to sift through than a sane film-goer can practically comprehend, let alone stand in line for.

What happened at AIVF over the last 30 years?

I first became aware of AIVF when Martha Gever was editor of The Independent. I marveled at this national organization that put out each month a magazine chock full of weighty, intellectual and critical articles on film and video.

Watching 2,000 short films in four months isn’t something you take on in your free time. It requires a finely honed system. For Roberta Munroe, one of the Sundance Film Festival’s two short film programmers, that system resembles an assembly line of video playback equipment. Since 2001, Munroe has spent an enormous chunk of her time from August to November ensconced in her LA apartment, situated amidst a television on a wheeling cart, her DVD-enabled laptop, two DVD players (one all-region, one region 1), and two VCRs (one PAL, one NTSC).

Dear Doc Doctor:

I’m in my first week of editing, and I have this horrible feeling that my 100 hours of footage won’t be enough even for a short. How can I stretch my film beyond the short format?

At the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, Steve Savage and Susan Margolin, the two minds behind New Video, a New York-based entertainment marketing and sales company, watched as tickets for documentaries were snatched up left and right. They witnessed audiences line up to get into sold-out theaters. They saw documentary after documentary screen with standing room only.

As I start writing this, I’ve just ejected from my VCR the 349th entry for this year’s Revelation Perth International Film Festival and…well…it looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.

I love programming the event. It’s always fascinating to see how distance and borders melt under the influence of common themes. It’s a powerful thing, and this year it’s more noticeable than before.

There is a mystique to filmmaking—the silvery light that reflects off the screen, the way the story shapes a character’s whole life in two hours and how that life can then resonate so deeply with an audience. The myth of filmmaking is what makes it such a powerful medium. But more and more, art and independent film have dovetailed with the contemporary commercial demands of the medium.

There was one good thing about Malcolm Lee’s 1999 studio film The Best Man: Terrence Howard. I wrote a review of the film for Africana.com (now Blackvoices.com) in which I said just that. I got lots of emails from angry black men because I likened the film to an R&B video (and I’d say it again today). But Terrence Howard was something else. You just sort of waited for him to enter the frame.