Swedish co-directors Ellen Fiske and Ellinor Hallin also win Best New Documentary Director Award Scheme Birds, a film about a corner of Scotland where you 'either get knocked up or locked up,' won the top documentary prize Thursday night as awards were handed out at the Tribeca Film Festival. Directors Ellen Fiske and Ellinor Hallin, both natives of Sweden, also claimed the Albert Maysles New Documentary Director Award. Their film revolves around "Scottish teenager Gemma and the people in her life: her grandfather, who raised her after her mother abandoned her; her boyfriend Pat; her unlucky best friend Amy; and her neighbor JP," Tribeca writes in the festival program. "Everyone finds a distraction to stay out of trouble: Papa keeps pigeons and teaches boxing, the kids drink and commit petty crime, and Gemma finds motherhood." For its poetic, haunting depiction of compelling characters living on the edge. Every element of the film, from editing to cinematography to point of view, is superb. The Tribeca documentary competition jury, made up of Drake Doremus, Robert Greene, Julie Goldman, Andrew LaVallee and Cheryl McDonough, heaped praise on the film in their citation. "For its poetic, haunting depiction of compelling characters living on the edge. Every element of the film, from editing to cinematography to point of view, is superb," the jurors wrote. "The filmmakers convey their voice in a unique and present-tense way. We’re proud to present the award for best documentary feature to Scheme Birds.” The documentary prize comes with a $20,000 award. A $10,000 award is granted to the winner of the documentary directing award, determined by a separate jury made up of David Cross, Orlando von Einsiedel and Kathrine Narducci. Those jurors echoed the praise for Scheme Birds, writing, “For a film that tells a deeply compelling story, but realised with cinematic vision and invited us intimately into the lives of the film’s characters. This film is a remarkable achievement, made even more so because it’s from first time feature directors. The winners for the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director are Ellen Fiske and Ellinor Hallin.” Our Time Machine, a film about extraordinary Chinese artist Maleonn and his poignant attempt to stay connected with his father whose memory is failing, won Best Cinematography in a Documentary Film, recognizing the work of Yang Sun and Shuang Liang (Yang co-directed the film with S. Leo Chiang). "For its insightful visual style that captures loss and uses both intimate and grand spaces to maximum effect," jurors Doremus, Greene, Goldman, LaVallee and McDonough wrote in their citation. "The images elevated a universal story to the realm of dream and metaphor." Best Editing in a Documentary Film went to Jennifer Tiexiera, who cut 17 Blocks for director Davy Rothbart. Jurors wrote, “The award for best editing goes to a film for its profound treatment of vast amounts of honest, often raw footage. The film is structured in a way that renders some of the most affecting moments with great subtlety. Viewers are transformed over the course of the film, a testament to the choices made in its making."
A Special Jury mention for editing went to Rewind, directed by Sasha Joseph Neulinger: “This brave film uses editing to reveal narrative layers that weren’t immediately apparent, challenging and surprising viewers along the way." Carol Dysinger's Learning To Skateboard In a Warzone (If You're A Girl) won Best Documentary Short and a $5,000 prize. The shorts jury (Kevin Cahill, David Krumholtz, Kathy Najimy, Sheila Nevins, Agunda Okeyo, Aaron Rodgers, and Buster Scher) wrote, “A revelatory tale of how skateboarding can fuel the future of dignified resistance to gender oppression in war torn Afghanistan. Told through the innocent confessions of young girls and the steadfast dedication of their headstrong female instructors, this film shines an uncompromising and ultimately uplifting light onto righting injustice.” A Special Jury Mention for documentary short went to St. Louis Superman: “An unflinching and delicate portrait of a loving father with a haunted past who bravely decides to stand up to the powers that be in Ferguson, Missouri." Claudia Sparrow directed the film about Máxima Acuña's brave effort to protect nature in the Peruvian Highlands The prestigious HotDocs festival in Toronto hosted the world premiere of Maxima, a documentary about one courageous woman's fight to preserve the natural beauty of the Peruvian Highlands. Máxima Acuña de Chaupe won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts to protect the resources around her, where she and other poor families toil as subsistence farmers. "I love the Earth and think of it as if it were my mother," Máxima says in the film, directed by Claudia Sparrow. "I defend the land, I defend the water, because they are life." But that life and livelihood was threatened by the arrival of a giant gold mining operation. "...As a multi-billion-dollar mining project is launched by the American Newmont Mining Corporation and lays claim to the land, Máxima finds her world turned upside down," HotDocs writes. "She's embroiled in conflict, forced eviction, violence and criminal prosecution. Undeterred by the intimidation, Máxima knows what's at stake." The film screens again on Sunday (May 5) at HotDocs, the final day of the Canadian International Documentary Festival. Watch the trailer below. The singer's life, loves and mystifying death are explored in film directed by Richard Lowenstein Perhaps nothing can fully explain the death of Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of the Australian rock band INXS. In 1997 he took his own life at age 37, putting an abrupt end to a hugely successful career that saw him become one of rock's biggest stars. Richard Lowenstein's documentary Mystify: Michael Hutchence, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival Thursday night, likely gets as close to the truth as can possibly be achieved. The director knew Hutchence at the height of his fame, directing music videos for INXS (as well as U2 and The Who's Pete Townshend). When Lowenstein met the singer for the first time in 1984 "I was sort of a Melbourne punk," the director told the audience at a Q&A following the world premiere. He revealed he initially felt little interest in INXS, which he said was then considered a "sunshine Sydney band." But later he would work with Hutchence not only on music videos but scripted films, including the feature Dogs in Space (1986). "Richard was the only person to do [the documentary]," Hutchence's sister Tina, insisted during the Q&A. "He was so close to Michael. He'd worked with him. Michael respected him. He's a wonderful filmmaker." Hutchence as depicted in Lowenstein's film grew up shy, basically stumbling into rock n' roll because some pals were into it. Eventually, he developed a potent singing voice of dynamic range (even though it's evident he never appreciated the extent of his vocal talent). He's described as a happy baby and a generally happy kid who tapped into an unexpected performative gift once INXS coalesced. Why, if he appeared to be a fairly well-adjusted rock star, would he kill himself? The film suggests a few answers. One was the turbulence of his romantic life. He loved a succession of women intensely, including singer Kylie Minogue and Danish model Helena Christensen. He became romantically involved with Paula Yates, then married to rocker Bob Geldof, in the mid 1990s, a relationship that would provide fodder for the British tabloids and extraordinary angst for Hutchence. There was also his drug use, which is hinted at but not probed in depth in Mystify. But perhaps the main cause of the singer's downward spiral was a traumatic brain injury Hutchence sustained after he was assaulted by a taxi driver in 1992. The seriousness of his injury was kept from the public at the time, but the documentary makes plain that he suffered personality changes after the incident and significant depression. He was never the same again, many of his intimates testify in the film, including his sister and his former love Christensen. "Helena had never spoken about that accident. It's never been really looked at in how profound that was in changing Michael's life and what happened at the end," Lowenstein commented. "No one knew, because it had been kept secret. It was kind of amazing to get that first-hand account of it." Along with Minogue, Christensen and Tina Hutchence, the film includes interviews with Michael's bandmates, his friend Bono of U2 and Michael's younger brother, Rhett. Similar to Amy, Asif Kapadia's Oscar-winning documentary on Amy Winehouse, the interviews are used as audio only. The visuals consist of archive photos of Hutchence, concert performances, music video outtakes and material shot by Hutchence himself, Minogue and others. Lowenstein was asked why he decided against putting his interviewees on camera in Mystify. "It was quite pragmatic. I felt what people had to say was very important but I also felt it's only a hundred minutes, this film, and I really need to have as much of Michael in it. So he's the only talking head in it, really," Lowenstein explained. "I basically decided I wanted to go back in time to the 90s, to the 80s, without having modern interviews sort of pulling you out and 'Oh, look it, now we're here and now we're going back again.' I wanted to actually immerse in a time capsule, like go back to those years." Mystify: Michael Hutchence is set to screen again tonight at Tribeca and twice on Saturday. The festival runs from April 24-May5. 'Mossville: When Great Trees Fall' exposes environmental racism that doomed historic Louisiana town4/25/2019 Documentary by Alexander Glustrom plays at Montclair Film Festival next weekend after Full Frame debut Not much remains of the town of Mossville, Louisiana, once a vibrant African-American community nestled in bayou country near Lake Charles. Only flat concrete foundations are left where homes used to stand. The faint echo of former civic life has been squelched by roaring bulldozers and dump trucks. "It's a historic black town. It's what I call 'oasis space,'" says Michelle Lanier, executive producer of Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, a new documentary that reveals what happened to the town and its residents. "It's a space where during Jim Crow segregation -- where catastrophic racial violence was a threat to all black lives all over the country but particularly in the deep South, in Louisiana -- these very brave formerly enslaved African-Americans had a vision to create community, to create schools and businesses and places of worship and for generations thrived." There have been a number of documented spills that have happened. There was a huge one in the 90s [with] ethylene dichloride... They found out it had been leaking for eight months into the groundwater. Mossville's ultimate undoing had something to do with geography. "It has access to a river which has access to the Gulf of Mexico... It also has a great rail system," notes Alexander Glustrom, director of the documentary, which just premiered at Full Frame in Durham, North Carolina. "It is an area that has all the things that they want." The 'they' Glustrom refers to are petrochemical giants like SASOL, a South African company, that have erected massive industrial plants in and around Mossville. When SASOL decided to build a multi-billion dollar operation in the area in 2012, the town -- historic or not -- was effectively in the way. SASOL went to work buying out homeowners, offering what it said were above market value prices. It was part of a seduction, Lanier asserts. "These companies that come in, they said, 'We will employ you and if we are going to build on land that you own you will make money because you're going to sell us your property and we know that these historical spaces are being impacted and we care about that so we're going to create a little museum and some publications to help tell that story because we have a conscience,'" Lanier recounts. "Meanwhile, people are not making anywhere near enough money off almost the forced sale of their property to buy anything approaching an equal kind of home life for generations of family." One resident, Stacey Ryan, refused to give up his tiny plot of land in Mossville, where he had grown up and where he was raising a son. "It's his form of activism... Just him being there and living is his resistance," Glustrom told me when we sat down at Full Frame. "At first he built a fence around his property to show them that he wasn't going to leave and then they cut him off all the utilities. They cut him off of sewer, water, electricity and he basically had to create a whole, self-sufficient little system within his property just so he could live there." That Ryan would want to keep living there speaks to the primacy of place in forming our identities -- the deep roots alluded to in the film's subtitle. Because, in truth, there is every reason to want to leave, if home exerted no gravitational pull. Mossville may have been a bucolic refuge in the early 20th century, but it metastasized into something else when the chemical plants began moving in in the 1940s, spewing poisons into the ground and the air. The people in Mossville and nearby communities have suffered dearly from that proximity. "There have been a number of documented spills that have happened. There was a huge one in the 90s [with] an ethylene dichloride spill," Glustrom comments. "Ethylene dichloride is a carcinogen and it actually got into the groundwater and this is at a time where most Mossville families had wells in their yards where they pulled water from the ground and so they watered their gardens with this water, they grew their food in this ground and they digested these chemicals." We were there for a couple of explosions where the sky is full of black smoke and these chemicals are in the air and there would be a 'shelter in place' warning. The environmental dangers didn't end there, Glustrom says. "There's releases [of chemicals] in the air that happen constantly. When you go there you can smell it, you feel it. When our team would go there we would get sick. Members of our team would often get bloody noses and would have lots of issues just being there. Then there's also explosions that happen. And then there's releases that happen there. We were there for a couple of explosions where the sky is full of black smoke and these chemicals are in the air and there would be a 'shelter in place' warning." Glustrom continues, "A lot of these chemicals affect the reproductive systems of the women. So there's really high rates of endometriosis. There's really high rates of birth defects. There's a cluster of babies that were born without brains... There's also just really high cancer rates, even what they call 'chemical diabetes' they trace back to these chemicals that people are breathing in and ingesting. Our main character [Stacey], he's lost almost his entire family to cancer and every single Mossville resident has family members that they've lost, if they haven't themselves had to suffer from cancer." Ryan's own health is precarious. "When I first met him his health wasn't good and we watched it slowly deteriorate," Glustrom reveals. "He struggles to this day." It appeared Ryan's health would not permit him to attend the premiere at Full Frame, but he rallied sufficiently to make the trip to North Carolina with his son Andre. As compelling as Ryan's story is and that of his neighbors and their community, the filmmakers see Mossville as being about much more than a single town and its people. It's about "fence line" communities everywhere where the disenfranchised live next to industrial plants. They struggle to exist at the whim of the powerful. The filmmakers got a glimpse of this phenomenon when they shot footage in Secunda, South Africa, where SASOL operates a huge plant that turns coal into synthetic fuel. "This is an international issue... It's the global south. Our team went to South Africa and said, 'This virtually looks the same.' And it has roots in both apartheids -- the American South apartheid and the South African apartheid," Lanier observes. She adds, "The repercussions of this kind of industrialized white supremacist extractive practice -- it is a machine that is mammoth, but it is not bigger than the human spirit. It's not." SASOL, according to the filmmakers, was not willing to participate in the documentary. "There response has been to not grant any requests for interviews, as much as we've tried," Glustrom says. He accuses SASOL of attempting "to intimidate us and to follow us around every time we're in Louisiana. We have been detained by security officers who then call police officers and it's been a constant intimidation that they've done to us while we've been filming." It's significant to point out that SASOL was courted to set up shop in Louisiana by Bobby Jindal, the state's Republican governor from 2008-2016. And the company insists its property purchase program in Mossville was and is entirely voluntary. "The offers typically amount to the appraised value of the property plus 40-60 percent," SASOL writes on its North America website. "For owner-occupied homes appraised at less than $100,000, the 60-percent markup is added to a minimum value of $100,000. Other allowances and bonuses are available to help ease the burden of relocation." The company further states, "Sasol is proud of our engagement with our neighbors in Mossville, Louisiana, a community west of our Lake Charles Chemical Complex. From the early stages of our ethane cracker and derivatives project, we've continually reached out to Mossville residents to keep them informed of our plans and solicit their input on what we can do to make a positive difference in their community. The result is an extensive, ongoing partnership between Sasol and Mossville to address their desires, give them the choices they asked for, and provide sustainable, long-term support to increase economic opportunities." SASOL's footprint in the Mossville area is only growing larger. "Sasol is constructing a world-scale petrochemical complex near the Lake Charles Chemical Complex," the company states. "The project will roughly triple the company's chemical production capacity in the U.S. and enable it to build on its strong positions in robust and growing chemical markets." To the creators of the documentary, the tale of Mossville is one of environmental racism. "'Environmental racism' is a really important phrase and it was actually born in eastern North Carolina as black people were resisting the placement of dumps and chemical sites," Lanier affirms. "This notion of valuing black and brown bodies less than white bodies." She says a petrochemical plant would never be erected near an enclave of wealthy white people -- an opinion no sensible person would dispute. "People of wealth and privilege can go to their friend who's sitting on the zoning committee and who's in the register of deeds -- those networks are very, very tied and they're deep and they're generational -- to say, 'No, no, no, not near my gated community. Not near my golf course. Not near my child's private school. Go put it over there. Those black folks, they live in poverty. How they live is kind of an eyesore anyway, wouldn't it be great, let's just put it there where we don't have to see it and smell it.'" Glustrom adds, "You'll find that every single [industrial] plant across the country you'll find communities of color that are the fence line communities." Mossville: When Great Trees Fall screens next at the prestigious Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey, playing Saturday, May 4 and Sunday, May 5. Theatrical distribution plans have yet to be determined. "I think in the next six to eight months we'll start looking at getting DVD's out there and definitely for libraries," Lanier tells Nonfictionfilm.com. "We want to work with other environmental justice and social justice organizations to use this as a tool for engagement and advocacy." In the meantime, the director and producers are basking in the glow of a successful appearance at Full Frame, where the documentary won a special award for human rights. "It feels amazing. It's indescribable," Glustrom offers. "The award obviously means a lot to us, it means a lot to our characters, our whole producing team. But honestly the award, the sold-out screening, the encore screening, nothing can compare to having our main character walk on stage to a standing ovation [Saturday]. I mean, that was just a high of this entire process for us." Michelle Lanier, executive producer of "Mossville: When Great Trees Fall," speaks at a Q&A following the premiere of the documentary at Full Frame. Behind her are producers Kate Mathews and Daniel Bennett; at far right is main character Stacey Ryan with his son Andre. April 6, 2019. Photo by Matt Carey 'Breakthrough' documentary puts Nobel Prize-winning scientist Jim Allison under microscope4/23/2019 Film directed by Bill Haney explores fascinating personality whose cancer research is saving lives Of all the tributes one could pay to renowned immunologist Jim Allison, this might be the most profound: there are people alive today who owe their survival to his work. The Houston-based scientist won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2018 for discoveries into ways the body's immune system could be triggered to fight cancer, insights that have led to life-saving therapies. Allison falls into that rare group of individuals filmmaker Bill Haney calls "creative scientists" -- people whose approach to phenomena is so original that they wind up making exponential advances in their fields of study. Haney directed the new film Breakthrough, which examines Allison's vital contributions and the unorthodox personality that produced such critically important research. Allison might wear a white lab coat by day, but by night you can often find him wailing on harmonica in a honky tonk. "You meet Jim and he's orthogonal to what you expect the studious, scholarly scientist of your childhood imagination to be," Haney told me when we met at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, where Breakthrough screened earlier this month. "He's so full of empathy and spirit and he's so willing to be emotionally exposed... He just is what he is and that makes him so much more relatable." He just believes science is the key to human evolution as a culture, as a people, as a nation. The Allison story begins in his native Texas, that outsize state that seems to yield a disproportionate number of outsize characters. His father was a doctor, which might explain an enthusiasm for scientific exploration. Equally significant to his future course of study was the loss of his mother, who died of cancer when Allison was just 11. In the film, he movingly recalls the burns on his mother's skin caused by radiation treatments, then one of the limited options to respond to cancer. Demonstrating an iconoclastic streak, in high school Allison refused to take a class from a biology teacher who rejected the validity of evolution theory on religious grounds. It was the teacher's beliefs Allison found heretical -- to science. Throughout his career he's kept faith with empirical evidence. "For Jim the god of life is the scientific method," Haney notes. "You follow the darn path where it takes you and you suffer what will come." As Allison continued his studies he was drawn to immunology, becoming fascinated by the function of T-cells -- a special kind of cell that plays a critical role in immune response. "T-cells have been my love ever since I heard about them in graduate school," Allison commented during his Nobel lecture in Stockholm. As a hunter-killer of other cells infected by germs or other harmful agents, T-cells ought to be uniquely suited to eliminating cancer, Allison understood. Yet cancer cells deviously inhibit T-cells from killing them off, allowing cancer to progress. Over many years and many studies, Allison figured out the secret to these cellular battles within the body, and how the power of T-cells could be effectively unleashed on cancer. Among medical breakthroughs that is very, very big. In 1994–1995, Allison studied a known protein that functions as a brake on the immune system. He realized the potential of releasing the brake and thereby unleashing our immune cells to attack tumors. He then developed this concept into a new approach for treating patients. The director recalls, "I read a paper in Cell magazine, a hardcore hard science piece, saying, 'Rarely in the history of science is there an invention that you can really associate very clearly with one person, but this is one.'" That one person being Jim Allison. It all sounds neat and tidy in retrospect, but Allison fought bias within the medical research community that long considered immunology a dead end that would never lead to useful cancer treatments. Somehow he persevered despite a formidable array of doubters. "His resilience is rooted in a lot of ways in the adaptive resistance to stress and challenge he had already formed as an 11-year-old," after his mother's death, Haney observes. "He'd already been willing to be a science kid in a school that was all about football and he was already surviving in some ways on his own at 11 years old and in so many ways he had positioned himself to be able to handle the resistance." Haney, in addition to being a filmmaker, is an entrepreneur who has launched a couple of biotech startups, including Dragonfly Therapeutics. As such, he was ideally positioned to tell the story of Allison's accomplishments. "I work in science and drug development. Immune-oncology has come from nowhere, and frankly it's even bigger than immune-oncology. The notion that we can work with the body's immune system to cure disease will be much more powerful than only immune-oncology -- and immune-oncology is a very big deal," he comments. "If you're in the world of drug development you quickly see, wow, there's something transformative happening." Distribution plans for Breakthrough haven't been finalized, but Haney is hoping for a theatrical release this summer. It will reach a larger audience at a time when science is under attack at the highest levels of government. "The Trump administration over its first two years has shown a pervasive pattern of sidelining science in critical decisionmaking, compromising our nation's ability to meet current and future public health and environmental challenges," the Union of Concerned Scientists [UCS] has written. "UCS first documented this pattern in 2017, six months after President Trump's inauguration. Our 2019 report, The State of Science in the Trump Era, finds that the administration has continued to undermine science." That's deeply antithetical to Allison and Haney. "The scientific method -- let's use facts to form conclusions that we test -- we're screwing with that right now," Haney declares. "We're debating what a fact is, or at least screaming about what a fact is." Haney argues "the centerpiece of progress for the world the last 120 years and arguably longer than that" has rested on three things -- the scientific method, assembling the best and brightest minds from around the world and research universities. "Research universities, there's kind of [an attitude], "Let's tax them, they're non-profit but we should tax them anyway,'" Haney says. "Research for cancer is down-- the present administration has tried to cut it repeatedly." He adds, "In the 18 years [since 2001] number of Americans killed by foreign terrorists -- 300. Number of Americans killed by cancer -- 11 million. Five trillion [dollars] spent on the war on terror." By celebrating a groundbreaking scientist, Haney is sending a message to those who might follow in Allison's footsteps. "I want to inspire young people to want to become scientists by telling engaging tales, by showing them the joy and creativity that can be the result of a life in the sciences," he states. "I want to remind the rest of us, our fellow citizens, of why we want to support the scientists. And what that really means, in the debate -- it's not a debate -- in the screaming on what a fact is. Let's remember what we'll lose if we forget what a fact is." Allison continues to jam on harmonica whenever possible (occasionally with his friend Willie Nelson), and fortunately for those dealing with cancer, his research work continues.
"He's on to new frontiers," Haney comments. "He's publishing new papers right now and he's taken the opportunity that his Nobel and his success before that has given him and he's built this extraordinary thing called the immuno-oncology center at MD Anderson with the best equipment and scientists from around the world working on the next level of treatments." |
AuthorMatthew Carey is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. His work has appeared on Deadline.com, CNN, CNN.com, TheWrap.com, NBCNews.com and in Documentary magazine. |