Danielle Kourtesis is the Music and Outreach Manager for Rooftop Films; look for more SXSW coverage from her and the rest of the Rooftop crew throughout the week.
I spent Wednesday morning at the Convention Center getting my press badge and sorting out my schedule for the day. After getting my bearings, I headed straight to the free Terrorbird/Force Field party at Red 7. I was surprised to find that there was no line for a free party with major buzz bands like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Wavves, not to mention the established acts like Beach House, The Thermals, and Vivian Girls. Eventually the venue started to fill up but by no means was it impossible to get in — good for my sister, who is tagging along with me totally badge-less. Beach House played a excellent set in the indoor space, making me fall deeper and deeper in love with the group’s atmospheric sound and lead singer Victoria Legrand’s haunting vocals.
That night I headed to the Alamo Lamar and saw Lena Dunham’s first feature Creative Nonfiction, which is part of SXSW’s Emerging Vision’s Program. I was truly impressed by Lena’s intelligent, if sometimes rough, coming-of-age story. At age 22, Lena’s directorial debut is witty, honest, and showcases a unique talent. After the jump, I chat with Lena about her experience as a filmmaker at SXSW, the creative process behind <em>Creative Nonfiction</em>, and future film projects — which include her mother.
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Mark Elijah Rosenberg is the Founder and Artistic Director of Rooftop Films; look for film reviews from him and the rest of the Rooftop crew throughout the week.
If you’re going to a bunch of SXSW films this year, you’ve probably seen David Lowery’s name in the credits a lot. Among other things, he edited It Was Great But I Was Ready to Come Home, worked on Beeswax, and was listed simply as “right hand man” on Alexander the Last.
At Rooftop, we screened David’s short film A Catalogue of Anticipations in 2008, at our “Surreal Sounds and Shorts” screening, co-presented with MoMA. The short is a strange and wistful fable with a little girl and a skeleton fairy, a unique film in tone, style, and subject matter — fairly different from the mumblecore films he’s collaborating on. So I was thrilled to see he had his debut feature here at SXSW, and my expectation has been rewarded. St. Nick is a stunning film, all the more resonant because it clearly comes from the same movement of realist movies here at SXSW, but has a distinct care for rich visuals and thought-provoking audio, qualities that are often lacking in these other films, which concentrate primarily on getting quotidian performances with a simple verite style.
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Danielle Kourtesis is the Music and Outreach Manager for Rooftop Films; look for more SXSW coverage from her and the rest of the Rooftop crew throughout the week.
It took me a long time to get to Austin. First I flew to Dallas, then to San Antonio, and then I boarded a bus to the capital city. That’s what you do when you want to go to SXSW but have very little money. I think I saved several hundred dollars using that convoluted route and I saw some interesting things on the way. For example, there is a hallway filled with rocking chairs in the San Antonio airport and “The Largest Flea Market in the U.S.” is on I-35.
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Mark Elijah Rosenberg is the Founder and Artistic Director of Rooftop Films; look for film reviews from him and the rest of the Rooftop crew throughout the week.
I’m not gonna name drop or reveal plans, and I’m not trying to brag on being busy, but this was how I spent yesterday at SXSW, and this is why I love a good film festival:
+ 5 movies seen
+ 5 introductions to filmmakers made
+ 1 meeting held with PR person about marketing and PR roll-out for Rooftop’s various initiatives
+ 1 meeting held with a film producer about special screening at Rooftop with doc subject, art installation, walking tour, and more
+ 1 meeting held with European programmer about live, cross-Atlantic simultaneous screening with web-cam link
+ 2 meetings held with different social justice outreach film coordinators
+ # ongoing talks with US programmer about curating a collaborative, serial film production
+ 3 parties attended
+ 3 rides taken on the Winnebago
+ 2 pitches developed for Winnebago Man horror sequels
+ 3 Twitter film reviews written
+ 1 Flavorwire film review written
+ Many, many, many conversations about films talked and chatted and debated
What a pleasure and an honor it is to do this stimulating work.
Mark Elijah Rosenberg is the Founder and Artistic Director of Rooftop Films; look for film reviews from him and the rest of the Rooftop crew throughout the week.
One of the enjoyable challenges of 45365 (a documentary portrait of Sidney, Ohio, made by brothers Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross, native sons) is just how difficult it is to write about. Like the old joke about the dancer asked to explain her dance, to which she replies, “If I could explain it, I wouldn’t go to all the trouble of dancing it.” With a free-form verite film like 45365, the only way to explain it: to describe every luscious and gritty shot, football fields, factories, fist fights and fair grounds; to perform all the flatly fantastic dialogue, pre-teen peer pressure, high school heartbreak, adult disillusionment; to replicate all the parade noise broadcast on local radio, the train rumble that rattles the windows, the melody of Midwest life = to go to all the trouble of making it.
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Mark Elijah Rosenberg is the Founder and Artistic Director of Rooftop Films; look for film reviews from him and the rest of the Rooftop crew throughout the week!
Jack Rebney. The World’s Angriest Man. A middle aged Winnebago salesman going nuts. You’ve all seen the clip. We even showed it at Rooftop Films as part of the Found Footage Fest.
You’d think by now Rebney would’ve climbed into a tower and capped a few folks, or parlayed his internet infamy into a short-lived late-night cable show, or at least sold his cussing clips as cell phone ring tones or something. But in fact, no one has heard a peep from him — not even those who’ve tried to find him. Until now.
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In my last post, about The Yes Men Fix the World, I wrote about recent and more obvious manipulations in documentary filmmaking, acknowledging that every documentary contains subjective choices. Lee Chung-ryoul’s wonderful film Old Partner contains more traditional manipulations. The film observes a 79-year-old Korean farmer, his wife, and the ox they’ve had for 40 years, and from a jumbled (and essentially banal) year in their life, the director crafts a narrative with multiple levels of significance, but with the simplicity, charm and clear emotional arc of a children’s book.
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Much has been written (including by me, ahem) about the evolution of the documentary form, and the ways that films increasingly blur the lines between doc and fiction, “reality” and, uh, “alternate reality.” We all know that every film is subjective, that the truth is relative (relatively speaking). Tellingly, of the films mixing staged and captured footage, the ones that are getting the most attention are political exposés — films in which the artists are exposing the lies and wrong-doings of politicians and corporations, films that don’t claim to be objective, instead offering a clear opinion of what the filmmakers think is right and wrong.
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Like just about every other scribbler here at Sundance, I’m overwhelmed with all that I’m seeing and all that I want to write about. (In writing the previous sentence, I first was going to call myself a “journalist,” but then I realized whom I was, and I’m sadly not a journalist. Then I was going to say “blogger,” but I’m not exactly keeping blog form — my pieces are reviews appearing on a blog. “Writer” is too generic, “critic” too critical. So I’m using “scribbler,” which Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times kept using to describe himself in the Sundance panel discussion I recently saw.
What I am doing in no way compares to what he’s doing, but I think the word is adorable. And, there: now I’ve acted bloggy, and knocked off some words, thus assuaging the guilt I’m about to tell you about.) So, not writing as much as I would’ve liked, I’ve been feeling bad, and wanted to file a quick report on a few of my favorite films here this year. I hope to add full reviews of these films soon, but wanted to make sure to recommend them as soon as I could so people could check them out.
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Mike Tyson has still got it. The ability to shock, excite, charm and terrify. When the audience found out before Saturday night’s screening that Iron Mike would be at the Q&A, the atmosphere became even more electric than it already was. It felt like one of his heavyweight title fights, buzzing with tension and danger.
Tyson has always been a hypnotic figure. For me, growing up the in 1980, his rise and fall took me from junior high school through college, and his character was as engrossing and crucial to my development as that of Kurt Cobain. Both were flawed geniuses: sudden celebrities and fallen icons at a young age, undereducated and over-thoughtful, famous and tormented for their mix of fierceness and sensitivity, for their honesty. After Cobain died, and after Tyson bit Holyfield’s ear, rock n’ roll and boxing became lost and corrupted. Their lives are the stuff of classic Greek tragedy, and James Toback’s energetic and intimate documentary Tyson animates the drama in a perfectly distilled post-modern form.
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