The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival announced additional programming news for the 2012 festival: The Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant, the Southern Documentary Fund: In-the-Works program, and a celebration of 40 years of New Day Films. The festival will also feature a retrospective of short films in honor of its fifteenth anniversary, featuring one title from each previous year of the festival.
The 2012 Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant has been awarded to Jason Osder for “Let the Fire Burn” and Ben Powell for “Barge.”
The Southern Documentary Fund (SDF) will once again present their In-the-Works presentation at this year’s festival. The program will include the short film “Café Sense” directed by D.L. Anderson and Brooke Shuman, along with excerpts from “Can’t Stop the Water” directed by Rebecca Marshall Ferris and Jason Ferris and “untitled LUCY film” directed by Elisabeth Haviland James.
Full Frame will honor the 40th anniversary of New Day Films and exhibit New Day Film’s very first titles. The four films will screen as one program: Liane Brandon’s “Anything You Want to Be” and “Betty Tells Her Story,” Jim Klein and Julia Reichert’s “Growing Up Female,” and Amalie R. Rothschild’s “It Happens to Us.” A separate panel conversation around New Day Film’s history and legacy will also take place at the festival.
Full Frame has curated a selection of short films from the Full Frame vault. The fourteen shorts will, representing each year of the festival, will be screened in three separate programs over the course of the weekend. Vault One features “A Thousand Words,” “Caretaker for the Lord,” “For a Miracle,” and “Salt.” Vault Two features “Picture Day,” “Crow Film,” “The Intimacy of Strangers,” and “Lost Book Found.” Vault Three features “Metacarpus,” “Bitter and Sweet,” “A Love Supreme,” “Seltzer Works,” “Breadmakers,” and “Leche.” Directors and festival years are included below.
The 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will be held April 12-15, in Durham, N.C.
2012 Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant
Barge (Director: Ben Powell)
This film examines the impact of one of America’s great rivers, documenting the next chapter of life on the Mississippi. Fascinating riverboat workers—notorious captains and seasoned first mates—expose both the decidedly colorful and highly specialized aspects of their profession.
Let the Fire Burn (Director: Jason Osder)
In 1985, police closed in on the Philadelphia row home headquarters of MOVE, a radical group some considered terrorists. Through archival footage, this film reveals a remarkable example of how intolerance, and incompetence, can lead to unthinkable acts of violence.
2012 SDF: In-the-Works
Café Sense (Directors: D.L. Anderson, Brooke Shuman)
In the last few decades, specialty roasting companies have tried to make the connection between the small farms that grow the plant to what we find at gas stations and in whipped drinks. Durham’s Counter Culture Coffee hosts a weekly tasting where drinkers learn to distinguish the flavors associated with different countries.
Can’t Stop the Water (Directors: Rebecca Marshall Ferris, Jason Ferris)
Over the last fifty years, Isle de Jean Charles has been gradually shrinking, and is now almost gone. Four months into filming the lives of the families that call this place home, one of the greatest environmental disasters in history left the people of this tiny island in south Louisiana with an even more uncertain future.
untitled LUCY film (Director: Elisabeth Haviland James)
Lucy Daniels believes a family secret radically impacted the trajectory of her life. Despite early promise, she endured brutal treatment in mental institutions only to pen a bestseller and win a Guggenheim fellowship, all before the age of twenty-two. Re-creations, animated dream sequences, and intimate interviews tell her story.
40th Anniversary of New Day Films
Anything I Want to Be (Director: Liane Brandon)
A teenager’s parents tell her time and again that she can grow up to be anything she wants to be. Through playful, yet troubling, reenactments, “anything” is discovered to be what exists within the realm of certain limitations.
Betty Tells Her Story (Director: Liane Brandon)
A woman sits in a chair before the camera. At the urging of the filmmaker, she describes a past event. She finishes her story, but then the filmmaker asks her to recount it. The distinctions between the first and second telling are restrained yet perceptible, raising ideas about femininity and self-worth.
Growing Up Female (Directors: Jim Klein, Julia Reichert)
This documentary captures six women, from ages four to twenty-six, as they experience coming of age in America. Touchingly revelatory, this pioneering feminist film acknowledges the countless pressures applied to young women and the many forms these influences can take.
It Happens to Us (Director: Amalie R. Rothschild)
Women of different ages, races, and economic backgrounds boldly speak to having had an abortion. This diverse collection of stories articulate and connect the viewer to powerful, sometimes graphic, recollections of the physical and emotional experience.
2012 Vault
Bitter and Sweet (Director: Johanna Lee) – 2001 Festival
Witness a day at an acupuncture shop in New York’s Chinatown, with Mom, Pop, and the family cat. A delightful, affectionate portrait of both a business and a marriage.
Breadmakers (Director: Yasmin Fedda) – 008 Festival
At the Garvald Bakery, a team of workers with mental disabilities prepare bread for all of Edinburgh. The participants, each in their own way, contribute to the rhythm of this choreographed effort.
Caretaker for the Lord (Director: Jane McAllister) – 2011 Festival
The maintenance man of a church in Glasgow’s East End muses about its future as he mops the floors and changes the light bulbs. The run-down church ministers to more members of its vulnerable community than those in charge realize.
Crow Film (Director: Edward P. Davee) – 2003 Festival
Ubiquitous and much-maligned crows are transformed into stately, mysterious objects of beauty. This film captures the intricate rhythms and textures of the birds flying and pecking their way through their world and ours.
For a Miracle (Po Cud) (Director: Jarek Sztandera) – 2005 Festival
This astonishing film of the national pilgrimage of disabled people and their caregivers from Poland to Lourdes by train—under the auspices of Catholic clergy—is a surreal passage that inspires faith and mercy, anxiety and despair.
The Intimacy of Strangers (Director: Eva Weber) – 2006 Festival
Cellphone conversations have the ability to collapse the distinctions between public and private space. Capturing intimate moments obliviously performed for strangers, this film is a love story of the modern age, transmitted for all to hear.
Leche (Director: Naomi Uman) – 1999 Festival
A dreamlike evocation of a dairy farm in Mexico through a textured film surface—the filmmaker develops her film in buckets. A document of a timeless place and the magic of crafting things by hand.
Lost Book Found (Director: Jem Cohen) – 1998 Festival
This film updates the venerable city symphony, but without the genre’s grandiose claims. Instead, this is more of a chamber piece; it starts as a personal documentary but then shifts from the private to the enigmatic.
A Love Supreme (Director: Nilesh Patel) – 2002 Festival
In this stunning and elegant tribute, Nilesh Patel pays homage to his aging mother as he captures the beauty and artistry of her life’s work: making samosas. A delicacy.
Metacarpus (Director: Nicole Triche) – 2007 Festival
Magicians, musicians, doctors, and others sing the praises of their hands. A collage of insight and image portrays this special limb’s beauty and diverse utility, its development and distinctive form.
Picture Day (Director: Steven Bognar) – 2000 Festival
One school. 601 kids. 12 frames per kid. What do you get? This playful, funny parade of images reveals the range of possibilities contained in half a second’s worth of pictures.
Salt (Directors: Michael Angus, Murray Fredericks) – 2009 Festival
Every year a photographer ventures to the middle of Lake Eyre, a desolate salt flat in South Australia, pitching camp at its very core. With neither land nor water in sight, he looks into the abyss and finds that, in the midst of nothingness, there is everything.
Seltzer Works (Director: Jessica Edwards) – 2010 Festival
Regular consumers are a rare breed but the dedicated owner of Gomberg Seltzer Works in Brooklyn takes great pride in his work and the details involved in creating the real throat-tingling spritz.
A Thousand Words (Director: Melba L. Williams) – 2004 Festival
Williams’s lack of communication with her father, especially after a stroke silences his memories, leads her to explore his enthralling home movie footage and accomplished still photos from the Vietnam War, which speak of a fettered artistic soul.
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