From its humble beginnings in 1992—just 10 Oscar-nominated films presented to local folk on a $20,000 budget—the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival now attracts scores of documentaries, filmmakers, much bigger bucks and an audience from all over the world. The 9th annual festival, which took place October 13-22, showed 90 films in two theaters and attracted 60 filmmakers as well as thousands of viewers from throughout the US and abroad to the pleasant resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas—former President Bill Clinton’s hometown. Legend has it that warring Indian tribes used to lay down
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Over the past few years, our community has seen a veritable tsunami of documentaries that examine the sex industry and its various strands—adult entertainment, prostitution, stripping, et al. Leading the charge are docs on porn. Shooting Porn (1997, Ron Larsen and Caryn Horowitz) took on the gay porn industry, while Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (1999, Gough Lewis), The Girl Next Door (1999, Christine Fugate) and Wadd (1999, Cass Paley) each profiled porn stars. The National Film Board of Canada aired Give Me Your Soul (2000, Paul Cowan) last October, Showtime plans to air The Other Hollywood
Legalized prostitution, one of the twin pillars of sin in Nevada—the other being legalized gambling—is under siege these days. With Mormons encroaching from over the Utah border and Nevada leading the nation in population growth, state officials have worked to restrict legal prostitution to the rural areas, where for over 150 years, a steady flow of clientele—from cowboys to miners to truckers—has made the desert brothels its way stations. When Doug Lindeman first surveyed this territory in the 1980s, he was a journalist working on a story about how the AIDS pandemic had impacted legalized
Last April, Live Nude Girls Unite!, an edgy documentary about labor issues in the strip-tease industry, premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival and won a Bay Area Golden Gate Award and the Audience Award. Since its theatrical release last October, it has been on the radar screen of independent film programmers, and has become a must-see for workers looking to organize. Over the course of an ID interview with Julia Query and Vicky Funari, the film’s co-directors, it became evident that, as Query attested, the success of the film is due to its “sexy and serious” nature—that a
Editor’s Note—Sometimes inspiration comes from the most unlikely sources—a plastic bag floating through a plaza, a little girl climbing up a tree to view a funeral. Bill Kramer happened upon an obituary that led him to the shady netherworld of pornography, escort service and the American dream. In the midst of my ongoing frustration with the state of the Hollywood film machine and its lack of compelling characters and powerful storylines, I happened to read in a downtown NYC rag that gay porn star Jon Vincent had died of an apparent heroin overdose. The obit went on to state that two ex-wives
In late 1997, The History Channel approached our company, MPH Entertainment, to develop a documentary mini-series dealing with sex throughout history. The History Channel's goal was to create a smart, compelling overview of this immense and often controversial topic by clearly separating fact from fiction. We really wanted a show that was provocative without being sensational or exploitive. The History of Sex aired in the fall of 1999 and was a critical success, along with becoming the History Channel's highest-rated program of all time. Not surprisingly, The History Channel wanted a follow-up
Nineteen seventy-seven was a watershed year: Anita Bryant launched the nation's first widespread offensive against gays rights legislation; Harvey Milk was elected into office; San Francisco's gay film festival was inaugurated; and I was gay-bashed. It was also the year Word is Out hit the screens. From its first frame, audiences were challenged: a pensive Latina sits on the edge of her bed looking out into the distance in prolonged silence, a silence finally broken by an off-screen voice asking tentatively, "Were you always gay?" She turns to the camera and without abandonment tells us,
HAPPY NEW YEAR! And what an exciting 12 months it is going to be for IDA. By this time next year, the new Executive Director will be well ensconced, the staff will have filled out and we will look back on this transition period as the grand opportunity that it is. David Haugland leaves the presidency after an exemplary four years. He has overseen a period of remarkable growth for IDA. We also bid farewell to those whose time is over on the board of directors: Lisa Leeman has served nine years, including one year as President. Fortunately, she has promised to stay involved in IDA affairs. Steve
“We spend 12 years in school learning the language of the written word, but no time on the language of the visual image,” filmmaker Jennifer Fox noted in her recent Documentary Master Class, held at New York’s New School and co-sponsored by IDA, Film/Video Arts and Women Make Movies. “We’re just expected to ‘get’ it.” Fox seems to have “gotten” it for herself while building a reputation as a powerful chronicler of private lives. Her first film, Beirut: The Last Home Movie, took top honors at Sundance in 1988, while An American Love Story, her 10-part series about an interracial family, aired
Editor's Note: What are you doing New Year's Eve? Well, if you're Daniel Kaven, you do the sensible thing: Contact, via e-mail, seven filmmakers from around the world, arm them with DV cameras and have them record a day in the life of their respective cities. Then bring the filmmakers and subjects together a year later for a big filmmaking bosh in Las Vegas. The result? The Glass Pool Incident . My eyes hardened into an unfamiliar daze. Across from me, a middle-aged Japanese karaoke music video producer, with a severe case of bad breath and gingivitis, reflected on his last 70 trips to