DocuWeeks 2011 dimmed the lights on its final screening at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles last Thursday, September 8. We’re sad to see the popcorn boxes and empty beverage containers cleared from the theaters, and it’s bittersweet to see all our DocuWeeks filmmakers off on their own paths with their films in tow.


Filmmakers and IDA Members mingle at the DocuWeeks Wrap Party.

After we cleared our eyes and sorted through all the great things we’ve seen since August 12, we sat down to look at exactly what happened at the 15th edition of DocuWeeks. What we found was a pretty impressive amount of time spent talking, thinking, and breathing documentary!

Over the four weeks of screenings...

>> We screened over 400 hours of documentary programming between 17 features and 7 shorts in two cities.

>> We had a combined total of 144 filmmaker and talent Q&As in both LA and NY.

>> The team from Dying to do Letterman clocked in the most Q&As, and had the closing night Q&A in Los Angeles!

The Dying to do Letterman team.

>> We had our first non-human Q&A participant in Sesame Street’s Elmo. Special thanks to Kevin Clash for bringing Elmo to life!


Connie Marks and Philip Shane of Being Elmo.

>> Filmmakers traveled from as far afield as Switzerland (Nick Brandestini, Darwin), Poland (Pawel Kloc, Phnom Penh Lullaby), England (Phil Grabsky, The Boy Mir) and Haiti (David Darg and Bryn Mooser, Sun City Picture House). These filmmakers make DocuWeeks truly international!


Pawel Kloc, director of Phnom Penh Lullaby.

>> We grew DocuWeeks’ social media presence on Facebook and Twitter from the ground up! We plan on keeping the conversation going, too. Join us for more on what’s going on in the lives of DocuWeeks alums.


More mingling at a Member Mixer at The Standard Hotel, Hollywood.

>> Our fabulous filmmakers weathered the storm in New York—literally! Hurricane Irene may have slowed us down, but it didn't stop us from showing great docs to the NYC community.

>>Menage a Trois Wine, the Standard Hotel Hollywood, and Stella Artois sponsored three Friday night Member Mixers at the Purple Lounge at The Standard.

And that was just the 15th edition. Who knows what Sweet 16 will bring?

Thanks so much to all the participating filmmakers, subjects, theaters, sponsors, and dedicated audience members who told their friends to tell their friends about DocuWeeks. We can't wait for DocuWeeks 2012!

1969 was a watershed year in America. Richard Nixon took the reigns of the US presidency. It was the year of Woodstock, the Chicago 8 trial, the Stonewall riots and Charles Manson's murder spree. Sesame Street debuted, and the Beatles played their last concert, on a London rooftop. It was also the year in which 52-year-old Conrad "Prof" O. Johnson, a music teacher at Kashmere High School, in a rough section of Houston known as "the Bloody 5th" Ward, shook up the world of school stage band competitions. A year earlier, inspired by an Otis Redding concert he had attended in 1967, Johnson set out to transform the sound and style of the Kashmere Stage Band he had been directing. So he began incorporating funk and soul arrangements. The experiment worked. Not only were his students inspired, but they won national awards, played internationally and continued to do so until Johnson retired in 1978.

But Prof's legacy didn't end there. The recordings Johnson made of his award-winning stage band found a new audience two decades later when DJ Shadow sampled the namesake track "Kashmere" for a song on Prince Paul and Dan The Automator's Handsome Boy Modeling School CD. Other DJs and music fans began digging through thrift store bins to find the band's recordings. Then, in 2006, the California label Stones Throw reissued a two-disc compilation of the Kashmere Stage Band. An NPR story about that reissue convinced Los Angeles-based producer/director Mark Landsman that he needed to track down Johnson and learn more.

 "I just turned on the radio and a blast of incredible funk hit me," recalls Landsman. "The reporter came on and said, 'Isn't this incredible? This doesn't sound like 14 or 15 year old kids, does it?' and I said back to the radio, 'No, it doesn't.' Prof came on talking about breaking the color barrier, winning the most outstanding band in the nation--the first time a black band ever did."

Landsman immediately went through the Houston phone book checking every Conrad O. Johnson, and the first one he called was Prof's son. "Your father is really inspiring me right now," Landsman told him. "I'm a filmmaker. I think this would make a powerful film."

Landsman began his own career teaching film in New York City public schools and has made several documentaries about teenagers. His first feature, Peace of Mind, chronicled a year in the lives of Palestinian and Israeli teens returning home from an Israeli-Arab summer camp in Maine and their struggle to maintain their friendships. In 2001, he directed Books Not Bars, a documentary short about a minority youth group working to keep other teens out of prison.  "I struggled a lot when I was that age, trying to find my place in the world--not knowing quite where to fit in," he notes. "So I naturally gravitated towards teaching and filmmaking so I could address those questions."

When he was teaching, Landsman was also struck by how difficult it was to get funding for the arts in schools. "To me that felt like a great injustice," he says. "When I was in school, I took access to arts education as a given. Why do the suburbs have art, music, dark rooms, rehearsal rooms? Why do they have access, but not inner-city schools? That didn't feel right, particularly in a country that has such a legacy of arts and music. How do you expect the next Stevie Wonder to arrive? Drop from the sky like Superman? No, it's going to be through a figure like Conrad Johnson. He was the predominant positive force in his students' lives."

At the time, Landsman was producing shorts about inspirational Americans for a cable network. He flew to Houston to spend a few days filming Johnson and interviewing some of his former students. "When I met him that first week he was teaching violin to elementary school girls who went on to play at Carnegie Hall last summer," Landsman recalls. "Prof was a very proud man but also humble. He didn't have to wave his accomplishments around. It was enough to know that his band was great. He never hung up his hat and he never swung it around. He just wore it.

 "We talked about his story and how it would translate into a film," Landsman continues. "Here was this amazing little cool dude who was 90 years old and like 90 pounds. But he had a kind of mighty quality that was immediately apparent. He had a real presence. He whipped out his sax and played a song he had written for his wife. The richness just kept unfolding. It was pretty clear to me he was going to be an incredible person to follow."

Landsman worked out a pitch to turn Johnson's story into a narrative film. Through mutual friends, he was introduced to independent producers Keith Calder and Jessica Wu (The Wackness), but they told him they had a full slate and couldn't take on another feature at the time. But when asked if he had any other ideas, he told them he'd learned some of Johnson's students were planning a reunion concert as a tribute to their mentor, and he wanted to make a documentary about it. Calder and Wu lit up and said, according to Landsman, "If we were going to do a documentary, this is the kind we would do." They signed on, but with the understanding they were going to fund it incrementally at first, to see how it developed.

With that promise, Landsman telephoned Craig Baldwin, a Kashmere High alumnus who was organizing the tribute. The filmmaker begged Baldwin to move the concert up from that summer to the beginning of 2008, fearing that he'd lose Calder and Wu's backing if he had to wait that long. If the alumni hadn't finally relented and agreed to move up the concert's date--without giving anything away here--it would have been a very different film.

Baldwin is a perfect example of Johnson's influence on his students. "Craig could have grown up to be a felon," says Landsman. "He wasn't a thug, he was a wannabe thug--which is probably worse. And Prof caught him breaking into the auditorium just to touch a piano. He wanted to know what it sounded like; he hadn't had any musical training. He was kicked out for breaking and entering, but he wanted to be in the band, and eventually proved himself to Prof. He truly believes he wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for Prof's intervention."

 "The biggest thing for me," says Gerald Calhoun, who played bass in the Kashmere Stage Band and went on to a professional music career, including playing with Grover Washington Jr. and Stevie Ray Vaughan, "was that all my life I'd been wishing that someone would tell the story of that time. That people would see this is where I came from and the effect Prof  had on students like us."

Another alumnus, Gaila Mitchell--who went on to become a high school band teacher herself-recalls how Johnson used to joke how someday they'd make a movie about him. She concurs that teachers can and do make a difference: "We can change people's lives--Prof's music lives on through us," then adds, "I had given up teaching before the movie and then afterward I got a call from a high school offering me a job, and I took it."

For Landsman, the making of Thunder Soul had an almost predestined spirit in the way all the pieces of the film fell together. "I kept telling the producers I felt like there was another producer involved, like some higher hand [propelling the project forward]. It was a bit crazy."

Perhaps the craziest example happened in post-production. Landsman and his editor, Claire Didier ("a huge creative force in this project," Landsman notes), felt stuck because they lacked sufficient visuals to tell their story. "We just had some photos, but no archival footage, no motion pictures," he says. "We thought we were just going to have to piece the story together with creative treatment of the photos." They had called every archival library, every television station in Houston, all without luck. "They either didn't have any material, or threw it out in the '80s, or one said they'd lost some stuff in a fire," he explains.

Then two weeks into editing, one of their production assistants called out of the blue to say he was on a set with a guy who back in 1972 had worked with Charles Porter, the first African-American television reporter in Houston, on a 30-minute documentary about the Kashmere Stage Band, and would Landsman be interested in seeing that? "I'm like, Hell, Yeah!" he recalls.

Landsman and Didier contacted Porter, who gave them the rights to use his film. "We were blown away by what we saw, and it became the spine of the film," says Landsman. "We had a half-hour of footage and we used maybe every frame of it. Charles was so gracious. When he had first tried to pitch the story at his TV station, he was told no one would care about some black high school students, but he took it upon himself to do it anyways."

Thunder Soul premiered at South by Southwest in 2010 and won the Audience Award. After the premiere, there was a live performance of the reunion band. As the film began to garner attention, including Audience Awards at Hot Docs and Los Angeles Film Festival, and a 2011 Spirit Award nomination, actor (and Texas native) Jamie Foxx stepped in as executive producer to help provide the film a theatrical release. Foxx said in a statement earlier this year: "I can't wait to share Thunder Soul with the world so that everyone can enjoy this one-of-a-kind experience. It's such an entertaining and inspirational story that touches your soul and awakens the human spirit in the way that only love and the power of music can."

In a 2006 interview, Johnson said, "My goal was to help the children understand. I had a chance to witness jazz when it was in its infancy. I had the chance. I wanted to spread that joy to the kids I taught." And now the film of that accomplishment is set to "spread that joy" to audiences worldwide.

Thunder Soul opens in theaters September 23 through Roadside Attractions.

Ron Deutsch recently co-wrote the documentary OK, Buckaroos!, on the life of singer Jerry Jeff Walker. Interviews he did with shlockmeisters Herschell Gordon Lewis and David Friedman in 1980 were released for the first time as extras on the American Grindhouse DVD in July. He also teaches cooking classes in Austin, Texas, and writing for The Criterion Collection as Chef du Cinema, pairing films and food.<

Telluride is literally made for film festivals. Even a novice like me learns that right away. I'd just arrived at the 8,800-foot elevation of this remote Colorado box-canyon village with a Wild West reputation (Butch Cassidy committed his first bank robbery here in 1889) and was worried that my shortness of breath would keep me from a screening a few blocks away. Suddenly a Land Rover pulled up and a voice called out, "Need a ride?" Roger Ebert once said Telluride was "like Cannes died and went to heaven." Unfortunately its thin oxygen content kept him from coming at all and required his wife, Chaz, to seek medical attention for herself. But I was blessed with altitude fitness, shuttle rides and the upgrade-to-patrons'-line coupons to get me into every screening of my choice.

Being a first-timer, I wasn't sure that documentaries would play a big part in the lineup. But I shouldn't have doubted an event whose head office is in the San Francisco Bay Area, a bastion for the nonfiction film. So my Telluride experience coincided with a bonanza of documentaries by famous and prolific directors.

I went for the longest first: Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour-long Living in the Material World focusing on the late Beatle George Harrison, the "quiet" or "spiritual" of the Fab Four. I thought my lifelong devotion to Harrison, and Scorsese's treatment, would make this consistently exciting viewing, but some witnesses (notably German photographer Astrid Kirchherr and Harrison's widow, Olivia-who is also one of the film's producers) are allowed to speak at tedious length, while intriguing episodes such as the "unconscious plagiarism" controversy of Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" are passed over. An unexpected pleasure is the recollections of Phil Spector, producer of All Things Must Pass and Concert for Bangladesh. The film's power lies in showing how the Harrison touch-- a single guitar line in "And I Love Her," for example--graced both the Beatles sound and Harrison's solo career with romance, mystery and transcendence. Many of Harrison's friends--and he had many--evoke a lingering memory of the man playing his acoustic guitar in the garden, changing people's lives just by being with them.

Werner Herzog's latest, Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life, is a gut-wrenching account of a 2001 triple homicide and its causes and consequences. Just days before the execution of 28-year-old Michael James Perry in Huntsville, Texas, Herzog interviews the condemned man and several people touched by the senseless killings. He draws a despairing portrait of life in southeastern Texas, with families scarred by alcohol, violence and incarceration--but not without the occasional humor displayed by incidental informants. While never extenuating the crimes for which Perry will die, Abyss makes a powerful argument for the futility and destructiveness of the death penalty. And like many of Herzog's documentaries, he leaves us with an epilogue that we can take away as a miracle or a horror.

Small miracles and underdogs are the themes of Telluride's two environmental documentaries, both of which drew rapturous audiences. The Island President, from Jon Shenk (The Lost Boys of Sudan), profiles Mohamed Nasheed, young president of the nation of Maldives, a chain of 2,000 tiny islands in the Indian Ocean. Climate change is inundating these flat islands at a rate only somewhat slower than the 2004 tsunami, which reduced the nation's Gross Domestic Product by half. Faced with the outright loss of his country's resources and land area, the candid and creative Nasheed is compelled to make his case for a carbon-neutral future at climate talks in Copenhagen and urges alpha countries like China, Great Britain and the United States to follow his example.

Micha Peled concludes his "Globalization Trilogy" (Store Wars [2002], about Wal-Mart; China Blue [2005], about jeans factory workers) with Bitter Seeds, a vibrantly photographed investigation into the tragedy of central Indian farmers who get caught up in biotech broker Monsanto's genetically modified seed-purchasing program, fall into debt and shame, and commit suicide by drinking pesticide. Such suicides have numbered over 200,000. The small miracle here is the daughter of one such farmer who yearns to be a journalist reporting on the frontlines of this environmental crisis.

In Perdida, Viviana García Besné presents the fruits of an exhaustive search into her family's secret history of film production and exhibition. Why so secret? Because the Calderón films' sleazy and sensational content--vampires, masked wrestlers, sex slaves, rock 'n' roll, Aztec mummies--was a source of near-national shame. This frankly indulgent and personal documentary is a people's history of Mexican cinema that constantly leaps over the border into Hollywood connections and traces of long-vanished movie palaces.

Crazy Horse, Frederick Wiseman's backstage look at the Parisian nude cabaret founded in 1951, follows exasperated choreographer Philippe Decouflé and his comically obsessed "artistic director" Ali Mahdavi's efforts to wrangle their performers into a new "avant-garde" show. Before seeing this film, I had no idea of the somewhat tacky and limited nature of the nightclub, which is geared to tourists but makes solemn claims to expressing the erotic and transformative nature of women. The most fascinating scenes include an audition in which we learn that Russian performers have the best buttocks and that transsexuals may sneak in but will never be hired.

Maybe it's unfair to compare the Crazy Horse to the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch, the late German dancer and choreographer. But seeing Wim Wenders' Pina the day before the Wiseman film compels an evaluation of the way documentaries represent human bodies in frenzy and passion. Unlike fellow viewers who marveled at the way 3-D enhanced the film, I found the performances immersive enough without optical tricks. Without any biographical information about Bausch (who died in 2009, five days after a cancer diagnosis), and talking heads limited to brief testimonials by dancers on her influence on them, this is an enthralling series of performances by an uncompromising and diverse crew of dancers.

Two of the strangest and most satisfying documentaries came from a festival tradition that reaches outside of filmmaking. Among Telluride's annual features is the choice of a cinephile arts figure to program half a dozen favorites. This year's guest director was the legendary Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso. Veloso, along with Gilberto Gil, was the founder of Tropicália (or Tropicalismo), the 1960s arts revolution of Brazil that also featured Gal Costa, Os Mutantes and Tom Zé and led to prison and political exile for both Veloso and Gil.

Veloso admits he was skeptical when encouraged by festival co-director Tom Luddy to include Tânia Quaresma's 1975 Nordeste: Cordel, Repente E Canção. Before seeing this film, Veloso worried it would be one of those "so flat films on the [Northeast] region's arts and culture." But it made it onto Veloso's roster and entranced a small Telluride audience at its sole screening. Highly reminiscent stylistically of Les Blank's 1970s films about American roots music, Nordeste richly layers performances of improvisational bombastic literature read aloud by their artists from tiny books (cordel) and a South American-style "dozens" boasting competition (repente), as well as lovely songs of romance and farewell (canção) accompanied by the viola caipira, or Brazilian steel-string guitar.

Not one of Veloso's choices, but putting him front and center, Marcelo Machado's 2011 doc Tropicália is an entertaining if bewildering overview of mid-'60s Brazilian pop culture. As an American only somewhat familiar with the repression and controversies of that era, I could have used some more historical background. But it's the exposure to other worlds and alternate universes that documentaries provide, and Telluride packed this year's Labor Day weekend with the best of these.

Frako Loden is adjunct lecturer in film, women's studies and ethnic studies at CSU East Bay and Diablo Valley College.

American Teacher, the new documentary from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth (Freeheld), is one of those films which makes you want to cry, or scream, or both.

The bright young public school teachers profiled in the film, from a cross-section of communities ranging from rural to urban to suburban, are people you would want your kids to spend their days with. Articulate and committed, these teachers represent the best and brightest of the education field. And yet long hours, low pay and scant respect for the profession undermine a career path that ought to be respected and revered.

 "We can't ask teachers to take a vow of poverty and then expect miraculous results," Ninive Calegari, one of the producers of American Teacher, remarks. "If we want a different future for our kids and grandkids, we'll need to give this priority the time, attention and money that it deserves."

American Teacher was inspired by Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers, a book co-authored by Calegari, Daniel Moulthrop and Dave Eggers, in which teachers reflect on the pros and cons of their jobs. Calegari, a veteran public school teacher, and Eggers, whose mother had been a teacher, co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring, writing and publishing organization now active in eight cities across the US. The organization galvanizes volunteers to support teachers and work with students, and has been duplicated in 30 satellites internationally.

Teachers Have It Easy was on The New York Times Best Seller List, but the authors wanted to reach a larger audience with their message about the necessity of giving teachers the value and support they deserve. Working with Vanessa Roth, they traveled all over the US, visiting many schools and spending time in many classrooms. Roth felt very strongly about the importance of teaching and points out that kids spend as much time with their teachers as with their parents. "Teachers not only affect what our kids learn in books, what they retain or how they score on tests, but how our kids look at the world, and who our kids become," she notes.

The film follows four teachers over the course of a school year, while weaving in observations from students, parents, colleagues and education experts. Each of the teachers faces personal quandaries that impact their perspectives on their profession. Rhena Jasey, a Harvard-educated elementary school teacher from a middle-class African-American family, makes ends meet by living with her parents. After several years of hard work, she finally decides to move to a charter school where starting salaries are $125,000. Johnathan Dearman chose teaching because he believes in its importance and loves it. As one of few male teachers at his San Francisco charter school, he is an important role model for his students, who adore him. But after a long period of struggling to support his family, he decides to leave teaching and go to work for his family real estate company-a job that he admits is far less satisfying but allows him to fulfill his responsibilities as a husband and father. Jamie Fidler is an energetic young elementary school teacher well along in her pregnancy. She has to take on extra tutoring to augment her salary, and when she has her baby, she gets only six weeks maternity leave, and is soon back in the classroom because she and her husband cannot afford to lose her salary, or her job. Eric Benner is a dynamic history teacher in rural Texas who earns the devotion of his students, colleagues and parents. He also coaches three sports teams. But to support his family, he must take on a second job selling stereo equipment-and the long hours away from home take a toll on his marriage; his wife files for divorce.

Despite the crisis situation that emerges from American Teacher, the film is not a rant, nor is it depressing. Rather, it has the effect of making us greatly admire these young people, and then curse a system that defeats and wastes their enthusiasm, their training and their commitment.

As Eggers and Calegari wrote in a New York Times editorial, "When we don't get what we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers...If the results are not there, we blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition. And yet in education we do just that. When we don't like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don't like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources."

American Teacher opens September 30 in New York and Los Angeles through First Run Features, followed by community screenings across the country planned in conjunction with teachers, schools, districts, as well as local and national organizations. For more information, click here.

Wanda Bershen is a consultant on fundraising, festivals and distribution. Documentary clients have included Sonia, Power Trip, Afghan Women, Trembling Before G*D, Blacks & Jews. She has organized programs with the Human Rights Film Festival, Brooklyn Museum and Film Society of Lincoln Center and currently teaches arts management at CUNY Baruch. Visit www.reddiaper.com.

 
Doc U is the International Documentary Association's series of educational seminars and workshops for aspiring and experienced documentary filmmakers. Taught by artists and industry experts, participants receive vital training and insight on various topics including: fundraising, distribution, licensing, marketing, and business tactics.

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