Natalia Almada was born in Sinaola, Mexico, to a Mexican father and an American mother, grew up in Chicago, and now maintains residences in both Brooklyn and Mexico City. It is this dual citizenship that best informs her work, that enables her to both transcend the mythical border between two nations and two cultures, and engage it with a deeper gaze--capturing the inherent dualities, nuances and grey areas, and infusing her inquiries into the predominant socioeconomic issues that define Mexican-American relations with an abiding sense of poetry and music.

Almada received her master's degree from Rhode Island School of Design--not in film, but in photography. That discipline, so predicated upon finding and capturing a soul in a frame, led her to the moving image. The three works she has produced in the past decade--All Water Has a Perfect Memory, Al Otro Lado and El General--demonstrate a singular vision, a resolve to take various sub-genres in documentary--the essay, the personal documentary, the social issue documentary and the history documentary--and make them her own.

Documentary talked with this year's Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Documentary Filmmaker honoree about photography, duality, and the territory between history and memory.

You earned your MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where your main artistic discipline was photography. Talk about how that art form has informed your documentary work. How did your initial training in photography evolve into your documentary career?

Natalia Almada: I had a really inspiring video teacher at RISD and fell in love with moving images, so I proceeded to insert myself as much as I could into the film department. Yet, I still think that I think as a photographer in terms of my relationship to the image and to the frame. In some regards, I was lucky to have studied something related but different because I felt much more free to invent my own way of doing things. 

Sometimes when I'm working on grant proposals and feeling frustrated trying to write a clear treatment about a film that I haven't begun making, I think back to making my short film All Water Has a Perfect Memory. I didn't have a clue about what I was doing or what the film would be like in the end, and it was wonderful. I had an impulse and I went for it. And I let that lead to the next impulse...until one impulse after the next, I had a film. I was driven by a set of inquiries and ideas that I wanted to materialize, rather than by a desire to make a film per se. 

I think I use the camera as a way to see what I see. It is almost like a mirror, in that sense. It is the process of making documentaries that I love. I really do begin from a point of curiosity and pick up my camera to go explore that thing which caught my attention. It is a pretext to look at something more closely, to look at it differently, to understand how I see it and relate to it. If I didn't have this curiosity, then I'm not sure if I would feel driven to make films.

You are the daughter of an American mother and a Mexican father, and you currently maintain homes in both Brooklyn and Mexico City. How has your bi-national/bicultural identity helped facilitate your inquiries into border dynamics, into larger questions about assimilation, immigration, multiculturalism?

I was flying from Mexico City to New York this past September when I noticed that the plane was full of unaccompanied minors. A boy who must have been about 10 was taking his little brother to the bathroom, and I had a flashback to flying with my brother back and forth when we were little. In many ways, these flights defined our childhood. Everything changed, from what we ate to the language we spoke. Without knowing, we were inside and outside in both countries and perhaps most at home in that space hovering in between. Back then, my brother and I were usually the only minors on the plane. It filled me with both sadness and hope to see all these children who I imagine were somehow inhabiting that same space in between.

Edward Said begins his biography with a quote about language that I think really describes the experience of growing up in a bicultural family and always living between two cultures. He writes, "I have never known what language I spoke first...or which one was really mine beyond any doubt. What I do know is that the two have always been together in my life, one resonating in the other, sometimes ironically, sometimes nostalgically, most often each correcting and commenting on, the other."

I don't think that my being bicultural triggers my interests in these issues as much as it shapes the way that I see things. I am interested in making the dualities and contradictions that Said describes in language, intrinsic to my films.

Your first film, All Water Has a Perfect Memory, addresses a tragic personal loss--that of your sister in a drowning accident--through home movies, photographs and manufactured images, and the off-camera recollections and reflections of your mother, father, brother and you. You were two months old when your sister died. As your brother says in the film, "You came after...That made you more independent." How did that independence better enable you to render this memory cinematically? 

I am not sure that it was the feeling of independence that led me to make All Water Has a Perfect Memory as much as it was the feeling that everyone in my family had a memory of something which I did not have. It was a sense of exclusion from this moment that deeply affected my family that led me to create a fictitious memory of my sister from the time I was very young.

Perhaps photography, more than cinema, has often been related to memory because of its relationship to the past and to time. The photograph is the memory object which tells us that something happened, that something was, and therefore that there is a memory of something. Making All Water Has a Perfect Memory was a way for me to fabricate a memory of something that I did not remember. I was interested in exploring the process of remembering and the subjectivity of memory. How could such an intimate event be remembered so differently? What were the points of amnesia, of contradiction, of similarity between each person's memory of the same moment?

In your first feature-length film, Al Otro Lado, you assemble a range of characters from both sides of the border--fishermen and farmers, corrido composers and performers, coyotes, Border Patrol agents and vigilantes--to help address a complicated array of interconnected issues, all related to the post-NAFTA world of illegal immigration and drug trafficking. But to me, the corrido, as channeled through Chalino, the Tupac-esque martyr/icon of the genre, and Magdiel, the struggling artist, is the heart and soul of the film. Talk about the challenges of maintaining the corrido through-line, while effectively addressing an ongoing sociopolitical issue.

I spent much of my childhood on a cattle ranch in Sinaloa, Mexico, and I remember the cowboys and fisherman talking about opium fields in the mountains and their adventures across the border. These issues were just a part of everyday life that everyone encountered in one shape or another. Meanwhile in the States, I went to elementary school in Chicago during the "Say No to Drugs" campaign, and I was always hyper-aware that my dual citizenship was not a privilege shared by most Mexicans. I was interested in making a film that would look at immigration and drug trafficking not from a moral perspective, but from an economic perspective, one that would look at the economic crisis as the catalyst for one to illegally immigrate or traffic. I also wanted to make a film in which the immigrants and traffickers were not reduced to being just immigrants and traffickers without history and culture.

The corrido tradition has existed for over 200 years in Mexico and has historically served as an underground musical newspaper of sorts. The protagonists of most of the contemporary corridos are drug traffickers and immigrants who've beaten the system, so I wanted to use the music in much the same way that one might use a narrator in a more traditional documentary. Rather than a voice of authority who speaks from the outside, it is the voice of the people in the film who are most often disempowered and silenced.

It was also a very obvious decision to use the corrido because it is such an integral part of Sinaloan culture. It is the music you hear coming out of car radios when you drive down the street and in every bar and bodega you walk into.

Your most recent film, El General, in a way picks up where All Water Has a Perfect Memory leaves off, in that personal memory--the audio tapes of your grandmother telling the story of her father, President Plutarco Elias Calles--serves as a touchstone for a broader and deeper exploration of how it connects to national history. While the former film is inspired by Toni Morrison's quote from her essay: "All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was," El General evoked for me a Tom Waits lyric: "And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget/That history puts a saint in every dream." 

Talk about how you addressed the challenge of rendering history and reconciling it with personal memory.

The film is precisely about that contradiction between history and memory. In her recordings, my grandmother was trying to reconcile her memories of her father with history's portrait of him. So my goal was not to render history and create a biography of Calles but rather to look at how we remember and how history is fabricated. I was not interested in resolving the contradictions but rather exploring them and allowing them to be the heart of the film.

In many regards the film is like a stream of consciousness between past and present. As I listened to my grandmother's memories over and over again, I had the sensation that her voice accompanied me in the present and changed the way in which I saw the things around me. She was not simply giving me a memoir of my family's past, but really changing the way I saw and understood Mexico today. It was for this reason that it became rather intuitive to begin filming on the streets of Mexico City as a way to further complicate the very contradictions that my grandmother was dealing with and look at the shadow that the past casts over the present.

There is a beautiful quote from [Chris Marker's] Sans Soleil that I use in the film: "We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is re-written." The narrator then asks, "How do we remember thirst?" I was very moved by this idea of trying to understand how we remember thirst and how we film the memory of thirst.

You both direct and edit your work, and you have edited other documentaries. How do you both reconcile the roles of director and editor--and keep them separate?

I decided to become an editor because I didn't go to film school and I thought it would be the best place to learn how to make films.

What documentary and documentary makers have served as inspirations for you?

Perhaps because my background is not in film, I find that I am inspired as much by fiction, painting, literature and other art forms as I am by documentary. There are bits and pieces of different films, quotes from certain books and feelings that I remember having while standing in front of given paintings that have inspired different aspects of my work.

I think I find encouragement to keep making films when I look at someone like Lourdes Portillo, who in many regards opened the door and paved the road for someone like me. And I don't think I could keep making films if I didn't have the support of my peers like Cristina Ibarra, Alex Rivera, Bernardo Ruiz and Vangie Griego, who are all out there making their films.

El General and All Water Has a Perfect Memory are both distributed by Women Make Movies; El General, for which Almada earned the Documentary Directing Award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, will air on PBS' P.O.V. in 2010. Al Otro Lado is distributed by Subcine; it aired on P.O.V in 2006. For more about Natalia Almada and her work, go to www.altamurafilms.com.

Thomas White is editor of Documentary magazine.

It's that time of the year--the early days of the Holiday Season, the first full week of December, and the official start of Awards Season 2009-2010, when the doc community does a collective Janus-like look back and look forward. With the Gothams and Spirit nods having been announced (see Awards Roundup for details), the IDA Awards rolling out in just a matter of days, and the first in a plethora of critics awards coming out tomorrow, the Sundance Film Festival announced its slate of titles that will undoubtedly yield a crop of buzz-and-kudos-worthy docs in the year ahead.    

Alex Gibney returns with his much anticipated Casino Jack and the United States of Money, about lobbyists-turned-felon Jack Abramoff; Stanley Nelson offers Freedom Riders, about the civil rights activists in the early 1960s; Ricki Stern and Annie Sunberg are back with Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work; Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp) make their Sundance debuts with 12^th and Delaware; and Leon Gast, in his first film since the Academy Award-winning When We Were Kings, premieres Smash His Camera, about paparazzo Ron Galalla.

The World Competition includes Last Train Home (Lixin Fan), fresh from its award-winning run at IDFA; Jose Padhilla's Secrets of the Tribe; Chrisian Frei's Space Tourists; and Lucy Walker's Waste Land.

Here's the lineup:

US DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

This year's 16 films were selected from 862 submissions. Each film is a world premiere.

Bhutto (Directors: Jessica Hernandez and Johnny O'Hara; Screenwriter: Johnny O'Hara)--A riveting journey through the life and work of  recently assassinated Benazir Bhutto, former Pakistani prime minister and a polarizing figure in the Muslim world. World Premiere

Casino Jack & The United States of Money (Director: Alex Gibney)--A probing investigation into the lies, greed and corruption surrounding DC super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his cronies.  World Premiere

Family Affair (Director: Chico Colvard)--An uncompromising documentary that examines resilience, survival and the capacity to accommodate a parent's past crimes in order to satisfy the longing for family. World Premiere

Freedom Riders (Director: Stanley Nelson)--The story behind a courageous band of civil rights activists called the Freedom Riders who in 1961 creatively challenged segregation in the American South. World Premiere

GasLand (Director: Josh Fox)--A cross-country odyssey uncovers toxic streams, dying livestock, flammable sinks and weakening health among rural citizens on the front lines of the natural gas drilling craze. World Premiere

I'm Pat _______ Tillman (Director: Amir Bar-Lev)--The story of professional football star and decorated US soldier Pat Tillman, whose family takes on the US government when their beloved son dies in a "friendly fire" incident in Afghanistan in 2004. World Premiere

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (Director: Tamra Davis)--The story of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work defined, electrified and challenged an era, and whose untimely death at age 27 has made him a cultural icon.World Premiere

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Directors: Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg)--A rare, brutally honest glimpse into the comedic process and private dramas of legendary comedian and pop icon Joan Rivers as she fights tooth and nail to keep her American dream alive. World Premiere

Lucky (Director: Jeffrey Blitz)--The story of what happens when ordinary people hit the lottery jackpot. World Premiere

My Perestroika (Director:Robin Hessman)--Intimately tracking the lives of five Muscovites who came of age just as the USSR collapsed and are adjusting to their post-Soviet reality, My Perestroika maps the contours of a nation in profound transition. World Premiere

The Oath (Director: Laura Poitras)--Filmed in Yemen, The Oath tells the story of two men whose fateful encounter in 1996 set them on a course of events that led them to Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, 9/11, Guantanamo, and the US Supreme Court. World Premiere

Restrepo (Directors: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington)--Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's year dug in with the Second Platoon in one of Afghanistan's most strategically crucial valleys reveals extraordinary insight into the surreal combination of back-breaking labor, deadly firefights, and camaraderie as the soldiers painfully push back the Taliban. World Premiere

A Small Act (Director:Jennifer Arnold)--A young Kenyan's life changes dramatically when his education is sponsored by a Swedish stranger. Years later, he founds his own scholarship program to replicate the kindness he once received. World Premiere

Smash His Camera (Director: Leon Gast)--Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sued him, and Marlon Brando broke his jaw. The story of notorious, reviled paparazzo Ron Galella opens a Pandora's Box of issues from right to privacy, freedom of the press and the ever-growing vortex of celebrity worship. World Premiere

12th & Delaware (Directors: Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing)--The abortion battle continues to rage in unexpected ways on an unassuming corner in America. World Premiere

Waiting for Superman (Director: Davis Guggenheim)--Waiting for Superman examines the crisis of public education in the United States through multiple interlocking stories--from a handful of students and their families whose futures hang in the balance, to the educators and reformers trying to find real and lasting solutions within a dysfunctional system. World Premiere

WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

This year's 12 films were selected from 782 international documentary submissions.

A Film Unfinished / Germany, Israel (Director: Yael Hersonski)--Film reels uncovered in Nazi archives reveal the mechanisms used to stage Warsaw Ghetto life--images which have shaped our view of history. World Premiere

Enemies of the People / Cambodia, United Kingdom (Directors: Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath)--A young journalist whose family was killed by the Khmer Rouge befriends the perpetrators of the Killing Fields genocide, evoking shocking revelations. US Premiere

Fix ME /  France, Palestinian Territories, Switzerland(Director: Raed Andoni)--When Palestinian filmmaker Raed Andoni gets a headache that won't quit, he seeks out help and insight in different forms in his hometown of Ramallah. International Premiere

His & Hers / Ireland (Director: Ken Wardrop)--Seventy Irish women offer moving insights into the relationships between women and men. North American Premiere

 Kick in Iran / Gemany (Director: Fatima Geza Abdollahyan)--The first female professional Taekwondo fighter from Iran to qualify for the Olympic Games struggles for recognition in a society where women still play a subordinate role. World Premiere

Last Train Home / Canada (Director: Lixin Fan)--Getting a train ticket in China proves a towering ordeal as a migrant worker family embarks on a journey, along with 200 million other peasants, to reunite with their distant family. US Premiere

The Red Chapel (Det Røde Kapel) / Denmark (Director: Mads Brügger)--A journalist with no scruples, a self-proclaimed spastic, and a comedian travel to North Korea under the guise of a cultural exchange visit to challenge one of the world's most notorious regimes. US Premiere

Russian Lessons / Georgia, Germany, Norway (Directors: Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov)--An investigation into Russian actions during the 2008 war in Georgia, revealing the little known story of the ethnic cleansing in the region since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. World Premiere

Secrets of the Tribe / Brazil (Director: José Padilha)--Is the academic Anthropology community capable of generating real knowledge about mankind? The scandals and the infighting regarding the representation of indigenous Indians in the Amazon Basin seems to indicate that the answer may be a resounding no. World Premiere

Sins of My Father / Argentina, Colombia (Director: Nicolas Entel)--The life and times of notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar are recounted through the eyes of his son, who fled Colombia to move beyond his father's legacy. North American Premiere

Space Tourists / Switzerland (Director: Christian Frei)--A humorous and laconic view of the way billionaires depart our planet earth to travel into outer space for fun. North American Premiere

Waste Land / United Kingdom (Director: Lucy Walker)--Lives are transformed when international art star Vik Muniz collaborates with garbage pickers in the world's largest landfill in Rio de Janeiro. World Premiere

After the heated debate over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Feature Documentary Short List announcement, The Envelope given props to the 2009 IDA Documentary Awards (taking place Fri., Dec. 4, by the way) for its list of nominees and already-announced winners in seven categories, also calling it an indicator for which way the win for the Oscar documentary may go.

Writer Paul Gaita pointed out that snubbed crowd-favorite Anvil! The Story of Anvil, and the popular Afghan Star and Diary of a Times Square Thief made the IDA's list only.

Meanwhile, Documentary Film Online called the IDA's picks, "A soothing aloe on burned skin...to quell the recent rage documentary film fans have had over The Academy Award selection process."

The Envelope also gave the IDA credit for knowing how to pick 'em in the past. From the piece:

As an indicator for which way the Oscar documentary might go, the IDA, which has been celebrating nonfiction film and filmmakers since 1982, accurately picked the 2008 best documentary feature, Man on Wire, which tied with Waltz with Bashir (a nominee for best foreign film that year) for the feature prize. It nominated the 2007 winner, Taxi to the Dark Side, but gave the prize to the PBS/Nova production Walk to Beautiful, and honored the 2006 winner, An Inconvenient Truth, with the Pare Lorentz Award (given to a filmmaker who best represents the spirit of the acclaimed documentarian) while giving top prize to Oscar nominee Iraq in Fragments.

Read the whole Envelope piece here.

Who will come out on top at the IDA Documentary Awards on Friday? Join us as we honor the best documentaries of the year, with host Ira Glass. Purchase tickets now to be there to find out.

Click here to read all about the already-announced winners in seleect categories, other special honorees, including Errol Morris, Nicolas Noxon, Michael Donaldson and special presenters including composer Philip Glass, The Office’s Rainn Wilson, Food Inc. director Robert Kenner and the Sundance Institute’s Cara Mertes. Current Media’s Laura Ling and Euna Lee will introduce a special tribute to filmmakers and journalists who displayed conspicuous bravery in the pursuit of truth.

Check out what others are saying about the 2009 IDA Awards. 

Born in Mexico, Almada's directing credits include All Water Has a Perfect Memory, an internationally recognized experimental short, Al Otro Lado, an award-winning feature documentary about immigration and drug trafficking, and El General, her latest feature, which won the U. S. Directing Award: Documentary at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Join us as we honor the best documentaries of the year, with host Ira Glass.

Click here to read all about the already-announced winners in seleect categories, other special honorees, including Errol Morris, Nicolas Noxon, Michael Donaldson and special presenters including composer Philip Glass, The Office’s Rainn Wilson, Food Inc. director Robert Kenner and the Sundance Institute’s Cara Mertes. Current Media’s Laura Ling and Euna Lee will introduce a special tribute to filmmakers and journalists who displayed conspicuous bravery in the pursuit of truth.

Check out what others are saying about the 2009 IDA Awards. 

Winners for the International Documentary Association’s 2009 IDA Documentary Awards competition were announced today in several major categories, including Limited Series, Continuing Series, Music, and Student, leaving Feature and Short for the night of the program.

The 2009 IDA Documentary Awards will take place on Friday, Dec. 4 at 8 pm at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA.

This year’s Continuing Series Award recognizes the long-running PBS series POV. Produced by American Documentary Inc., and beginning its 22nd season on PBS this year, the award-winning POV series is the longest-running showcase on American television to feature the work of today's best independent documentary filmmakers. In the Limited Series category, the prize goes to the Sundance Channel’s Architecture School, a six-part series from creators Michael Selditch and Stan Bertheaud following a group of students at Tulane University's prestigious School of Architecture as they submit competing designs for an affordable home in Katrina-battered New Orleans.

The IDA Music Documentary Award honors Sacha Gervasi’s Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, which also competes against Afghan Star, Diary Of A Times Square Thief, Food, Inc. and Mugabe And The White African for IDA's top feature prize. Director Gervasi as well as Anvil's Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner will be accepting the Music Award.

The IDA/Humanitas Award, a new prize established this year and recognizing a film that strives to unify the human family, goes to Mai Iskander’s Garbage Dreams, which follows three teenage boys born into the trash trade and growing up in the world’s largest garbage village, on the outskirts of Cairo. Here, the Zaballeen, Arabic for ‘garbage people,’ are suddenly faced with the globalization of its trade.

The IDA/Pare Lorentz Award, in homage to the pioneering filmmaker’s legacy, goes to Irene Taylor Brodsky’s Oscar nominated short The Final Inch, about a vast army of health workers who go door-to-door in some of India’s poorest neighborhoods, ensuring every child is vaccinated for polio. The IDA/ABCNEWS VideoSource Award, for best use of archival news footage, goes to Wounded Knee, an episode in the “We Shall Remain” series produced by WGBH with Native American Public Television, and produced and directed by Stanley Nelson.

IDA continues to recognize the next generation of documentary filmmakers with its prestigious David L. Wolper Student Documentary Achievement Award. This year’s prize has been awarded to Stanford University’s Peter Jordan for his short documentary The First Kid To Learn English From Mexico, the story of 9-year-old Pedro's reluctant journey through elementary school in pursuit of the American Dream.

Presenters for this year’s Awards include composer Philip Glass, The Office’s Rainn Wilson, Food Inc. director Robert Kenner and the Sundance Institute’s Cara Mertes. Current Media’s Laura Ling and Euna Lee will introduce a special tribute to filmmakers and journalists who displayed conspicuous bravery in the pursuit of truth.

This year’s IDA Documentary Awards, hosted by This American Life’s Ira Glass and honoring the legendary Errol Morris, are sponsored by HBO Documentary Films, Current Media, Planet Green, Sony Pictures Classics, Sundance Channel, ABCNews Videosource, Moxie Pictures, Participant Media, POV, Skywalker Sound, SnagFilms, Kodak, the Directors Guild of America, The Standard, Derby Wine Estates, The Spot Gourmet and Monster Energy.

Tickets for the 2009 IDA Documentary Awards are available at www.documentary.org/awards2009.

ABOUT IDA
The IDA is a nonprofit, membership organization based in Los Angeles. The organization was founded in 1982 to promote and celebrate nonfiction filmmakers and is dedicated to increasing public awareness and appreciation of the documentary genre. For more information about IDA visit www.documentary.org or call 213-534-3600.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:
Amy Grey / Ashley Mariner
Dish Communications
Phone: 818-508-1000
amyg@dishcommunicatons.com / ashleym@dishcommunications.com

2009 IDA DOCUMENTARY AWARDS WINNERS

CONTINUING SERIES – WINNER
POV
Executive Director: Simon Kilmurry
Vice President: Cynthia López
American Documentary, Inc.; PBS
Episodes Submitted:
Inheritance (Dir./Prod.: James Moll; Prod.: Christopher Pavlick; Exec. Prods.: Chris Malachowsky, Ryan Malachowsky) Campaign (Dir./Prod.: Kazuhiro Soda)
Up the Yangtse (Dir.: Yung Chang; Prods.: Mila Aung-Thwin, Germaine Ying-Gee Wong, John Christou; Exec. Prods.: Daniel Cross, Mila Aung-Thwin, Ravida Din, Sally Bochner)

LIMTED SERIES – WINNER
Architecture School
Director/Executive Producer/Original Concept: Michael Selditch
Original Concept: Stan Bertheaud
Senior Producer: Rob Tate
Producer: Rachel Clift
Executive Producers: Lynne Kirby, Laura Michalchyshyn
Sundance Channel

IDA MUSIC DOCUMENTARY AWARD – WINNER
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Producer: Rebecca Yeldham
Little Dean’s Yard; Ahimsa Films; Abramorama; VH1

IDA/HUMANITAS AWARD
Garbage Dreams
Director/Producer/Cinematographer/Writer: Mai Iskander
Executive Producer: Tiffany Schauer
Editor/Co-Producer: Kate Hirson
Iskander Films in co-production with MotiveArt in association with Chicken & Egg Pictures/Films Transit International

IDA/PARE LORENTZ AWARD - WINNER
The Final Inch
Director/Producer: Irene Taylor Brodsky
Producer: Tom Grant
Vermilion Pictures; Google.org; HBO Documentary Films

IDA/ABCNEWS VIDEOSOURCE AWARD – WINNER
Wounded Knee
Director/Producer: Stanley Nelson
Executive Producers: Sharon Grimberg, Mark Samels
Writer: Marcia Smith
Firelight Media; American Experience; WGBH; Native American Public Television

IDA/DAVID L. WOLPER STUDENT DOCUMENTARY ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
The First Kid to Learn English from Mexico
Director/Producer: Peter Jordan
Localfilms; Stanford University

Happy birthday, Brave New Films! Five years of activism hasn't aged you at all. To celebrate the activists' big day, the group is offering nearly everything they've produced in a massive, 10-disc box set that is bound to get you angry at something or someone. It's a must-have tool kit for any documentary filmmaker or passionate activist who wants to use video to achieve political and social change. See a pitch for it below or check it out and buy it here.

IFC Entertainment and Netflix have partnered up in order to offer 53 unique IFC titles for instant streaming to televisions and computers via Netflix's download service. Some of the prominent titles include Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line and Jim Stern and Adam Del Deo's political documentary So Goes the Nation. Read more about it at The Wrap.

If you still like holding the actual DVD in you hands, Oscilloscope may have the program for you. The indie label was founded by Adam Yauch and David Fenkel is starting a direct-mail DVD club. For a subscription fee of $150 you will get the company's next 10 DVD releases (one per month, and a week before general release) and Oscilloscope catalog DVDs at half price. (via the Hollywood Reporter)

TV Guide Network has acquired the U.S. rights to the one-hour documentary film I Dreamed a Dream: The Susan Boyle Story. The cable channel will televise the film at 8 p.m. Dec. 13, same day it premieres on Britain's ITV1. (via Broadcasting & Cable)

In March of this year Ling and Lee were reporting on the trafficking of North Korean women who are fleeing poverty and repression only to end up being exploited across the border in neighboring China. Ling and Lee were apprehended by North Korean soldiers while filming along the Tumen River, which separates China and North Korea. They were sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean labor prison for illegal entry and unspecified hostile acts. After 140 days in captivity, Ling and Lee were eventually pardoned, and they returned to the United States following an unannounced visit to North Korea by former US President Bill Clinton on August 4, 2009.

The 2009 IDA Documentary Awards will take place on Friday, Dec. 4 at 8 pm at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA.

Join us at the 2009 IDA Documentary Awards!

That evening, the IDA will also award its prestigious 2009 Career Achievement Award to legendary and innovative filmmaker Errol Morris. 

The IDA will also honor Michael Donaldson with 2009 Amicus Award.

Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life, will be host the 2009 IDA Documentary Awards.

A man who travels to small villages making movies, a Japanese boy who leaves his village to join a sumo group, and American millionaires who pay huge sums to have the chance to experience outer space with the Russian space agency are three films screening here at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) that turn the spotlight on lifestyles.

Argentine directors Eduardo de la Serna, Lucas Marcheggiano and Adriana Nidia Yurovich’s “The Peddler” (El ambulante) profiles a filmmaker who brings new meaning to the DIY approach. Daniel Burmeister drives around in a beat-up car approaching the local mayor in a village with a proposal: He will film a feature in the town using locals in exchange for room and board and using a camera he already owns. The doc follows this very charming man as he undertakes one project in a small Argentine town. Using his seductive charisma, he captivates the towns people and they become a part of his project. After filming, he even drives through the town with a loudspeaker offering screening times as part of his own marketing blitz. The town comes out to see the film, and they are the stars.

“There is a saying in Argentina that if there’s a problem, you fix it with a string,” said Marcheggiano referring to how Burmeister devised clever but basic ways to repair technical snafus that inevitably occur when filming. “He’s made over 50 films in 11 years, using a [rotation] of about five scripts.”

Eighteen year-old Takuya leaves his village in Japan’s northern main island of Hokkaido for the capital, Tokyo, to train as an apprentice sumo wrestler in the world premiere of Jill Coulon’s “A Normal Life: Chronicle of a Sumo Wrestler.” Despite trepidation, Takuya enrolls in a sumo school to please his father. Typical of Japanese, Takuya hides his emotion as his father tells him “not to fail” and says before he leaves that if he drops out of the program “there is no place here for you.” His mother died three years prior to cancer, and his only other close relation is his sister. Coulon, who undertook the project originally planning to follow a Mongolian sumo wrestler who moves to Japan but then found Takuya, goes into the secretive and insular world of sumo, following Takuya’s preparations for tournaments, sponsors’ dinners. He misses his friends from his hometown, and as a new wrestler, he has to act as a personal assistant to the more established wrestlers. He reveals his doubts about his new life in phone conversations with his sister at a laundromat at night as he washes the other wrestlers’ belts, saying he just wants a normal life.

“Finding Takuya was a very long process,” said Coulon after the world debut screening. “It took three years before we found Takuya. It’s hard for women to be accepted - it’s a very insular world. You have to get through a lot of authorization, there are a lot of rules, so it’s a very complicated process. Filming in Japan can be very hard…”

Swiss director Christian Frei also had huge bureaucratic hurdles to deal with for his look at the rising number of space tourists who pay millions for the chance to reach orbit via the Russian space agency. Frei takes his camera to remote Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union built its “Star City,” a secretive but once proud town that was the center of the USSR’s thriving space program where the first satellite, Sputnik, launched the space race back in the ‘50s. Though the Russians still use the facilities, its a shell of its former glory when tens of thousands of people lived there and the nation looked with pride on its achievements. Gorbachev pulled the financial plug in the ‘80s. To help defray the costs, the Russian space agency has taken on “space tourists” to accompany their cosmonauts on their missions.

“Everything was difficult with this project, nothing seemed possible at the beginning,” said Frei after a screening of his film in Amsterdam’s lovely Tuschinski Theater. “The Russian secret service wanted me off the project, and they never let me film the way I wanted.” Though he originally wanted to profile a Japanese space tourist, he later settled on Iranian-American Anoush Ansari who had dreamed of going to space as a little girl living in Tehran. She paid $20 million for the chance to go into space, half the cost the Russian space agency incurrs for a launch. “What is the price of a dream?” asked Ansari in the film addressing criticism that the money was a lavish expenditure. “One month’s salary? Two months? If I could go into space but not come back, I would still do it. It’s my life’s dream.”

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam continues through Sunday.

This news item is brought to you by a special partnership between the IDA and indieWIRE and SnagFilms.

by Eugene Hernandez

Serious movies with weighty international topics gave way to laughter (and even some tears) today after the Saturday skies cleared and the temperature warmed up a bit here in The Netherlands. British filmmaker Julien Temple sipped red wine while lecturing this afternoon at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and earlier in the day American radio star (and 2009 IDA Documentary Awards host) Ira Glass drank from a can of Red Bull to counter jet lag at a conversation and demo at the fest.

Folks familiar with Ira Glass’ successful weekly radio documentary program (and its recent Showtime cable TV offshoot) know that he takes a more conversational approach to telling his stories, incorporating sometimes wry narration with quirky music cues, while depicting interactions between host and subject. The popular public radio program reaches well over 2 million people per week via the airwaves and online, mainly telling the stories of people who aren’t famous or necessarily newsworthy.

Today in Amsterdam, Glass encouraged journalists and documentarians to loosen up. Rather than stripping interviews from conversations in making journalism, he advocated depicting actual conversations between people, and he encouraged, “Narration is awesome.” But, only when it avoids stodgy conventions.

“Too much of broadcast news, too much of documentary, leaves out a sense of humor,” Glass argued during a jammed Doc Lab session at the Escape Club on Amsterdamn’s central Rembrandtplein. He encouraged filmmakers to loosen up and have fun with their work, admonishing them to reconsider their approach to making documentaries.

The dour tone and heavy narrative of many docs, Glass argued, “Makes (the world) seem smaller and darker than it is.” Continuing he added, “It makes the world seem smaller and stupider and less interesting.”

During today’s unmoderated presentation that was part of IDFA’s new media prograam, Glass reiterated a frustration with journalism and documentary that adopts a false sense of seriousness, rather than capturing a human conversation.

Citing the rise of commentary about the news which is more popular than the delivery of the news itself, Ira Glass singled out the success of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and even Glenn Beck, saying that they resonate with audiences because they “talk in a human voice.”

In the words of IDFA Doc Lab organizer Caspar Sonnen, “documentary shouldn’t feel like a bad day at school.”

Julien Temple would very likely agree.

Later, in the same room where Glass spoke, Temple delivered the first ever IDFA Lecture. He repeatedly encouraged filmmakers to continuously break the rules. There’s nothing worse, in a bad music documentary (he hates the word ‘rockumentary’), than an aging, overweight hippie talking about the old days, he said. Temple’s music docs sometimes featuring conversations with older musicians, but he also weaves in archival footage and cutaways to loosen up the movie.

In “The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle,” his 1980 take on The Sex Pistols that mixes fact with fiction to tell the story of their rise (and then break-up), Temple used animated caricatures of the band when they refused to cooperate for the movie. “It was an homage to Tex Avery,” he said today.

Throughout his career, Temple’s work has featured distinctive music, but not for just for the sake of it. “Fingers on guitars is not why I make films,” Temple said today, adding that he likes to make music a strong element in his work because songs are interpreted uniquely by different people.

“To me the point is to provoke thought in an audience rather than tell them what to think,” Temple said. “Let the story lead you,” he advised filmmakers. “If you think you know what you’re going to say already, you’re fucked.”

The same could be said for Temple’s talk today. While billed as a lecture, the filmmaker didn’t come in with an agenda. Instead he brought a few clips and took a free form approach to talking about his life and work, often repeating himself and then pausing to prod the audience to ask questions.

Thinking back, Temple said he heard The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” one night on a pirate radio station and his life was never the same. His life changed again when he stumbled upon The Sex Pistols playing music in an abandoned British warehouse, he recalled. In film school at the time, he eventually picked up a camera to shoot the band, leading to “The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle” and then “The Filth and the Fury,” a doc about the group’s years later.

At times rambling, but never boring, Temple’s lecture eventually felt a bit like spending time late at night in a bar with friend. He started to cry when recounting his close friendship with the late Joe Strummer, who died suddenly in 2002.

“That was my friend…” he began to explain, after playing a clip from his own film, “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten.” Temple couldn’t regain his composure, so the lights were eventually lowered and another clip screened while a stagehand brought him a tissue.

Minutes later, as the session drew to a close, he loosened things up by recalling a hilarious story from a visit with Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson at their father’s home many years ago.

“Anyway,” he concluded, at the end of his lecture, “I’ve had a funny old life.” Tonight, he will cap the day in Amsterdam by DJing the festival’s late night dance party.

This news item is brought to you by a special partnership between the IDA and indieWIRE and SnagFilms.

From the interview:

It won’t be a so-called David Lynch film, really; it will be about Maharishi and the knowledge he brought out. It’ll hold a lot of abstractions. We’re on our way to India in December to start the India part of it.

It’ll have to go in the documentary department, I think. I don’t think it’ll be a talking heads kind of thing, but we’re going to do a lot of interviews with people. We’ll interview--I hope--in India, a 97-year-old man who was with Maharishi from the beginning and get stories of times that weren’t so well recorded.

Until that comes to fruition, you can get caught up on Lynch's latest activities on the David Lynch Foundation Television website, which is hosting clips from the recent 4th Annual David Lynch Weekend. There you can watch videos with titles such as "Exploring the Frontiers of Consciousness Creativity and the Brain" and "Transforming Lives - How to Get Involved with the David Lynch Foundation."

Still not enough Lynch for you? Check out his currently running, online 121-part documentary series Interview Project right here.