The Film Panel Notetaker

Yesterday, I tagged along with Sujewa Ekanayake to Brooklyn to meet up with filmmaker and blogger Tambay Obenson, whom Sujewa interviewed for his documentary The Indie Film Bloggers: A Portrait of a Community. Sujewa will also soon be interviewing me for the film. Tambay’s blog is The Obenson Report, which not only reports on African [...]

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The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York began a celebration this week of the distributor Zeitgeist Films 20th anniversary with a retrospective of some of their best releases from over the years. Friday night, Todd Haynes presented two of his earlier films from the Zeitgeist collection, the short Dottie Gets Spanked and [...]

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Silverdocs AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival
Herb and DorothySilver Spring, MD
June 21, 2008

(L toR: Megumi Sasaki with Dorothy and Herb Vogel)

Last Saturday afternoon at Silverdocs, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to sit down and watch a more light-spirited documentary given that I had watched several hard-hitting and more serious docs on current [...]

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CWNY/NYWIFT Screening Series Presents…
The Cake EatersTwo Boots Pioneer TheaterNew York, NYJune 24, 2008

(Jayce Bartok, Mary Stuart Masterson & Jesse Scolaro talk about The Cake Eaters. Photo by Maria Pusateri.)

(After Party at No Malice Palace. Pictured L to R: YLANA KELLAR, CWNY board member, MARIA PUSATERI, CWNY board member/programming director screening series, MARY STUART [...]

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As you’ve been reading, The Film Panel Notetaker was at Silverdocs last week. Many more notes to come from panel discussions and filmmaker Q&As. In the mean time, here’s the winners of this year’s festival:

THE GARDEN Wins Sterling US Feature Award
Special Jury Mention to TROUBLE THE WATER
THE ENGLISH SURGEON Wins Sterling World Feature Award
Special Jury [...]

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Here’s some news from the 2008 AFI Silverdocs Film Festival. On Friday, a reception was held to announce the 2nd Annual Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking that will take place in March 2009. (The Film Panel Notetaker attended the very first Cinema Eye Honors this past March.) Friday’s announcement was made by Cinema Eye [...]

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In May, I met Lucia Gajá at the Tribeca Film Festival during a press meet and greet at the filmmaker lounge. She told me about her documentary My Life Inside, about a woman from Mexico named Rosa who was sentenced to what basically equates to life in prison on the counts of homicide and injury [...]

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Along the lines of my One-on-One Q&A with My Life Inside director Lucia Gajá, I saw another film at Silverdocs that dealt with the similar theme of illegal immigration to the U.S. called The Infinite Border, directed by Juan Manuel Sepulveda, who spoke to the audience after the screening of his film.
The Infinite Border
Silverdocs AFI/Discovery [...]

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Prolific filmmaker Spike Lee was honored at the Charles Guggenheim Symposium on June 19th. Clips from Lee’s documentary work were played including 4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, We Was Robbed and Jim Brown: All American. And a preview of Lee’s upcoming narrative feature, Miracle at St. Anna (In [...]

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Tonight at Silverdocs, Tia Lessin’s and Carl Deal’s Sundance Award-Winning feature documentary Trouble the Water, which tells the account of Hurricane Katrina survivors Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts through their home video footage, was presented at Silverdocs. Lessin and Deal along with Kimberly, Scott and their newborn baby girl were on hand after the [...]

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