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Meet the makers
In order to provide aspiring filmmakers and curious viewers the opportunity to peek behind the scenes of filmmaking at its most creative, Cinema Arts Festival Houston presents this series of in-depth discussions with our featured artists and professionals. Several of these offerings feature acclaimed filmmakers with Texas connections as well as luminaries with international reputations.
The programs will be held at Edwards Greenway Palace, Theater #4 (3839 Weslayan St, Houston 77027) or at the Freed Auditorium at the Glassell School (5101 Montrose Blvd, Houston 77006). Conversations and panels are free, with seating on a first-come, first-seated basis.
First of its kind in Texas and one of the first in the U.S., Southwest Alternate Media Project (www.swamp.org and www.theterritory.tv) is a 33-year-old, Houston-based nonprofit media arts organization. SWAMP promotes the creation and appreciation of film, video and new media by providing independent makers with opportunities for professional development education, screenings, Texas PBS television broadcast, and a variety of other programs.
INDEPENDENT MEDIA ARTS PRESERVATION IN HOUSTON
Moderator: Linda Tadic
Media arts archivists and professionals from the Menil Archive, SWAMP, and Aurora Picture Show will discuss current trends and issues in independent media preservation. Each of them will project examples of works from their collections, ranging from rare footage of Roberto Rossellini to Texas-based indie icons Eagle Pennell and Andy Mann. The free panel will be moderated by Linda Tadic, who is conducting an all-day workshop (9:30 a.m. - 4:00PM) at the MFAH on Digital Preservation for Video. To register and for more information, visit www.imappreserve.org.
Linda Tadic is Executive Director of Audiovisual Archive Network (www.archivenetwork.org), an independent non-profit digital library and preservation service for historical sound and moving image collections.
Geraldine Aramanda, archivist for the Menil Foundation, has worked with the de Menils since 1968 in several roles relating to their art collections and archives. The Menil Archives contains many special collections and other acquired materials, such as films, audio and videotapes, letters and artwork.
Mary Magsamen is a video artist, curator and educator. She is the curator at the Aurora Picture Show and teaches Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Houston. The Aurora Picture Show, a non-profit micro-cinema, is also home to an extensive video library in addition to the Andy Mann Archive.
Mary M. Lampe, art historian, film programmer and art documentary filmmaker, is the executive director of Southwest Alternate Media Project and co-executive producer of The Territory, the Texas PBS broadcast short film showcase series. The SWAMP archive is comprised of films produced through its Independent Production Fund and the programs of artists’ work featured in 33 seasons of The Territory series.
This panel is a co-presentation of Aurora Picture Show, the Menil Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston Cinema Arts Society and SWAMP, partnering with Independent Media Arts Preservation.
INDEPENDENT MEDIA ARTS PRESERVATION IN HOUSTONWednesday, November 10, 4:30-6:00PM |
A MASTER CLASS with animator Bill Plympton
Bill will discuss the creative and business aspects of his career and do a live drawing demonstration. Along the way, he’ll screen some of his latest shorts, including Santa, the Fascist Years, Mexican Standoff and The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Burger, as well as the trailer for his feature, Idiots and Angels, and the pencil test for his upcoming feature. Every attendee will get a free Plympton drawing!
Bill Plympton is an Academy Award nominee and his animated films have received worldwide acclaim for their unique style. Incredibly, his 30+ shorts and six feature films, have been single-handedly drawn and self-financed. Idiots and Angels, his darkest, richest and most accomplished film, launched its national theatrical run in October.
A MASTER CLASS with animator Bill Plympton
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A CONVERSATION WITH ALEX GIBNEY
Moderator: Sasha Waters Freyer
Just this year, celebrated documentarian Alex Gibney released three feature length films, including Client 9, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and Casino Jack, a remarkable feat for any filmmaker. In conversation with documentary director Sasha Waters Freyer, Gibney will discuss the ingredients of a successful documentary feature, what motivates him to pursue a subject, and how he uncovers the storytelling and stylistic elements that give his work distinction. A special preview of clips from Magic Bus, about Ken Kesey’s electric Kool-Aid road trip of the 1960s, will be an additional highlight.
Sasha Waters Freyer’s videos & 16mm films have screened widely in the U.S. and abroad, including her award-winning documentary, Razing Appalachia, and Chekhov for Children, which premiered at Telluride and screens in this festival. Since 2000, Waters Freyer has taught film and video at the University of Iowa, where she is an Associate Professor.
Alex Gibney’s 2006 Oscar-nominated feature Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room was investigative journalism into a corporate crime made vital and cinematic. Taxi to the Dark Side won the Oscar for best documentary. Jigsaw Productions, established by Gibney in 1982, has a long and successful track record that precedes the recent theatrical films.
A CONVERSATION WITH ALEX GIBNEY
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MUSIC IN MOTION:
SCORING AND ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTARY AND EXPERIMENTAL FILM
Moderator: Esther Robinson
The directors of Gravity Was Everywhere, Back Then and Utopia in Four Movements, two of the most adventurous works in the festival, will be joined by two of the musicians accompanying them live in Houston and throughout the U.S. Brendan Canty and Todd Griffin, both experienced live film accompanists, are also accomplished composers of musical scores for documentary films. The filmmakers and composers will discuss their partnership and their methods of marrying music and film.
Esther Robinson is the founder of ArtHome, a non-profit business that helps artists and their communities build financial assets and equity. Her feature documentary A Walk into the Sea, screening in this festival, won top prizes at the Berlin, Tribeca and Chicago film festivals.
Best known as the drummer for the band Fugazi, Brendan Canty is an adept multi-instrumentalist. Canty composes soundtrack music for Discovery Channel and National Geographic documentaries and wrote the score for the Sundance Channel documentary series, The Hill.
Brent Green is a self-taught animation filmmaker and artist whose films have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival (2006-9), MoMA, the Getty Center, Warhol Museum, and many other museums and festivals around the world including a current DiverseWorks exhibition in Houston.
Sam Green’s feature The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His work has won awards and been featured in many festivals, among them Sundance, the London Film Festival, and Locarno, where he won the Critics Choice Award.
Todd Griffin, best known as leader of The Quavers, has scored dozens of film and theater projects. His work is distinguished by his commitment to find the music that emanates from an image, rather than music to lay on top of it. His recent composing projects include Prodigal Son, Children of Invention, and Utopia in Four Movements.
MUSIC IN MOTION
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THE STATE OF CRITICISM: FILM AND THE ARTS
Moderator: Phillip Lopate
There is perceived to be a “crisis” in film criticism today, as professional film critics are losing positions and influence. Is the “crisis” real, and is it shared by other art forms? Film, music, dance, literary and art criticism — all these discourses ought to conference to get back to basics and find out whether shared vocabularies, as well as points of divergence, can point to productive futures, ways beyond permanent crisis.
Phillip Lopate has written three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections and a memoir of his teaching experiences. Collections of his movie criticism (Totally Tenderly Tragically) and essays (Getting Personal: Selected Writings) are supplemented by several anthologies of great writings by others he has compiled, including The Art of the Personal Essay, Writing New York, and American Movie Critics.
Gerald Peary has been a much-published North American film critic for more than twenty-five years. He is the author of eight books on cinema and his articles have appeared in many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, and in film periodicals around the world, including Film Comment, Cineaste, and Sight and Sound. Since 1996, he has been a weekly film critic and columnist for the Boston Phoenix.
Michael Sicinski is an Instructor of English and Fine Arts at the University of Houston, and a freelance film critic specializing in experimental cinema. His writing regularly appears in Cinema Scope, Cineaste, and Cargo. He is also a prominent Internet-based critic (www.academichack.net).
Nancy Wozny, MA, is a contributing editor at Dance Magazine and covers the arts at CultureMap in Houston. Her work has appeared in The Houston Chronicle, Pointe, Dance Teacher, Dance Spirit, Artshouston, Culturevulture, Dance Source Houston, Dance Studio Life and other publications. Among many awards throughout her career, most recent are as a 2010 Scholar in Residence at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
Kelly Klaasmeyer is an artist and writer and editor of the online art magazine Glasstire. Klaasmeyer received her MFA in painting from the University of Houston in 1992. Her last solo show was a 2007 installation at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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SETTING THE SCENE: LOW BUDGET PRODUCTION FROM THIS STATE I’M IN TO MEMORIES OF OVERDEVELOPMENT
Moderator: Laura Harrison
Driven to express creative visions without studio resources, independent feature filmmakers have managed to defy the expense and complexity of moviemaking and get their films made. Twenty years ago, This State I’m In was such a miracle and, in Houston, director Robert Ziebell pulled together a remarkably assured and innovative feature that got significant national attention. Its production methods and history will be contrasted today with another low-budget independent feature also playing in this year’s festival, Memories of Overdevelopment, which has likewise made its remarkably low budget go a very long way.
Laura Harrison is an award winning documentary filmmaker. Her Secret People (2000), a chronicle of leprosy in America, was broadcast nationally on PBS’ Independent Lens series and won a silver medal for Best Feature Documentary at the SXSW Film Festival. Laura most recently co-produced, directed and edited Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with ANT FARM, a documentary feature about the renegade 1970s architecture collective.
At 17, Cuban filmmaker Miguel Coyula made his first short with a VHS camcorder, which led to his admittance to the International Film School of San Antonio de los Baños and winning multiple awards in Cuba for his short films. In New York, he made his first feature, Red Cockroaches (2003), for less than $2000 over a two-year period. The film was described by Variety as “a triumph of technology in the hands of a visionary with know-how... “ His current film, screening in this festival, is Memorias del Desarrollo (Memories of Overdevelopment).
Indie filmmaker David Leitner has over fifty director, director of photography and producer credits in feature-length documentaries and dramas, including seven Sundance premieres and an Academy Award nomination (For All Mankind, 1990). His latest work as producer is Memories of Overdevelopment. Leitner is also an author, columnist, and contributor to The Filmmaker’s Bible and senior contributing editor at Millimeter magazine.
Robert Ziebell is a lens-based artist who earned a B.F.A. from the University of Michigan School of Art and was a participant in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core Program. His feature film This State I’m In has been screened at media art centers across the USA, and is having its 20th anniversary screening during this festival. He is currently working on a series of artist apps for the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch and the new iPad.
Co-sponsored with the Houston Film Commission and Women in Film & Television.
SETTING THE SCENE
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Levantine Entertainment
Postponed until a future date after the Festival
Levantine Entertainment will be unveiling its exciting forthcoming plans and invites you to join them for a sneak peek into the future of quality cultural entertainment. Levantine is embarking, as an associate producer, on the development of an inspiring animation, Zeitoun The Movie to be written and directed by the ingenious Jonathan Demme and based on the Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Decade by David Eggers, Zeitoun. Zeitoun is a non-fiction, riveting story of how a prosperous Syrian-American, father of four, traveled the flooded streets of a post-Katrina New Orleans in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could when one week later, he abruptly disappeared. Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife Kathy will be here, along with Executive Producer Lindsay Jaeger to share this touching real life story.
The ever-talented documentary filmmaker, Frederic Laffont will also be joining and discussing his plans for his next testimonial-style documentary filmed in Lebanon, in association with Levantine. He will capture stories of death, loss, pain, but also laughter, creation and love. Three decades of war, three decades of life in wars and three-decades of life itself.
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