An excerpt from Today’s times:

Nansel and his colleagues work so hard, in fact, that they’ve stumbled into real estate development. About a mile north of the Old Market, Saddle Creek is almost finished building a complex that will have retail space, a restaurant, apartments, the record company’s offices, a music venue and a nonprofit film art house called Film Streams.Rachel Jacobson, 28, the founder of Film Streams, moved from Omaha to New York in 2000 with a plan: for five years she’d apprentice at Miramax Films and WNYC, the public radio station, then move back. Alexander Payne is on her board (disclosure: so am I), and in short order, she raised $1.5 million, mainly from locals. “At first I had so much empty space in my head,” she said. “Moving back to Omaha was like when your ears ring right after you leave a loud concert. But it’s so much easier to get things done.”

Mark your calendars! Indiepix filmmaker Dominic DeJoseph is proud to show two shorts
at the 60 Second Southern Video Festival via Fugitive Projects gallery in Nashville, TN
on Saturday, May 5th, and again in Basel, Switzerland on May 11th. The films are:
“Ghost Ray” (2007), an experiment in surrealism made in Paris, France with of the ghost of Man Ray and
the music of Sean Eden (Luna) and “After Emak Bakia” (1995), an experimental graphics film made in Athens, GA from instructions in the autobiography of Man Ray.

Director Jennifer Venditti and Billy Price at the after party for BILLY THE KID at SXSW.
I had the great honor of meeting Billy Price, the star of Jen’s BILLY THE KID, at a party celebrating the premiere in Austin. Billy jokingly played dj sets featuring clips from Phantom of the Opera. The one-man one-liner memorably declared: “I’m here for the women.”

Among the colorful cast of filmmakers, actors, producers, and booth-attendees at this year’s SXSW Film Festival are new friends

Matthew Lessner, Brian Davila, Nadia Litz, Reg Harkema, as well as first anniversary friends Kiki Allgeier and Laurent Rejto, of the Woodstock Film Festival.

Producer-cinematographer David Becker (Shut Up and Sing) and performing arts agent David Persky were on hand to help us shoot our much-lauded interview sessions. Indiepix is also proud to announce that BILLY THE KID, a film directed by Jennifer Venditti and executive produced by Bob Alexander and Barnet Leiberman, won the top Jury prize for best Documentary this past week.

Lauryn Siegel’s wonderful new short, the 16 minute A TRIPLET AFFAIR, is almost ready for release. In the meantime, you can catch a screening of the short tomorrow night at the illustrious Anthology Film Archives, located at 2 East 2nd Street, at 9pm. Lauryn will be on hand to sell 50 limited edition preview discs, so make sure you get your copy early!

I just returned from Paris, France where my comedy- documentary, “Johnny Berlin,” was screening at the CineRAIL film festival, a festival consisting of all films on or about trains. I had a great trip! I even learned a bit of French along the way, so I was able to get around quite easily. It was great fun to see Johnny subtitled in French. Some of my American friends were there in Paris by coincidence, and they attended my screenings. One of the other films I saw at the festival was “Tickets,” a feature made by three directors, Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Ken Loach.

“Johnny Berlin” did not win any prizes at CineRAIL, and I’m really not sure that the French audience understood the oddball humor in the film. After all, Johnny does use an awful lot of American slang to express himself. The documentary that won was a French film about the sad life of train workers in Sengal. I will say that I’m actually pretty disillussioned by the climate at so many film festivals wherein political films are automatically seen as being “better” than the rest simply because they are political statements, but not necessarily because they are interesting cinema. Then again, “Tickets” was both a political film, as well as good cinema.

Still, I’m glad that I attended CineRAIL as the party was held at the Cinemateque Francaise, the great archive of world cinema founded by Henri Langois (see the wonderful doc, “The Phantom of The Cinemateque” about him) where Godard and Truffaut used to go to watch Hitchcock’s and Hawks’ films to get their inspiration. The building the Cinemateque is housed in was designed by Frank Gehry, one of my favorite architects.

One major highlight of my trip was searching for the grave of Man Ray in the Montparnasse cemetary. I had a very hard time finding his resting spot as the grave was unmarked. However, right before I was about to give up, a woman asked me in French if I was searching for Man Ray. I was stunned as there are so many famous individuals burried there, I couldn’t understand how she would know that I was looking for Man Ray. Perhaps she was psychic. Regardless, she pointed me to the gravesite, a very plain unmarked tomb. Another highlight of my trip was riding my friend’s bike all over Paris, from a suburb, to the Arc de Tiomphe, past the Champs Elysees, along the Seine past Notre Dame, to Bastille, and back to the Marais.

Dominic DeJoseph
Black Shoe Films
Director, “Johnny Berlin”