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Debra Jacobson, head librarian of Duke University, announced the university’s union with Full Frame Film Festival at a press junket this weekend, commemorating the festival’s tenth anniversary. The main project, which “will ensure the preservation of films from the festival’s beginning into the future”, is an exciting venture to archive every single film released by the festival. The finest works are to be made available to historians, students and professionals, with viewing facilities located on the East Campus open to the community at large. The preserved copies are to be made available to scholars “in their most sophisticated form”.

Well folks, there is much time to write this blog update because this year’s Full Frame Film Festival coincided with the biggest Nor’easter this country has experienced in 15 years. A hotel room, a laptop, and some coffee — this is my reality right now. The slogan of what NPR termed “The Cannes of documentary film festivals” is “How Much Reality Can You Take?” Now granted, this is not an entirely accurate question (More like “How much MEDIATED reality can you take?”) but it is an interesting one. Particularly when so much of what these film focus on is the ugly side of life — genocide, war, cruelty, poverty, injustice. And yet, with all of them, we are left with a sense of hope. One of the most striking films I viewed, WITHOUT THE KING (produced by Indiepix filmmaker Paola Mendoza) explored Africa’s last absolute monarchy, Swaziland. The small country, with no natural resources, is also one of the few sub-Saharan nations that has not experienced a genocide or civil war in the last couple of decades. Yet, the rate of HIV is a staggering 42.6%, and most of the country lives in such abject poverty that they much scrounge for food in dumpsters. (One of the film’s most repulsive images, and one of the most horrifying things I have ever witnessed on celluloid, was that of young men eating grilled animal intestines plucked from the garbage.) And yet, although the director Michael Skurnick followed the film by saying that this is a nation and peoples on the verge of extinction within 5 years, he also offers a ray of hope in the form of one of the country’s Princesses. After witnessing, at the director’s urging, the suffering of her countrymen, she becomes determined to make change.

This past Sunday, I braved the wintry cold to go see THE LIVES OF OTHERS, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s near-masterpiece about artists under surveillance by the Stasi in Communist East Berlin. That morning, before I saw the film, I found myself sending an email to friends, imploring them to go see Andrea Arnold’s thriller RED ROAD, which I had the opportunity to see at Sundance in January. In Arnold’s film, a woman who works for a security film monitoring various locations around Glasgow via closed circuit cameras (The U.K. has more closed circuit cameras per capita than anywhere in the world!), becomes obsessed with tracking one grainy figure (presumably from her past). This idea of obsessive monitoring of another’s patterns and behavior, whether it be for personal reasons or the perceived security of the state, makes for some consistently riveting cinema, and of course, is extremely relevant in a post-9/11 age of compromised civil liberties, as well as the Internet. The idea of being watched without knowledge makes for a rich and diverse cinematic canvas. Most recently, Michael Haneke used this in CACHE to stunning effect; implicating the viewer into the position of the spy and making us uncomfortable with the role of the passive spectator. One of my other favorites films, Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (to which THE LIVES OF OTHERS has been compared), was also about surveillance and the role of the watcher, as well as what is at stake and making sure what one has seen is accurately analyzed.