I had the opportunity to attend the screening of Desert Bayou at the MOMA on Thursday night. It was a terrific presentation.

Desert Bayou first played at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in April of 2006, just 8 months after the Katrina event. Filmmaker Alex LeMay (from Chicago) had read about the relocation of 600 citizens of New Orleans to a National Guard Camp near Salt Lake City, Utah and was immediately caught by the story. His film was selected by Full Frame as part of their “Katrina Experience” slate of films. Shortly after the festival, IndiePix and Full Frame teamed up to bring 7 of the 9 films to the library and educational market. Alex was the first filmmaker to commit to that project, and we have a close relationship to this project. (Thank you, Alex, for including us in the “special thanks” credits!)

Desert Bayou is a clear-eyed, troubling look at the whole event. No easy rush to judgment, no simple solutions, no rhetoric. The lives of the people who experienced “the worst disaster in American history” were complicated before it happened, and complicated afterwards. In the process of telling this story, the fears and prejudices across racial, social, political, and cultural lines seem like ragged tears in the social fabric. How on earth will this ever be put back together?

The presentation was introduced by Jimmy Finkl, Executive Producer, who asked a simple question: “I thought Americans cared about each other, took care of each other. What happened here?” It’s through work like this film from Alex LeMay and his team at TapRoot Productions, the judgment of Nancy Buirski, Artistic Director at Full Frame, the commitment of Philippe Diaz and Cinema Libre Studios (who are distributing the film theatrically in a few weeks) — that (using Nancy Buirski’s phrase) “the power of culture to heal” may offer some positive outcome.

We are very pleased to have been able to be part of this project and we are very pleased to be able to represent it, along with 6 other outstanding films from the Full Frame track “The Katrina Experience” to the library and school communities. Our goal is to put enough of these sets in the public and school libraries that a documentary record of the event from top independent filmmakers will stand for all to see.

Here are some additional links …
The Movie Site on the web
Press Release on the MOMA screening
IndieWire interview with Alex
The mySpace page

So, it is 2:45 a.m., and I am experiencing one of my frequent bouts of insomnia. A bit too foggy due to the bizarre combination of being wired and exhausted to write an eloquent post. Still, while reading J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in bed before succombing to sleeplessness, I was struck by this quote

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

(Which, incidentally, reminds me of another favorite quote of mine, from Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion :

“I was happy but happy is an adult world. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.”

So, all this pondering on pain, happiness, life, and adulthood, led me to. . . of course, documentary:

1) The two best documentaries I’ve seen recently have been on suicide. First, the film EXIT , which just opened at Film Forum, takes a meditative, understated look at assisted suicide in Switzerland, following the final days of several people as they seek to be put out of the misery that has overtaken their lives.

The depth of that misery, that so overshadows the innate, almost unshakeable impulse to live, is also explored in Eric Steel’s THE BRIDGE . The film has been getting a fair amount of press lately, — this Indiewire exchange is quite good so I won’t add my own analysis to the pot. However, I will say I think it is an incredibly important one, which seeks to illuminate a subject far too long taboo in the visual media. A few years ago, I read NOONDAY DEMON by Andrew Solomon, a memoir about depression. There is one description to which my mind often returns — that of Soloman, a rich and accomplished intellectual — lying prostate, paralyzed with emotional pain, in his bathtub. A middle-aged man with no impulse to move or to live, who had to be pulled out of the bath by his father. I believe it was in this same book (though possibly I am conflating this with something else I read about depression and suicide) in which the author writes that to commit suicide one needs to both 1) want to die and 2) want to KILL. There are many people who have one impulse or the other, but to be able to have such aggression toward one’s own self takes a particular person. As we seen in Steel’s film, these are people who have not jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge on an impulse, but rather who have been obsessed with the idea of offing themselves for long periods of time; whose psyches are overtaken by the will to die and kill, to exit life. Life and death are not binaries; many who live walk with death inside them at all times. To understand and explore what death is can be one of the most illuminating explorations of living that exists.

In a recent post on her blog, Agnes Varnum proposes the idea of “Trifecta” which she defines as: “3 films that … together [showing] different facets of an issue that have given me a new way to look at or think about something happening in our world.” I think this is a really powerful idea.

Agnes is careful to point out in a reply to a comment that I made that she is not talking about a “sidebar” in a film festival that may give you three tries at the same topic in similar ways. She wants three shots from different sides that illuminate something going on in a useful and stimulating way.

IndiePix is releasing 8 documentaries in cooperation with the Full Frame Documentary Festival that achieve this goal (we hope!). But there are other examples, too … (more…)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room: Magnolia Home Entertainment — the biggest corporate scandal of the last century!

The War Within: Magnolia Home Entertainment — Pakistani student struggles with ethics of terroism

Bubble: Magnolia Home Entertainment — Soderberg’s new film about romance and murder in a small midwestern town

La Bete Humaine: Criterion Collection - A couple cills their former employer in a train. Engineer Jacques watches them, but doesn’t tell the police, because he’s in love with Severine. But in an epileptic attack he kills her…

Metropolitan: Criteron Collection - In an apartment on Manhattan a couple of friends from the New York upper-class meet almost every night to talk about social mobility, play bridge and discuss Fourier’s socialism; the cynic Nick, the philosophical Charlie, partygirl Sally and austenite Audrey. They are joined by Tom. His background is much simpler and he is critical of their way of life. But he finds a soul mate in Audrey, who without his knowledge falls in love with him.

Kind Hearts and Coronets: Criterion Collection - Louis Mazzini’s mother’s frequent tales of how her titled D’Ascoyn family shunned her after she eloped with an Italian commoner causes a simmering resentment in him. On being spurned because of his lowly status by his lifetime (if devious and fickle) sweetheart Sibella he decides to permanently remove all the D’Ascoyns standing between him and the Dukedom. Becoming romantically involved with one of the widows he has created, he finds Sibella’s jealousy could seriously threaten his grand design.

Emmanuel’s Gift: First Look Pictures - If you are born disabled in Ghana, West Africa you are likely to be poisoned, or left to die by your family; and if you are not poisoned or left for dead, you’re likely to be hidden away in a room; and if you’re not hidden, you are destined to spend your lifetime begging on the streets. Of the twenty million people in Ghana, two million are disabled. This is the story of one disabled man whose mission-and purpose- is to change all that forever.

The Take: First Run Features - In suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed auto-parts workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave. Armed only with slingshots and an abiding faith in shop-floor democracy, the workers face off against the bosses, bankers and a whole system that sees their beloved factories as nothing more than scrap metal for sale.

Torremolinos 73: First Run Features - Set in 1973 Spain, a struggling encyclopedia salesman and his wife take advantage of an offer to make adult films. The act turns him into an aspring legit filmmaker and her into an international sex symbol.

State of Mind: Kino Video - A British documentary that follows two young North Korean girls as they prepare for the Mass Games, the world’s largest choreographed gymnastics performance.

The Hobart Shakespeareans: New Video Group - A profile of one phenomenal teacher and his eager students who together touchingly demonstrate the power of education.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye: Palm Pictures - A mature, evocative biography of the man considered to be the greatest photographer of the last century and the grandfather of photojournalism.

William Eggleston in the Real World: Palm Pictures - Director Michael Almereyda reveals the deep connection between Eggleston’s enigmatic personality and his groundbreaking work in photography, and also reveals his parallel commitments as a musician, draftsman and videographer.

The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till: Thinkfilm - Never-before-seen testimony is included in this documentary on Emmett Louis Till, who, in 1955, was brutally murdered after he whistled at a white woman.

Who Gets To Call It Art?: Palm Pictures — the 60’s art scene in New York City under the eye (and hand) of Henry Geldzahler