The Intelligent Factual Televisual Festival starts tomorrow at The Arts Club in London - 2 days of televisual education with panels allowing you to hear from lots of different commissioning editors. Topics include Alternative Sources of Funding and Where Next for Factual and feature loads of big names in British telly like Peter Bazalgette, Roger Graef, and Stephen Lambert - plus some great doc filmmakers including Kim Longinotto, Brian Woods and Leo Regan.

I’m at Silverdocs till Thursday so shall be going to some panels of my own (including this frightening sounding trio: Does Public TV Have a Future? Future of Non-Fiction Storytelling, U.S. Factual Budgets Forecast). I only wish I could beam myself between the two events to take the televisual temperature on both sides of the Atlantic!

We had a fantastic evening of panels at Rooftop Films on Saturday night - and the rain was no match for the incredible folk at Rooftop Films and their magical Brooklyn Can Factory! My favorite quote from the evening has to be this from Esther Robinson during the Cinema and Social Justice panel: “Make your life good, don’t get in a lot of debt and do something meaningful.” Amen Sister!

Photo: Copyright Sarah Palmer 2008
Cinema and Social Justice: Simon Kilmurry (P.O.V.), Ryan Harrington (Gucci Tribeca Fund), Esther Robinson (Director, A Walk Into The Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory), Katy Chevigny (Arts Engine and Director, Election Day) and moderator Danielle DiGiacomo (IndiePix)

Photo: Copyright Sarah Palmer 2008
The Art of Short Film: Casimir Nozkowski, Signe Baumane, Benh Zeitlin, Duana Butler and moderator Mark Rosenberg (Rooftop Films)

Photo: Copyright Sarah Palmer 2008
The rain didn’t stop us!

I went to see Captured (Ben Solomon, Dan Levin and Jenner Furst) at Rooftop Films last night - on the Open Road Rooftop in the Lower East Side. It was an incredible night - feeling so plugged into the neighborhood, looking out over the ever changing skyline, and watching a film about a man, Clayton Patterson, who has tirelessly documented the LES for 30 years. Clayton’s photographs and videos tell a fascinating story of a neighborhood in constant flux - from the drugs and graffiti, the homeless and the squatters, the Puerto Ricans and old-time Jews, to the drag queens at the Pyramid Club and the hardcore boys who watched over them, and on to the encroaching gentrification of the late 80s and 90s. The film peaks in 1988 with the Tompkins Square Riots when the fight against gentrification was fought in the streets in pitch battles with police. The deal is sealed with the closing of CBGBs, celebrated and mourned with a final Bad Brains show, Clayton snapping away in the front row as he is moshed from all sides. Clayton was always there, constantly getting arrested and beaten up, working in tandem with his quietly powerful wife, losing teeth to tell the story of the neighborhood he loved and the people who lived there.

Still from Clayton’s footage of the 1988 Tompkins Square Riots.

The roof of the Open Road Rooftop has some amazing graffiti murals and sitting up there with Clayton in his signature embroidered cap, snapping photos of the audience (gentrifiers though we may be!), felt electric. A.R.E. Weapons provided much of the music for the film and they played a great set before it started, including my cheesy favorite Don’t Be Scared. If you live in NYC, or any city for that matter, and you care about what happens to communities and local histories you should see this film (and if you’re one of those people who keep moving into the horrible new chrome and glass buildings in my neighborhood you should definitely see this film!)

A.R.E. Weapons performing before the Rooftop Films screening of Captured with some of Clayton’s photographs projected behind them.

From XKCD.

Reframe, an online film distribution website from the Tribeca Film Institute in partnership with Amazon, launched today. According to their website, Reframe aims to solve the problem of rare or important works that end up without any means of centralized, convenient distribution:

Substantial amounts of film, video and media arts remain “stuck on the shelf,” inaccessible to large segments of the public. Sometimes this is due to rights-clearance issues, but more often it is because of the high cost to convert to digital formats that would allow for broad circulation. Even media that is available for distribution can be difficult to find because it is held and catalogued in many places, and in less than ideal databases.

Films are available to rent or to own - as downloads or as DVD-on-demand - to both institutions in the educational market and to individuals (depending on the film from the looks of it). The Hollywood Reporter describes the deal structures as follows:

The nonprofit TFI and copyright holders will split the profit on digital download rentals and purchases (distributed in Windows Media Player format) evenly. DVD sales will operate under a tiered system, with 40% of $50 and under titles, 85% of $51-$200 titles and 90% of more than $200 titles going to rights holders. More expensive titles will be aimed at the educational market looking for classroom materials, though rentals in the $4 range, lasting anywhere from 36 hours-30 days, are accessible to all visitors. Buyers must have an Amazon account to make purchases.

I haven’t had a chance to really check out the site yet but I’m excited to see how it develops and what sort of collections it builds. Have a gander - I’m very pleased that they’ve launched with Thriller, a rare 1979 film from Sally Potter who is one of our wonderful Shooting People patrons!

The acclaimed documentary series P.O.V. begins its Summer Season on PBS on June 24th with Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade, the story of Browne’s slave-trading New England ancestors and her family’s contemporary retracing of the trade triangle (and the fallout that ensues). See the complete list of films screening this Summer on P.O.V. here.

Yance Ford, P.O.V.’s Series Producer will be at DCTV at 7.30pm tonight to talk at a Shooting People/DCTV event about how the films are chosen, the history of P.O.V., the social outreach element of what they do and the role of docs on public television. There are exactly 10 tickets left at this point so snap one up now if docs are your thing on a Friday night (je suis so rock and roll!)

I went to the Where Internet and Film Collide event at the IFC Center last night, presented as part of Internet Week New York and hosted by IndieGoGo and Filmmaker Magazine. You can read more about the event on The Film Panel Notetaker but I wanted to link to some of the cool films I saw last night here too.

First Green Porno. I love Isabella Rossellini - she’s beautiful, funny and the sort of person I would love to eat cheese with. Christopher Barry, who does digital media and business strategy at Sundance Channel, spoke after screenings of Snail and Praying Mantis from the Green Porno series and he seems like a smart guy. He sees both the possibilities and the limitations of digital distribution - speaking of ad-supported models he said “50% of nothing is still nothing.”

I was also impressed with the work of m ss ng p eces. I loved their Pangea Day film, Moving Windmills. They know how to use the limitations of the short form to create strikingly visual pieces, even when they are making corporate vids like their films for TED (I challenge you not to be inspired by them!).

Overall, it was very gratifying to see how much creativity/activity there is out there, even without all the revenue models in place. Here are some links to other work that screened that you should check out:

The West Side

Drawn By Pain

Jamie Stuart’s NYFF45

Beyond the Rave

Summer is here which means that Rooftop Films are back on Friday, June 6th with This Is What We Mean By Short Films. This is very good news indeed for fans of film, lovers of New York City, and appreciators of fine rooftops.  I am always happy to sit outside under the stars and watch beautifully curated shorts and features so I was pleased as punch to get involved with the Rooftop Films Panorama which is happening next week, June 12-14. On Saturday, June 14th Rooftop Films, Shooting People and IndiePix will be presenting two panels before the Industriance shorts program at The Old American Can Factory: Cinema and Social Justice and The Art of the Short Film. Panelists include Ryan Harrington (Gucci Tribeca Fund), Simon Kilmurry (P.O.V.), Esther Robinson (Director, A Walk Into the Sea: The Danny Williams Story), Katy Chevigny (Arts Engine and Director, Election Day) Benh Zeitlin (Filmmaker, Glory at Sea), Duana Butler (Filmmaker, Curator of ReelNY) and Signe Baumane (animator).

It’s going to be an amazing evening of panels, music and films -  tickets are only $6 online so please come out to play.

Not exactly hot off the press this, but I went to see Jonathan Demme’s The Agronomist at Stranger Than Fiction last Tuesday and the Q&A was fantastic. Jean Dominique’s widow, Michèle Montas, got a highly deserved standing ovation. Danny Glover walked in and joined the group on stage and Montas proceeded to have everyone in tears talking about how the team at Radio Haiti-Inter convinced her to keep the station running for three years after Dominique’s death (until an assassination attempt, which resulted in the death of her bodyguard, forced her to leave Haiti in 2003). The bravery and determination of Dominque and Montas in their fight for democracy and freedom of the press in Haiti comes across so powerfully in the film and it was a real privilege to hear Montas speak.

Meira Blaustein (representing screening co-presenter: Woodstock Film Festival), Executive Producer Daniel Wolff, Producer Peter Saraf, Director Jonathan Demme, the incredible Michèle Montas, and Danny Glover.

Albert Maysles’ Psychiatry in Russia and the little seen Showman are screening at the last of this season’s Stranger Than Fiction tomorrow night. Al will be there for the Q&A - should be a treat.

Shooting People run a really fun series of networking events with DCTV called Hook Me Up. It’s like speed-dating but you get to talk about your skills and your projects rather than about why blue is your favorite color and why you’re a cat person and not a dog person (look I don’t know what people talk about when they go speed-dating ok!) The next one is happening on Tuesday, June 10th at 7.30pm and this time we’re going to have a room packed with both narrative and documentary filmmakers.

The application deadline is Sunday, June 1st so get your applications in asap if you want to find new, creative people to work with.