Documentary Fortnight at MoMA

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Tuesday, 16 February 2010 07:29

Written by L E Shannon

Documentary Fortnight, MoMA‘s annual two-week showcase of recent nonfiction film and video takes place February 7 through March 3, 2010 in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters at MoMA. The ninth annual festival includes 20 features and 23 mid-length and short documentaries that represent the wide range of creative categories that extend the idea of the documentary form.

The festival‘s thematic programs focus on community and collaborative film and media initiatives from around the world.

Opening the festival are two U.S. premieres:

Christoph Draeger‘s romantic The End of the Remake trilogy of films about the 1960s, including My Generation (2007), Blow Up, Stroll On (2007), and Hippie Movie (2008).

David Christensen‘s feature The Mirror, which follows the mayor of a tiny Italian village as he attempts to build a gigantic mirror on a nearby mountaintop to reflect sunlight into the town square during the dark winter months.

Other features include:

George Gittoes‘ Miscreants of Taliwood—the third in a trilogy of documentaries that have premiered in this festival over the past several years—in which the director enters the remote and forbidden Tribal Belt of the northwest frontier of Pakistan disguised as an actor in the low-budget Pashto Tali movie industry.

Carol Dysinger‘s work-in-progress Camp Victory Afghanistan is a verite look at the U.S. National Guardsmen stationed in Herat, Afghanistan, and the Afghan officers assigned to them as mentees.

Cathryn Collins‘s Vlast / Power reveals, through brilliantly detailed interviews, the hushed-up story of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia‘s wealthiest man, now imprisoned in Siberia.

The closing night avant-premiere film is Johan Grimonprez‘s stunning Double Take, a hybrid documentary/narrative feature that casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in the subterfuges of the Cold War era, blackmailing housewives in coffee commercials.

This year‘s shorts include:

Alla Kovgan and David Hinton‘s Nora, based on the true story of dancer Nora Chipaumire, who returned to her native Zimbabwe and brought her history to life through performance.

Closing night selections include:

Diane Nerwen‘s Open House, which documents the recent development spree in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and chronicles how the neighborhood has been affected by the housing market

Heidrun Holzfiend‘s Za Zelazna / Behind the Iron Gate) looks at a modern housing estate built in Warsaw, Poland, in the mid-1960s and how it functions for its residents today.

A spotlight on the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam‘s Jan Vrijman Fund, which supports filmmakers in developing countries, features:

Iranian filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi‘s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates!

Chilean-based filmmakers Bettina Perut and Ivan Osnovikoff‘s News

The Afghanistan/UK production of Addicted in Afghanistan by Jawed Taiman.

Three U.S.-based initiatives include:

Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, which began in 1968 as an experiment in community-based filmmaking and economic growth, and supports films that celebrate Appalachian culture and an Indonesian video exchange project

New York City‘s Deep Dish Television, which produces and distributes grass-roots film and television

UnionDocs Collaborative, a program for nonfiction media research and group production, which showcases their most recent innovative projects. A program of films by four directors—Patty Chang, Liza Johnson, Sharon Lockhart, and Jeannie Simms—showcases how artists interact with their subjects in the creation of their films.

Many of the filmmakers will be present throughout the festival to introduce and discuss their films, which are almost all world, U.S., or New York premieres.

Documentary Fortnight, 2010 is organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, with Maria Fosheim Lund, Director Liaison, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

For more information, visit www.moma.org.

Documentary Fortnight
February 7-March 3, 2010

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York City

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