Full Frame Documentary Film Festival: Southern Exposure

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Sunday, 08 April 2012 00:37

Written by Laura Blum

Looking for a friendly place to watch harsh reality? Head on down to Durham, North Carolina for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, presented by Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. The 2012 edition runs April 12 - April 15, a year shy of the Festival's silver anniversary. Full Frame was launched in 1998 as the Double Take Documentary Film Festival and has since emerged as a premier national showcase for international nonfiction films.

This year, the programming team sifted through more than 1,200 submissions -- 40 feature films and 17 shorts. The Opening Night selection is the world premiere of Laurens Grant’s Jesse Owens. Produced and written by Stanley Nelson, the film harkens back to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin and the African-American track and field star who won four gold medals despite the games' intended platform as a glorification of Aryan ideals.

Nelson is also the 2012 Tribute honoree. Four of his films will be screened over as many days: The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, A Place of Our Own and Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice.

Ross McElwee was tapped to curate the 2012 Thematic Program. The North Carolina-born filmmaker and friend of the Full Frame family has, appropriately, dubbed his lineup of kin flicks Family Affairs. Per McElwee, the viewer of these films "about the families of the filmmakers...must not only consider what is happening before the camera but also how events portrayed in the film are connected to the...filmmaker who also happens to be a daughter, a son, or a parent."

McElwee's latest work, Photographic Memory, figures among the 10 thematic titles from such veteran documentarians as Alan Berliner (Wide Awake) and Doug Block (The Kids Grow Up). The New Docs category is a perennial favorite among FFDFF's forward-thinking Triangle Area crowd. Entries get a shot at winning the Full Frame Audience Award and are shortlisted for a host of other juried prizes.

Tickets are either sold out or fast disappearing for a number of New Docs films. The hum is amping up for Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,  Alison Klayman's take on the artist and dissident's output and struggle for free expression in today's China. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present offers a different sort of a look at contemporary art, from director Matthew Akers.  

The health of a city and the health of healthcare inform two other buzz builders, Detropia and Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, respectively. The former, by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, stares down the smoldering barrel that is post-industrial Detroit, and the latter sends Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke on a sad expose of America's lucre-motivated medical care system, but not without a glimpse of possible remedies.

To feed the flames there's Eugene Jarecki's The House I Live In. In it, he assesses the merits of America's War on Drugs by tallying the toll that  narcotics has taken on a family. Rory Kennedy reveals family tugs of another ilk in Ethel. Peep into the erstwhile guarded life of Ethel Kennedy  and meet one of the dynasty's private and public personae. Or miss it and lose your peephole...

The charm and challenge of Full Frame is that films are screened only once, typically alongside two or so other choices unspooling at the same time in Durham's downtown theaters. Whether this succeeds in vesting a sense of urgency in each screening -- or in merely vexing Festival-goers -- is a toss up. What's clear is that the public has responded by a run on the box office. And come Sunday, April 15, there's also sure to be a run on the down-home barbecue at FFDFF's annual Awards shindig, where New Docs winners are announced.

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

fullframefest.org

Screening Venues: Carolina Theatre, 309 West Morgan Street

Durham Convention Center, 201 Foster Street

Durham Arts Council, 120 Morris Street

PSI Theater Durham, Central Park 534 Foster Street