The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, now entering its seventh year, is feeling the ground shifting beneath its feet. The object of its adoration is no longer ghettoized, if not quite upgraded to Beverly Hills, and the form is becoming an increasingly visible and viable commercial medium. Furthermore, as documentaries become more popular, the very […]
David Fellerath
Bio: David Fellerath is INDY Week's culture and sports editor.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/dfellerath
Posted inGuides
Dawn of the docs
They’re coming. Banished from the mainstream media, left to their own expressive devices, bearers of important, urgent or at least fascinating truths about the awesome beast called humanity, they’re the documentary makers. And, given the disparity between the awesome size of their subjects and the paltry means at their disposal, they’re totally insane. Delusional, on […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Southbound, hellbound
Viewers encountering What Alice Found might be forgiven for sniffing at its first few minutes as we see ungainly digital video images of an unknown actress driving on the interstate in a montage sequence that could be someone’s home movie footage of making that first trip to college. But this second feature from writer/director Dean […]
Posted inNews
Still pumping
If recent events in California are any indication, not all documentaries work in the service of progressive political causes. The classic doc Pumping Iron, released in 1977, made a star out of ambitious muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger and ushered in the era of gym membership and personal training that remains with us today. Schwarzenegger acquired the […]
Posted inFilm & Television
FilmBeat
Last month, 28-year-old filmmaker Ben Coccio sat in a tent in Hollywood for the little league Oscar-eve ceremony called the Independent Spirit Awards. He was up for a best newcomer award, which would go instead to a different young director. If Coccio, the writer and director of the remarkable, zero-budget Zero Day, was irritated by […]
Posted inFilm & Television
History’s nightmares
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the new Charlie Kaufman-scripted romance (let us say), is perhaps a movie that might be best served by the viewer empowerment features of the DVD format. This isn’t a put-down; rather, it’s a testament to the power and interest of this manic story of two lovers fighting attempts to […]
Posted inNews
In words and visions
The Sonja Haynes Stone Center on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus will celebrate its founding and namesake with the 10th Annual Stone Memorial Lecture. At 7 p.m on Tuesday, March 16 in the Tate-Turner Kuralt Auditorium, Gay McDougall, executive director of Global Rights: Partners for Justice, will give an address entitled “Race and Poverty: Critical Frontiers […]
Posted inNews
Just browsing
It was a warm evening last Thursday night. I was sitting on a bench outside Quail Ridge Bookshop in Raleigh, fiddling idly with the mystifying array of functions on my new cell phone, when a blue Ford Expedition pulled into a parking space in front of me. Already overcome with the blissful languor of a […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Band of insiders
Long, long ago there was an electrifyingly talented filmmaker who made movies that were poised on a unique nexus of sex, politics and pure cinema. His name was Bernardo Bertolucci. In 1964, his second feature, Before the Revolution, appeared; it was an intoxicating, boldly romantic adaptation of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. A personal favorite […]
Posted inNews
In worldly reads
In an age when many novelists have retreated into the private realms of sense and memory, it’s refreshing to find a writer who grapples with the intricate operations of our unfathomably immense and complex global economy. The young, multi-talented British writer Robert Newman is one such writer and his latest novel is The Fountain at […]
