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11.16.03 High Falls Film Festival
 Renaissance Parc 55
Hotel, San Francisco The
UNAFF was inspirational and overwhelming. Sitting
though 5 hours of films at a stretch took stamina, but I thought of it
like a college seminar in independent filmmaking. When I came home, I
noticed that Rochester's own
High Falls Film Festival was about to take
place. It is in its third year, geared especially toward women
filmmakers, and I noticed that many of the films were documentaries like
the ones we saw at Stanford. So I went out and got the two of us
all-access passes.
The nice thing about HF3 is that its directors took pains to set up
panel discussions and opportunities for film groupies to interact with
the filmmakers. Out of this I pulled several themes that I found
affirming -- that suggested I may be on the right track with my
directions and decisions so far.
1. The more personal a story is, the more universal it is and the
more other people engage with it. I realized this when Venora asked me to try
a video for diversity training. My options were what I am now thinking
of as a video Power Point presentation -- expositional bullets shot at
the viewer -- or my tiny personal story. I definitely made the right
choice. But apparently "the personal" doesn't have to be
autobiographical but it needs to have a personal voice and a
subjective story. ("Discovering Dominga" followed an adopted woman back
to find her family in Guatemala -- not autobiographical, but very
subjectively told.)
2. The intensely personal is painful. It's difficult to expose all that
raw emotion and to mold it into a technically refined product. This risk
must raise constant choices about how far to lean into that emotion and
how to resist pulling back. It takes courage to keep opening the doors.
"My
Architect: A Son's Journey" was Nathaniel Kahn's search for the man
behind his famous father Louis Kahn, but the quest seemed just as
personal and wrenching for his producer Susan Rose Behr.
3. Telling an intensely personal story requires "inwardness"
on the part
of the filmmaker, which is not comfortable and certainly not easy. I've
experienced that, even with the micro-productions I've been involved
with. The final story comes from within. It can be pulled out, but only
if you sit still and stare into it for long enough -- without
distraction.
4. Finally, there seems to be some agreement among the documentarians
that these personal stories are more than a personal working out of
issues -- the can be a means for social change or at least for building
social awareness. "Discovering Dominga" explores the highs and lows of
one woman's quest to discover her roots but also reveals some murderous
Guatemalan history. But the personal story is what is so engaging and
what what opens your mind to the larger, more abstract issues of
cruelty, injustice, family conflict, etc. |