Congrats! 1st IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling goes to HIGHRISE/Out My Window, Katerina Cizek (dir)

IDFA Opener “Position Among the Stars” Takes Top Festival Prize
Photo by Brian Brooks/indieWIRE

Leonard Retel Helmrich’s “Stand van de Sterren” (Position Among the Stars) won both the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary and the Dioraphte IDFA Award for Dutch Documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) Friday, which includes a €12,500 prize. This is the first time ever that a director has won the award for feature-length documentary twice at IDFA - Retel Helmrich also won in 2004 with “The Shape of the Moon.”

The film, which opened IDFA last week, is the final part of a trilogy that views modern Indonesia through the eyes of a grandmother, Rumidjah. Through her vantage point in the slums of Jakarta, the changing economy and globalization are reflected in the life of her juvenile graddaughter, Tari, and her sons, Bakti and Dwi.

Taking home a special prize was Luc Coté and Patricio Henriquez for “You Don’t Like the Truth – 4 Days inside Guantánamo” (Canada). The film revolves around the case of Omar Khadr, who was incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay at the age of sixteen and is based on recordings of his interrogation. Boris Gerrets, meanwhile, received the NTR IDFA Award for Best Mid-Length Documentary (€10,000) for “People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am” (the Netherlands), in which the director attempts to break through the anonymity of the big city by filming conversations with strangers on the streets of London with his mobile phone.

A scene from Leonard Retel Helmrich’s “Stand van de Sterren” (Position Among the Stars). Image courtesy of IDFA.

Kano: An American and His Harem” (the Philippines) by Monster Jiminez received the €5,000 IDFA Award for First Appearance award. The film centers on an American who assembled a harem for himself in the Philippines and is now in prison for rape, though his many wives stick by him.

In other prizes, the Publieke Omroep IDFA Audience Award went to Lucy Walker’s “Waste Land” (€5,000) (UK/Brazil), about art photographer Vik Muniz, who is making a series of photographs of refuse scavengers at the world’s biggest refuse dump, in Rio de Janeiro.

Eva Küpper received the IDFA Award for Student Documentary for “What’s in a Name” (Belgium). The film is about New York body art performer Jon Cory and his sexual ambivalence: explicit performances he calls “gender terrorism.”

The Hyves IDFA DOC U Award, the €1,500 award granted by a separate youth jury, went to “Autumn Gold”  by Jan Tenhaven (Germany/Austria). The film follows five extremely aged athletes preparing for a competition in Finland.

The first ever IDFA Award for Best Green Screen Documentary (€2,500) went to “Into Eternity” (Denmark/Sweden/Finland) by Michael Madsen. The film is an existential message for future generations about Onkalo, a depot deep below the rocky ground, where Finnish nuclear waste is to be permanently stored.

The jury also gave an honorable mention to “The Pipe” (Ireland) by Risteard Ó Domhnaill about resistance by local activists on the Irish west coast to the construction of a gas pipe line by multinational Shell.

Finally, for the first time, IDFA’s DocLab also inaugurated an award - the IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling went to “HIGHRISE/Out My Window” (Canada) by Katerina Cizek. The project utilizes 360-degree image technology to portrays apartments and their inhabitants in cities around the world.

IDFA continues through Sunday, though it estimates its attendance increased by about 15,000 to 180,000 from 165,000 compared to 2009. IDFA released its estimated earnings this year, saying their intake went from €750,000 in 2009 to €850,000 this year. The number of Dutch and international guests increased in relation to 2009: to 2,477 from 2,295.

Love this project: Rio favela painting itself out of a corner

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Excerpt from the article on artreview.com :

"Creating imagery to counter the steady stream of negative coverage is one of the ambitions of Haas & Hahn's Favela Painting project, which they launched in 2006 with some funding from the Dutch Ministry of Culture. Rio Cruzeiro follows the project's first act, The boy with the kite, a mural in the centre of Vila Cruzeiro on the side of a building that became the neighorhood's first art gallery. The inspiration for the project came in 2005 when Haas & Hahn (their name is derived from the last syllables of Koolhaas & Urhahn) first came to Rio to make Firmeza Total, a short documentary commissioned by MTV on the role of hip hop in the lives of favela youth. Struck by the disconnect between these neighorhoods and the city that surrounds them, Haas & Hahn started imagining ways to encourage the citizens of Rio to take a second look at one of their city's defining features.

"If you want to build a bridge between these two sides of the city that live side by side but have an enormous gap between them," Urhan tells me later, "the easiest way is to do it through some sort of art intervention." Koolhaas adds: "We tried to find a way for the [residents'] sense of pride to be painted on the walls of the favela so that the outside world could see how good they feel about themselves and could understand that there are families here that can take care of themselves."

Amazing project - artists paint murals in Rio: Favela Painting

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From the site:

"Our Latest Work On Praça Cantão In Santa Marta

On the 29th of march we finished work on the latest Favela Painting and our first part of 'O Morro': Praça Cantão. The central square at the foot of the community of Santa Marta, a favela in the heart of Rio de Janeiro.

You can find information and Images about this and our earlier work on this site."

Great production story - read!: Monsters: the bedroom blockbuster that's the anti-Avatar

Monsters Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able have to cross an infected zone peopled by aliens in Gareth Edwards's Monsters.

This time last year, the film world was raving about how Avatar was going to "change the game" (even that expression feels so 2009), but it could turn out we were looking in the wrong direction. For sure, Avatar has changed the movie landscape: without it, we'd never have had such 3D delights as The Last Airbender, Resident Evil: Afterlife and Garfield's Pet Force. But perhaps the industry should have been looking harder – and worrying more – about Monsters.

  1. Monsters
  2. Production year: 2010
  3. Country: UK
  4. Cert (UK): 12A
  5. Runtime: 94 mins
  6. Directors: Gareth Edwards
  7. Cast: Scoot McNairy, Whitney Able
  8. More on this film

Directed by 35-year-old Brit Gareth Edwards, this is another credible alien sci-fi movie. But instead of Avatar's blue cheese, it servers up hipster indie vibes and, despite the title, offers a genuine alternative to your standard monster-movie fare. What's really striking about Monsters, though, is that the entire film was put together using standard equipment and off-the-shelf computer software, for around half-a-million dollars – which is probably less than James Cameron's on-set beard technologist gets.

"The history of cinema has always been an industrial process where you needed hundreds of people to make a movie, and that's just not true any more," says Edwards. "Now you can just do it with a handful." At least, you can if you're a multi-tasking maverick like Edwards, who's officially Monsters' director, writer, cinematographer, production designer and visual effects supervisor. The latter is the key: he wasn't actually supervising anyone; he did all the effects himself in his bedroom.

But without 10 years' experience doing effects for TV, Edwards would never have been able to envisage doing a movie like Monsters. It was also seeing the inefficiency of the studio process that inspired him. "Sometimes you'd have 100 people on the set and you'd ask, 'Can we do this? Can we do that?' And they'd say, 'No, we can't, because we'd have to move all these people. It's too expensive and it would take too long.' That felt very back to front: to be told you can't do something because you're spending too much money. Shouldn't it be the other way round?"

But the story of how Edwards made Monsters is destined to be retold more than the story of the movie itself. It's set in the near future, six years after a crashed space probe resulted in an "infected zone" between Mexico and the US. Our heroes, a world-weary freelance photographer (Scoot McNairy) and his boss's daughter (Whitney Able), must cross this aggressively quarantined zone to get back to the US. The aliens that lurk there – sort of giant walking octopuses – are rarely shown, but their presence is continually implied by ruined ships and aircraft (strewn like toys across derelict landscapes), giant border walls, patrolled fences, and huge warning signs everywhere telling people to stay the hell away.

"I was about to try and do a 'Blair Witch meets War Of The Worlds', shooting it all on a video camera," Edwards explains, "and then the Cloverfield trailer came out, and I thought, 'Oh. Damn. Right, can't do that, then ..."

'We grabbed people in the street and asked if they wanted to be in the film. It was very guerrilla, really'

Monsters Whitney

If Cloverfield is like 9/11, then Monsters is more present-day Afghanistan, he says. "It's years later, no one cares, it's the other side of the world and it's somebody else's problem." And instead of Cloverfield's disaster-movie dynamics, Monsters gives you more of a low-key indie road romance. Something like Before Sunrise meets District 9, or maybe Predators meets In Search Of A Midnight Kiss (which, coincidentally, also starred McNairy).

Most of the film was shot with a crew of just four: Edwards behind the camera, a sound man, a line producer and his Spanish-speaking equivalent. And they basically made it up as they went along, driving through Central America in a van with the actors. They'd ask around for any out-of-the-ordinary, post-apocalyptic-looking stuff nearby, then jump out, shoot a scene (improvised, of course) and move on, editing on a laptop in hotels at night. "We had a rough plan but most of the time when we turned up, it was the first time we'd ever been there. We grabbed people in the street and asked if they wanted to be in the film. It was very guerrilla, really." When they got back home, Edwards added in the monsters, the signs, the barricades, the crashed planes, the ruined buildings … In fact, the whole sci-fi element was added retrospectively in his bedroom.

It sounds like every aspiring film-maker's dream, a sort of gap-year backpacking holiday with a movie shoot thrown in. Edwards doesn't remember it like that, though. On top of hazardous local conditions, illnesses, back pains and other hardships, it was endless stress and pressure and exhaustion. "I sit and watch the film now," he says, "and I think, 'That looks like an adventure. I wish I'd gone on that trip. And then I realise, 'Oh yeah. I did. It was horrible.'"

That probably won't put people off following Edwards's example; after all, there's more processing power in a decent PC now than it took to make, say, Jurassic Park. Indeed, Edwards made Monsters using Adobe's After Effects software, a widely available cousin of Photoshop. Finding no plug-in for alien tentacles, he adapted a program that models rope. The CGI planes and cars you see were all bought off the internet, like real props.

To misquote Jean-Luc Godard, all you need to make a movie is a girl and laptop, right? Perhaps. But it might take more than a splurge in Dixons, warns Edwards. "When I first bought a computer in 1997, I thought, 'I'll learn this software and a few months later I'll make a movie.' It took me nearly a decade to get good enough at it," he says modestly.

'Anyone who says they know what's going to happen in film-making is lying, but it's definitely changing'

Monsters Scoot

And he's right to be cautious. He's not the only one doing this: visual effects expertise is now a regular route to the director's chair. There's the Brothers Strause, owners of California effects house Hydraulx, who directed Alien Vs Predator: Requiem and current alien-invasion flick Skyline. There's Scott Charles Stewart, who contributed effects to the Harry Potter and Pirates Of The Caribbean franchises and also directed this year's Legion (the one with Paul Bettany as an angel) and the forthcoming Priest (the one with Paul Bettany as, er, a priest). And, most notably, there's South Africa's Neill Blomkamp, who also spent 10 years doing CGI before striking gold with District 9 (like Monsters, District 9 put special effects where we weren't used to seeing them).

Now, the danger is, with effects people wagging the dog, you'll tend to get a certain type of movie out of it. Effects-centric directors don't make costume dramas or romcoms. For every District 9, there are a dozen examples of the type of mindless, bludgeoning sci-fi epic we've all grown heartily sick of, like Skyline, which boasts A-grade special effects but a depressingly mindless script. Monsters, too, has its weaknesses – its "aliens and indigenous folks = good; US military = bad" motif is really not so far removed from Avatar's – but it at least does something fresh, story-wise as well as budget-wise.

For his next mission, Edwards has teamed up with Russian effects ace Timur Bekmambetov, of Night Watch and Wanted fame, to make something more ambitious and bigger budget, but incorporating his guerrilla approach. In the meantime, if Monsters does well, the cash-strapped studios will doubtless wonder if they're not better off getting 500 films like it for the same price as one Avatar.

"Anyone who says they know what's going to happen in film-making is lying, but it's definitely changing," says Edwards. "It reminds me of that era when people like Spielberg and Scorsese turned up, when the studios didn't understand this new young audience and all those people got a chance to play and make artistic films.

"No one's too sure what the future's going to be," he continues. "So if you can grab a camera and tell a story, there's a good chance you can do something. In the chaos, there's always opportunity."

The Endless Mural: interactive collaborative art project - you and the world play -

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Arcade Fire: 'We're not a band that's out to party until we die' | Music | The Observer

Arcade Fire Arcade Fire: 'the first rock group in a long time that have dared to be so unashamedly uplifting, to shun irony'. Photograph: Eric Kayne/http://erickayne.com

In a concrete room backstage at the Palau Sant Jordi arena in Barcelona, I am midway though a post-show interview with Arcade Fire's unfeasibly tall, quietly charismatic lead singer, Win Butler, when the door opens and his bandmate, Richard Reed Parry, enters. He roots around in a cupboard for a few moments, then exits again, having found what he was looking for – a yoga mat.

It strikes me later that this may be a small, but revealing, indication of a bigger pop-cultural shift that Arcade Fire exemplify: an illustration of just how far rock music has travelled from its rebellious roots, how much it has shed the emotional baggage – the angst, the self-destructive habits, the dissolute lifestyle – that once defined it. Suffice to say that there was a time, not that long ago, when yoga would not have been the preferred means of post-gig relaxation for a hip young rock star, but, my, how times have changed.

"The cliched rock life never seemed that cool to me," says Butler, who, as we chat, is eating brown rice salad from a small plastic container and sipping on a throat-soothing brandy. "We're not a band that's out to party until we die every night. We did a lot of shows with a lot of bands that were living that dream, but it's a dream I never bought into. It never seemed that fun. In fact, it was always kind of embarrassing to me. That isn't what I think is cool about rock."

In case you have not noticed, Arcade Fire – a multi-instrumental, mixed gender, seven-piece indie-rock group from the very un-rock'n'roll city of Montreal, Canada – are what is most cool about rock right now. The group's debut album, Funeral, was released in 2004 on the small independent label Merge Records. Initially championed by influential American music websites such as Pitchfork, it became one of the most critically lauded albums of the year, selling more than half a million copies globally.

read the full article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/28/arcade-fire-interview-sean-ohagan#