Rehoboth Beach Film Festival

		Rehoboth Beach Film Festival 2003 Documentaries BUKOWSKI: BORN INTO THIS The name Bukowski is as synonymous with fighting and f--king as it is with poetry and prose. Charles Bukowski was one of those rare writers whose work succeeded in creating a mythos of epic proportions around its creator. He came to personify the downest and dirtiest of human existence. In a direct, clean style, he wrote about unthinkable, but very real, degradation based on his own personal, hellacious experiences. Best known for Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Love Is a Dog from Hell, and the autobiographical novels, Women, Hollywood, and Post Office, as well as the screenplay for Barfly, Bukowski is considered one of the most influential authors of his generation. His language is simple, powerful, and often graphic. With exceptional insight and skill, he tears away the mask from conventional civilized life to reveal a raw, tragic, sometimes humorous, but often unsettling reality. Bukowski: Born into This brilliantly manages to do this same thing to the man. Utilizing an amazing array of interviews to reveal Bukowski in his own words and as seen by the people who knew him best, the film peels off the hardened mask of the beast to reveal the insecure, loving, and extremely human man underneath. Dir. John Dullaghan, 2002, USA, 35mm, 130 mins. THURSDAY 11/6 8:45 FRIDAY 11/7 4:30 SATURDAY 11/8 4:35 SPONSORS >> 4:35 Cape Gazette
		CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS Family life has always been essentially a private preserve, a world of secrets and closed doors, of guarded relationships and unattractive truths that never see the light of day. Andrew Jarecki's film, Capturing the Friedmans, is such an amazing revelation because it does what the title promises: captures a family on film. It creates a portrait which is complex, ambivalent, and absolutely engrossing because of video. Home movies were limited to recording special events, but the development of home video changed all that and made this film possible. The Friedmans are a seemingly typical, upper-middle-class Jewish family whose world is instantly transformed when the father and his youngest son are arrested and charged with shocking and horrible crimes. Caught up in hysteria and with their Great Neck community in an uproar, the family undergoes a media onslaught. But they shot the really interesting footage themselves. Given access to the family videos, Jarecki constructs his film as an investigation, but our expectations are constantly subverted. The film inquires not just into the life of a family but into a community, a legal system, and an era. By constantly changing perspectives and keeping the audience's judgments and understanding in flux, Capturing the Friedmans embodies the difficulty of capturing the truth. Winner – Grand Jury Prize Best Documenatry at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. Dir. Andrew Jarecki, 2002, USA, 35mm, 107 mins. THURSDAY 11/6 9:10 FRIDAY 11/7 4:35 SUNDAY 11/9 2:55 LOVE AND DIANE "Jennifer Dworkin's compelling documentary immerses you so intensely in the problems of the Hazzards, a troubled New York family living on public assistance, that by the end of its two and a half hours you feel almost like a member of the household… What lifts the movie above many other high-minded documentaries dealing with poverty and the welfare cycle is the filmmaker's astounding empathy for both Diane and Love.” – STEPHEN HOLDEN, NEW YORK TIMES Her name is Love Hazzard, and it would defy the imagination of most dramatists to evoke a better two-word summary of an 'at-risk' family, and the tortured dynamicsthat go along with it; warmth and resentment, innocence and guilt, heaven and hell. Love and her siblings were torn from their mother, Diane, by New York City'ssocial services after a school-age Love informed a teacher about Diane's crack habit. After a decade of separation Diane claims to be clean, sober and prayerful. But the damage is done; Love and Diane are virtual strangers to one another, and at a time when the daughter could use the most support. For the now-adult Love is HIV-positive, and she has passed the virus on to her newborn baby boy Donyaeh. Furthermore, the younger Hazzard suffers from mental illness, and she now claims memories of childhood molestation by Charles, a now-deceased brother whose efforts to lift Diane out of addiction have enshrined him as a household hero. When Diane confides her fears about Love's state of mind to her own counselor,police threaten to put Donyaeh into foster care, unless Love Hazzard can prove to the system her fitness as a parent. It takes a village to raise a child, goes a favorite cliché, but it can take a city to destroy a family, and this one is frighteningly vulnerable. Movies are not commonly made about the people in Love & Diane, the ones barely clinging to the strands of society's so-called safety net, and that makes Jennifer Dworkin's monumental verité documentary so much richer, and more important. Dir. Jennifer Dworkin, 2002, USA, Video, 155 mins. THURSDAY 11/6 12:00 SATURDAY 11/8 3:00 SPONSORS >> 3:00 Teleduction MY FLESH AND BLOOD It takes a special person to adopt a special-needs child. Susan Tom of Fairfield, California, adopted eleven. My Flesh and Blood spends a year in the lives of eleven exceptional children with eleven extraordinary needs and eleven very different life stories – all living under one roof. In director Jonathan Karsh's words, the Tom household "makes THE OSBOURNES look like OZZIE AND HARRIET." This Technicolor family portrait includes the daughter without legs who dates the most popular boy in school, the daughter with severe burns who becomes the top student in her class and the son battling both Cystic Fibrosis and Bipolar Disorder, whose heartbreaking reunion with his biological mother is as jarring as the epithets he slings at his "freaky" sisters. With remarkable and wrenching honesty, My Flesh and Blood asks the tough questions: What motivated Tom to take on this brood? What happens when a single mom finds she can't do it all? Why does government assistance fail to support the adoptive parent? But the inevitable struggles at the Tom house never overshadow the moments of sheer joy and irrepressible laughter. After all, they're just kids. Even through the tragic end of one child's life, the Tom siblings reveal themselves to Karsh with candor and determination so affecting and inspiring, it's impossible not to wonder why we can't all find room in our hearts – and our homes – for children who need both. Winner – Audience Award Beast Documentary 2003 Sundance Film Festival Dir. Jonathan Karsh, 2003, USA, Video, 83 mins. THURSDAY 11/6 9:10 FRIDAY 11/7 12:00 SUNDAY 11/9 4:25 SPONSORS >> 12:00 Cannon Technologies 4:25 Dolphin Dreaming Courtesy of Silverdocs POWER TRIP Power Trip examines the difficulty involved in transitioning from communism to a free-market society by focusing on the struggle for electricity in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. The massive American utility company, AES, comes to Tbilisi to take over Georgia's only existing power company, which was previously owned and operated by the government. At first glance, it seems that the greed of corporate America has once again invaded a small, helpless country just to make a profit. However, it soon becomes clear that AES is sincerely committed to improving the sporadic service and dangerous conditions of the former corrupt suppliers, even in the face of losing $120,000 per day. AES manager Piers Lewis, who has lived in Tbilisi for six years, has the unpleasant task of teaching his neighbors that in the new free world; customers must pay for their electricity, which in Tbilisi often amounts to two weeks' pay. He graciously tries to work with his customers, all the while keeping a strict policy of "no money, no power," and he is forced to balance his love for the Georgian people with the hardships his company will create for them. Through his many trips to the region, director Paul Devlin constructs a complex tale involving assassinations, public demonstrations and shady, politically motivated blackouts. Without Devlin's camera documenting the rocky transition, no one would have believed the corruption behind the scenes when the lights went out in Georgia. Dir. Paul Devlin, 2003, USA/Republic of Georgia, Video, 85 mins. / In English and Georgian with English subtitles. THURSDAY 11/6 5:15 FRIDAY 11/7 3:50 SATURDAY 11/8 6:20 Producer Claire Missannelli is scheduled to attend. DOCUMENTARY SHORTS: THE FOLLOWING SHORT SUBJECT DOCUMENTARIES BRING US UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH PEOPLE, PLACES AND THINGS. TAKING AIM AT SUBJECTS INCLUDING AIDS ORPHANS IN KENYA, TRANSGENDER PEOPLE, A DREAMSCAPE ON THE SEASHORE AND A BALTIMORE GROUP UNITING LOCAL ARTISTS WITH ITS OWN COMMUNITY, THESE SHORTS WILL ENRICH OUR LIVES THROUGH BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE. TOTAL RUNNING TIME 83 MINS. CORONA Not a story film, but rather a surreal sleepwalk or dreamscape memoir which reconstructs the filmmaker’s childhood and coming of age pilgrimages to the seashore. The sound impressions, music, geography, visual metaphors and narration embrace places of familial epiphany in an effort to reframe a lost place and time. Corona is an intimate film about a mother who would initiate late-night journeys to the shore in hopes of soothing her turbulent soul. She was drawn to the pious seaside community of Ocean Grove where Billy Graham preached and promised spiritual revival and redemption. But the guilty, innocent pleasures of the nearby Asbury Park boardwalk, with its neon attractions, greasy burgers and fries mingling with the sea air could overwhelm Graham’s fiery born-again rhetoric. Dir. John Columbus, 2002, USA, Video, 9 mins. FLUID MOVEMENT Age, body type and fitness are of no obvious relevance in the casting of this French-inspired synchronized swimming event extraordinaire and neither is the ability to swim, as long as everyone has the desire to improvise and collaborate creatively with their neighbors, literally. Fluid Movement follows an eccentric yet sincere group of Baltimoreans through the hilarious process of developing an amateur water ballet in an urban park pool. You will meet the “artists”, the neighborhood people who range from a wise old Ukranian woman to the dry-humored (yet game for anything) pool manager, and a community organizerwho offers cogent theories of modern performance art while dressed in an artificial lei and a funny hat. They have all come together in a valiant effort to take back the declining park. From the community auditions to the pening night, you desperately want to laugh at these folks but realize soon enough that they beat you to it. Dir. Beth Pacunas, 2003, USA, Video, 23 mins. LEFT BEHIND Winner of a student Academy Award and a College Emmy, the film was produced and directed by Washington DC resident Christof Putzel. Left Behind is a documentary that reveals the devastating effects of AIDS on Kenya's children by exploring the lives of HIV-positive orphans at Nyumbani Children's Home; why the virus spreads in the poverty-ridden slum of Kibera; and the struggle for survival of homeless children in nearby Dagoretti who lost their parents to AIDS. Through the eyes and voices of the children themselves, as well as prostitutes, slum dwellers and those infected with HIV, Left Behind dramatically exposes the enormity of the challenge that faces all those who seek to help the victims and prevent the collapse of a continent. Dir. Christof Putzel, 2002, Video, 34 mins. / In English, Swahili and Kikukyo with English subtitles. XX TO XY: FIGHTING TO BE JAKE The film is a documentary about Jake, who was born female, but since his early childhood, felt there had been a genetic mistake: he was a boy. XX to XY is an intimate portrait using interviews, music, and animation, about an individual’s courage to stand up against society, the medical system, mother nature and his own fears. Jake is ready to fight to change his gender however difficult it may be and whatever consequences he may encounter. He’ll do anything to become the man he has always thought he should have been born as. Dir.Emily Atef, 2003, Germany, Video, 20 Mins. / In English. FRIDAY 11/7 6:00 SATURDAY 11/8 4:40 SPONSOR >> 4:40 Atlantic Sands Director, Christoif Putzel (Left Behind) and Producer David Beaudouin (Fluid Movement) are scheduled to attend.