Documentary Happening

CDS > Events > Documentary Happening

	2007 Documentary Happening Call for Submissions 2007 Documentary Happening Institute Highlights from Past Happenings
	THE DOCUMENTARY HAPPENING HAS BEEN RENAMED THE DOCUARTS INSTITUTE. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE FEBRUARY 7–10, 2008 DOCUARTS INSTITUTE. 2007 Documentary Happening Eleventh Annual Documentary Happening January 31–February 4, 2007 GUEST ARTISTS: Judith Helfand & George Stoney (video) Barrett Golding (audio) Registration (Full Event): $50 Individual Sessions: $5 Evening Presentations: January 31–February 3 Daytime Events: February 2–4 REGISTRATION/TICKET SALES Available 1 HOUR Before Events & ALL DAY Saturday at Richard White Lecture Hall, East Campus, Duke University The Happening, presented by the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University with support from the Duke Program in Film/Video/Digital, is a community festival where documentary artists come together to see and discuss work, to learn and be inspired. Welcoming work by first-time audio, video, and multimedia documentarians and by more experienced artists, the Happening presents creative work that is exciting, innovative, and a pleasure to experience. For people already familiar with CDS, the Happening is a wonderful weekend of celebrating connections and each other’s work; for newcomers, it’s an opportunity to be welcomed into an open and friendly environment, and to learn more about CDS programs. FOR DIRECTIONS TO CDS: http://cds.aas.duke.edu/about/here.html FOR DIRECTIONS TO RICHARD WHITE LECTURE HALL: http://www.duke.edu/web/film/directions/Direast.html EVENING EVENTS Wednesday, January 31 Reception: 6–7 p.m., Center for Documentary Studies Screening: 7:30 p.m., Richard White Lecture Hall, East Campus, Duke University ROCATERRANIA Directed by Brett Ingram [This event is also the Fresh Docs: Work in Progress session for January.] Rocaterrania is a feature-length documentary portrait (work in progress) of scientific illustrator and visionary artist Renaldo Kuhler. In the past forty years Kuhler, now seventy-five, has created hundreds of plates for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, illustrating diverse flora and fauna for obscure scientific journals and reference books. The only son of Otto Kuhler, the legendary industrial designer of steam engines such as the 1937 Hiawatha, Renaldo grew up in the immense shadow of his father and struggled to affirm his own identity as an artist. Like many German immigrants, Otto Kuhler romanticized the Old American West. When he fulfilled a lifelong dream by moving his family from upstate New York to a remote cattle ranch in Colorado in 1948, teenager Renaldo found the isolation unbearable and retreated to the private fantasy world of his notebooks. What began as the illustrated history of an imaginary country called Rocaterrania became Renaldo’s secret lifelong obsession—the sublimated telling of his own life story. BRETT INGRAM Formerly an electrical engineer on the Space Shuttle Main Engine Program, Brett Ingram exchanged his pocket protector for a movie camera in 1990. His short documentaries and animated films have won thirty awards collectively and have screened at more than 150 festivals and cinema venues internationally. Ingram’s first documentary feature, Monster Road, won sixteen awards (including “Best Documentary” at the 2004 Slamdance Film Festival) and screened at more than eighty festivals and cinema venues internationally before premiering on the Sundance Channel in 2005. Ingram has twice been awarded a Film and Video Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council. He teaches filmmaking in the Department of Broadcasting and Cinema at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Thursday, February 1, 7:30 p.m. THE UPRISING OF ’34 (1995, 90 min) Followed by a conversation with Judith Helfand and George Stoney Richard White Lecture Hall, East Campus, Duke University The General Textile Strike of 1934, barely publicized and rarely acknowledged in history books, remains a stirring yet amazingly forgotten chapter in Southern history. The Uprising of ’34, a film by George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock, examines this hidden legacy of the labor movement in the South and its impact today. In 1934, Southern textile workers took the lead in a nationwide strike in which half a million people walked off their jobs—the largest single-industry strike in the history of the United States. For a time these new union members, in response to New Deal legislation, stood up for their rights and became a force to be reckoned with in the South. Then management moved in and crushed the strike. Some mill workers were murdered, thousands more were blacklisted, and many were so intimidated that “union” became a dirty word in Southern communities for decades to come. The Uprising of ’34 is “meant to challenge the myths that Southern workers can’t be organized, that they will work for nothing, and that they hate unions,” says Stoney. More than a social document, the film is intended to spark discussion on class, race, economics, and power—issues as vital today as they were seventy years ago. “This is more than a story about a strike; it’s a story about community. We went out of our way to make sure that we didn’t make a ‘which side are you on’ film,” says Helfand. “The thrust of this film is to give the workers their chance to speak.” GEORGE C. STONEY & JUDITH HELFAND George Stoney is a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with a passionate interest in the history and culture of the South. He has written, directed, and produced more than fifty documentary films, videos, and television series, including the Emmy Award–winning We Shall Overcome and The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time (both co-produced by Jim Brown), How the Myth Was Made, and the classic All My Babies, about African American midwives in Georgia. Stoney has been a professor of film and television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts since 1970. An innovator in the art of community-based film and video, he is an internationally respected media educator. Stoney’s community-based approach to filmmaking significantly influenced the career of Judith Helfand, who defines herself as a filmmaker/organizer and has worked as a documentary producer and educator for the past ten years. Her film A Healthy Baby Girl, which had its broadcast premiere on P.O.V., was in competition at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and received a Peabody Award for Excellence in Journalism and Public Education. Blue Vinyl, the 2002 “toxic comedy” directed and produced with Daniel Gold, was broadcast nationally on the HBO series America Undercover. Accolades include the 2002 Excellence in Cinematography Award, an IDA nomination for Best Documentary, a Nice Modernist award from Dwell magazine, the 2002 Environmental Messenger of the Year award from the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a 2002 EPIC Award from the White House Project, and recent Emmy nominations. She and her filmmaking partner Daniel Gold will be premiering their most recent documentary, on human nature and global warming titled Everything’s Cool, at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Helfand also co-founded Working Films, a nationally recognized organization dedicated to leveraging the power and prestige of documentary to promote economic, social, and environmental justice. She is a full-time professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Department of Undergraduate Film and Television. Friday, February 2, 7:30 p.m. DO YOU HEAR VOICES? An Audio Road Trip with Barrett Golding Richard White Lecture Hall, East Campus, Duke University Experience some short sonic conjurings from HearingVoices.com and other radio projections exploring the Black Audio Arts of Juxtaposition, Voxpop, Manipulation, Montage, Storytelling, and Found-Sound. A little talk and a lot of radio stories that’ll change your life, or at least make your night. BARRETT GOLDING Barrett Golding has been an independent audio producer since 1983. His work has been broadcast by NPR, PRI, BBC, CBC, VOA, and CBS, including on Lost & Found Sound, All Things Considered, CBS Radio's The Osgood Files, and NPR’s The DNA Files w/ John Hockenberry, Morning Edition, Marketplace, Weekend America, Day to Day SoundPrint, and This American Life. He has won numerous awards, including ones from the Scripps Howard Foundation, the American Bar Association, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and the Montana Broadcasters Association. Golding is executive producer of the HearingVoices.com radio project. From 1987 to 1992, he was a member of the radio comedy troupe No One You Know, heard on the Olympia Comedy Network, a network of five hundred commercial stations. He is also a Web site designer and creative director of the Dreamwaves project. Saturday, February 3, 7:30 p.m. THOSE WHO CAN, TEACH CDS Continuing Studies Documentary Artists/Teachers Present Their Work Richard White Lecture Hall, East Campus, Duke University This presentation features the talents and perspectives of a sampling of the many fine instructors in the CDS Certificate in Documentary Studies program. Throughout the year in conjunction with Duke Continuing Studies, CDS offers courses, institutes, and workshops for adults who are interested in learning to do their own documentary work. Courses involve instruction in photography, film and video, audio, and writing and include such topics as documentary traditions, techniques, fieldwork, theory, and ethics involved in conducting and presenting fieldwork. For this evening, the spotlight is on the instructors’ work; it’s a great chance to see what those who teach you can do, and to consider what classes you want to take next. DOCUMENTARY HAPPENING DAYTIME EVENTS Saturday and Sunday, February 3–4 SATURDAY All Saturday events will be held in the Richard White Lecture Hall, East Campus, Duke University. REGISTRATION BEGINS at 8 a.m. 9–10:30 a.m. DOCUMETING “THE OTHER” with George Stoney In this seminar, George Stoney will explore the implications of documenting “the other” through examples of placing marginalized individuals on screen with positive effect. Stoney will present examples from a selection of his documentaries, including Walk with Me (1960), The Newcomers (1961), How One Painter Sees (1985), and Coping with Difficulty (1992). 10:30–11 a.m. BREAK 11 a.m.–1 p.m. “GURU” SESSIONS Happening submissions curated and discussed by Judith Helfand (video), Karen Michel (audio), and MJ Sharp (photo) 1–2 p.m. LUNCH 2–3:30 p.m. YOUTH NOISE ACROSS THE COUNTRY Members of Youth Noise Network, the in-house youth radio project at CDS, take us on a sonic tour of youth-produced radio from across the nation. Learn what’s going on in the world of youth radio and what makes youth-produced work unique. 3:30–4 p.m. COOKIE BREAK! 4–5:30 p.m. HEARING VOICES Barrett Golding The weird wide world or radio works: a presentation of the possibilities of radio production, with examples from both young media mixologists and some of us ancient audio alchemists. SUNDAY 10:00 a.m., Bagels 10:30 a.m.–12 p.m., Presentation BAGELS AND BUCKS Held at the Center for Documentary Studies Presented by the Southern Documentary Fund (SDF) The Southern Documentary Fund brings successful fundraisers together to help you think about how to raise your first funds; we’ll also discuss how to break through to substantial amounts of money for larger projects. As always, SDF presents honest talk and helpful examples about the wild world of raising funds to support your important work. In 2002 a group of North Carolina–based media artists and their supporters came together to create the Southern Documentary Fund (SDF), whose primary goal is to serve as fiscal sponsor for independent documentary projects produced within or about the American South. In addition to fiscal sponsorship, one of the organization’s long-term objectives is to provide documentary artists with access to resources that will assist them in the production of their media projects. SDF is committed to helping independent documentary artists produce work in sound, writing, film and video, photography, and interactive media. Working with SDF members, the organization seeks to connect regional resources in order to increase visibility and expand audiences for documentary projects. For more information, see http://southerndocumentaryfund.org/. 2 p.m. ALL MY BABIES Screening with George Stoney Richard White Lecture Hall, East Campus, Duke University This beautiful film is the story of “Miss Mary” Coley, an African American midwife in rural Georgia more than half a century ago. Conceived as a demonstration film for illiterate “granny” midwives—produced by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Georgia Department of Public Health—All My Babies quickly transcended its initial purpose. The film has been used around the world by UNESCO and has become an enduring nonfiction classic. Written, produced, and directed by George C. Stoney in collaboration with Mrs. Coley as well as with local public health doctors and nurses, the film shows the preparation for and home delivery of healthy babies in both relatively good and bad rural conditions among black families in the 1950s. In addition, the film is both a deeply respectful portrait of “Miss Mary,” who is revealed as an inspiring human being, and a record of the living conditions of her patients. All My Babies was selected in 2002 by the Librarian of Congress as a "culturally, historically, and artistically significant work" for permanent preservation in the National Film Registry. banner image: Illustration by Keith Norval top