Inside Full Frame: Part One

Facets' Amy Boyd presents a five-part series on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which ran from April 8-11 in Durham, North Carolina.


The daffodils have waned here in the North Carolina Piedmont but everything else is draped in yellow--cars, mailboxes, lawn chairs all covered in an immobile blanket of pollen. It’s bright and sunny, warm and casual in the courtyard in front of the historic Carolina Theatre in downtown Durham as a Hawaiian shirt clad fiddler mingles over lunchers, a camera team conferences and a policeman casually checks his cell phone as it charges near the catering staff’s cache of wine bottles and extra gas tanks.

I walk up the hill past the convention center to a town square where two children play and a woman stands behind a lone Rastafarian jewelry stand selling clothes and trinkets from Africa and beyond. It’s so open and so quiet you can just make out the clicking of the stoplight above the empty intersection. It seems like everyone must be at the movies!

I grew up in this region though I live in Chicago now. Being a native North Carolinian as well as a fan of and worker in the industry of documentary films, I jumped at the chance to cover the 13th Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Getting settled in for four days of non-stop documentaries, I spot Gordon Quinn, Artistic Director and co-founder of Kartemquin Films, Chicago filmmakers since 1966, in the lobby of the main theatre. He and Julia Reichert, co-founding member of New Day Films, a filmmakers’ collective and distributor since 1971, indulge me in a chat over their dinner in the filmmakers’ lounge where they are, regrettably, out of cake.

Quinn recalls his first film job, working as a grip for a company out of Washington, D.C., making an internal safety film for employees at a British tobacco company right here in Durham. He calls the Full Frame Fest “very American” and as I casually twist the wooden ring from Kenya via Appalachia that I just bought in the square up the street, I would have to agree.

We talk about ethics in documentary filmmaking, standing in your subjects’ shoes and staying out of the way of the film. These filmmakers demonstrate artistry and have achieved credibility through respecting their subjects and avoiding cheap shots that some filmmakers use to sensational effect, but which in the end only serve to undermine the films and the genre.

In Joanna Rudnick’s film, In the Family (2008; Kartemquin Films), we learn about the hereditary gene which causes breast and ovarian cancer from survivors, potential carriers and the genetic testing companies themselves. That the long-running television news magazine, 60 Minutes, turned to Kartemquin to license behind-the-scenes footage because their television crew was not allowed into the genome lab is a testament to the trust earned by these filmmakers. They have helped set the bar high for new and veteran filmmakers alike, both celebrated at Full Frame.

There are 98 press people covering 101 films screening over four days at Full Frame with practically every corner of the globe represented. There are four different programs (Thematic, New Docs, Career Award and Invited Programming) running over the course of the long weekend on four or so different screens including free movies in the park for local residents.

Most of the action is centered in the Carolina Theatre, which was the first theatre in Durham to admit people of color in 1926. The main screening room accommodates over 1,000 people and has two balconies. It’s easy to picture Will Rogers, Katherine Hepburn, Tallulah Bankhead and famed African-American opera singer, Marian Anderson performing on the stage below in the Twenties and Thirties. During the Sixties, the theatre provided a tolerant and welcoming harbor for civil rights activists in Durham. I can’t imagine a better place to examine and celebrate the history, present and future force of documentary filmmaking.

The Thematic Program is a diverse and deeply moving group of previously screened or previously released films dealing with this year’s theme of ‘work and labor’ which is, of course, a concern during these trying economic times. Sitting down for one of these double features, we’re taken into the coal mines of 1970s Kentucky in Coal Miner: Frank Jackson (1971), a 12-minute, black and white portrait film from the long running Appalachian arts non-profit Appalshop, and then over to New York City in the 21st century for Man Push Cart (2005) by Ramin Bahrani and Michael Simmonds (Goodbye Solo), which follows an actor vividly portraying a former Pakistani pop star who labors anonymously behind the source of his new income--a silver coffee pushcart. Each film makes the other richer.

Oscar-nominated filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert (The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant) (2009) curate the Thematic Program this year with mastery, orchestrating “valuable collisions”--using the context of a festival with its pairings of seemingly disparate films--to help us experience the “interconnectedness of people, nations, communities, and environments.” To “let us see and feel the actual work people do, as well as how that work influences our lives, our identity, our sense of self.” And in this program the festival comes alive.

I sing sad, melancholy miners’ folk songs along with Will Oldham and Low during Travis Wilkerson’s An Injury to One (2002) and laugh out-loud with the audience at This American Life’s Christopher Wilcha’s dwindling hold on sanity while navigating the halls of corporate America at CD mail-order giant Columbia House in the mid-1990s in The Target Shoots First (2000).

An Injury to One asks us to remember the strength and faith of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) labor organizer Frank Little after his 1917 death at the hands of city-sanctioned lynchers in Butte, Montana. The film employs gritty stills and subdued, seemingly hand-colored footage of deserted copper mines and worker shanties that make me truly believe we’re looking at a scene shot in 1864. Wilkerson paints his story with bold, not hyperbolic, rhetoric and poetic stanzas, utilizing text, split screen, repetition and a contemporary graphic sense to activate the audience’s sense of outrage at the inequalities of what no longer seems like a time far gone. We’re left with present-day shots of the deserted mine which has turned into an open sore in the middle of the city of Butte and which serves to draw a powerful parallel between the irresponsible and inhumane treatment of the working class as well as the environment by the profit-driven employment class.

Christopher Wilcha sets up a more subtle tale of the inequality between classes, this time between the creatives and the executives working on different floors under the same high-rise, Manhattan roof. We’re drawn into Wilcha’s struggle to reconcile his accidental position as an executive with how he identifies as a creative, freshly-dubbed philosophy graduate and alternative music fan.

By pulling together a meticulous program of eighteen new and old work-themed films, Julia and Steven have truly recognized the value of the theatrical experience and have drawn powerful similarities between people of varying occupations with all their ongoing struggles, emphasizing the importance of empathy, memory and organized labor.

The New Docs Program continues in this quest to explore a wide range of social issues. Coverage of this Full Frame program and the festival itself continues in Part Two tomorrow.