Missing Hot Docs in Toronto was my one big regret when I was on the festival circuit with my last film, Power Trip. It was 2003 and the SARS scare shut down the Toronto Documentary Forum and kept a lot of filmmakers home. I was already at the San Francisco Film Festival, and decided to cancel the trip to Toronto.
Power Trip went on to win the Jury Prize for Best Documentary. Whoops!
But my new film BLAST! has allowed me to make up for that absence. BLAST! is an adventure story about a group of tenacious astrophysicists who travel from the Arctic to the Antarctic to launch a revolutionary telescope on a NASA high altitude balloon. The project had a very successful pitch at TDF last year with BBC Storyville’s Nick Fraser at my side. And now we're going have our World Premiere! (We finished the film last Tuesday – just in time!)
I arrived in Toronto with my producer Claire Missanelli Monday morning and while we were picking up our materials we ran into Isabel Vega, who directed La Corona, about a beauty pageant in a Columbian women’s prison. We met her last year when she and Amanda Michelli were pitching it at TDF as a feature. It was playing RIGHT NOW, so we popped in to see it. Very colorful, fun and heartbreaking at the same time. I wanted to know more about the woman who was a paid assassin, though. It would have needed to get outside the prison to be a full feature. So, making it into a short was a smart move; it got them an Academy Award Nomination! Isabel said at the Oscars she felt like one of the woman prisoners in her movie getting dressed for the big show.
Beyond our Ken is about the Australian “spiritual organization,” (some say cult) Kenja Outside that screening we were approached by members of the organization who were working the line. They came all the way from Australia trying to discourage people from seeing the movie, describing it as inflammatory and deceptive. After some discussion, BLAST! co-editor Laura Minnear pointed out to them that all this was so intriguing that she was probably more likely to see it! The trailer has a dodgy moment when the leader breaks down with anger and his wife (?) addresses the camera: “You’re not going to use that are you…”
Attending talks was a little too ambitious for the first day, but I managed to talk to the talkers. I ran into Pat Aufderheide after her “Open Source/Fair Use” presentation and picked up a signed copy of her new book Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. She was very reassuring that Fair Use covered the appearance of a Happy Feet poster in BLAST! – at least in the US; Europe might be a different matter.
I also missed the Sheila Nevins conference session, but happened to be in the right place when she was asking for directions to the rest room. Of course, I took the opportunity to point out that one of her former HBO associates, Julie Anderson, is a consulting producer on BLAST! and she should certainly attend the screening tomorrow night. She was congratulatory, but apologetic.
After dinner with the BLAST! team and some other member of the online community D-Word, I saw The English Surgeon, a fellow BBC Storyville piece. Very envious of the packed house at the large Bloor Theater. Well-executed narrative, with a can’t-lose main character. I imagine a lot has been written about it already, but the highlight for me came when the doctor was waxing philisophical in the midst of the climactic operation with an open skull with gray matter exposed on a screen behind him, marveling at the brain’s incomprehensibility: “Thought is physical; we are our brains.” Moments filmmakers live for.
Next up: the Doc Mogul Luncheon for Nick Fraser and then the BLAST! World Premiere!
Related Links:
Watch the trailer for BLAST!.
Read Paul Devlin's posting about his executive producer, Nick Fraser of BBC's Storyville.
Read Devlin's posting on his film's world premiere.
Read Devlin's posting on the quasi-hangover he experiences the day after his film's premiere.
Visit the Hot Docs website.
Visit the BLAST! website.
Read about the process of making the film BLAST! at Artistshare.com.
