To get us in the mood, Colony co-director Ross McDonnell gives us the following facts about bees. Check out the new Colony movie website for more!  

Bees: The Facts.

The honeybee has been around for 30 million years.

It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.

The average honeybee will actually make only one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.

More...

Dan Fallshaw and Violeta Ayala sent us this video that they made after their first visit to the Polisario camps where they would focus their film.

For screening information for Stolen click here 

Here's a teaser for Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, playing today at 5:00 PM at the AMC.  Thanks to director Marc Levin for sending it to us!

For Schmatta screening information, click here

Marc Levin shares the story of how his documentary,Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, got made

In the summer of 2007, my producing partner Daphne Pinkerson and I met with HBO senior producer Nancy Abraham and Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films, who was interested in finding a good story to illuminate the the current troubled economic times.  I had made a number of contacts in the hedge fund world and the sub prime crisis was just beginning to heat up.   I thought I might be able to get access to Wall Street insiders while the crisis unfolded for an unprecedented verite look.   But she rejected the idea  saying, “Wall Street’s for Bloomberg or CNBC, not our style – why don’t you go to the Garment Center.”

Sheila looked at the label on her blouse, “This was made in China, my skirt was made in India, my shoes in Italy…do we make anything here anymore?

“If you want to wear anything made in America,” Daphne responded, “or that is made by non-exploited labor or a non-polluting process, you will probably have to go naked.”

“The Garment Center?”  I muttered.  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Sheila smiled, “You’ll figure it out.”

It’s taken a while, but right from the start we playfully referred to the project as the SCHMATTA film.  Those who knew the Yiddish word for rag, laughed and thought it was a ballsy working title.  But we were surprised how many folks in the garment and fashion industries had no idea what the word meant.

As we talked to more and more people, it was amazing how almost everyone had some family member or friend who was somehow connected to the “Schmatta” business.  When Sheila revealed her great aunt Celia had died in the Triangle Fire, things began to gel.  I looked back to my own great grandfather, Isaac Levin, a young immigrant from Lithuania at the beginning of the 20th century, who invented the “adjustable dress form.”  My grandfather Herman Levin and his brothers took over the Acme Dress Form and Hanger Company in Brooklyn.  My father, Al, refused to go into the family schmatta business.  He and my mother Hannah were young labor organizers as was my father in law, Bill Burke, who actually worked with Sidney Hillman, the founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America union.    

We decided from the start that the film was going to be like a tapestry and the challenge was going to be in the stitching together of these compelling stories and characters.  We didn’t want experts or academics.  We wanted real people to create this rich human fabric - a colorful cast who would stay true to the word SCHMATTA and give the film a first person, street smart, raw, authentic, heartfelt, humorous voice.

The garment center would be the main character and the main location.   It  was once a magic kingdom and now it was down and almost out, a microcosm of the economic crisis that had touched so many.   It seemed that 2008 could be the last season in the garment center for a good number of the folks we met.       We decided to start the contemporary story at February Fashion Week and follow it through to September Fashion Week and then end with Black Friday and the start of holiday shopping.  Simultaneously, we developed a historical time line starting with the tragic Triangle fire in 1911 and ending with a similar recent tragedy, a deadly fire in a Bangladesh sweatshop.   We wove the stories of present day hard times and past history together with an emotional thread provided by a series of interviews with a wide variety of professionals who had just lost their jobs in the industry.

Over and over again we were moved by their stories which had a similar theme – they were devastated by a new world that no longer promised job security, benefits or the life style they were accustomed to.  Their testimony was emotional punctuation to what was happening to America’s middle class.  It was literally hanging on by a thread.

We wanted to highlight and contextualize the immediacy and power of their experiences.  We recalled Stud’s Terkels classic oral history – “Working,” and referred to our interviews as “Not Working.”  What ever happened to the working class hero?  What ever happened to the Average Joe?  It seems he had been devalued, laid off, or outsourced.  His fortunes mirrored the vanishing American dream.  We wanted to pull the curtain back to see the people behind the scenes who make and sell our clothes.

During September Fashion week 2008, Wall Street crashed.  There was concern that current events might be outstripping and outdating the SCHMATTA project.  But as we watched the Thanksgiving Day parade, I felt that if anything, it had made this film even more relevant and timely.  We had the story, “Rags to Riches to Rags.”  The Crash revealed that much of the wealth of this new gilded age was a mirage.  As the floats passed by Macy’s, it hit me, “THE ECONOMY HAS NO CLOTHES.”

~ Marc Levin

 You can find screening information for Schmatta here

Thanks to Ross McDonnell, co-director of Colony, for sending us this post!

"At the beginning of making the documentary Colony, a film that draws parallels between the honeybee colony and our own human colony, we spent some time filming at beekeeping conventions, doing interviews and researching before we actually saw our first beehives, littered along the sides of the California highways, getting ready to pollinate the almond crop.

It did not take us long however, once we started filming bees, that we began to appreciate why it is that, throughout history, this industrious little insect has enjoyed a special place in the hearts of man. Simply watching the beehive is, in many ways, to watch a whole world in miniature; it’s not hard to become quietly transfixed on the cycle of life unfolding before your eyes.

Endless dramas happen in the beehive everyday, blink and you miss them: The bees, returning to the mouth of the hive with their caches of pollen and nectar, briefing the departing foragers as to where to locate the target, can draw to mind the organized chaos of an aircraft carrier’s flight deck in scramble mode. The larva, hatching from the honeycomb, the baby bees emerging bleary-eyed, like thousands of joyous births every hour. The bees, repelling would be invaders and robbers of the hive, like bouncers taking charge at a nightclub brawl. The beehive is the perfect window for studying behavior: the insect world’s answer to Big Brother.

At the heart of this incredible microcosm is the amazing nature of the honeybee to work, not for itself, but for the greater good of the colony. The individual bee is not really aware of the greater whole, but has evolved to carry out small tasks that each contributes to the overall health and safety of its society. It is so devoted to protecting the sanctity of the colony that it will of course sting and lay down its life for the defense of the hive.

Over the course of the making the film, as the actions of a few selfish individuals collapsed the global economy, we began to attempt to show two societies, both experiencing unusual, unexpected collapses, with far reaching consequences. We documented the effect these unprecedented twin collapses had on the people involved:  the beekeepers. The result of this is the film ‘Colony’."

Click here for screening information for Colony

"Working on Google Baby I knew I was dealing with the actual application of business rules and commerce dynamics to… well babies. And yet the actual real life examples (excuse the pan) where many times surprising and hard to digest.

One such example that did not make it into the movie was that of Manjhi, a Japanese baby girl born to a japanese couple through a surrogate in India. Between the time she was conceived and her birth in India the ordering parents have divorced.  Neither the would-be mother nor father wanted the baby and they declined to come pick her up from the surrogate house in Anand. The Indian surrogate who gave birth to Manjhi was being pushed by local authorities in India to take her as her own. The Indian surrogate did not want to take Manjhi as her daughter and the Hostel backed her up in a legal dispute against the state. Eventually the Japanese grandmother from the divorcee father side from whos sperm Manjhi was conceived decided to take care of her and she made her way back to Tokyo 3 months after her birth.

When making a baby can be outsourced than clearly there bound to be situations where by  the outcome (not to say product) will be returned or at least not picked up. What happens then remains an open question....at least until you watch the movie."

Click here for screening info for Google Baby

Don Argott talks about how and why he came to make The Art of the Steal. 

"I didn't grow up in the Philadelphia area, so I must confess that before beginning this project, I knew very little about the Barnes Foundation.  The idea for the film came to us from executive producer Lenny Feinberg, someone who lived in the area and believed that the story of the Barnes was one that needed to be told.  As it turns out,  when you do mention the Barnes Foundation around Philadelphia, nearly everyone seems to have an opinion about it.  For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the Barnes, it is a jewel-box of a place tucked away in Merion, PA, and houses some of the most important and amazing post-impressionist and early modern art in the world.  I remember the first time I visited the Foundation, I really didn't know what to expect. What's all the fuss about? As I walked through he main entrance, the place just took hold of me-- it's sensory overload. Floor to ceiling masterworks by Matisse, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Renoir, Seurat, etc.  Aside from being overwhelmed, the next thing I remember thinking was, how is it I've never heard of this place?

We then set out to tell the very complex tale of what this place is, how it got here, and where it's going.  As I soon discovered, there were decades of local animosity, complex legal battles, incredibly large egos and political corruption to wade through to condense into a digestible narrative. I also discovered the real main character of the film, Albert Barnes. Since he died in 1951, his Foundation has been under siege by powerful forces that have had their own agenda.  Since he's been gone for decades, he has been reduced to a name on a building. It was our goal to help bring him back to life and to tell the story through his eyes.

'm incredibly proud of the work we've done on this film. I miss the endless debates in the edit room with Sheena Joyce [producer], Judah Lev-Dickstein [associate editor], Demian Fenton [editor] and Lenny Feinberg [exec. producer]. We were all so committed to making this film the best that it could be and never settling until we knew we had it right. I look forward to finally getting to share it with the audiences."

Click here for screening times for The Art of The Steal. 

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For screening times for Good Hair, click here.

You can also catch Chris Rock in our Mavericks presentation of An Afternoon with Chris Rock, where Chris will participate in a long discussion about Good Hair, among other things.

Thom talks about this year's doc lineup at length with Brian Brooks for indieWIRE here. 

Especially useful for anyone for needs helping making up their mind before submitting their picks on Monday!

We’ve just confirmed three panelists for this year’s Doc Conference discussion on Documentary Ethics.
Geoffrey Smith (Presumed Guilty), Michael Tucker (How to Fold a Flag) and Vikram Jayanti (Snowblind) will participate in a panel discussion led by Pat Aufderheide from the Center for Social Media. Pat will be unveiling her new report on Documentary Ethics, which follows her immensely influential Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use.  Originally published in 2005, The Fair Use report became a foundation for fearless filmmaking in docs and has inspired application across disciplines.

Here’s a link to a great article that explores the impact of that original report.

The Doc Conference will be an exciting place to talk about these new ideas in doc creation. 

Click here for more info on the Doc Conference.