‘Two prospectors casually discover a rich ore body, a bankrupt financier promotes the venture, the boomtown of Frisco becomes one of the wildest mining camps in the West with a murder or two every evening, a tough lawman who shoots on sight begins to clean up the town, after producing millions the huge mine collapses, and Frisco becomes another ghost town.’

Nearly 125 years after a mine collapse essentially sealed Frisco’s inevitable doom, Utah filmmakers Torben Bernhard and Travis Low scouting the Beaver County area some 15 miles west of Milford completely missed the town’s location on their first pass. As Bernhard recalls, ‘the former boomtown was once home to thousands of people, but is now mostly sagebrush, building foundations, old mining equipment, and scraps of metal. The old charcoal kilns are listed on the National Register of Historic Places [as of 1982] but they are beginning to fall apart as well.’

In their short film ‘Boomtown,’ which premieres next month at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana, Bernhard and Low reconstruct Frisco for a contemporary audience through excerpts from rare recordings of oral histories taken from individuals who had lived in a town that disappeared from the map by the end of the 1920s.

As much as this 12-minute film, which also was produced by Bernhard’s wife Marissa, reflects countless hours of historical and scholarly research, the visual imagery and tape excerpts in ‘Boomtown’ underscore the primal challenge we all face in the lifelong predicament of preserving identity. Like the other four films in their forthcoming Lost and Found Series, ‘Boomtown’ suggests, ‘nobody or very few people know our history but this will change.’

‘Boomtown’ reminds us of how easily we overlook the urban dimension that shaped the history of the American West as deeply as its rural and agricultural character. Frisco literally sprouted overnight in the 1870s after prospectors from a galena mine discovered a promising outcrop that showed high silver content. It took five years to extend the rail lines, which in Frisco’s earliest days were still at least 175 miles away, but by 1880, the town became a major center of industry and commerce.

Frisco, as viewers discover in the film, also was plagued by familiar big-city problems of today: murders, bar brawls, gambling, and prostitution, to name a few. There are stories about a man, accused of killing his wife, who ‘ran makeshift whiskey distilleries illegally,’ a woman who recalls growing up in a town that easily referenced Sodom and Gomorrah, and, most vividly, a sheriff who wasted no time in dispensing quick-trigger justice by way of his belief that ‘the dead man gives no trouble.’

The tapes were a serendipitous find for the trio of filmmakers. Looking for descendants of former Frisco residents, they found Dick Davis who had tapes apparently recorded nearly 50 years ago not long before the last generation of Frisco citizens died out. ‘Our jaws dropped,’ Bernhard explains. ‘Instead of scholars or family members talking about Frisco, it was the people who actually lived there. He couldn’t remember how he came by the tape, but knew that one of the interviewees was a family member of his.’

There is a haunting literary eloquence in ‘Boomtown,’ with these voices overlaying present-day images of Frisco that show remnants of the once-vibrant mining town and glimpses of tombstones including one with the simplest ironical epithet ‘Gone but not forgotten.’ The film’s soundscape is an Expressionistic masterpiece with the motivic unity of ghost town ambient sounds, original musical phrases, and the taped excerpts.

The film’s music comes from Earth’s 2005 album ‘Hex: Or Printing in The Infernal Method,’ which was released by Southern Lord Records. Indeed, it is a perfect symbiotic partner in the film’s overall effect. As band member Dylan Carlson explained on the band’s Web site, ‘I was heavily influenced by [Cormac McCarthy's] book “Blood Meridian; or the Evening Redness In the West,” a book that explores the real western expansion and real clash of people on this newest continent. It has been a continent that from the beginning has been alien and hostile yet posessing a bewitching beauty.’ That motif certainly echoes throughout ‘Boomtown.’

The West is filled with ghost towns. Utah has hundreds. An estimated 1,600 have been documented in Nevada. Yet, they remain strangely absent in the ongoing exercise about how we construct our local histories. Clint Thomsen, an award-winning freelance journalist who has spent much time visiting Utah’s former towns, has suggested that we should think about Frisco and others more than as curious footnotes to the state’s history:

‘Next time you see a pile of wooden planks where a house once stood, consider that every board was cut or imported by the industrious people who built these towns from scratch. Children were born there. People worked and spent their lives there. They died there and their bones still lie there under the dirt. The beauty of a ghost town lies not just in what buildings remain, but in the history that saturates its half-standing walls and scattered bricks.’

Indeed, ‘Boomtown’ asks its viewers to take up the question: What happens when all of our dreams end up in a figurative cemetery? And, why, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable catastrophe, some of us are able to persevere and continue the crazy dreamlike ideal of our original dreams even as the physical results of our efforts lay in ruins.

Furthermore, we must be consistently mindful of how these memories can be erased so easily and lost forever. Otherwise, our reconstructed histories end up being neatly patterned comfortable artifices that eschew the more valuable elements of critical thinking and the atheistic notion that history is governed more by chaos, unanticipated events, and anarchic upheavals than by a framework of analytical and theoretical codes.

‘Boomtown,’ which is among the half dozen films selected to compete in the Big Sky Award category, is the second Lost and Found Series entry to be accepted into Big Sky, a documentary film festival that is in its ninth year. The festival slate comprises 144 films selected from more than 1,000 entries. Big Sky runs February 17-26.

In ‘Tarkio Balloon,’ which played at last year’s festival, Bernhard goes back to a cemetery in a small Missouri town where his brother, Dane, is buried. In 1985, when Bernhard was 2, his two-month-old brother died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Shot on 8-MM film and incorporating excerpts from an audio interview recorded years earlier with his mother (Janae), ‘Tarkio Balloon’ gives visibility to all parents who lost a child.

The entire series is expected to be completed by spring with the five films running under 15 minutes each and representing different angles and settings (Utah, Missouri, and Thailand).

‘Trash Collector’ explores the life of Chaan, a man living in a slum along the train tracks that snake through Nakhorn Ratchasima (Korat) en route to the northeast region of Thailand. Bernhard’s wife Marissa is directing ‘Thailand Cowboy,’ a fascinating look into a Thai man who lives to fuel his passion for American westerns and the romanticized personalities of that genre including John Wayne and John Ford.

The fifth film – ‘The Gospel According to Ralphael’ – is about a Salt Lake City man who has transformed a shabby warehouse into a museum of enormous concrete and steel sculptures, paintings, murals, and ceiling frescoes that synthesize his religious beliefs taken from traditional and personal interpretations of many theological foundations.

For more information about the festival, see here. For information about The Lost and Found Series, see here.

From the perspective of those in the business of marketing the arts or managing large cultural enterprises, how does one approach the purest and most passionate aesthetic sense when it cannot be neatly categorized in numbers or demographics?

One of the many impressive epiphanies in Megumi Sasaki’s cinematic celebration of Herb and Dorothy Vogel, who amassed one of the most voluminous collections of contemporary art while living on the most modest of means, is that we must transcend the conventional definitions of what constitutes a truly intellectual audience when it comes to the arts. The pristine love of art that a retired U.S. Postal Service employee and a Brooklyn librarian demonstrate emphasizes that a culture need not be predicated upon speculative commercialism, jaded universalism, or elitist sensibilities. On the other hand, Sasaki makes it quite clear that this is an enormously complex venture.

The 2008 film ‘Herb and Dorothy’ will be screened Friday, Dec. 9, at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (formerly known as the Salt Lake Art Center) as part of the free, public Creativity in Focus series sponsored with the Utah Film Center.

Essentially, Sasaki shatters the conventional ideals of what it means to be an authentic art collector especially during a time when art works commanded skyrocketing prices at gallery and art house auctions and the cult of personality played as much – if not more than – a major role in propelling the success of particular artists. The documentary was the first film for Sasaki, an independent journalist who initially heard about the Vogels in 2002 when she was working on a feature about Christo and Jeanne-Claude at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (Photo above is ‘Herb at 80′ by Lucio Pozzi.)

Ten years earlier, as viewers learn in the film, the Vogels had given the collection free to the institution, which at that time already amassed more than 2,000 works of art. Years later, the number of works had swelled to nearly 4,800. The Vogels still live in Manhattan. Herb will turn 90 in February and Dorothy is 76.

One of the many fascinating scenes in the film is how the National Gallery personnel were startled when they saw how much work had been crammed into the tiny Manhattan apartment the Vogels called home. When the initial collection was brought to Washington, D.C. for cataloguing, it took five 40-foot tractor-trailer rigs to transport the works. In fact, the collection’s size was so overwhelming that the National Gallery established a program in which a major gallery in each state received 50 Vogel works for its permanent collection. In Utah, the works are housed in the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art on the Utah State University campus in Logan. (Photo is ‘Dorothy’s Seascape’ by Pat Steir.)

However, the film’s richest moments come in scenes where the Vogels interact with artists. Among the most memorable was shot in artist James Siena’s studio where, after a few minutes of conversation, ask that the cameras be turned off as they try to complete a deal. Despite all of the attention, the couple preserved their integrity, refusing to ever leaven their discussions about art with money or how much a work costs. On the other hand, the Vogels make it clear in acknowledging the necessity of the monetary aspect of art and how it ensures the survival of both the artists and the institutions which showcase them.

For more information about the film and the series, see here. And, for more information about the Vogel Collection, see here.

The credits that rolled at the end of each of the outstanding quartet of films, which was screened for the first time to a sold-out audience in the 500-seat Jeanne Wagner Theatre in downtown Salt Lake City, provide ample evidence of that spirit.

No doubt, and with great justification, the audience cheered on the filmmakers likewise. In its ninth year, the staff and students involved in PitchNic, once again, demonstrate just why Spy Hop is a powerhouse for youth multimedia arts with a growing national reputation. And, for those of us who attend these screenings every year, it never fails to impress just how that bar for continuous improvement is raised in each cycle. For this writer, there is already the anticipation for what next year’s corps of young directors, producers, and cinematographers will offer. One easily can see that same excitement in Frank Feldman and Josh Samson, the program mentors.

The opening short film ‘Dinner’ – a film by Laela Omar, Erin Cole and James Hadden – is a good first course for stimulating the dialogue about why so many families find it so difficult – and even awkward – to sit together for dinner. The student filmmakers, who include interviews with a family counselor as well as Liz Edmunds, better known as the Food Nanny on Brigham Young University’s public television programming, illustrate a curious irony that only has become more apparent with food becoming the political lightning rod it has become. Perhaps we need a healthy dose of collective embarrassment – or even shame – about why our national diet is in the state it is. The students set the stage for realizing how making and eating dinner together as a family can sew the seeds for learning more about food and breaking our own worst bad food habits.

‘Delayed’ – by Emalie Ruffy and Rowan Eyzaguirre – was a thoroughly enjoyable comic fictional short about three rock musicians, whose trip to the biggest concert of their careers takes several incredible detours, including the kidnapping of the lead singer. From a dancing cactus to a multi-colored VW Beetle and to a cast of strange characters whom one could realistically expect to encounter on a dusty desert road, the film let the comedy speak for itself without forcing or repeating the humor.

‘River’s End’ – a fictional short story by Mikkel Richardson, Anna Berbert, and Rodrigo Arroyo – stands out as one of the most mature narratives put to film in PitchNic. There is a distinct sense of emotional familiarity for any viewer who ever contemplated running away from home or who had lost contact with a childhood friend. The film follows a 12-year-old boy who runs away from home with his imaginary friend in hopes of reaching the seacoast. Covering four days, the story shows all the starkly real turns and twists one faces at that inevitable moment when childish ideas and dreams blur and fade away. The film succeeds so magnificently because the creative voice of youth – embodied in the trio of filmmakers as well as the pair of child actors – conveys a child’s point of view with an acute sobriety and significance that frankly would not be possible if made by an older adult.

Finally, ‘Trashed’ – by Mallory McDaniel, Connor Estes, and Jon Tatum – was a snappy, well-paced look at ‘freegans,’ who go through Dumpsters behind grocery and retail stores to retrieve food and other goods, mainly as a way of making a larger political statement about consumer waste and environmental politics. The film went a good solid way to challenge convincingly the stigma of ‘freegans,’ which tend to chaff people much in the same way that the Occupy Movement has managed lately. Instead of focusing too much on a potentially polarizing political message, the filmmakers show and tell the evidence of their searches in a way that legitimately raises the eyebrows of any conscientious consumer. In particular, the film shows plenty of examples in which remnants and materials are repurposed into wearable and usable goods. They effectively counter the often-stereotypical delegitimizing portrayals of ‘freegans’ and they narrow the distance between the political messaging underlying what ‘freegans’ do and what they hope to accomplish.

Many previous PitchNic short films have been featured in various festivals around the country and each of these films deserve the attention. Likewise, each film also merits serious consideration for next summer’s Utah Short Film of The Year at the 2012 Utah Arts Festival.

For more information about Spy Hop, see here.

The four films, running an average of 20 minutes, were made by young filmmakers – almost all of them in their teens and some in their early college years. Their work will be premiered Nov. 10 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center.

As noted previously in this blog, the most impressive aspect of the PitchNic program is how these young filmmakers continuously improve upon the work of their predecessors. The PitchNic brand has been crafted exceptionally well. Documentaries reflect a mature, sensitive treatment that belies the age of their storytellers while fictional narratives — whether through comedy, romance, slice-of-life reality or drama — show a deft hand in orchestrating important literary elements such as irony, metaphor, and epiphany.

Past PitchNic films have been featured at festivals including Sundance, Los Angeles International Film Festival, Utah Arts Festival’s Fear No Film Competition, Barcelona Television Festival, Seattle International Film Festival and others as well as cable networks including HBO.

As in other years, the young filmmakers set the bar for creative enterprise unprecedentedly high as in ‘River’s End,’ a fictional short story by Mikkel Richardson, Anna Berbert, and Rodrigo Arroyo. Based in part on a short story Richardson wrote about his experience in seeing a childhood friend drift away without ever really learning why such distance came between them, the film follows a 12-year-old boy who runs away from home with his imaginary friend in hopes of reaching the seacoast. Covering four days, the story revolves around the tension, dissent, and challenge against the fictions all of us at one point or another confront within ourselves that masquerade as our alleged identities.

Josh Samson, a Spy Hop instructor who mentored the filmmakers involved with both fictional narrative shorts, says the students learn to deal directly with the frustrations and struggles involved with all elements of production from conceiving plausible ideas to working within their budgets and to casting and directing their actors. Samson and his colleague, Frank Feldman, the mentor for the pair of documentary films, set appropriate boundaries as mentors, encouraging the students to take full ownership for their projects. “When we see that they are clearly flustered, then we step in gently to give them a chance to regroup and subtly suggest what they might need to do to resolve a particular problem.”

In ‘River’s End,’ Richardson and his young colleagues found the first day of shooting quite problematic with the two young actors who had been cast. ‘On the second day of shooting, I took Josh’s suggestion and decided to get the kids to play and joke around with me for about 10 minutes,’ Richardson recalls. ‘And it worked because the actors then picked up on what we were trying to tell in this story.’

‘Delayed,’ the second fictional film, had its own challenges. The filmmakers – Emalie Ruffy and Rowan Eyzaguirre – originally hoped to open the film with a shot of a car on fire. ‘Unfortunately, when they found out that the shot could eat up nearly all of their budget, they settled on a showing a car broken down in the middle of nowhere,’ Samson explains. PitchNic’s major comedy offering for this year follows three rock musicians, whose trip to the biggest concert of their careers takes several incredible detours, including the kidnapping of the lead singer. The other two members meanwhile meet a strange cast of characters as they try hitchhike their way to safety and to rescue their bandmate.

Achieving integrity in the narrative is equally challenging for the two teams of documentary students. ‘The students bring great ideas to the table as well as a solidly mature outlook of the world,’ Feldman says. ‘However, they also learn to work through the experience and the struggles that the film they get might not be the one they originally hoped for when they pitched the topic.’ Such was the case in ‘Dinner’ – a film by Laela Omar, Erin Cole and James Hadden – which originally had hoped to chronicle the differences in family dinner rituals among several multicultural families.

On the other hand, the film goes to the most pervasive questions about why so many families find it so difficult – and even awkward – to sit together for dinner. In addition to featuring two families, the film includes interviews with a family counselor and Liz Edmunds, known as the Food Nanny for her books and television show which is part of Brigham Young University’s public television programming.

‘Freegans’ – known more widely as Dumpster divers – is the focus of the other PitchNic documentary film. However, the film turns the stereotypes of Dumpster divers on its head by asking sharp questions about wasteful consumerism. The young filmmakers – Mallory McDaniel, Connor Estes, and John Tatum – raise valid concerns about why companies such as Whole Foods and REI, who exert a good deal of brand-building effort to emphasize their sense of corporate social responsibility, relegate with alarming regularity significant quantities of good food and product to the trash. They also show that ‘freegans’ come from a broader demographic range than what is typically believed and that many share a common overarching concern about restoring a core ethical obligation to our behavior as consumers.

The 2010/2011 PitchNic program is generously supported by Zoo, Arts, and Parks of Salt Lake County, Salt Lake County Substance Abuse Prevention, the National Endowment for the Arts, Adobe Youth Voices, Zero Divide, The Broadband Technology Opportunity Program, The George and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation, the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Foundation, Salt Lake City Arts Council, and the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.

Tickets at $6.50 each are available online here, all ArtTix Office locations, or by calling (801) 355-ARTS.

When an audience member at one of her lectures asks if she ever consults anyone else for advice, she says, ‘Who do I go to when I want a second opinion? You mean, like a cardiologist? That would be the only time.’ She laments that too many people are writing books that are terrible because people have been taught to have self esteem. She argues that the best culture comes from a natural aristocracy of talent. Lebowitz, soon to be 61, is firmly for smokers’ rights, adding that the history of art has always been about talking, drinking and smoking in bars and cafes.

The 2010 Home Box Office (HBO) documentary will be screened Friday, Oct. 14, at 7 p.m. in the Salt Lake Art Center auditorium as part of the Utah Film Center’s Creativity in Focus series, sponsored in part by Rio Tinto.

While audience members should not expect to see any deep background details about her formative life, the documentary is really a beautifully edited monologue of her appearances (featuring moderator Toni Morrison) interspersed with footage of her speaking in her customary booth at the Waverly Inn as well as scenes from the 1960s and 1970s featuring William F. Buckley, Jr., Truman Capote, Pablo Casals, Jack Paar, Gore Vidal, Oscar Levant, and James Baldwin.

As for the film’s epiphany, it refers to the extraordinary and refreshing self-confidence of a brilliant wit and mind that refuses to be constrained by digital tools or to be reduced to the pablum dictates of a contemporary age. Lebowitz proudly states that she does not have a computer or cell phone and wonders if a microwave oven would allow someone to text.

One of her favorite possessions, in fact, is a pale gray Checker Taxi Cab that she bought for $9,000 in 1978 with the money she received for a book advance. Lebowitz, who, at 19, moved from her native New Jersey to New York City’s West Village in 1969, drove a cab part-time each month just enough to cover her $121 rent. In the film, the car still looks magnificent, the product of meticulous restoration and its owner’s care.

Lebowitz came rapidly into her own during the 1970s, especially as a columnist for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and then later for Mademoiselle. The magazine columns – or more accurately, essays – became part of two classic best-selling books Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, published in 1978 and 1981, respectively. A master of repurposing writing, she gathered the essays of both books into the ‘Fran Lebowitz Reader.’

She also published a children’s book called ‘Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas,’ which, as recollected in the film, caused a good deal of consternation among panda experts who were upset that the author had the animals eating pizza.

Those unfamiliar with Lebowitz, who is a widely sought speaker, might be quite surprised at how small her published oeuvre actually is. Already successful at 27, she resisted, as we learn, lucrative offers from Hollywood studios to turn both of her books into movie scripts. She already had decided that her next book would be a novel, ‘Exterior Signs of Wealth.’ However, she lapsed into her famous writer’s block – or as she calls it, ‘writer’s blockade’ – which only has been recently lifted.

To give a sense of just how long this blockade had gone on, one only needs to refer to a 1993 Paris article in an interview with James Linville and George Plimpton:

‘Because I didn’t write. I had an idea for this book, but I wrote very little. When I was about twenty and had just started publishing, I thought: I’ll write two books of these funny essays and then I’ll write a novel. I never wanted to write a novel first. I had—because of my aversion to young people, even when I was a young person—an aversion toward writing a young person’s novel. There are few books written by people in their twenties that, even if they are great books, are not in some way young people’s books. It’s that base longing of youth that really irritates me. I like a person who is more embittered. That embittered sensibility is not possible in a young person. You can be nasty when you are young, but you really have to be older to achieve bitterness. When I finished Social Studies, I had an idea for the novel, but I thought I needed a form for the book. When I was writing all those little essays, most of the topics I wrote about, everyone had written about. Everyone has written about everything; you’re not going to come up with some new topic to write about. So I always tried to come up with some kind of form for the piece that would be intrinsic to what I was saying. I like restrictions when I write. I don’t understand people who want more freedom. The terrifying thing about writing is freedom, when people say, but you can do anything. I don’t want to be able to do anything, that’s too terrifying.’

Not one moment sags in this 82-minute documentary, thanks to the appropriate New York sensibilities of Scorsese, whose technique in this film also reflects to a different artistic period. However, Lebowitz appears effortlessly timeless. Her 1997 Vanity Fair essay about race in America remains a must-read piece that seems even more relevant after the 2008 election. She is a favorite guest on late night television talk shows, recently returning to David Lettermen after a 16-year absence. And, she appeared as a tough-talking judge on a Law and Order episode.

Indeed, rare is the artist such as Lebowitz with a fascinating gift to resist the temptation to conform or compromise while still being able to outshine virtually every other figure in brilliant articulation, verbal or written.

For more information about the series see here.

With a name change this season – known for its first nine years as the SLC Film Center – the organization is poised to carve its place among the state’s preeminent cultural institutions. In broadening its outreach to Logan, Ogden, Moab, St. George, and other state locations, the UFC uses film – which founder and board chair Geralyn Dreyfous says is so ideally flexible and portable as a form of creative expression – to capture and cultivate a socially connected network that is inspired by film to take up the “what can we do” challenge for creating better engagements in our community.

It was that recognition of film’s capacity to inspire a community-based identity that overcomes the constraints of contentious dichotomies and social fragmentation, which inspired Dreyfous, along with Nicole Guillemet and Kathryn Toll, to form the center in 2002. The original proposal called for the project to be a local adjunct to the Sundance Film Festival, of which Guillemet was co-director at the time. However, in the spring of that year, Guillemet moved to take charge of the Miami International Film Festival.

Dreyfous brought Toll on board and both women, with impressive portfolios in both philanthropy and the film industry, knew instinctively the center could flourish first by capitalizing upon their close connections with filmmakers and industry distributors and then by collaborating with local organizations with goals and objectives that dovetail with the content of film screenings.

The first film screened was ‘Promises,’ a 2001 documentary chronicling three years of experiences for seven Jewish and Palestinian children living in Jerusalem. The Oscar-nominated film, which racked up many honors at some of the best-known international cinematic festivals, played to a standing-room-only audience at a screening, which featured Justine Shapiro, one of the film’s directors, in a Q&A afterward.

Since then, more than 500 directors, producers, and actors have appeared at UFC screenings and the availability of digital technologies such as Skype have even made it easier for audiences to start a dialogue with a filmmaker. And, of course, to mark its anniversary, UFC is offering programs featuring Geena Davis, John Waters, and many others.

So encouraging was audience reaction to UFC’s first screenings that it wasn’t long before the center’s programming expanded from one screening per month to weekly and eventually to the common two to three screenings each week now. In recent years, the annual attendance at UFC programs, of which nearly all are free and open to the public, has easily topped 20,000.

Those numbers likely will continue to grow at a faster pace especially as UFC widens its slate of programming not only throughout Utah but also with smartly curated film festivals of its own. A single screening of a documentary about climate issues drew more than 130 people at Dixie State College, a new venue for UFC programs.

The center opened its anniversary year last month with the first-ever Gandhi Film Festival, cosponsored with the Gandhi Alliance for Peace. The opening film – the 2008 biographical documentary ‘The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan: A Torch for Peace’ – played to a packed City Library auditorium and audience members talked extensively with Teri McLuhan, the film’s director.

Last spring, effectively achieving the capacity to provide essentially lifelong cinematic programming for Utah residents, the UFC held its first Tumbleweeds Film Festival, the only large-scale cinema gathering in the Intermountain West geared exclusively toward children, which also played to large audiences.

Likewise, attendance has continued to grow at the Damn! These Heels LGBT Film Festival, which will have its ninth run next June. This festival, in particular, signifies UFC’s customary sensitivity for programming in how it reflects the most current pulse on the most prominent issues concerning social and political awareness. For example, the most recent festival underscored the growing public opinion acceptance that marriage rights and economic equality regardless of sexual orientation or identity were important.

Therefore, the lineup represented films of solid artistic measure with aesthetic attributes and storytelling elements that appeal to a broadly diversified audience regardless of sexual orientation and identity. The festival’s storytelling emphasis was less on political points than on the everyday issues of love, happiness, and personal epiphanies, which everyone faces.

Similarly, the ‘Tillman Story’ which aired last spring in four Utah cities as part of the center’s Films Without Border series opened up a dialogue with director Amir Bar-Lev who answered audience questions at all of the screenings. It became evident that the film did not represent a battle between hawks and doves or between atheists and religious adherents or set out to ascribe blame to a specific group for covering up the details behind Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan seven years ago.

Indeed, if one wants to find a commonly accessible thread which runs through the 170 or so films the center screens each year is how a monumental cast of governmental officials, military leaders, corporate elites, journalists, talk-show hosts, celebrity pundits, public relations ‘spin doctors,’ and savvy, opportunistic marketers contribute substantially to blurring the lines of entertainment and information for the sake of a production that hardly represents realities with which audiences identify on a daily basis.

In fact, one would be hard pressed to name an issue, event, phenomenon, icon or cultural element that hasn’t been touched upon in one way or another during the center’s first 10 years. A Creativity in Focus series, in collaboration with the Salt Lake Art Center, has featured experimental films as well as top-rated documentaries dealing with artists such as Banksy, Chuck Close, and Basquiat that compel the local art community to face and discuss the challenges of generating visibility for its own work while wrestling with the temptations of making it big without sacrificing their authentic creative voices.

Body image, civil rights, food sustainability, gender and sexuality, environmental protection and preservation, civil rights, immigration reform, Islam, Africa, and literature have appeared among countless other themes. International cinema, including Spanish language films, also has become a regular component of UFC’s annual programming. Afternoon film series for seniors and retired citizens are offered periodically free of charge.

In its second decade, UFC hopes to build upon the expanding film-literate community of Utah with programs that give more opportunity to local filmmakers to hone their storytelling skills, according to Dreyfous, a Harvard graduate who has assembled an impressive portfolio as a producer and executive producer of more than 15 films including the Academy-Award-winning documentary ‘Born Into Brothels.’ UFC has joined with the Salt Lake Film Society and Spy Hop Productions in hopes of developing a film and digital media facility with production and exhibition capabilities in some of the space of the old Utah Theater in downtown. While the concept has been identified in the master plan for development of a cultural campus that would ultimately link all of the existing and proposed arts and culture facilities, no firm initiatives have yet been made.

As a strong testament to the UFC’s success, Dreyfous also has assembled a staff with significant experience in filmmaking and philanthropy. Missy Dawson, the current executive director, started out in journalism before moving to nonprofit organizational management and development. She came to Utah in 2009 after serving as the senior manager of the San Francisco Symphony’s Second Century Campaign, which raised more than $120 million for the symphony’s core programs and endowment.

In the same year, Patrick Hubley, joined as the UFC’s artistic director. His portfolio includes substantial press, event producing, and consulting experience with Sundance and the Sundance Institute, the Toronto International Film Festival, CineVegas Film Festival, and the Dubai International Film Festival.

Marcie Collett, the center’s current development manager, brings extensive experience from Denver in coordinating various adult literacy programs. Likewise, Levi Elder, communications manager and programmer, has professional credits with several major studios and festivals including Tribeca, the American Film Institute, the Middle Eastern International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi, and Ireland’s Kerry Film Festival.

One of the most familiar faces on the Salt Lake City cultural and arts scene, Mariah Mann Mellus keys the center’s membership and outreach activities. A writer and event coordinator, she brings broad experience from the ski and extreme sports industries as well as organizations dealing with global youth cultural outreach programs.

Rounding out the staff are Keb Brady, business manager and executive assistants Kelsie Jepsen and Sarah Mohr.

It is worth noting the breadth and depth of experience UFC staff members bring to the table, which will be essential for carrying forward the center’s founding mission. No doubt, everyone sees the strategic opportunities in the cost-effective transportability of films as the center cultivates larger and new audiences especially in other parts of the states. Certainly, initial responses to screenings in locations outside of Salt Lake City have been justifiably heartening.

However, Dreyfous and her staff also are focused on the transformative potential of their work for a state that definitively is not as conservative or as reactionary as what mainstream media and pundits often characterize. Miles Horton, who is one of the best-known teachers of social movement leaders, wrote in his 1990 autobiography ‘The Long Haul’:

‘If we are to have democratic society, people must find or invent new channels through which decisions can be made . . . the problem is not that people will make irresponsible or wrong decisions. It is, rather, to convince people who have been ignored or excluded in the past that their involvement will have meaning and that their ideas will be respected. The danger is not too much, but too little participation.’

For more information about the UFC, see here.

The festival’s eight films have been wisely curated for how they tie in so substantively to ongoing issues and events that demand the attention of international audiences.

Among them are the following:

‘Bringing Down A Dictator’ (Steve York, U.S., 2002, 56 mins.) – Saturday, Sept. 24, 5 p.m.

NOTE: York will be present for a Q&A after the screening.

In the climactic days of the Egyptian revolution earlier this year, a report on Al-Jazeera English showed youth leaders watching this award-winning documentary which focuses on the precipitating events for the eventual downfall of the late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic and the rise of the nonviolent movement called Otpor! (which is the Serbian word for resistance).

The 2002 TV documentary, which won a Peabody among many other awards, demonstrates the tremendous discipline for nonviolent strategies in both the student protesters and political opposition leaders during the 2000 elections. York makes its thoroughly evident that if the political opposition (representing nearly 20 parties if not more) had not united to support a single candidate (Vojislav Kostunica), then the resistance movement might have failed and Milosevic could have prevailed.

In an interview earlier this year with a correspondent with the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the groups involved in the Egyptian revolution, York described what he had set out to achieve in the making of this documentary:

‘Simply stated, it’s a popular belief that authoritarians and dictators can only be defeated militarily. History has shown this argument to be false, many times, but the myth persists. Films like this one are a very small effort to gradually provide evidence that nonviolent options are viable, that nonviolent struggles do succeed, more often that is commonly understood, and against all kinds of adversaries.’

Accordingly, viewers of the documentary should take note of how the young leaders of Otpor! carried through their strategic work, which was extraordinarily difficult. However, it also is easy to be impressed by the young leaders’ capacity for humor, creative demonstrations, and bold slogans that proved to be critical stimuli for broadening the movement’s support.

Furthermore, it would be somewhat foolish to think that other nonviolent resistance movements should simply copy what happened in Serbia. Unity, organization, and nonviolent discipline are essential, according to York, and that conclusion is a commonly occurring theme in all of the festival’s films.

Today, few media pay attention to what has transpired in the former Yugoslavian republic, which is moving toward full membership in the European Union. Last spring, Boris Tadi? (who is seen in the film), now Serbian president, announced the arrest of Ratko Mladi?, the former Bosnian Serb general who was wanted on war crimes by The Hague tribunal. This was critical because Tadi?, who became the defense minister after the 2000 elections, had led a monumental reform of the country’s military and police forces which still had operated under the guise of Soviet-style communism.

Indeed Serbia’s reforms were tenuous in the initial years after Milosevic’s downfall. For example, Zoran Djindjic (also seen in the film) was the new prime mminister but he was assassinated by dissident nationalist paramilitary forces a year after York’s documentary was released.

Tadi? has been extremely significant because he is the face of Serbia’s moral and geopolitical rehabilitation, particularly as the continent continues to sort the enormously complicated mess of Kosovo, recognized as independent by the EU but not by Serbia. And, it was the Kosovo bombings in the 1990s that eventually led to Milosevic’s downfall.

York’s documentary, therefore, effectively reminds us why international support for continuing reforms in Serbia, as launched in 2000, by the Otpor! Movement is so critical.

‘Budrus’ (Julia Bacha, Israel, 2009, 78 mins.) – Sunday, Sept. 25, at 1 p.m.

Viewers should look at Bacha’s film about a tiny Palestinian enclave of 1,500 residents and olive tree groves differently in light of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ bid today for his nation’s statehood before the United Nations General Assembly. Bacha filmed the events in 2003 and 2004, during which 55 peaceful demonstrations organized by Ayed Morrar eventually forced the Israeli government to move the Separation Barrier and not close off his village from the rest of the West Bank.

The film is a stunning piece of visual culture of how the landscape is manifested as the medium for conflict and contest in countercolonial struggles. The so-called fence – better yet, a wall of imprisonment – is plainly ugly amidst the olive trees upon which the Budrus residents depend solely for their livelihood.

Seven years after Budrus, the questions remain the same as The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg suggests:

‘Is the maximum the Israelis can offer equal the minimum the Palestinians can accept? The answer, so far, on both sides, has been no, but I don’t doubt that most Israelis, and most Palestinians, seek a deal of some sort, and would like the peace process to progress in a way that ensures their security.’

Even despite the most heartfelt nonviolent efforts of Morrar and his fellow Palestinians, the barriers were still there.

A Skype Q&A will take place with Bacha following the screening.

‘Gandhi’ (Richard Attenborough, United Kingdom, 1982, 191 mins.) – Sunday, Sept. 25, 3 p.m.

Only a few words need to be said about this film, which won eight Oscars and scores of other awards. One of the most intriguing bits of trivia regarding the film concerns the two-minute funeral sequence, which was filmed coincidentally on the anniversary of Gandhi’s funeral (which occurred Jan. 31, 1948). Two-thirds of the 300,000 extra actors used for the sequence were volunteers. It is an extraordinary scene.

The best guide for viewing the film, now nearly 30 years old, comes from Roger Ebert’s 1982 review:

‘Imagine that for many Americans, Mahatma Gandhi remains a dimly understood historical figure. I suspect a lot of us know he was a great Indian leader without quite knowing why and such is our ignorance of Eastern history and culture. We may not fully realize that his movement did indeed liberate India, in one of the greatest political and economic victories of all time, achieved through nonviolent principles. What is important about this film is not that it serves as a history lesson (although it does) but that, at a time when the threat of nuclear holocaust hangs ominously in the air, it reminds us that we are, after all, human, and thus capable of the most extraordinary and wonderful achievements, simply through the use of our imagination, our will, and our sense of right.’

For more information about the festival’s complete slate, see here.

Films about one of Gandhi’s earliest colleagues in the Pashtun frontier of the Indian subcontinent, the groundbreaking Christian-Muslin women’s peace movement in Liberia which led to the election of Africa’s first woman head of state, the 2009 Green Wave Revolution in Iran, and the president of Maldives facing the dual challenges of democracy building and climate change highlight the inaugural Gandhi Film Festival which will be held September 23-25 (Friday-Sunday) at the Salt Lake City Public Library in the main auditorium.

Sponsored by the Gandhi Alliance for Peace and the Utah Film Center, the slate of eight films, directed and producers by artists and documentarians in five countries, focus on events, movements, and individuals that often fly under the radar of mass media coverage. The films – with stories from India, Iran, Liberia, Maldives, Palestine, and Serbia – exemplify the accurate and appropriately situated historical significance of Gandhi’s meticulous step-by-step approach for achieving true independence and democratic enlightenment while maintaining an unwavering commitment to nonviolent protest and resistance.

As Ian Desai wrote earlier this year in The Wilson Quarterly, Gandhi’s success was predicated on the tremendously hard work of a deeply rooted social network:

‘The real magic of the Mahatma was not a trick of popular charisma, but in fact a deft ability to recruit, manage, and inspire a team of talented individuals who worked tirelessly in his service. Gandhi himself was one of the few people to recognize how this phenomenon worked. “With each day I realize more and more that my mahatmaship, which is a mere adornment, depends on others. I have shone with the glory borrowed from my innumerable co-workers,” he wrote in 1928 in Navajivan.’

Those sentiments are evident in each of the festival’s films, which are free and open to the public. The festival opens with a 2008 biographical documentary film about Badshah Khan, born into a Pashtun warrior society who worked with Gandhi and formed a nonviolent army of resistance including Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Parsees, Sikhs, and Buddhists. Made by Teri C. McLuhan, the daughter of one of the most famous media theorists (Marshall T. McLuhan), the film – ‘The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan: A Torch for Peace’ – brings to light an historical chapter that too easily has been obscured by the more familiar legacy of Gandhi.

Working more than 20 years on the film, she shot footage in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India and interviewed many key figures who worked with Gandhi and Khan and were in the 80s and 90s at the time of the film’s production.

McLuhan will attend the screening (Friday, Sept. 23 at 7 p.m.) and will take questions from the audience following the film.

Audience members also should take note of ‘The Island President,’ which will be screened Saturday, Sept. 24, at 7 p.m. Directed by Jon Shenk, the 2011 film just earned the Cadillac People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. Shenk is one of the most widely respected documentarians, having won awards for ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’ as well as ‘Smile Pinki’ which won an Oscar in 2009. A Q&A session with the director will follow the screening.

While the film’s title refers to Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, Shenk quickly earned the trust of governmental officials and the film is remarkable for its unscripted, unquestionably realistic chronicle of the nation’s efforts to promote governmental transparency, to deal with climate change threats, and to showcase its cultural heritage. The nation, with a population of just 385,000, encompasses 2,000 islands.

Nasheed gained international attention in 2009 when he conducted a meeting of his cabinet ministers underwater to emphasize not only the Maldives’ amenities as an ecotourism destination but also to highlight the vulnerabilities of rising seas as a result of global warming.

The festival will close Sunday, Sept. 25, at 3 p.m. with a screening of ‘Gandhi,’ the 1982 blockbuster biographical film which starred Ben Kingsley and was directed by Richard Attenborough.

Previews of other films that will be screened in the earlier portions of the Sept. 24 program are featured below. Tomorrow, The Selective Echo will present previews of the remaining program of films.

As it marks its 10th anniversary, the Utah Film Center continues to broaden its community partnerships, adding the Gandhi Alliance for Peace to its network.

The alliance arose out of a small group organized in 1988 to conduct a grassroots campaign to urge for a comprehensive test ban treaty on nuclear weapons. The group expanded its efforts by collaborating with Peace Brigades International to conduct a local albeit smaller and shorter version of the famous ‘Salt March’ along the shore of the Great Salt Lake, which took place on Gandhi’s birthday (October 2). This year’s celebration will be held Oct. 2 at Jordan Park. For more information about the alliance, which was incorporated in 2000, see here.

For information about the Utah Film Center’s screenings, see here.

Other films:

‘Pray The Devil Back to Hell’ (Virginia Reticker, U.S., 2008, 72 mins.) – Saturday, Sept. 24 (11 a.m.)

The West African nation of Liberia is Africa’s oldest republic, founded in the middle 19th century by former slaves, but it seemed doomed to an endless stream of warlord thugocracy and civil war (with more than a quarter of million deaths in a 14-year period) until thousands of women bridged the Christian-Muslim divide to push for an end to violence and to ensure a transition to a democratic government free of corruption. Reticker steers wisely clear of leavening the film with political ideology, instead focusing on the emotional yet maturely poised efforts of women who are so desperate for peace that they are willing to withhold sex from their husbands and men who seem irrevocably tempted by violence, greed, and corruption.

More importantly, the film documents in exceptional detail the rise of a movement, which was nearly ignored in total by the international media who were swept up at the same time by the American push to topple Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. The film follows the ouster of dictator Charles Taylor (who is now awaiting the verdict on his international war crimes trial for acts of murder in Sierra Leone’s civil war during the 1990s) and the subsequent campaign to elect Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected woman head of state. Controversial in her own right, Sirleaf – widely known as Africa’s Iron Lady – has been cited by The Economist as the best president the country has ever had, singling out her zero-tolerance campaign against corruption as well as her efforts to rebuilt Monrovia’s battered infrastructure.

Reticker’s film, which has won nearly 20 film festival awards including Tribeca and Silverdocs, stands out for its simple yet unforgettable portrayal of deeply courageous women who followed Gandhi’s example step by step.

This film is presented with KUER-FM.

‘One Man, One Cow, and One Planet’ (Thomas Burstyn, New Zealand, 2007, 56 mins.) – Saturday, Sept. 24 (1 p.m.)

Among the many tectonic shifts taking place in India’s economy, farmers are reviving old biodynamic approaches to agriculture, thanks to Peter Proctor, an octogenarian who has shown how cow manure can make compost for restoring spent soil along with agricultural practices that can be adapted for the benefit of India’s poorest farmers. The film, narrated by Peter Coyote, includes an amazing soundtrack by Mercan Dede, a Turkish-born turntablist and DJ who works out of Montreal.

‘The Green Wave’ (Ali Samedi Ahadi, Germany, 2010, 80 mins.) – Saturday, Sept. 24 (3 p.m.)

Before the Arab Spring revolutionary phenomenon began its sweep through the Middle East, the rapidly spreading Green Wave movement at the height of the 2009 presidential election campaign in Iran was on the verge of transforming the police-state Islamic republic into an unprecedented democracy. So quickly the movement had spread that government officials had no choice but to rig the election results and return Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. However, Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader, unleashed a torrent of brutal repression and violence that will never extinguish the flames ignited by the unforgettable crowds that marched in Teheran’s public spaces two years ago.

Ahadi’s film, with collages of animation and mobile phone footage footage inspired by the writings of bloggers and Twitter feeds, is a near heart-breaking account of the sinister oppression where a government did not hesitate to maim or kill its own people who merely wanted to know: ‘Where is my vote?’

Ahadi traces the movement with quick pace from a campaign where voters were excited about the prospects for significant change and for the opportunity to express themselves freely, ironically coming from their support of the opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who really was far from being a radical revolutionary. Citizens – wearing green that symbolized both the hope of spring and Islam – are encouraged as one blogger who says, ‘many people thought the elections could not be manipulated.’ The deceit and violence which follow the rigged election are chronicled in voiceovers that were rarely captured in tone or impact by traditional media coverage.

Despite the film’s deeply depressing tone at times, Ahadi, who now lives and works in Germany, leaves telling signs in his work that the willed spirit to continue the fight was not broken. There are plenty of cues in the film that Ahadi believes that the patience, so essential to the core of Gandhi’s work, will serve the Iranian people well. And, certainly the most recent reports from respected international journalists indicate that the majority of Iranian citizens no longer believe the government represents the well-being or safety of its people.

The film already has been screened at Sundance, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

‘They have simply gone on ahead:
they will not wish to return home.
We’ll catch up to them on those hills
in the sunshine!
The day is fair on those hills.’ – Translation of Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866)

When a child dies, especially so young and so suddenly, the words don’t come in the same way when a parent or another loved one passes. It always is a struggle to regain those words – to be able finally to express and to let others know that in his long absence his presence remains still so strong. There is always that promise or hope – no matter how many years have passed and regardless of the physical crumbling of bricks and mortar – of the lesson and gift of his presence.

In ‘Tarkio Balloon,’ a five-minute film of fragile poetry, Utah filmmaker Torben Bernhard goes back to a cemetery in a small Missouri town where his brother, Dane, is buried. In 1985, when Bernhard was 2, his two-month-old brother died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Shot on 8-MM film and incorporating excerpts from an audio interview recorded years earlier with his mother (Janae), ‘Tarkio Balloon’ gives visibility to all parents who lost a child.

Bernhard’s film will have its Utah premiere on Saturday, Aug. 20, at 7 p.m. in the Tower Theatre (876 E 900 S) as part of the Salt Lake City Film Festival. The short is paired with the feature-length documentary ‘Better This World,’ by Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, an impressive piece of investigative journalism going to the surprising background story of how two young men from Texas ended up facing charges of domestic terrorism.

‘Tarkio Balloon’ received its premiere earlier this year at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. It was one of seven films selected for the mini-documentary competition.

The inspiration for the film came to Bernhard at last year’s Cinequest in San Jose, California, where The Sonosopher, the excellent experimental documentary (co-directed with Travis Low) about Alex Caldiero, was being screened. Although it had been 25 years since his infant brother’s tragic death, Bernhard’s mind flooded with memories of Dane and his own challenging attempts as a two-year-old brother trying to understand why his brother had gone away and wondering if he would ever come back. Before returning to Thailand, where he was working on other film projects, Bernhard and his wife Marissa drove from Utah to Tarkio, where he had not been for more than 20 years, to locate Dane’s grave and to see what had become of the town. “It felt like stepping into a myth. My mind sought to contrive the experience. It wanted me to make sense of the experience, structure it like an aimless road trip movie, where I leave my journey, resurrected by exhaled breath making ashes dance again in scattered procession,” Bernhard writes. “But, being isn’t tidy. At least, not from my experience. Being is, well, being.”

Bernhard’s poetic imagery is immensely moving in its stark simplicity. The film opens with a vivid shot of the hills leading into the town. The viewer can imagine easily the bitter cold, slate gray skies which greeted Bernhard and his wife as they moved through the cemetery to find Dane’s grave and document the remnants of a once-vibrant town that had forgotten itself as much as it had forgotten the Bernhard family had ever lived there. Layered among the imagery are the poignant recollections of Bernhard’s mother.

In the space of a few minutes, Bernhard imparts a profound message about our individual challenges in questioning our prevailing social assumptions on the basis of how each of us sees what gives our lives meaning and value. In our contemporary society, the idea of losing a child still seems so rare to many people. However, when it does occur, the grieving parent eventually may be shunned or even ostracized if the grieving continues beyond some norm of appropriate grieving time. Societal expectations of grieving norms are predicated on healing as if one can heal from grief as they would from a cut, wound, or injury.

Bernhard’s film reaffirms that the pain of loss never goes away nor does the memory of a lost child’s presence. As for the pilgrimage, he writes: ‘There is so much to say. There is so much I have left out. My only desire is that I have somehow left breadcrumbs for a future self to find his way back to Tarkio.’

The film is part of Bernhard’s ‘Lost and Found’ project, comprising five short films running under 15 minutes each and representing different angles and settings (Utah, Missouri, and Thailand) that yet carry through the theme suggested by the series’ title. Among the other films is ‘Boomtown,’ co-directed by Travis Low and which documents the vanishing of a southwestern Utah town which flourished in the late 1800s with the discovery of gold and other precious metals at the Horn Silver Mine. ‘Trash Collector’ explores the life of Chaan, a man living in a slum along the train tracks that snake through Nakhorn Ratchasima (Korat) en route to the northeast region of Thailand. Bernard’s wife Marissa is directing ‘Thailand Cowboy,’ a fascinating look into a Thai man who lives to fuel his passion for American westerns and the romanticized personalities of that genre including John Wayne and John Ford. The fifth film – ‘The Gospel According to Ralphael’ – is about a Salt Lake City man who has transformed a shabby warehouse into a museum of enormous concrete and steel sculptures, paintings, murals, and ceiling frescoes that synthesize his religious beliefs taken from traditional and personal interpretations of many theological foundations.

Bernhard has launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign here. The goal is $5,000 which must be accomplished by the end of business on Sept. 18 in order to be funded. A pair of trailers featuring the filmmakers and the stories is below.

For more information about the festival and to purchase tickets for the screening, see here and for more about The Lost and Found Series, see here.

‘The Crossing’, directed by Cristian Plesh of Romania and written by Victor Dragomir, received the Grand Jury Prize (photo). Set in 1944, the film is an other-worldly piece about two soldiers who believe they are trapped behind enemy lines but whose problems are confounded by the onset of unexplainable health problems affecting one of the soldiers.

‘Love Sick,’ by Kevin Lacy took the prize among nine contenders in the Utah Short Film of The Year Competition. The five-minute film, which took the $2,000 prize earlier this year at the Utah State University Fringe Film Festival, is a romantic comedy about a young man and the woes of love and affection.

Jaehee Lee of South Korea took the Fear No Filmmaker Award for ‘A Scene at The Sea,’ a beautifully shot meditation showing how life comes full circle for an old, blind fisherman who now must entrust his well being to his son.

Grand jury honorable mentions went to the following films: ‘First Contact,’ a six-minute hilarious animated film directed by James Cunningham of New Zealand; ‘Proposal,’ a 16-minute film from California directed by Chris King about a man, feeling ready to move on with his life after the tragic loss of his love, who carries an heirloom wedding ring and steels himself to ask the most portentous question of his life, and ‘Protect The Nation’ by German director C. R. Reisser, which tells the story of a young boy caught amid the wave of xenophobic attacks and riots that plagued South Africa in 2008.

Fear No Film had standing room only attendance at many of its screenings, held in the City Library auditorium, according to Topher Horman, coordinator and curator. Also, the first-ever screening of comedy shorts exclusively for kids in the Art Yard proved to be a rousing success.

Now in its ninth year, Fear No Film, which featured 66 shorts, has raised the festival’s bar of production quality and storytelling significantly in the last three years. A festival jury of film-making and media industry peers along with audience members selected the festival winners.

Audience award winners included the following:

Applauding the Muse of COMEDY: ‘For a Fistful of Snow,’ Switzerland

Applauding the Muse of TRAGEDY: ‘The Birds Upstairs,’ Michigan

Applauding the Muse of LOVE: ‘Time for Change,’ New Zealand

Applauding the Muse of DANCE: ‘A Moment,’ Minnesota

Applauding the Muse of HISTORY: ‘She Wore Silver Wings,’ California

Applauding the Muse of ASTRONOMY: ‘The Hack,’ Kansas

Applauding the Muse of LYRICAL STORYTELLING:‘Metro,’ Utah

Applauding the Muse of SPIRITUAL STORYTELLING: ‘A Scene
at the Sea,’ South Korea