2009 Program Guide

Into Abyssinia, directors: Adam Maurer and O'Keefe Foster: several Vermonters undertake a two-year effort to adopt children from Ethiopia (62 min)

Once in Afghanistan, dirs: Jill Vickers and Jody Bergedick: women look back on their time in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan (71 min)

For a Muse, dir: Rebecca Schmidt: An artist and her relationship with her unusual inspiration. Ryan Liebert, Cinematographer & editor will attend the panel. (7 1/2 min)

Making a Living, dirs: Ziye Lin and Jennifer Lopez: Two Dartmouth undergrads struggle to reconcile their career aspirations with the hopes their immigrant parents have for them. (17 min)

Unimagined Bridges, dir. Laura Cooley. Local ear acupuncturist Laura Cooley documents simple inexpensive disaster relief techniques which help relieve disorders following major disasters. A surprising solution to an increasingly common ailment.

Brief excerpts of these films will be shown, followed by a panel of the filmmakers involved. Screenwriter and Dartmouth professor Bill Phillips will moderate. These films shown in their entirety on Saturday starting at 10am in the Calvin Coolidge Room on the second floor of the Hotel Coolidge.

Q&A with the filmmakers and Nelson Kasfir after the film.
Gala tickets include food, performance and film. Cash bar. Space permitting, tickets for the film only will be available at 7:40pm.

Join us for this Gala Evening featuring local comic and musician David Lasagna, followed by Vermont's own Lisa Merton and Alan Dater's award-winning documentary, Taking Root, The Vision of Wangari Maathai.

6:00pm Hors d'Oeuvres and Cash Bar

7:00pm David Lasagna Like his heroes, Jon Stewart and Bill Moyers, Lasagna articulates a world view from the margins. With the rhetorical skills of an absurdist lawyer from the planet Ragwaar, Lasagna decodes the prevailing code of Humpty Dumpty, exposes the bizarro world of conventional wisdom and points the way home.

7:45pm Breaking Up (17 min) A locally produced short directed by filmmaker Christopher I. Ivanyi and written by Bill Phillips. A couple tries not to break up, but they are hampered by the modern communications convenience of a cell phone and answering machines. Starring Alan Gelfant and Suzanne Schon. Music by Roy Prendergast. Shot in Etna NH and WRJ with a local crew: Mike Murray, Michael Sacca, Daniel Maxell Crosby, Effie Cummings, Dorothy Gannon, Katharine Fisher Britton, Sarah Maxell Crosby and a greeting card donated by East Barnard artist Sabra Field.

8:00pm Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai Vermont's Marlboro Productions filmmakers Lisa Merton and Alan Dater lovingly worked for six years to create this remarkable, one-of-a-kind portrait of Kenyan 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai. Meeting Wangari Maathai in 2002, Merton and Dater were inspired to begin work on an expansive account of Maathai's life journey and passionate activism as founder of the Green Belt Movement, restoring life and culture to her people, culture and country by planting trees. Maathai's story is also Kenya's story -- it is Maathai's connection to the land that Taking Root so vividly captures with profound clarity, heart and immediacy. "I had never met a person of such courage, one who had risked her life for the truth," co-director Lisa Merton says. "Her story was organic; her rural roots connected her deeply to the earth, and despite her education and years in academia, she had never lost that connectedness." A masterful and moving documentary that shows how the simple act of women planting trees has changed a nation, and how one person can make a monumental difference. -Steve Bissette

"It is the people who must save the environment. It is the people who must make their leaders change. And we cannot be intimidated. So we must stand up for what we believe in." Wangari Maathai

Audience Choice Award winner at Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montreal, Projecting Change Film Festival • Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and others • Amnesty International Durban Human Rights Award winner, Durban, South Africa, 2008 • Best documentary Asheville Film Festival 2008

Sponsored by Railroad Row and Jim Hurt

Community Partner: Developing Country Network developingcountrynetwork.org

Preceded by The Secret Lives of Shells (4 min) by Louise Michaels

Q&A with Robert Cornellier, Director & Riki Ott, Marine Biologist, Author of Not One Drop.

In the early hours of March 24th, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil supertanker runs aground in Alaska. It discharges millions of gallons of crude oil. The incident becomes the biggest environmental catastrophe in North American history.

For twenty years, Riki Ott and the fishermen of the little town of Cordova, Alaska have waged the longest legal battle in U.S. history against ExxonMobil—the world's most powerful oil company. This film tells the heartbreaking story of the environmental, social and economic consequences of the black wave that changed their lives forever. This is the legacy of the Exxon Valdez. Toward the end of their judicial saga, Riki Ott and the fishers of Cordova ask if corporate values have trumped human rights and community values in the United States today. And they look for ways to rebuild their lives. Meanwhile Riki Ott is spearheading a movement to pass a 28th amendment to the Constitution to separate corporation and state.

Sponsored by Chelsea Green www.chelseagreen.com

Community Partner: Sierra Club

Preceded by Layers of Lasagna (28 min) by John Goldman

Q&A with David Lasagna after the film

Clint Curtis was an everyday computer programmer in Florida until he was asked by a powerful Republican legislator to create vote-rigging software for electronic voting machines.

For the first time, Patty Sharaf's terrifying documentary, Murder, Spies & Voting Lies (the Clint Curtis story), recounts the full, remarkable tale.

Join journalist/blogger Brad Friedman, as he investigates Curtis's hair-raising claims, uncovering a seamy side of American democracy that mainstream media fails to report.

Also featuring: Gore Vidal, Bob Fitrakis, Cynthia McKinney, Harry Hursti, Mavis Georgalis and a host of others. Beautifully shot in Hi-Def.

"Must See! Plays like a high tension political thriller...Amazingly elaborate and detailed...want to get hoppin' mad? This'll do it... Let's hear it for paper ballots." —Bob Butler, Kansas City Star

"Alfred Hitchcock would have chosen this, if the fact that it's true didn't scare him too much...The crime that dare not speak its name: Election Fraud." —Mimi "Dharma & Greg" Kennedy, National Chair of PDA

Winner Best Documentary, New Jersey Film Festival 2008

Community Partner: StillWater Productions/Bob Walker

Preceded by Belly Boat Hustle (6 min) by Blue Moon Productions

Panel discussion follows after the film.

Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century - The World Water Crisis.

Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world's dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel.

Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question, "can anyone really own water?"

Beyond identifying the problem, Flow also gives viewers a look at people and institutions providing practical solutions to the water crisis and those developing new technologies, which are fast becoming blueprints for a successful global and economic turnaround.

Official Selection 2008 Sundance Film Festival • International Jury Prize 2008 Mumbai International Film Festival &bull Best Documentary 2008 Vail International Film Festival &bull Winner Best Documentary United Nations Association Film Festival

Sponsored by Save the Planet Productions

Community Partner: Eric Blanchard

Preceded by Set Set Spike (4.5 min) by Emily Hubley

Q&A with filmmaker

"If love is anything, isn't it bound to protect us? If love is all, isn't it bound to betray? Can this one bear to be loved?" Direct from its winter 2009 theatrical premiere at the Museum of Modern Art comes Emily Hubley's enchanting, mercurial debut feature combining animation and live action to conjure a pivotal weekend in the life of young Mona Peek (Lily Rabe). Still grieving at the childhood loss of her deceased father, Mona excavates a piece of bone (a relic of her cremated father's remains) and inadvertently triggers a mystical card game played by animal tricksters inhabiting a parallel universe (voiced by Eli Wallach, David Cross, Andrea Martin, Don Byron and Marian Seldes). These creatures interact with her reality: stealing objects, putting her in the path of others she needs to meet, and even materializing as human beings when necessary. Hubley's playful, ever-inventive meditation on love, life, creativity, healing and family is one of the most unusual films of this or any other year, a valentine to all from the daughter of pioneer animators John and Faith Hubley (Moonbird, The Hole, the prologue of Watership Down, etc.). Emily's many animated short films include Delivery Man (1982), Enough (1993), Pigeon Within (2000) and others; she also created the animation for John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). Also starring Kevin Corrigan, Daniel London, Novella Nelson, Jane Lynch, Xander Berkeley, Mary Kay Place and John Sayles, The Toe Tactic is a rare and truly magical film. —Steve Bissette

Official Selection at New Directors New Films, South By Southwest, Sarasota Int'l Film Festival

Sponsored by Alschuler Associates and Center for Cartoon Studies

Preceded by Ice (4 min) by Art Bell

Ali, a retired Turkish widower, lives in Germany with his son, Nejat, a university lecturer. Ali takes in Yeter, a Turkish woman. When she dies, Nejat goes to Turkey to find Yeter's daughter, Ayten, a political activist, but she has fled to Germany. There, she lives with Lotte, whose mother Susanne disapproves. Istanbul calls Ayten, Lotte and Susanne in turn. From the gifted director of Head-On, this is an elegy on death, new beginnings, the mystery of interwoven lives and the longing for home.

Winner Best Screenplay Cannes Film Festival 2007 • Winner Best Screenplay Award, European Film Awards 2007 • Winner Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing 2008 German Film Awards (LOLA) • NY Times Critics Pick http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/movies/21heav.html

Sponsored by Systems Plus Computers www.systemsplus.com

Q&A with filmmaker

Writer/producer/director Mark Mitchell's pitch-black satiric mockumentary savages all sides and dramatizes the further degeneration of the American electoral process via the 2016 campaign of Independent Presidential candidate Texan billionaire nihilist Neil Liszt. With appealing candor, Liszt makes no bones about his platform: since life sucks, his plan is to end the world. Targeting propagandistic corporate media, morally-bankrupt political parties, yellow journalism, populist extremism and religious fanaticism, Mitchell extrapolates a not-too-distant era in which the choice between an action-star candidate (whose campaign interrupts reshoots on Oceans 112 Part 3 Redux) and a beguiling Texan apocalypse-inviting oligarch makes the past eight years seem—well, you decide. Stars Yancy Butler, Holt McCallany, Marisa Berenson, Stephen Bradbury, Larry Pine, with cameos by Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Richard Masur and others. -Steve Bissette

Winner Best Non-European Dramatic Feature at the European Independent Film Festival (ECU) • Accolade Award for Excellence in Film.

Sponsored by Applegate Group

Preceded by Lucy: A Period Piece (13 min) by Julie Sagalowsky

Panel discussion follows led by Cyndy Bittinger, faculty member at the Community College of Vermont who teaches Women in U.S. History and historian commentator for Vermont Public Radio, Miriam Richards, retired Dartmouth Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English; aspiring artist Anne Galloway, freelance writer for Seven Days and former editor of the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus.

In a half-changed world, women often feel they need to choose: mothering or working? Your children's well-being or your own? Who Does She Think She Is?, a documentary by Academy Award winning filmmaker Pamela Tanner Boll (Born into Brothels), features five fierce women who refuse to choose. Through their lives, we explore some of the most problematic intersections of our time: mothering and creativity, partnering and independence, economics and art. The film invites us to consider both ancient legacies of women worshipped as cultural muses and more modern times where most people can't even name a handful of female artists.

Sponsored by Resource Systems Group www.rsginc.com

Community Partner: Byron Hathorn

Preceded by Only a Farmer (8 min) by Art Bell

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the gripping account of a group of brave and visionary women who demanded peace for Liberia, a nation torn to shreds by a decades old civil war. The women's historic, yet unsung achievement finds voice in a narrative that intersperses contemporary interviews, archival images, and scenes of present-day Liberia together to recount the experiences and memories of the women who were instrumental in bringing lasting peace to their country.

"Uplifting, disheartening, inspiring, enraging—the mind reels while watching the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, even as the eyes water, the temples pound and the body trembles. Directed by Gini Reticker and produced by Abigail E. Disney, this no-frills, no-nonsense inquiry into human beings at their absolute worst and heartening best charts the overlooked victory of the Liberian women's peace movement. Even those who think they know the story of modern Liberia may be surprised at what they discover." —Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Winner Best Documentary Feature 2008 Tribeca Film Festival

Preceded by Jeu (4 min) by Georges Schwizgebel

Panel discussion follows with Jon Finer, journalist from Norwich, VT who was in Gaza during the fighting, Frank Nicosia, Raoul Hilberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at UVM, and Diana Abouali, Professor of Arabic, Dartmouth College.

This is a bludgeoning catalogue of what its director, Mohammed Alatar, believes to be the effects and injustices of the 42-year Israeli occupation of east Jerusalem on the Palestinians who are steadily losing their homes. The film includes interviews with Palestinian and Israeli leaders, human rights activists and political analysts. This documentary takes you on a journey to the Middle East, exposing Israel's policy to gain supremacy and hegemony over the city of Jerusalem and its inhabitants.

Community Partner: Left Bank Books

Preceded by No Wind, No Waves (22 min) by Julian Higgins

Q&A with filmmaker Anne Henderson

Battle of Wills is a story of obsession and intrigue in the art world. Lloyd Sullivan believes he owns the only portrait of Shakespeare done from life, created in 1603 by an ancestor who was part of Shakespeare's troupe. Thirteen scientific tests have proven that the Sanders portrait is an authentic 17th century work. But is it Shakespeare? The film follows the trail of the portrait from the high tech labs of North America, to the art galleries of Bond Street and the wind-swept castles of the English Midlands. Battle of Wills unravels the mystery behind a painting that has shaken the art world.

Montreal International Art Film Festival, March 09, the National Portrait Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and at a special screening in Guelph, Ontario.

A German family's life takes a turn when Rudi, the father, travels to Japan to deepen his understanding of his wife's love of Butoh dancing, and to visit his expatriate son, in Tokyo. As he becomes intrigued by a young woman Butoh dancing in the park with a pink telephone to her ear, he is not sure if she is insane or the wondrous creature she appears to be. As Rudi abandons the inhibitions of his Western European upbringing and embraces the joy and beauty around him we can only gasp at the beauty of a Japan we have rarely seen on screen.

From the Director: "The story of Cherry Blossoms—Hanami begins with asking to see the connection to our ancestors in all of our movements. At some point (my dancing teacher) told me that the dead are dreaming of us...these words have become a "through-line" for me...if the dead dream of us, then maybe all signs of transience are just little postcards from the dead. The cherry blossom...has a long tradition in Japanese culture as a symbol of transience.

A painterly film about an aging man's love for his wife, the beauty of death, and the bonds of family. Transience and permanence merge as we explore one man's adventure of self-discovery in both the urban and rural landscapes of Japan.

Winner Golden Space Needle Award: Best Film • Seattle IFF 2008 • Winner Audience Award Week of German Films London 2008 • Winner Swann d'Or - Price of the Youth Jury Cabourg Film Festival 2008 • Winner Audience Award & Prize of the Youth Festival de Chatenay Malabry / France • Winner Best Lead Actor (Elmar Wepper) Best Costume Design (Sabine Greuning) Silver Lola for Best Film German Film Awards 2007 • Winner Best Film & Best Actor & Best Producers Bavarian Film Awards 2007

Sponsored by Casey Family Services

Community Partner: Mascoma Savings Bank

An astonishing, electrifying, eye-and-ear opening treat! What began in the streets of urban America has grown into an international dance movement, rooted in Hip-Hop music, gymnastics, martial artists like Bruce Lee and the smooth moves of James Brown. Producer/director Benson Lee traces the B-Boy (Beat Boy) breakdance phenomenon from its humble sidewalk origins to its breakthrough showcase in Flashdance (1983) and beyond. Though corporate American media quickly exploited and discarded the movement, the generation inspired by innovators Ken Swift, Storm, Mr. Freeze and others gathered in 1990 for the first international B-Boy Battle of the Year marathons, an event that now attracts cutting-edge teams from 18 countries. Breathtaking skill, artistry and energy charges the screen as dancers from Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, America and around the world come together to compete. Not to be missed! -Steve Bissette

Sponsored by Main Street Museum www.mainstreetmuseum.org