The work of Adelaide-based artist-filmmakers Dan Monceaux and Emma Sterling continues to shine beyond their expectations. Having traveled the world and reached a projected audience in comfortable excess of 10000, their short experimental documentary ‘A Shift in Perception’ is now enjoying its online premiere at the Con-Can Film Festival, based in Japan.

The prestigious event, now in its fourth year, saw the film selected as one of only twenty films selected worldwide from a field of over eight hundred. Having previously won awards in Mexico, Canada, the USA and Australia, the support of its already broad audience gives it a strong chance of making the festival’s Grand Final and major prize round. The film explores blindness through the senses and words of three South Australian women.

“When you’re packing and posting out copies of your work to festivals, it’s always a pleasant surprise to hear you’ve been selected.” says Monceaux, 26 of Leabrook. “The timing for our online debut couldn’t have been better though. We’ve had a good run of screenings since last November, and online media from the Super8 community and the documentary one have been very supportive of our efforts, offering oodles of encouragement.”

The film has recently piqued the interest of a Canadian distributor who has expressed interested in reviewing the film for distribution in the USA and Canada, and Emma and Dan are enthusiastic about their young business having an impact abroad.

“When Danimations began I was working freelance with illustration, photography and graphic design jobs. Most of that work was for advertising and small business. Finding personal stories in our community and sharing them with the world as documentary films is a far more satisfying process, and is beginning to look like a sustainable business. The success of our first short documentary has attracted the interest of several more established collaborators and the future looks bright.”

Working out of their home in Leabrook and building their industry network via the internet, Danimations has also recently entered the international Citizen Super8 project. A collaborative filmmaking enterprise initiated by a group of film makers from as far a field as Iran, Uganda and the UK, each filmmaker’s brief is to explore an aspect of local and global citizenship with their own short documentary shot on Super8 film. The Danimations inclusion which will commence production shortly, will peep into the world of a man who rebuilt a life as an artist after a fateful brain injury. Monceaux’s debut ‘A Shift in Perception’ can be seen online at http://www.con-can.com until July 17th, or in person at the Sydney International Film Festival, Sydney, Australia in June.

After screening in nineteen countries and winning accolades at home and abroad, the locally (South Australian) produced experimental documentary film ‘A Shift in Perception’ has pushed filmmakers Dan Monceaux and Emma Sterling into the international spotlight. Currently screening at the Burnside Library as part of the exhibition ‘Watch This Space’ until May 4^th, the film has shared the stories of three vision impaired women from the Port Adelaide Enfield area with audiences the world over.

“Since the film premiered at IDFA in the Netherlands last November (like the Cannes of documentary), it’s continued to surprise us. The film’s now screened as far a field as Uruguay and Croatia, and has won several awards at festivals in the USA and Canada. It won first prize at the Black Maria Film & Video Festival in New Jersey, and is currently in their touring program, with over seventy scheduled screenings in cinemas, art galleries, libraries and universities. Locally we’ve screened at Adelaide International Film Festival, and Sydney International Film Festival has it programmed for their prestigious event in June. The audience it’s reaching is enormous.”

For the dedicated young couple, the thrills keep coming with FreeSpeechTV, an American cable and satellite network buying a license to broadcast the work to a potential audience of 130 million viewers. The Danimations team has also been selling the film through their website to people internationally, and are currently producing a version for the education market to be distributed in Australia by Ronin Films.

“The reward of reaching such a wide audience is wonderful,” says Monceaux. “The film aimed to provide its viewers with insight into the blind person’s world, and clearly it’s a concept that appeals to regardless of culture or verbal language. The film puts you inside the heads of its subjects- Leander, Rhonda and Edna- and does so in an often abstract way. The result is a conversational narrative from the women illustrated experimentally- a far cry from traditional documentary.”

The exhibition currently screening the work at Burnside Library is a showcase of emerging artists’ artwork with a focus on animation and short film- a perfect match for ‘A Shift in Perception’.  Incorporating techniques of time lapse, animation and soft-focus, the work premiered locally at Higher Ground, Adelaide during the South Australian living Artists’ Festival last year. The film is also available for sale at the Royal Society for the Blind’s Low Vision Centre, 230 Pirie St, with part proceeds going to the organisation.

 

Visit the film’s website for more details: http://www.danimations.com.au/perception

As documentary filmmakers, Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine looked up to Michael Moore.Then they tried to do a documentary of their own about him _ and ran into the same sort of resistance Moore himself famously faces in his own films.

The result is “Manufacturing Dissent,” which turns the camera on the confrontational documentarian and examines some of his methods. Among their revelations in the movie, which had its world premiere Saturday night at the South by Southwest film festival: That Moore actually did speak with then-General Motors chairman Roger Smith, the evasive subject of his 1989 debut “Roger & Me,” but chose to withhold that footage from the final cut.

The husband-and-wife directors spent over two years making the movie, which follows Moore on his college tour promoting 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The film shows Melnyk repeatedly approaching Moore for an interview and being rejected; members of Moore’s team also kick the couple out of the audience at one of his speeches, saying they weren’t allowed to be shooting there. [read more…]

A U.S. federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit by an Iraq war veteran who claimed filmmaker Michael Moore used the veteran’s image without permission in the anti-war documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

The film showed Iraq war veteran Sgt. Peter Damon, who had lost his right arm near the shoulder and much of his left arm, lying in a hospital gurney at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Maryland, saying that he feels pain but that pain-killers given him “take a lot of the edge” off of it. (more…)

In an open ed piece in the LA Times, Michael Moore made this pledge to “disheartened conservatives:”

1) We will always respect you. We will never, ever, call you “unpatriotic” simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us.

2) We will let you marry whomever you want (even though some among us consider your Republican behavior to be “different” or “immoral”). Who you marry is none of our business. Love, and be in love — it’s a wonderful gift.

3) We will not spend your grandchildren’s money on our personal whims or to enrich our friends. It’s your checkbook too, and we will balance it for you.

4) When we soon bring our sons and daughters home from Iraq, we will bring your sons and daughters home too. We promise never to send your kids off to war based on some amateur Power Point presentation cooked up by men who have never been to war.

5) When we make America the last Western democracy to have universal health coverage, and all Americans are able to get help when they fall ill, we promise that you too will be able to see a doctor, regardless of your ability to pay. And when stem cell research delivers treatments and cures for diseases that afflict you and your loved ones, we’ll make sure those advances are available to you and your family too. [Read More…]

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19th Seagate Foyle Film Festival announces Call For Entry to the Stella Artois Film Awards, 10-19 November 2006.

Categories include: Best International Short, Best Irish Short, Best Animation, Best Feature and Best Documentary

FINAL DEADLINE is 8th September 2006

A £10 fee will be applied for entries recieved by 4th September.
Those received by the final deadline will be charged £20

Short Film and Short Animations must be between 5–40minutes duration, while Short Documentaries must be a minimum of 15minutes and a maximum of 30minutes duration. There is no time limit for the categories of Feature Film, Feature Animation and Feature Documentary.

For the selection process acceptable formats are VHS, NTSC and DVD. Successful entries to the competition must be on 35mm format for all categories excluding Documentary, for which 35mm and digital formats (excluding Digibeta and DVCam Pro) are suitable. Read the rest of this entry »

Telefest is more than a festival for television. The goal of Telefest is simple – the revolution of television. Telefest is as diverse as the programming currently on network and cable TV, with 15 categories encompassing drama, comedy, reality, soaps, documentaries, films, music videos, stand up comedy, how-to shows, political shows, animation, commercials, teleplays and more. Read the rest of this entry »

“Blood Of Eden”, a new feature film documentary written and directed by Ziad Hamzeh, has begun principal photography in Washington, DC and Damascus, Syria. Conjuring up the visual feeling of the classic battle scenes and majestic beauty of Arabia that was masterfully created by David Lean in “Lawrence Of Arabia”, “Blood Of Eden” follows, explores and experiences the lives of extraordinary Arab women as they raise the stakes in the fight against religious fanaticism, societal barriers, political domination and archaic traditions all aimed to curtail the freedom of Arab women. Read the rest of this entry »

“Punto de Vista”, the Navarra International Documentary Film Festival, is now inviting submissions for the next edition of the festival which will take place 23th February – 3rd March 2007, in Pamplona (Spain). Read the rest of this entry »

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These days, when you watch a movie and wonder “How did they do that?”, it’s typically a technical question. How did CGI create that dragon, those thousands of Middle Earth warriors, the Chinese swordsmen skipping across a lake, that web-slinger’s battle with Doc Ock? How did they get that incredible angled shot of Victoria Falls (or a bird plummeting a thousand feet)? How did they get those dangerous exotic animals into the same frame with the hero?

With the 2004 surfing documentary “Riding Giants,” “How did they do that?” becomes a different question—or rather, two. There’s the psychological one: Where did those young men get the cojones, never mind the skill, to ride a board down a 40-foot wave, at 35 miles an hour and more, with white foam curling behind, rocks up ahead, and a vicious undertow below? Then there’s a procedural one: Just how did they produce that 1950s video footage of big-wave surfing off Waimea Bay, Hawaii, and how did they manage to live out there, year after year, simply to surf?

Click here for the full review by David Loftus.