Inaugural Non-Fiction Screening Series ends
BASILICA NON-FICTION SCREENING SERIES
CO-CURATED WITH CHRIS BOECKMANN OF TRUE/FALSE FILM FEST
Image Credit: CAMERAPERSON, Kristen Johnson, 2016, Rwanda, by Gini Reticker
//$5- $10 sliding scale at the door
Basilica Hudson is proud to announce the expansion of its Screenings Series through a new collaboration with Chris Boeckmann, film programmer for the Columbia, MO-based True/False Film Fest, a pioneering film festival dedicated to exploring creative nonfiction film. The Basilica Non-Fiction Screening Series celebrates and interrogates the documentary genre through screenings and dialogue with visiting directors. The Basilica Non-Fiction Screening Series celebrates and interrogates the documentary genre through screenings and dialogue with visiting directors, featuring films by Brett Story, Kristen Johnson, Zhao Liang, Mehrdad Oskouei, and Tony Stone.
Following the premiere of Tony Stone’s 2016 documentary PETER AND THE FARM at True/False, Basilica Hudson co-founders Stone and Melissa Auf der Maur found a synergy of vision with the True/False mission and a collaboration was formed. Basilica Non-Fiction Film Series follows a similar model of a vibrant film festival in a small city surrounded by a rural landscape, attended by dedicated regional residents and national film enthusiasts.
SCHEDULE
SEPT 8 | THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES, Brett Story
SEPT 22 | CAMERAPERSON, Kristen Johnson
OCT 13 | BEHEMOTH, Zhao Liang
OCT 20 | STARLESS DREAMS, Mehrdad Oskouei
OCT 30 @ 7PM | PETER AND THE FARM, Tony Stone
//All Films Begin Promptly at 8PM unless otherwise noted
Image Credit: THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES, Brett Story
Thursday, September 8 | 8PM
THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES, Brett Story, 1hr 30min
Intro and Q & A with filmmaker Brett Story
More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES is a film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of goods destined for the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.
Brett Story is a geographer and non-fiction filmmaker based out of Toronto and New York. Her first feature-length film, the award-winning LAND OF DESTINY (2010), screened internationally and was broadcast on both Canadian and American television. She was the recipient of the Documentary Organization of Canada Institute’s 2014 New Visions Award, and is a nominee for the 2015 Ontario Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal for academic excellence. THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES is her second feature-length film. It won the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs International Canadian Documentary Film Festival and the Colin Low Prize for Best Canadian Documentary Film at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in 2016. Brett is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Centre
AWARDS + FESTIVALS // Alliance of Women Film Journalists EDA Award, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, The Colin Low Award for Canadian Documentary, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Best Canadian Documentary – Honourable Mention, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival
Image Credit: CAMERAPERSON, Kristen Johnson, Image by Lindsey Adario
Thursday, September 22 | 8PM
CAMERAPERSON, Kristen Johnson, 2016, 1hr 42min
Kirsten Johnson is one of the most notable cinematographers working in documentary cinema today, having shot CITIZENFOUR, HAPPY VALLEY, FAHRENHEIT 9/11, THE OATH, THE INVISIBLE WAR, and dozens of other essential documentaries. With her visually radical memoir CAMERAPERSON, Johnson presents an extraordinary and deeply poetic film of her own, drawing on the remarkable and varied footage that she has shot and reframing it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between storytelling and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented in so many other directors’ films as one reflection of truth into another kind of story — one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.
AWARDS + FESTIVALS // Feature Documentary Award, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Bruce Sinofsky Prize for Documentary Feature, Montclair Film Festival (MFF), Special Jury Prize, RiverRun International Film Festival, Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival, Jury Prize, Sarasota Film Festival, Grand Jury Award, Sheffield International Documentary Festival, Founders Prize, Traverse City Film Festival
Image Credit: BEHEMOTH, Zhao Liang
Thursday, October 13 | 8PM
BEHEMOTH, Zhao Liang, 2015, 1hr 35min
With restrained anger, Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang brings us on a staggering journey into a modern-day Dante’s Inferno, the pitch-black mines of Inner Mongolia. BEHEMOTH initially possesses a terrifying, widescreen grandeur, as explosions ravage the land and sheep stream down the newly formed slopes. Then as this mesmerizing movie digs deeper into the flames, the focus shifts to the workers toiling in this merciless profession. We pull up close, studying a miner as she methodically removes soot from her skin. Zhao carefully arranges these scenes into a gripping, disturbing travelogue. “Life’s greatest sorrow,” the narrator notes, “is to live with desire yet without hope.” By the time it’s reached its startling, unforgettable finale, BEHEMOTH has honed its fury into something every bit as powerful as its industrial-age subject.
AWARDS + FESTIVALS // Golden Firebird Award, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Best Documentary, Stockholm Film Festival, Green Drop Award,Venice Film Festival, SIGNIS Award, Venice Film Festival
Image Credit: STARLESS DREAMS, Mehrdad Oskouei
Thursday, October 20 | 8PM
STARLESS DREAMS, Mehrdad Oskouei, 2016, 1hr 16min
A haunting portrait of stolen childhood, STARLESS DREAMS plunges us into the lives of seven young teenage girls sharing temporary quarters at a rehabilitation and correction center on the outskirts of Tehran. As the New Year approaches, the girls bond and reveal with disarming and often playful honesty the circumstances and acts that resulted in their incarceration. They have killed their father, robbed a bank or were arrested for carrying 651 grams of cocaine. Outside the prison walls, danger is everywhere, even within their own families. Oskouei, one of Iran’s most prominent directors spent seven years securing access to this all-female facility. With incredible empathy, STARLESS DREAMS delivers an unforgettable cinematic portrayal of restored innocence and humanity.
AWARDS + FESTIVALS // True Vision Award, True/False Film Fest, Reva and David Logan Grand Jury Award, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Inspiration Award, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Amnesty International Film Prize, Berlin International Film Festival
Image Credit: PETER AND THE FARM, Tony Stone
Sunday, October 30 | 7PM
PETER AND THE FARM, Tony Stone, 2015, 1hr 31min
Director in attendance for special Hometown Screening!
Peter Dunning is a rugged individualist, an extreme, hard-drinking loner and a former artist. He has burned bridges with his wives and children; his only company, even on harsh winter nights, are the sheep, cows and pigs he tends on his Vermont farm. Peter is also one of the most complicated, sympathetic documentary subjects to come along in some time, a product of the 1960s counterculture whose poetic idealism has since soured. For all his candor, he slips into drunken self-destructive habits, cursing the splendors of a pastoral landscape that he has spent decades nurturing. Imbued with an aching tenderness, Tony Stone’s documentary is both haunting and heartbreaking, a mosaic of its singular subject’s transitory memories and reflections—however funny, tragic, or angry they may be.
AWARDS + FESTIVALS // Selected for True/False Film Fest, and New Directors | New Films in 2016.
ABOUT CHRIS BOECKMANN
Chris Boeckmann is a film programmer for the Columbia, MO-based True/False Film Fest and Ragtag Cinema. At True/False, he oversees the festival’s Neither/Nor sidebar, which brings documentary legends to mid-Missouri. And at Ragtag, he organizes free educational screenings with local nonprofit organizations. His writing has appeared in Film Comment and Filmmaker Magazine.
ABOUT TRUE/FALSE
Now entering its fourteenth year, the True/False Film Fest honors outstanding work in the blossoming field of nonfiction cinema. True/False is a celebration of distinct filmmaking voices from all over the world and an opportunity to discuss and appreciate the ways in which documentary films are constructed. Taking place over one weekend in Columbia, Missouri, the fest is a non-fiction utopia, alive with enthusiasm for cinema, as festgoers pack screenings and even take part in a documentary parade. Focusing on collegiality and the connections between diverse filmmakers rather than on awards and honorifics, True/False fosters non-competitive camaraderie and an unhurried opportunity to view and discuss great films.