{"id":4148,"date":"2005-04-27T14:30:07","date_gmt":"2005-04-27T18:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/httpblogslawharvardeduceerock4\/2005\/04\/27\/iffboston-awar"},"modified":"2006-12-23T12:29:31","modified_gmt":"2006-12-23T16:29:31","slug":"iffboston-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/2005\/04\/27\/iffboston-awards\/","title":{"rendered":"IFFBoston Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Apparently my priorities were very different from the other IFFBoston<\/a> audience members as well as the Grand Jury for the festival, as I managed to miss every single one of the winners for both Jury and Audience awards. I therefore cannot give you my own commentary on the winners, so I will instead tell you why I missed each and give my own alternate winner:<\/p>\n

Grand Jury and Special Jury Award Prizes<\/p>\n

Narrative Feature: BLACKBALLED: THE BOBBY DUKES STORY<\/a>, directed by Brant Sersen. This is a mockumentary and therefore I question its placement in the narrative feature category. And I did plan to see it but I chose instead to see some real documentaries. I was flying high on idealism after seeing Chain<\/a> <\/span>and Mutual Appreciation<\/a><\/span> and didn’t want to spoil the ride with silly cynical Comedy-Central comedy about Paintball players. And I want to know who the hell is on this Grand Jury if they picked this<\/em> as the best film. I did manage to catch Filmic Achievement<\/a>, another mockumentary, but was not impressed. It takes a very subtle hand to make an effective mockumentary–a little too much of one thing or another and you just look like a bad imitation of Spinal Tap<\/em> or The Office<\/em>. And Filmic Achievement<\/em>, a mockumentary about film students, looked like that. MY SELECTION FOR THE AWARD: Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation<\/a><\/em>, natch.<\/p>\n

Best documentary: Ellen Perry for THE FALL OF FUJIMORI<\/a>. I did also plan to see this one but couldn’t due to time conflicts. It is not possible to see all films in a film festival, unfortunately. I could’ve made time, but there are very difficult decisions to be made when you are trying to see as much as you can at a festival. Sigh. Such sacrifices we make. MY SELECTION FOR THE AWARD: I didn’t see enough docs in the festival to really have an authoritative opinion, and of those I did see I wasn’t bowled over by any, so I would have to go with The Future of Food<\/a><\/em>, which I suppose you could say did bowl me over–with horror at our government and corporate greed. But if you allow Chain<\/em> into the documentary category, that would definitely be my choice. It doesn’t really fit into doc or fiction categories, though.<\/p>\n

Audience Awards<\/p>\n

Narrative feature: BROTHERS<\/a>, directed by Susanne Bier. This was a late addition to the schedule and only had one screening, which I learned of too late, and I don’t really understand how a film can get that many votes from a single screening. It’s not something that I probably would’ve wanted to see anyway, though, and I suspect it got its votes because it is a dramatic and timely war film.<\/p>\n

Documentary feature: AFTER INNOCENCE<\/a>, directed by Jessica Sanders. Another that I was only mildly interested in. The docs in the festival seemed very straightforward and while generally I am more interested in documentary, I am not usually in it for the actual subject matter. If that’s all you want in a documentary, it becomes merely a matter of somebody finding the best\/weirdest story. It’s then about journalism, not about filmmaking. The docs I did see (Future of Food<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Rhythm Is It<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Spew<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> and Inside Out<\/a><\/em>) were all in this vein. Rhythm Is It<\/em>, which is about a troupe of troubled teenagers who were wrangled together to put on a dance performance in Berlin, was perhaps the only one that tried to say more than its subject matter. But in a fairly didactic way, which to me undermines the artistry. And I didn’t see anything in the doc lineup at the festival that attempted much in the way of artistry. I could be wrong, of course, as there were a dozen or so that I didn’t see. But I don’t think I’m wrong.<\/p>\n

In sum, I don’t think much of these award winners, neither the Grand Jury nor Audience Awards. Pfft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apparently my priorities were very different from the other IFFBoston audience members as well as the Grand Jury for the festival, as I managed to miss every single one of the winners for both Jury and Audience awards. I therefore cannot give you my own commentary on the winners, so I will instead tell you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1228,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iffboston","category-just-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58QoK-14U","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}