“Film festivals are the dominant way to see films like this,” noted documentary filmmaker A.J. Schnack , whose film We Always Lie to Strangers turned out to be my favorite doc of the recent Sarasota Film Festival. His comment was a response to an audience member who during the Q&A wanted to know where her friends might be able to see the film. Unfortunately, the question and comment reveal the dismal situation for documentary distribution and exhibition. Outside the three major markets (New York, Chicago, and L.A.), there are few venues that regularly show nonfiction film. Charles Coleman, the intrepid programmer at Chicago’s Facets Multi-Media, where I used to work, booked a variety of documentaries, which satiated my nonfiction appetite, but it is much more difficult to see docs on the big screen in smaller cities.

The festival experience provides a golden opportunity to catch a variety of nonfiction and alternative films. The selection of documentaries at the Sarasota Film Festival was excellent this year. I can honestly say I liked every documentary that I saw. In that spirit, I recommend all of the titles in today’s post in the hopes that fans of this tragically under-viewed format will seek them out on DVD or at local film festivals.

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A perk to living in a small city populated by art lovers is a film festival with all the advantages that such an event offers with none of the disadvantages that plague big-city fests. The Sarasota Film Festival (SFF) opened this past weekend, showcasing a variety of worthy foreign, indie, and documentary films in a conveniently located venue with a friendly, well-organized staff and free parking. (Special nod to festival staff member Josh Jacobson, who herded me to the right theaters all day with a smile and a joke.) My newly adopted hometown of Sarasota is filled with avid movie lovers of all ages, and the SFF fills a void for residents who crave more than Hollywood’s indistinguishable drivel (G.I. Joe: Retaliation; Fast and Furious 6; Pain & Gain) or the occasional indie hit. The success of film fests in smaller markets like Sarasota reveals the misconceptions of distributors who insist that audiences outside the major urban centers of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles will not support non-Hollywood films. The jammed screenings and enthusiastic patrons of the SFF prove how narrow that viewpoint truly is. READ MORE

My attempt to do the SXSW film festival last year on a small budget was a remarkable fiasco. The round-trip drive had me spending 40 hours on the road, aided in part by a GPS device that would set itself to a default destination every time its suction-mount failed and it fell to the floor by the passenger seat (which was often). I almost lost my car to high waters in a freak deluge three hours before arriving to Austin in Brownwood, Texas. Although I arrived safely my bike was stolen on my third day in Austin, and the return trip saw me hiding out at the Trail’s End Trinidad motel hoping I wouldn’t be robbed by nearby meth addicts. Side-note to readers: don’t pick up hitch-hikers with tear-drop tattoos. I realize this is a rather broad statement, one that does not take into account which eye the tattoo falls under, or whether the tear drop is unfilled, possibly meaning simply that the person’s friend was killed, or whether the tear drop is inked in, thus symbolizing that the person has killed the killer. Either way, it does seem to point toward some degree of poor judgement regarding the friends the hitchhiker likes to hang out with. I tried not to dwell on their peculiar views involving vigilante justice – focused as I was on dropping them off at the nearest corner I could find.  Ironically, what almost killed me that night was a so-called air-freshener, one that had been hidden under a night-stand by the bed and opened up full-throttle, saturating my small room with near-lethal toxins. It was hard to breathe, much less sleep, and it left me nauseous and sick for days afterwards.

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I’m packing my bags today and flying out to Salt Lake City tomorrow. The first stop is the 6th annual Art House Convergence – a yearly meeting of independent and art house movie theater owners and operators that takes place January 14 – 17 in Midway, Utah. The conference will include talks and discussions by film historian David Bordwell, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema founder Tim League, actor Crispin Hellion Glover, and even Sundance top dawg Robert Redford will be there for the opening dinner to talk about Sundance Institute. It’ll basically be a bunch of workshops, seminars, and presentations where both film exhibitors and distributors meet to talk business, and this will then be followed by a trip to Park City to attend the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. READ MORE

The beginning of the New Year means it’s time to catch up with the old. For the second year running the “First Look” series at the Museum of the Moving Image (January 4 – 13) provides an invaluable showcase for undistributed international cinema. Programmers Rachael Rakes, Dennis Lim and David Schwartz pluck adventurous work from festivals around the world, tracking developments in documentary form, the Berlin School, Korean indies and the continuing vibrancy of Portuguese film culture. In a clue as to the series’ disregard of commercial impulses, the series’ opening night film is Hors Satan, the latest by the divisive arthouse provocateur Bruno Dumont. Operating as a relatively youthful version of the New York Film Festival, First Look is an attempt to clue its audiences in to the possible future of the medium.

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The New York Film Festival is in its final week, concluding on Sunday night with a screening of Robert Zemeckis’ return to live-action filmmaking, Flight. Most of the action this past weekend, though, took place during the Views From the Avant-Garde sidebar. In its 16th year, Views provides an increasingly large snapshot of experimental film practice around the globe. Taking place in the year-old Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, the series takes over two screens and an amphitheater space, where audiences can jump back and forth between programs, if they can afford it.  This year’s slate includes festival mainstays like Nathaniel Dorsky, future fixtures Laida Lertxundi and Ben Rivers, and the unclassifiable duo of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Raul Ruiz, who straddle the arthouse/avant-garde divide.

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The 50th edition of the New York Film Festival opened this past Friday night with a Gala 3D screening of Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi. While that digital projection was warmly received, later that weekend the first showing of Brian DePalma’s Passion was canceled because of an intransigent DCP (Digital Cinema Package). As the NYFF, like festivals worldwide, becomes dominantly digital, attending some of the few celluloid screenings starts to feel like a modestly defiant gesture.  Two 35mm dinosaurs,  Manoel de Oliveira’s The Satin Slipper (1985) and  Miguel Gomes’ Tabu (2012) use Portugal’s colonial past as their subject, with both using archaic forms to emphasize themes of negation and evanescence.

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For the sixth year running, the Japan Cuts film series in New York City presents an eye-opening glimpse of contemporary filmmaking from across the Pacific, the vast majority of which will never receive distribution in the United States. Programmed in concert with the ongoing New York Asian Film Festival (which I covered for Film Comment), it runs from July 12 – 28 at the Japan Society, and will screen 37 features and two shorts. The normally sober-minded fest has gone pop this year, booking a slate bubbling with hyperactive rom-coms and sci-fi extravaganzas, but there is also a sidebar of films responding to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, as well as a tribute to the expressively stone-faced actor Koji Yakusho, who will appear in-person for the screening of The Woodsman and the Rain (2011).

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Last week I shared photos from the first 15 years of the Cannes Film Festival. While the 65th Cannes Film Festival is still unfolding on the French Riviera I thought I’d continue celebrating by sharing some more photos from the decade that made Cannes one of the most important film festivals in the world – the 1960s. Keen observers will notice a distinct change from the last group of photos I shared. The publicity stunts got sillier and the bikini’s got smaller while men let their hair grow longer. The films winning awards also became more challenging, more radical, more overtly political and more experimental. Women were now allowed on the Jury and in 1965 actress Olivia de Havilland became Cannes’ first female President. The times were changing and the festival was changing right along with them.

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