Film Fest Opens in Missoula Feb. 14

Editor's Note: Ninety-eight documentaries in six days is a veritable smorgasbord of reality. So, to help you navigate the best of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which kicks off at in Missoula at the Wilma Feb. 14 and runs through the 20, we enlisted one of Missoula's famed reviewers, filmmakers and artists: Andy Smetanka. Read on for Andy's top five picks for the festival. And, to read up on others and make your own picks, check out the Festvial's site at www.bigskyfilmfest.org.

Butte, America (63 minutes)
Directed by Pam Roberts
If history were a natural resource, Butte would be sitting on a pile of it bigger than the rest of Montana put together. Though industry in Butte today is a only a trace of what it was a century ago, Montana's mining city continues to exert a powerful hold on the imagination, and now comes a documentary that manages to stuff a hundred-plus years of rough-and-tumble into a scant hour and three minutes. Rushed at times (or maybe Butte history fans like myself just can't get enough), Butte, America still conveys the tumultuous excitement of a once-upon-a-time Montana that preferred spats and tweed to boots and denim, where rival labor factions took the fight to the streets and money gushed even faster than the poisonous groundwater filling today's Berkeley Pit. Mandatory viewing for Montana history buffs.
Butte, America opens this year's festival at 10 AM on Thursday, February 14
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February 14-20, 2008

Official selections for the 2008 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival are now on-line, here. See complete list after the jump.

From February 14 - 20, 2008, the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival celebrates its 5th year by showcasing 98 films from 40 countries. The official selections represent a broad array of filmmaking styles, formats and production dates, from classics to World Premieres. The 2008 films were selected from nearly 1000 submissions from across the globe. [more]

Documentary Film Festival Winners Screen Wednesday Night

The Cats of Mirikitani, A Revolving Door, Ha Ha Ha America, The Colour of Olives, Seeds and Salvation Mountain all took home awards from the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival at the Wilma Theater in Missoula Tuesday.

Director Linda Hattendorf's The Cats of Mirikitani, won the Best Feature award at the festival. The jury said it recognized the film because it showcased, "the ability of cinema to transform not only the lives of the viewers who witness it, but also the transformation of the lives of the filmmaker and the subject - an impact that is often understated or denied in the documentary filmmaking process, but in this case is embraced when the events of life surpass the conventions and expectations of filmmaking itself."

Salvation Mountain, an artful look at a 74-year-old man with a mission of building a mountain to God in the middle of a desert, won the coveted Big Sky Award after its world premiere Tuesday night. The jury chose Salvation Mountain because, "It is a beautifully shot film that does not judge the artistry or convictions of its subject whose work in scale and execution could only belong to the American West." The award for "Best Short" went to HBO Films' A Revolving Door, Ha Ha Ha America won the "Best MiniDoc" and Seeds by Wojciech Kasperski and The Colour of Olives, a touching film about a family struggling with racial segregation in Palestine, both won "Artistic Vision" awards.

All winning films will screen on Wednesday, starting with the shorter films (A Revolving Door, Ha Ha Ha America and Seeds) at 6:15 p.m. Click "more" for the full screening schedule.
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At the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival

"What do you think the title should be?" Les Blank asked the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival audience after the Saturday night screening of The Tea Film. The film, Blank's 40th, chronicles an American importer's pursuit of the finest teas in China, and is a work in progress. So too is Les Blank. At 71, the legendary filmmaker continues to challenge himself with new digital technologies, an ever-expanding cast of quirky film characters, and a travel schedule that would exhaust the most die-hard jet setter.

Audience members, giddy at being queried by the filmmaker, shouted out suggestions like "Tao of Tea" and "Steeped in Tradition," but I preferred Blank's own choice, "For all The Tea."

The cool man with a white beard and black cap listened closely to all the suggestions and criticisms, no matter how outlandish. Audience reaction is important to Blank's creative process, so on Sunday afternoon he held a workshop to screen his most recent works: Being There, about legendary documentarian Richard Leacock, and Butch Anthony, which profiles an outsider artist from Alabama. Both are short works designed to woo investors, who would provide the funds to turn them into feature-length films.

Click here to listen to Seonaid B. Campbell's interview with Les Blank.

Big Sky Documentary Film Festival

“All the things that are beautiful and magical about the cinema are beautiful and magical about documentary too,” said Ariana Gerstein during this afternoon’s panel with four other filmmakers at the Big Sky Film Festival.

With Andy Smetanka moderating, Steve James (The War Tapes), John Sinno (Killing a Deer, Iraq in Fragments), Niklas Vollmer (Happy Crying Nursing Home) and Gerstein (Alice Sees the Light) shared their creative differences, similarities and views on the changing and growing documentary genre. [more]

New West Pick: Documentary Film Festival

You'd think the likelihood of things ending badly would deter more people from joining cults with lots of stockpiled weapons and compounds situated in barren, windswept wildernesses perfectly suited for breeding religious psychosis.

You'd think cult women would see through cheesy pickup lines like "To lie with me is to lie with God" or, "To bear a child with me is the greatest gift a woman could give her God." And, you'd think their God-fearing menfolk would be wise to religious leaders who drive black Camaros and claim that God doesn't want them to sleep with their wives -- they should hand them over to him instead. That, in a nutshell, is why it's tempting to suggest that maybe the Branch Davidians -- the grown-ups, that is -- maybe kinda sorta weren't the sharpest tools in the shed.

And that's why the spectacular, strawberry-flavored demise of Jonestown is way more tragic: The 900-odd people who died by cyanide-laced soft drink had actually come close to a working version of the sort of earthly paradise promised by every compound-building, hellfire-preaching nut job with lots of land in the middle of nowhere. Son of a Klansman, Jim Jones preached a gospel of radical racial integration at a time when few others dared, appealing particularly to African-Americans, establishing the first so-called Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in the late 1950s. Watching Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (playing this coming Monday at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival), you're struck not by Jones's legendary charisma, but by the fervor and diversity of his followers and the seemingly guileless simplicity of their aspirations: peace on earth. [more]

New West Pick: Documentary Film Festival

A common feature of my favorite "crackpot scheme" documentaries -- practically a genre unto itself--is the, ahem, culture of enablement in which these crazy dreamers thrive. Look behind a Mark Borchardt or a Troy Hurtubise, subjects of American Movie and Project Grizzly, respectively, and you'll notice at least one neighborhood dude hovering around that crazy dreamer like a moth.

In Big Dreamers, the story of a small Australian town's oddball mission to build a giant statue of a rubber boot, one of the men helping boot artist Bryan Newell cut the fiberglass panels and weld the steel armature is credited simply as "neighbor." He doesn't say a word in the film, but you just know he and artist Newell have formed one of those man-bonds that accrete around man-things like potato cannons, pumpkin catapults, bear-fighting suits and DIY slasher movies. And by "man" in this case, of course, I mean "overgrown kid."

Editor's Note: "Big Dreamers" is one of NewWest.Net's top picks for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which opens Feb. 15 at the Wilma Theater. "Big Dreamers," which will see its world premiere at the festival, shows on Monday, Feb. 19 at 5:30 p.m. in the Wilma. Check back to www.newwest.net/bsdff for more NewWest.Net picks this week and coverage of the festival. [more]

Big Sky Documentary Film Festival

The film Montana Meth made its world premiere Thursday night at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in front of an audience that overflowed the Wilma Theatre’s main auditorium.

The crowd winced its way through the often-graphic hour-long film that features scenes of real meth addicts smoking and injecting the drug while delving into the painful world of meth addiction. Many in the audience cringed when the film showed a dentist tear a shrunken, rotted tooth from a recovering meth addict’s mouth.

A common response after the screening was that it was “disturbing” but “effective.”

Click here to listen to the NewWest.Net interview with "Montana Meth" director Eames Yates.

New West Pick: Documentary Film Festival

Of all the miracles that constitute The War Tapes -- and this movie is a seemingly unending string of miracles -- easily the most overriding is the very fact of its existence.

Billed as the first war flick with combat scenes filmed exclusively by combat soldiers, this might be the most improbable movie ever made.

Editor's Note: "The War Tapes" is one of NewWest.Net's top picks for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which opened Feb. 15 at the Wilma Theater. "The War Tapes," which is one of the special presentations at the festival, shows on Friday, Feb. 16 at 7:30 p.m. in the Wilma. Producer Steve James and co-producer Adam Singer will be on hand to do an extended question and answer session with the audience after the screening. Click here to watch the trailer for the film and check back to www.newwest.net/bsdff for more NewWest.Net picks this week and coverage of the festival. [more]

New West Pick: Documentary Film Festival

At more than 40 million acres it’s the largest irrigated crop in America and 5,000 new acres are planted daily. It uses 30,000 tons of pesticides a year, billions of gallons of water and looks great with garden gnomes. It's lawn grass. And Gimme Green,, a short film at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival this week, explores the American obsession with it -- and the tidy, green front yards it creates.

In just 27 minutes this sometimes funny, sometimes scary film ambitiously pulls together the environmental, economic and social impacts of lawn cultivation, all the while toying with the idea of lawns as a symbol of social status. [more]