connecting*the*dots

To attend the free preview screening tonight at 7pm Friday night, please reply to this RSVP e-mail. The theater address is:

Carmike Market Fair 15 (Google Maps)
1916 Skibo Road
Fayetteville, NC
910-868-9434

Enjoy!

If you’re in SF, check it out if you can (trailer).

No matter your position on this war or war in general, it’s an amazingly honest narrative… one that’s hard to capture, even through traditional channels of documentary filmmaking.

San Francisco
Free Screening Tonight! 7:30PM.
Castro Theatre (Directions)
429 Castro Street

To get your free ticket, please RSVP to screening@thewartapes.com with subject “War Tapes Screening/SF” and your full name in the body of the email. The free tickets are being given out on a first-come first-served basis, so RSVP now! If you are bringing a friend, copy them in the email and put their name in the email as well.

Yesterday, Andy, Jonathan and I attended the film’s world premeire at the Tribeca Film Festival as a guest of Director, Deborah Scranton. The air of the theatre was chock-full of tangible anticipation, as the audience verbally spatted with itself before, during and after the screening. What else would you expect? We’re waist deep in a war that has spiraled out of (non)control into random acts of sectarian violence, kidnappings and assassinations.

But no matter your position on the war in Iraq, The War Tapes is a must see. It isn’t propaganda for empire building and it isn’t anti-war material. The film is 90-minutes of brilliantly edited (from 1200+ hours of raw footage), first person perspective of three National Guard soldiers who agreed to film their year-long tour of Iraq. The narrative twists and turns through adrenaline rushes, moments of self-reflection and gut-wrenching honest discourse.

It’s nothing but real, human storytelling of real, human beings.

The Q&A session following the film was interesting, both from the filmmaker and audience perspective. While we were being told about the thousands of hours of footage and IM conversations behind the making of the film, a few guys in the front of the audience began shouting randomly at the audience, defending the complexity of the war to a group of people who might have had a particular political perspective, but were incredibly apropos with their attention and questions directed squarely at the film itself.

Deborah and crew gracefully handled the protests and gave their mic’s to the soldiers (Stephen Pink, Mike Moriarty and Zack Bazzi), who casually stepped into the spotlight and delivered their $.02 on the whole experience. I guess a film premeire isn’t too much pressure after spending 365 days watching each other’s backs on the other side of the planet.

Following the Q&A, we stopped by the after party at The Bubble Lounge. While packed with friends, family and industry types, we eventually bumped into Deborah and her son (what’s up, Benjamin!?).

During our conversation, Deborah told me that due to the success of this project, a handful of soldiers have since contacted her, looking to become armed with the latest weapon of warfare: a video camera.

Citizen media has a new brother in arms, and soldier media has a five star director.

Yesterday, Andy and I had the opportunity to rap with a handful of UNCG film students, as his former professor (Matt Barr) invited him to present his documentary, reveal his creative process and expose the realities of the distribution game. I tagged along to introduce the possibilities of the web; how it can be used as both a creative channel and a viral mechanism for distribution.

Andy dove right in and introduced the story behind his documentary (Greensboro’s Child) to the students — the ties between the 1979 KKK shootings of five worker’s rights protesters and the unjust sentencing of a civil rights activist’s child to two life sentences for unarmed burglary just 7 years later.

The entire time I sat listening intently to my brother’s passionate presentation, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of times he mentioned his desire to not only go back into the film and improve upon his student-level production techniques (he began the documentary back in 1996), but to continue to document the unfolding story by re-editing the film and updating it with the findings of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

While I completely understand his intent and agree with the desired results, I just don’t agree with the approach — not in this day and age.

As a blogger and an enthusiast of web/documentary projects like the Echo Chamber Project and The War Tapes, my perspective of an evolving narrative is completely different than Andy’s.

When I think about Greensboro’s Child, I view it as a foundation of knowledge; an element that can be built upon with new elements of video, images and text to create an even broader and more reputable narrative thesis. It’s an impossible goal to continuously include the numerous, ever-evolving tentacles of the story (the Greensboro police department, the community attitude, etc.) within a single 1.5 hour long documentary.

So once the lights came back on and the students finished their Q&A, I introduced myself, a bit of my career history and proceeded to find my zone… Somewhere in the midst of my presentation, I introduced:

• myself as an activist, rather than a designer (a first)
• the possibilities of using cutting edge video distribution channels to introduce their voices to the world, such as youtube, currentTV, democracy
• how a mixture of blogging and video can have a more lasting reach than both tv and film (Rocketboom for example)

By the time my diatribe subsided, I found myself engaged in a conversation surrounding The People, Yes. Once we moved beyond the concept of the collaborative blog for the homeless of Greensboro, we evolved into a conversation about weekly trips into the community to capture the various stories of the underprivileged, on camera, and turning it back around as weekly shorts in a vlog. Heads were nodding left and right as the film students seemed eager to participate in such a project.

So I now have a new angle to TPY… and quite possibly a pool of energetic, dedicated, creative filmmakers to participate in the cause.

While walking off the UNCG campus, I turned around to take in a final glimpse… something, I don’t know what, just seemed different…