Watch Excerpts from the July 6th Cinema Speakeasy

PIFVA presented a Cinema Speakeasy event at L’Etage (6th and Bainbridge in south Philadelphia) featuring work by filmmakers Q and Ted Passon. Screened works included Maple Rabbit Music Videos, Pink on a Man, by Q, and This One Time in Paris, by Ted Passon. Q & A with Q & Ted followed the screenings.

Watch video HERE

Films and more films

QFest, the gay and lesbian film festival, has 125 features to offer.

Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20100709_Films_and_more_films.html#ixzz0tCMhqscS

Postcard for PIFVA Cinema Speakeasy on July 6, 2010!

PIFVA Cinema Speakeasy July 6, 2010

Q & A with Q & Ted: Filmmaking in Philly

Q with Pink on a Man and Ted Passon with This One Time in Paris; special screenings of Maple Rabbit music videos.

WHEN: July 6, 2010, Doors open at 7pm, food and drinks available from Beau Monde
WHAT: Q with Pink on a Man and Ted Passonwith This One Time in Paris; special screenings of Maple Rabbit music videos.
WHERE: L’Etage, Bainbridge and 6th, Philadelphia, 19147

More info: contact Caroline at PIFVA – 215-382-2579 or contactus@pifva.org

A collaboration between PIFVA and L’Etage, to engage our community in provocative conversations for and about media arts.

The Philadelphia Film and Video Association (PIFVA) has inaugurated a new series, Cinema SPEAKEASY,featuring Philadelphia media makers who have received grants from PIFVA to complete their media projects. Regularly scheduled on the 1st Tuesday of every month, this event will be hosted by a Philadelphia “creative” who will introduce the filmmaker and their screening and after the screening, will engage in a lively conversation that will illuminate current issues, ideas and movements in today’s media arts.
Once the formal evening’s events are finished, everyone will be encouraged to network (bring your laptop) share projects and meet others in the Media Arts. You can order food and drinks from the L’Etage menu.

Pink a Man by Q and This One Time in Paris by Ted Passon In anticipation of Q Fest, PIFVA presents the filmwork of Q with Pink on a Man and This One Time in Paris by Ted Passon with Maple Rabbit music videos as ongoing video delight. Q and Ted will exchange roles as artist and interviewer.

Pink on a Man by Q

Adrian “Q” Quintero, a genderqueer identified trans person, documents the decision making process around whether or not to physically transition on hormones. The journey includes discussions about gender roles, identity, and language with people who are a part of the process: patient friends, fellow trans people, an inquisitive chiropractor, and the filmmaker’s own mother. Pink premiered in May 2008 at the Trans Health Conference in Philadelphia.

This One Time in Paris by Ted Passon Reality develops in front of the camera as fantastical expectations develop behind it. A true story of love and loss in the city of Paris is told as it unfolds.Music by: Tender Forever, Chris Ward, and Jen Rice.Animation by: Bonnie B. Scott

Maple Rabbit is a 3-person, all-keyboard video band that prefers their cuteness with edge, their politics with glitz and stop-motion, and their drum machines with careful harmonies.

Inside a Soccer Soap Opera in Africa

by Patrick Reed, Director of The Team

With World Cup fever upon us, Patrick Reed, director of the upcoming ITVS International production The Team, describes filming the making of a soap opera about soccer in Kenya. The fictional program was intended to unite and distract Kenyans in the aftermath of violence following the 2007 elections. The film is still in production.

With the 2010 World Cup in full swing, the eyes of the world are on Africa.

Each morning — before rushing off to the edit suite in Toronto, Canada, where I live — starts with a guilty pleasure: eating breakfast in front of the TV and watching the early morning World Cup match with my 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.

For my kids, the novelty of watching TV in the morning compensates for their difficulty following the action. Lots of questions, of course, such as: “Why do the players keep falling down?” And, “What’s happening?” when the referee brandishes a red card and sends a player off (something my kids keenly appreciate, as they are very familiar with the concept of being penalized for bad behavior).

Films I’ve made in Africa — including Shake Hands with the Devil and Triage — were neither easy to make, nor easy to watch. I was hardly suffering from “Africa fatigue,” but did want to explore a different side of the so-called African story: one that wasn’t about a Western outsider on a pilgrimage back to the past, or on a crusade into the future. Rather, a story set in the present where Africans played the starring role, active participants instead of passive victims.

So, I was immediately intrigued when I heard that a Kenyan production company — borrowing an idea from the innovative U.S.-based NGO Search for Common Ground — was creating a TV soap opera series called The Team, hoping to captivate an audience and compel their nation to confront issues like tribalism.

We started filming in December 2008 on our first of four shoots in Kenya over the period of a year. As a thousand aspiring actors auditioned at Kenya’s national soccer stadium — an appropriate location since the soap opera follows a soccer team composed of players from warring tribes — our crew was immediately struck by the idealism of the final cast. Some had never acted before and all were from different backgrounds in terms of tribe and class, but all seemed committed that the soap opera might just change their nation, and would undoubtedly change their lives. Finally, I thought, here was my positive “African story.”

Well, without giving too much away, that was a bit of wishful thinking on my part.

In soccer, as in life, it’s easy to celebrate a victory but the real test of character is how you react to a loss that’s as painful and as a kick to the head, and a blow to the heart. And that, more than anything, is what The Team is about.

Opening Night Screenings
Wednesday June, 23, 2010

Philadelphia, PA

More Info…..

Watch and Listen to Excerpts from the June 1st Cinema Speakeasy

PIFVA presented a Cinema Speakeasy event at L’Etage (6th and Bainbridge in south Philadelphia) featuring four documentaries by Nadine Patterson. Screened works included Thirty Eight Twenty, I Used to Teach English, Moving With The Dreaming, and Cosmic Trane. After the screening WHYY’s/NPR’s Elisabeth Perez Luna led a discussion about Ms. Patterson’s documentary work and engaged Ms. Patterson and the audience in a provocative analysis of current media practices.

Listen to excerpts below:

Elizabeth Perez Luna Introduces herself and Nadine Patterson talks about “Thirty Eight Twenty”

Question and Comments on “Thirty Eight Twenty”

Questions and Comments on “Cosmic Trane”

Questions and Comments on “Moving with the Dreaming”

VIDEO: Talking about Nadine’s films

By CAROL VOGEL, NY TIMES

For artists, being included in a museum exhibition generally means first having to penetrate the well-guarded gates of a prestigious art gallery. But now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and YouTube are aiming to short-circuit that exclusionary art-world system, at least briefly, in much the same way that other hierarchical systems have been blown apart in the Internet age.

The project, called YouTube Play and conceived as a biennial event, is intended to discover innovative work from unexpected sources. It is open even to entrants who don’t consider themselves artists, and actively encourages the participation of people with little or no experience in video. “People who may not have access to the art world will have a chance to have their work recognized,” said Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Foundation. “We’re looking for things we haven’t seen before.”

For YouTube the project is one in a series of experiments in tradition busting. In late 2008 it created the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which allowed any musician to audition for a concert at Carnegie Hall conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas; the previous year it helped create the CNN/YouTube debates, giving everyone with a Web cam a chance to ask a question of a presidential candidate.

“What we’re doing is removing the middle man,” said Hunter Walk, director of product management for YouTube. “Whether it be Carnegie Hall or the Guggenheim, we’re giving people a way to see the aspirational light on the hill. And not just online but in the physical world too.”

While the company does not publicly discuss it, some of its officials say it is also hoping that collaborations with august institutions like Carnegie Hall and the Guggenheim Foundation will attract high-end advertisers.

Applicants will be able to submit their videos (only one entry per person) starting Monday, uploading them on a channel created for the initiative, also called YouTube Play (youtube.com/play). The works must have been created within the past two years and cannot be longer than 10 minutes, made for commercial use or excerpted from longer videos. The deadline for submissions is July 31.

A team of Guggenheim curators will look at all the submissions — the foundation is expecting many thousands, Ms. Spector said — and narrow them down to 200, which will be seen by a jury of nine professionals in disciplines like the visual arts, filmmaking and animation, graphic design and music. (Ms. Spector, who will be a juror herself, is putting the group together.) Although the jurors will know the names of entrants, Ms. Spector said, the makeup of the jury should be diverse enough to prevent art-world or other biases from infecting the process.

Then, in October, the jurors’ final selection of 20 videos will be on simultaneous view at all the Guggenheim museums. And the 200 that made it through the first round will be available on the YouTube Play channel.

There will be no first prizes or runners-up among the 20, Ms. Spector said, “because this is not about finding the best, but making a selection that represents the most captivating and surprising work.”

That work could come, the foundation and YouTube say, from any quarter. “Within the last few years you can get a camera and for a few hundred dollars get the tools to create Hollywood magic,” Mr. Walk said. And Hewlett-Packard, which is collaborating on the project, is not only providing hardware to all the Guggenheim museums for displaying the videos, it is also offering online tutorials on YouTube Play to teach skills like editing, animation and lighting to the video-naïve.

While Ms. Spector and YouTube say they created the project as a way of breaking down traditional art-world boundaries, some in that world question how meaningful it really is.

“Hit-and-run, no-fault encounters between curators and artists, works and the public, will never give useful shape to the art of the present nor define the viewpoint of institutions,” said Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art, the organizer of the 2007 Venice Biennale and a former senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art, in an e-mail message from Europe.

“It’s time to stop kidding ourselves,” Mr. Storr added. “The museum as revolving door for new talent is the enemy of art and of talent, not their friend — and the enemy of the public as well, since it refuses to actually serve that public but serves up art as if it was quick-to-spoil produce from a Fresh Direct warehouse.”

But those involved in the project, naturally, see it differently. “If this is all the Guggenheim did, it would be a problem,” Ms. Spector said. “There are many layers to our programming. And we can’t say at this point that this won’t spawn ongoing relationships with people we discover through this process. One can only hope that it will.”

If you think it is as simple as make a great film and it will get seen, you are not truly recognizing the world we live in. Great films get ignored all the time. Great films don’t get distributed, and when they do, often they are not distributed in a significant way. Filmmakers and their collaborators have to move beyond the dream that if you build it they will come as it allows both them, their work, and their supporters to be exploited.

You are reading this presumably because you either love watching great movies or because you aspire to making great movies.  I write here because I want to do both of those things and I have the confidence that if we change our behavior, both are possible.  I write here because I want to do both of those things and I have the concern that if we don’t change our behavior, we will lose the opportunity to do either for ever.

Change begins with a step, usually the easiest one for the most people to do.  What would be that change that encourages either, and ideally both, for better movies to be seen more widely, and for more of the movies to actually be better?  On all fronts, I think the answer comes down to collaboration.  If the quality of culture and the access to quality culture is of a concern to you, you have to enter the equation.

Speak up and join in.  Curate.  Filter.  Focus.

1. Too many leisure options for film to compete without further enhancing the theatrical and cinematic experience.
2. Too many “specialized” films opening to allow such films to gain word of mouth and audience’s attention.
3. Too many films available and being distributed to allow films to stay in one theater for very long, making it more difficult to develop a word of mouth audience.
4. Lack of access — outside of NYC & LA –to films when they are at their highest media awareness (encourages bootlegging, limits appeal by reducing timeliness).
5. Distrib’s abandonment (and lack of development) of community-building marketing approaches for specialized releases (which reduces appeal for a group activity i.e. the theatrical experience).
6. Distrib’s failure to embrace limited streaming of features for audience building.
7. Reliance on large marketing spend release model restricts content to broad subjects (which decreases films’ distinction in marketplace) and reduces ability to focus on pre-aggregated niche audiences.
8. Emphasis on upfront compensation for star talent creates budgets that can’t reasonably recoup investment.
9. HP&W fringe levels at too high a level to allow low-bud production to benefit from know how and talent of union labor.
10. Lack of media literacy/education programs that help audience to recognize they need to begin to chose what they see vs. just impulse buy.