Flaherty on the Road: Family Affairs
Free Land (Martin, 2009)
The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar is the longest continuously running film event in North America. Named after Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran, Louisiana Story) who is considered by many to be the father of documentary film, the Seminar began in 1955 when Flaherty’s widow, Frances, convened a group of filmmakers, critics, curators, musicians, and other film enthusiasts at the Flaherty farm in Vermont. For more than fifty years the Flaherty Seminar has been firmly established as a one-of-a-kind institution that seeks to encourage filmmakers and other artists to explore the potential of the moving image. The films of such directors as Robert Drew, Louis Malle, the Maysles brothers, Mira Nair, Satyajit Ray, John Cassavetes, Yasujiro Ozu, Pedro Costa and Robert M. Young were shown at the Seminar before they were known generally in the American film community. New cinematic techniques and approaches first presented at the Seminar have routinely made their way into mainstream film.
The Flaherty is excited to announce the 2012 Flaherty on the Road series, comprised of four programs of innovative, groundbreaking, and provocative nonfiction film selected from the 2012 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, called Open Wounds, curated by Josexto Cerdán. Filmforum bring you program 3, called “Family Affairs, featuring two films dealing with families in different ways. We’re delighted to have with us filmmaker (and former Filmforum intern) Minda Martin, maker of Free Land, for its Los Angeles premiere!
This program is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Additional support generously provided by American Cinematheque. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Family Nightmare
Directed by by Dustin Guy Defa (2011, DigiBeta to QT, 10 min) Los Angeles premiere!
Using VHS frames as family memories, thousands of middle-aged Americans can identify with this video by seeing imagery of their own similar domestic videos, including clothes, hairstyles, furniture, and even attitudes toward being in front of the camera. But no two families are alike.
Dustin Guy Defa has been making movies since he was eleven. His feature film Bad Fever premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW). Distributed by Factory 25, the film opened in New York in early 2012 with additional theatrical runs in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, receiving glowing reviews from the Village Voice, LA Weekly, New York Magazine and Filmmaker Magazine; the New Yorker calls the film “quietly hectic and brutally poignant.” It will be released on DVD, VOD, and digital platforms this fall. His short film Family Nightmare has played film festivals all over the world, including Sundance, Locarno, Melbourne, SXSW, Sarasota, Silverdocs, and Hot Docs, where it won an Honorable Mention award. The L Magazine recently named him “Best Emerging Brooklyn Filmmaker.” Originally from Salt Lake City (where Family Nightmare takes place), he now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Free Land
Directed by Minda Martin (2009, QT, 63 min.) Los Angeles premiere!
From the personal to the community portrait, Free Land draws an arc of almost two hundred years in the history of the United States that allows Minda Martin to point to a series of structural connections between class (especially in regards to poverty), race, culture, and identity, which are not always taken into account when dealing with these issues and implications. An essay film involving landscape as history, found footage as hints of trauma, and family as social memory, Martin describes the film in her own words as “a personal historical documentary that examines what it means to be constantly looking for opportunity in America.” Using her family history of homelessness and displacement, she examines the unfulfilled promise of “The Land of the Free” in the United States of America. Furthermore, Free Land describes “how this myth is translated into a belief in ‘free land,’ which has geographically and psychically uprooted people, created social inequalities and left legacies of emptiness.” http://www.mindamartin.com/freeland
"With found footage, historical documents and personal interviews, Free Land binds together questions of ancestry, home, land, culture and identity. Lauded for its powerful sound design, this memoir documentary not only tells a heart-wrenching story, but tells it with profound craftsmanship." – Adam Sekuler, Northwest Film Forum
“Filmmaker Minda Martin explores her family’s painful and poverty-stricken past in her powerfully realized memoir film, “Free Land.” Martin’s adventurous manipulation of complex sound work, solarized images, superimpositions and archival selections sets her work apart from other docs on the Native American experience; as terrible as her family history becomes, affected by a legacy of American subjugation of indigenous people, her telling of it is shot through with vital artistry…” – Robert Koehler, Variety
Minda Martin received an MFA in film and video from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA from the University of Arizona. She writes and directs personal, experimental, documentary, and narrative films that explore the underpinnings and disparities of social class in America, and her works have won many festival awards and have screened at various international venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, RedCat, the Viennale, the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival, the New York Video Festival, Créteil Films de Femmes, and Mostra/OMNI Video Art Tour. Along with her collection of short films and videos, her features include Free Land (2009) and AKA Kathe (2000). Her most recent work, The Long Distance Operator is an experimental video made for the omnibus feature film Far From Afghanistan, which was released in August of 2012 with a world premiere at Locarno. It has screened at Toronto International Film Festival, Montreal, Vancouver, RIDM, CPH, BAFICI, Viennale, and several other film festivals. We had our US Premiere at Museum of Modern Art, New York Documentary Fortnight. She is currently an associate professor in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at California State University San Marcos.