I just got out of the first showing this afternoon. City to Yourself, a grainy, poetic essay-like documentary of Detroit, commenced the program with the city's shocking problems and romantic decay. It was so entrancing that I didn’t realized that my massive popcorn ended up being pretty much gone after the film's 24 minutes. Nora, winner of the Eileen Maitland Award for the film that best addresses women’s issues, followed the tense life moments of a dancer in Zimbabwe. Surrounded by settings saturated with varied textures and colors, Nora, the main character, acted out emotions through expressive movements, bringing in a rarely scene artistic medium in the already very holistic realm of film.

The Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival goes to O’er the Land, which I watched early in the afternoon. Though it’s a longer piece (at 51 minutes) , I plan to head back to the theater in a short while to catch it again. I found that the beauty of the compositions—all shot in 16mm and even more captivating with the Michigan Theater’s incredible projection system—often mesmerized me to a point that I lost focus of the story. I would definitely blame that more on the sleepiness than the director. Filmmaker Deborah Stratman uses intense sound accompaniments--like the repeated blare of a fire alarm, bug noises in the forest, or empty silence--to drive her sequencing of painterly scenes.

In some scenes, themes of war, death, and destruction are juxtaposed with narration, the most striking being a dramatic story of survival told by a military pilot. For the most part, the camera stays still or slowly panning, such as with some beautiful shots of trees with rustling leaves and undulating branches, and on occasion suddenly makes jarringly sharp movements that punctuate the emotion of the story. Shots of humans seemed dehumanized and automaton-like—lines of marching band members or civil war re-enactors stiffly stream by the camera lens. I’m not one to re-watch much of anything, but I’m sure that a second viewing of O’er the Land will reveal much more depth and dynamism than the first, as any fine work of art should do.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto, which recently screened in Austin, TX at South By Southwest, stitches together interviews with copyright law obeyers and disobeyers, animated sequences, and live footage of mash-up music artist Girl Talk, who we find is by day a research biologist by the name of Gregg Gillis. Incredibly pertinent for the times, this issue of copyright law (see more about the AAFF lecture from Thursday) could easily be presented densely and end up convoluted, but instead RiP is youthful, fun, and snappy while still thoroughly presenting the various dimensions of copyright law conflicts in the present times. Most intriguingly Gaylor proposes a parallel between Gillis' musicianship--in which he takes pieces of other people's songs and remixes it into a new work--with his career as a scientist, in which he takes bits from other scientists' research and tries to piece it together into a something new. Intellectual property laws protect scientists from being able to freely use others' work, and thus Gillis says that these laws stifle scientific discovery and advancement in the same way they limit artistic creation.

My favorite moments of booing: when we saw Paris Hilton having her picture taken with Gregg and when an archival news interview with Lars Ulrich complaining about Napster came on the screen. Moments of cheering: hearing Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig propose that we need to adapt the copyright law because it is outdated, mention of the Creative Commons (non-profit that wants to promote creative sharing of works of art and music), and the appearance of festival guest Mark Hosler of Negativland, who Gaylor described as a "professional sh_t disturber." For a Saturday night, a social issue documentary could have been a bit too dense, but Girl Talk's dance music, along with the audience's booing and cheering, kept it alive.