Climbing Higher - Lake Placid Film Forum

Afterimage, July, 2001 by Karen Vanmeenen

Lake Placid Film Forum Lake Placid, New York

June 6-10 2001

The second annual Lake Placid Film Forum was constructed around the auspicious theme of "Do Filmmakers Have Social Responsibility?" A radical proposition for the mainstream festival circuit, this year's Forum admirably tackled: this mission with several panels and feature films striving to address this complex subject. With its successful bids over the past year to increase its corporate financial support--with Ralph Lauren Fragrances and Esquire joining I "" NY, last year's official sponsor--and its location in a mountain resort town, the Forum might initially seem to be following in the footsteps of so many recently anointed festivals. While there are numerous parties, a professional PR team and a degree of Hollywood-style hobnobbing, the Forum is dedicated to celebrating the personal visions behind filmmaking, honoring the gamut of individuals involved in the process. The Forum's Artistic Director Kathleen Carroll, long a film critic for The New York Daily News, also revealed that in her search for films t o program she looked for "films that... really connect with the audience or move people in some profound way." [1]

New this year were midnight shows and an increased emphasis on the limited enrollment, master classes offered, on topics such as producing, documentary filmmaking, screenwriting and directing. The "forums" sought to address the conference theme in more directly interactive ways, with topics ranging, from women in film to the obligatory "Is Film Dead?" Notably, these panels-even the early morning ones--were often better attended than the film screenings with high levels of audience engagement and participation, including panelists referencing comments made by earlier presenters, providing proof that this event does indeed function as more than merely another film festival.

The forum "Where Are the Women? Or Climbing Out of the Girl Ghetto," moderated by Allison Anders, focused more on the plight of emerging filmmakers in general than on women specifically. Director Nancy Savoca did claim that none of the work that her female peers made in the 1990s would be supported today. Filmmaker' Yvonne Welbon went further to: say that the era when any individual could make a film alone is over. Now, she said, to be successful you need to find someone to market your film, to think of it as a business. Liz Manne of the Sundance Channel concurred, explaining that success as a filmmaker is about luck, perseverance :and 'hustling. "There are many ways to acquire knowledge," she said, "the question is how do you turn it into a business opportunity?" Anders replied that as in all artmaking, you have to be "insanely ballsy." A final statement from a female audience member was offered, ending the conversation on a more woman-centered note: "We have lost something through new technologies," she sa id, "but women:... filmmakers have retained.... [that] ... tenderness."

In the forum "Real to Reel: When Does Creativity Become a Lie?," filmmaker Barbara Hammer stated the obvious baseline for this line of inquiry that every editing decision is a "choice of fiction," in that "if we were doing [true] documentary it would be as long as our lives are." Norman Jewison posed the age-old trope, "What is truth?," personalizing the point by admitting, truth, I think, is a moving target... I [may have] misinterpreted what someone said, someone did." Raoul Peck, director of Lumumba (2000), amusingly observed that the debate about "truth" is a "typical American problem ... as if it's the only way to see the world or a story or a human being." "I am subjective in my truth," acknowledged the Haitian filmmaker, advocating for providing an audience with enough elements to build their own truth. Moderator Elvis Mitchell, film critic for The New York Times, asked whether audiences hold films based on fact to a higher standard. Victor Skolrnick, co-director of the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntingt on, New York agreed, saying. that Americans live in a country based on the idea that "we hold these truths to be self-evident" and perhaps this is a conceit of western civilization. Mitchell later returned to the question of editing, quoting Jean-Luc Godard as saying "each cut you make is a political act" Hammer picked up on her earlier point, saying "multiplicities of truth are the excitement of film.... We need to raise the level of film education in this country." The conversation turned toward the democratizing effects of new technologies such as video cameras, enabling the truth to be told in far-flung communities previously unrepresented. Having power today means having access to the media, said Jewison, in a world where "multi-global corporations own or control everything." In response to an audience members query about filmmakers' responsibility, Kimberly Peirce, director of Boys Don't Cry (1999), claimed that she does not approach her work with an agenda, while Peck responded, perhaps more honestly, that he does.