AIFF 2015: Wednesday Choices All Good

Three venues today:  Bear Tooth, the Anchorage Museum, and Alaska Experience theater.

Everything tonight is worth getting out and seeing.

This is a Screenshot so links don't work, but go to the original here to see details of each film

The green represents documentaries and the blue is for feature films.  Grey is Alaska Made.

A quick overview:

AK Experience offerings:

Madina's Dream is video of the lives of Nuba people who have been forced out of their homes in southern Sudan's Nuba Mountains.  We see and hear from the women and children in a refugee camp in South Sudan (a new separate country) and their men still is the south of Sudan (the country South Sudan was split from) who are fighting the Sudanese government in an attempt to regain their land.  A powerful documentation of the kind of thing that is happening in too many places around the world.  

The Descendants is an Iranian film about a father who goes to Sweden because the family hasn't heard from their son who is there studying.  It looks at the problems of poorer student trying to study in Western countries.  It's a good film with strong acting.  One of my favorites so far among the features.  The audience Saturday enjoyed it too - here's a link to a video of audience reaction I did.

Storis: The Galloping Ghost of the Alaskan Coast  - from the official description:

"STORIS: The Galloping Ghost of the Alaskan Coast is a documentary that chronicles the nearly 65 year history of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter STORIS and examines the roles it played during World War II, the Cold War, and throughout the post-Cold War era. The documentary will introduce some of STORIS's many officers and sailors as they recount the STORIS's most famous mission that helped define the Coast Guard's mission in Alaska and beyond." 

The director Damon Stuebner will be there for Q&A - always a bonus.  

All three films are in competition for an award in their categories (documentaries and features and Alaska Made.)

Museum

Two more strong films.

Children of the Arctic - is a very well made documentary about some high school kids growing up in Barrow and the pull between maintaining a traditional lifestyle and going to college and becoming modern.  The director and some of the people featured in the film were in attendance the other night, as you can see in the picture at the right when they were answering questions.   Probably the best documentary I've seen so far, though it's close.  

Eadweard - a feature that looks at the life of the man who tried to stop motion with a camera in the 1880s.  He made the famous pictures of horses running to show there's  point where all the hooves are off the ground at once.  A well made and interesting film of his work and also his life, both of which, it's implied were impacted by his having hit his head badly in a coach accident.  Definitely worth seeing.  

Bear Tooth

The Circus Leaves Town - This is a Turkish feature which I haven't seen yet.  It should be good.  I've got more details and trailers of it (and The Descendants) on my overview of the features in competition.

Lost and Found - This documentary also promises to be good.  It's about debris from the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan drifting over to the US and people finding it, then looking for some of the owners.  See a trailer of Lost and Found and for Children of the Arctic and Madina's Dream at my post on Documentaries in Competition.