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kfitz

Flaherty, Day Five

Yesterday was a fabulous day at documentary boot camp, and a very good note for me to go out on. There are, in fact, two more days to go in the Flaherty, but I’m off to Louisiana this morning. And though I’m a little burned out, I’m still regretting missing the last two days of films.

Yesterday’s lineup (during which the morning session was cancelled):

Wednesday, July 15, 1.00 pm

El perro negro (The Black Dog: Stories from the Spanish Civil War, dir. Peter Forg?°cs, 2005, 84 min)

Wednesday, July 15, 3.15 pm

Presentation by The Labyrinth Project:

Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill

Three Winters in the Sun: Einstein in California

Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles

Wednesday, July 15, 8.00 pm

La Television y Yo (Television and Me, dir. Andres Di Tella, 2003, 75 min)

Del Olvido al no me Acuerdo (I Forgot, I Don’t Remember, dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo, 1999, 70 min)

All of these films and interactive projects were wonderful, but La Television y Yo demands special mention; this film begins from its director’s sense that, due to the seven years of his childhood his family spent abroad, he missed some key to Argentine life that could have been found on television. Di Tella begins an exploration of early Argentine television but finds all possible avenues for investigation to be blocked, and instead gradually comes to recognize that his interests demand in part an exploration of his own family history. The film becomes part autobiography and part public history, and in no small part a meditation on its own failures to fully comprehend either.

I’m headed to my reunion shortly — how appropriate to be revisiting my own past on the heels of these documentary explorations of memory and history…

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