God’s Architects
A documentary about five builders carrying out God’s play
A film by Zachary Godshall
in collaboration with Emilie Tyalor
with music by Shane Monds

Wednesday, Nov. 11
7:00 p.m.
Alamo Drafthouse South

$10 per person
(A portion of the proceeds beneft HousingWorks)

Tickets: www.aiaaustin.org

Backstory: In the spring of 2005, Emilie Taylor, then a graduate student at the Tulane School of Architecture, received a travel grant to research and document self-taught and visionary builders around the south. After visiting and documenting a number of builders, most of whom professed some degree of divine inspiration, Emilie shared her findings with filmmaker Zachary Godshall. Immediately attracted by Taylor’s stories, drawings, and photographs, Godshall decided to visit the builders himself.

And so in November 2005, Godshall set out from south Louisiana with a camera, tripod, and microphone to interview and document the work of Floyd Banks Jr., a divinely inspired castle builder living in the east Tennessee hill country.

Three years later, Godshall completed a feature-length film that both examines and celebrates the work of Banks along with four other solitary builders who have constructed similar monuments. Beyond the builders and their work, the film functions as a personal essay that explores the nature of inspiration and one’s dedication to a creative project, no matter how absurd or mysterious the circumstances may seem.

Zack Godshall was recently named the Louisiana Filmmaker of the Year by the New Orleans Film Festival for his new documentary God’s Architects. God’s Architects is playing at film festivals around the country and is slated for a DVD release this fall. Godshall’s previous film, the heartfelt Low and Behold, a blend documentary and fiction in post-Katrina New Orleans, premiered at Sundance and won numerous awards at festivals around the country. While working to complete his third feature film, a comic adventure called Lord Byron, Godshall teaches at LSU where he is the Screenwriter-In-Residence.

INTIMATE STRANGER
Alan Berliner examines the life and legacy of his maternal grandfather, Joseph Cassuto, a Palestinian Jew who brokered cotton purchases for the Japanese in Egypt before the outbreak of World War II.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2009
7:00 PM
Alamo Downtown (320 E 6th Street)
Tickets are $6 / $4 for AFS Members and students with ID

“INTIMATE STRANGER,” says Berliner, “walks the fine line between sorting the dirty family laundry and polishing the precious family jewel.”

Famous for his personal and often intimate explorations of himself and of his family in such films as THE FAMILY ALBUM, NOBODY’S BUSINESS, THE SWEETEST SOUND, and WIDE AWAKE, here Alan Berliner examines the life and legacy of his maternal grandfather, Joseph Cassuto, a Palestinian Jew who brokered cotton purchases for the Japanese in Egypt before the outbreak of World War II. After the war Cassuto reunited with his family in New York, but his Japanese ties were strong. Soon he was living in Japan most of the time, while his wife and children remained in the US. Nearly two decades after his death, his grandson Alan constructed a documentary study of the man who was alternately labeled “a romantic adventurer or a shirker of family responsibility; a man at the center of historic events or a nobody.”

Berliner spent the first nine months of pre-production going through his grandfather’s archives. Joseph Cassuto threw nothing away and kept carbon copies of all his correspondence. One day, while searching through the vast amount of material, Berliner found $500 in an envelope, almost as if to say that Joseph Cassuto blessed his grandson’s project and willingly offered the initial financing. INTIMATE STRANGER can certainly be considered a hand-made object since Berliner shot all the footage and copied the family photographs he wanted to use. True to his film roots, the filmmaker edited on a classic Steenbeck system. – Chale Nafus

Intimate Stranger, USA, 1991, distributed by Independent, color, 60 min

Along with this fascinating family portrait, Berliner will show a selection of his rarely seen short films, “City Edition” and “Everywhere at Once.”

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Austin Film Society Documentary Tour
Austin Chronicle Interview by Anne S. Lewis

The Austin Asian American Film Festival will present A PEOPLE IN SHADOWS, the new film by award-winning director Bani Khoshnoudi, who studied in RTF before moving to Paris, France, in 1999. In 2006, Bani founded her production company, Pensée Sauvage Films, and recently produced and directed the feature length documentary about of Tehran, Iran, where she was born before immigrating to the U.S. in 1979. In Tehran, Bani is currently pursuing archival research on a film, while writing her first fiction feature, ZIBA. With this project, Bani has been selected for the Cinéfondation Screenwriting Residency of the Cannes Film Festival, which takes place from October 2009 to February 2010 in Paris.

Synopsis: Almost thirty years after the revolution, and twenty since the end of the long Iran-Iraq war, A People in the Shadows takes us on a voyage into the heart of Tehran, a megalopolis of 14 million people. The city is still recovering from its past, as talk of American sanctions and a possible attack resonate. Through observation and slow sequences, the film takes an intimate look at the way people live in this immense city today. Caught up in the paradoxes and contradictions of their society, the people of Tehran are surrounded by images of past and future death, while finding ways to juggle state propaganda and foreign threat on a daily basis.

A PEOPLE IN THE SHADOWS (90 m)
In Farsi with English subtitles
Saturday November 14th, 12pm
Alamo South Lamar

Co-sponsored by the University of Texas of Austin, Middle Eastern Studies Department.

Additional information:
Austin Asian American Film Festival
Pensée Sauvage Films

The UT Documentary Center along with The Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, The Department of Radio-Television-Film and the Russian Cultural Center will be presenting a screening of the documentary film The Revolution That Wasn’t by Aliona Polunina. A Q&A will follow the screening with Polunina and television personality Andrey Shemyakin.

Synopsis: Russia, 2007. Exactly a year before the next presidential elections. The opposition is set to act decisively and take power. Anatoly and Andrei are veteran revolutionaries. Since 1997, they have been members of a banned political organization. This film follows them over the course of one year, through the presidential elections. For the central figures of this film, it is a year of challenge and the start of a new life. This is a story about individuals within the framework of a general political fever, a personal story within a historical narrative. Russia has a fever… nothing new there. But this time the fever looks like this.

Aliona Polunina is a member of the guild of directors in Russia. She graduated as a documentary filmmaker from Moscow’s higher directing and scriptwriting courses in 2004. Aliona graduated from VGIK, faculty of film critics in 2000 and Moscow Academical Art School of Surikov’s Institute, faculty of architecture and design in 1996.

Aliona will be joined by Andrey Shemyakin, a well-known movie critic, film scholar, producer, and the creative director of the “Documentary Camera” TV program.

For more information, contact Allegra Azulay at (512) 471-7782 or at aazulay@mail.utexas.edu.

Part of the 3rd annual Russian Documentary Showcase, co-sponsored by the Russian Cultural Center – Our Texas (Houston). This year’s theme is “Images of Russia” with film screenings in Austin, Dallas, College Station, and Houston. Information on films outside Austin can be found HERE.

Award-winning director Ondi Timoner is to premiere her newest documentary We Live In Public on Friday, October 9 at the Alamo Draft House South. The film, which was ten years in the making and culled from 5,000 hours of footage, reveals the effect the Web is having on society, as seen through the eyes of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of,” artist, futurist and visionary Josh Harris. Timoner (winner of the 2004 Sundance Grand Prize Jury award for her film DIG!) documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.

For ticket information, please visit: www.drafthouse.com. For more information on We Live In Public, please visit: www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com.

The Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, The Harry Ransom Center, The Department of Theatre and Dance, and Ballet Austin present:

100 Years of the Ballets Russes

2009 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of Ballets Russes by Sergei Diaghilev. In September 2009, CREEES will celebrate the centennial of this milestone in cultural history with a symposium of events, featuring films, talks, discussions, and an exhibition of original costumes and scene designs.

Films

Date/Time:: September 15 at 7:00 in GRG 102
Location: :Geography Building, corner of 24th and Whitis
Ballets Russes
Dazzling collection of archival footage depicting the revolutionary 20th century dance troupes of the Ballets Russes from their imaginative and turbulent beginnings in turn-of-the-century Paris to their equally turbulent end in the 1960s. (Documentary, 2005, 118 min)

Date/Time:: September 17 at 7:00 in GRG 102
Location: :Geography Building, corner of 24th and Whitis
Nijinsky
Onstage, Nijinsky, the most celebrated dancer of the early 20th century, was in flawless control. Offstage, he was in turmoil, torn between the ballerina he married and the domineering mentor he loved. Eventually, the stresses of this volatile triangle drove him to madness. (Feature film, 1980, 125 min)

Date/Time:: September 22 at 7:00 in GRG 102
Location: :Geography Building, corner of 24th and Whitis
Stravinsky‘s Rite of Spring
Traces Stravinsky’s journey from the salons of St. Petersburg to the cultural crossroads of pre-war Paris, where he developed the shocking, erotic, and violent evocation of pagan Russia that became “The Rite of Spring”.
(Documentary, 2006, 116 min)

Date/Time:: September 24 at 7:00 in GRG 102
Location: :Geography Building, corner of 24th and Whitis
Return of the Firebird
Presents dramatic recreations of the original Ballets Russes productions of “The Firebird”, “Petrushka” and “Scheherazade”, first seen in Paris almost a century ago. Russian ballet superstar Andris Liepa heads an all-star cast. Music by Igor Stravinsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
(Ballet film, 2002, 120 min)

Additional Information:
Attendees at the films listed above will have the opportunity to enter a drawing to win two tickets to the Ballet Austin Season Opener of The Firebird and Swan Lake (Act II). The drawing will be held after the final film screening on September 24. Thanks to Ballet Austin for the generous donation!

Click here for updates and additions to the calendar.

AIGA Austin will present the third film in the REEL Design film series for a design-conscious audience, Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight is a documentary portrait film about Milton Glaser, who is the embodiment of American graphic design for the last sixty years.

For many, Milton Glaser is best known for co-founding New York Magazine, the enduring I Love NY campaign (and logo), his Bob Dylan poster, and the DC bullet logo used by DC comics. A film artfully directed by first time filmmaker Wendy Keys, she exposes the full breadth of Glaser’s remarkable artistic output and glances into everyday moments of his personal life while capturing his immense warmth, humanity and boundless depth of his intelligence and creativity.

Date/Time: August 12, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Location: Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, 320 East Sixth St.
TRT: 1 hour, 30 minutes

More about AIGA Austin

More about Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight