2013 Program Guide

Storytelling across multiple media platforms is generating a vibrant new arena for innovation and creativity. It’s changing how we watch films and how we make them. In this panel we’ll explore the nuts and bolts of creating a successful transmedia project. How do you fund it? What are some of the tools available for creation? And how do you harness the power of this new form to attract participants and deepen your audiences engagement with your story/issue?

Presenters include transmedia creators Melanie Crean and Liz Canner, as well as producer Jane Applegate.

In the spirit of using technology to create more interactive experiences, the panel will utilize Google Hangout for audience participation. Please bring your laptop.

Liz Canner, named one of the "10 Filmmakers to Watch" by Independent Magazine, is an award-winning media artist who produces documentaries, digital public art installations, and transmedia projects on human rights issues. She has been the recipient of over 55 honors, awards and fellowships including a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship from Harvard, a Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She is also the President of the WRIF Board.

Examples of Liz’s Transmedia projects: www.symphonyofacity.org

http://www.astreamedia.org/hiddentribe/

Melanie Crean is an Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. Her art work deals with the politics of speech, the phenomenology of perception and the capacity of socially engaged art to produce social change. She has also designed special effects for the MTV Digital Television Lab. More information at www.melaniecrean.com.

Jane Applegate is a veteran producer of television, film and online video content. She's written, produced and hosted a variety of original online video programs for Microsoft, Verizon Wireless, Epson and Pitney Bowes and produced documentaries for Discovery Channel. She also served on the WRIF board for many years. More information at www.theapplegategroup.com.

During the "Shape of Change Workshop", participants will contribute to an ongoing exchange with Iraqi citizens on the nature of change, freedom and utopia as it applies to the built environment, and the idea of home.

Many Americans have lost their homes during natural disasters or the recent foreclosure crisis, and have been forced into a considerable amount of debt. Thousands of Iraqis were displaced from their homes during the Iraq war and the ethnic violence that followed. In both cases, peoples’ relationship to their home has been particularly intense over recent months, forming a basis for communication and exchange.

Workshop participants will join with Melanie Crean, a transmedia artist from New York City, to communicate with people in Iraq and their exchange will be added to the shapeofchange.com website, an online archive of opinions compiled from across Iraq and the United States since 2008. Participants should bring laptops.

(See "Nuts and Bolts of Transmedia" listing above for more about Melanie Crean.)

Sponsored by Liz Canner and Alex Barnett

This workshop panel will introduce transmedia documentary, as a practical new format of media production and community building. Transmedia documentaries develop a mosaic of inviting and engaging media forms and experiences, utilizing new and classic forms of expression in relation to one another.

Noted experts Patricia Zimmerman, Helen De Michiel, and Laura Kissel will present their work in this innovative new field, and invite discussion and participation in transmedia work. One focus for local participation will be the LunchLoveCommunity project that De Michiel co-created, which works to provide better local food options for children. We are keenly interested in soliciting community participation in this event.

Mark Williams of the Dartmouth Dept. of Film & Media Studies will moderate.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor of Screen Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, as well as several other works. For more information, see http://faculty.ithaca.edu/patty/

Helen De Michiel is a director, writer and producer. She has created several award-winning independent documentary and dramatic works, including Turn Here Sweet Corn and The Gender Chip Project. Her films are included in museum collections around the country, including The Walker Art Center and MOMA. For more information, see http://www.thirtyleaves.org

Laura Kissel is an Emmy nominated documentary filmmaker and media artist. Her most recent project is a transmedia documentary about globalization and cotton, The Cotton Road Movie. For more information, see http://laurakissel.com

See also Laura Kissel at Finger Lakes Environmental Film Fest: http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/blogs/fleff_intern_voices/live_blogging:_laura_kissel_and_the_ideas_behind_c/

Sponsored by Dartmouth College, Film and Media Studies

Community Partners: Upper Valley Farm to School • Vital Communities

Threatened by growing domestic unrest, Richard Nixon has declared a national “Event of Insurrection.” At secret detention centers across the country suspected activists receive summary hearings, inevitable convictions, and a terrible choice: years of prison, or punishment park. Who can forget those frightening times?

But wait -- punishment parks? That never happened—or did it? Are these people on screen “real,” or “actors?” Is this one of the most honest films ever? Or utterly dishonest? How can this nearly forgotten 42-year-old film feel so relevant?

In Punishment Park exiled British filmmaker Peter Watkins probes the complicated relationships between fact and fiction, artist and audience. A pioneer of faux-documentary style (The War Game, 1965) and a fierce critic of conventional mass media norms, Watkins remains controversial, polarizing, and eerily prophetic. The elimination of civil rights for suspected “terrorists,” indefinite extralegal detention, officially sanctioned torture, multinational media empires beyond the reach of law, the utter breakdown of meaningful political dialogue, reality TV. . . it’s all present in this angry and disturbing vision of a dystopian America that many will feel is just a little too familiar.

“Now you know the secret source,” writes media critic Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic. “All things come from Watkins.”

See more at: http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/index.htm

Stay for a postscreening discussion with filmmakers and activists, Jay Craven, Nora Jacobson, John Douglas, and others.

Sponsored by Keeper Barn and Off The Grid Productions

Community Partners: Peace and Social Concerns Committee of Hanover Friends Meeting

Once a climate-change skeptic, National Geographic photographer James Balog devises revolutionary time-lapse cameras for one purpose: to capture a multi-year record of the world's changing glaciers. Chasing Ice follows Balog on this mission as he compresses years into seconds and records ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate.

Traveling with a young team of adventurers by helicopter, canoe and dog sled across three continents, Balog risks his career and his well-being in pursuit of the biggest story in human history.

As the debate polarizes America and the intensity of natural disasters ramp up around the world, Chasing Ice depicts a heroic photojournalist on a mission to gather evidence and deliver hope to our carbon-powered planet.

In partnership with the Vermont International Film Festival. ( VTIFF.ORG

Featuring Q&A with director Jeff Orlowski. Chasing Ice at WRIF is made possible through our partnership with The Vermont International Film Festival. www.vtiff.org

Nominated for an Academy Award. Winner, Cinematography Award, Sundance Film Festival. Also, Audience Awards at South By Southwest Film Festival, Hot Docs Film Festival, and others

Sponsored by DPF Design • Lia Rothstein • Janine Williamson and Michael Tsapakos

Community Partners: SERG • Sierra Club

A down-and-out aspiring rock star, Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be Blood) in a powerful performance, agrees to sign divorce papers only to discover that he will forfeit all custody of his six-year-old daughter. With a good-natured lawyer (Jon Heder) unable to make headway in reversing the decision, and a girlfriend (Jena Malone) who represents an era of his life that he might be ready to graduate from, Dano’s character negotiates a visit with his daughter to explore whether he is able to walk away from his child, and whether it might be too late for reconciliation.

A beautifully shot film with cinematography by Upper Valley native Reed Morano.

For Ellen is an uncompromising and often witty look at marriage, parenthood, dreams, and rock & roll, parts of our lives which don’t always blend in perfect harmony.

Featuring Q&A with award-winning director of photography and Upper Valley native, Reed Morano

Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival

Sponsored by Lyn & Tom Lord

"A hilarious satire of media culture" -- Filmmaker Magazine

"A ferocious indictment of Generation Me" -- indieWIRE

King Kelly is an aspiring Internet star who performs web cam stripteases.

When Kelly's car -- filled with illegal narcotics that she must deliver -- is stolen by her bitter ex-boyfriend, Kelly and her best friend embark on an epic whirlwind of drugs, sex, violence and mischief-making as Kelly tries to reclaim what's hers. Kelly's biggest online fan, a wayward State Trooper, joins the journey as the night spirals into chaos.

Made entirely from camera-phone footage and directed by former Vermonter Andrew Neel, King Kelly is a sensational journey through hedonistic American culture and the world of YouTube. iWRIF, you’ve been warned.

Adult content.

Discuss the film afterwards over cocktails with us and director Andrew Neel.

Jury's Choice Award, Puchon Intnl. Fantastic Film Festival