I was searching for indie filmmaker blogs and I found Morgan Spurlock’s on Indiewire - the post I stumbled on was a mea culpa letter, dated last week, about a recent appearance at a high school. His letter and the posts since are interesting but the responses are fantastic reading!

I can’t imagine going to a school to talk to kids and swearing at them. I haven’t met Morgan, maybe he was nervous, or like he says, trying to be familiar, or maybe he’s just kind of a jerk…but it makes me crack up to imagine the scene. He probably thinks of himself as a regular Joe, a doc filmmaker, and wouldn’t have imagined the backlash he would face from dropping a couple of f-bombs or other similarly well-thought-out comments. Poor guy!

Since the ‘fair use’ issue has been shut out of FullFrame (April 6-9 in Durham NC), I have to admit I’ve been pouting a bit. In addition to the fact that besides us, the Duke Law people and others, are doing some very cool stuff to help makers deal with intellectual property issues. It seems bizarre that FullFrame totally snubbed all of us…I also just really wanted to go. But today I got a message that one of the docs that inspired me to get into this line of work is screening there, and I really want to mention it - Stranger with a Camera by Elizabeth Barret is part of St. Claire Borne’s programmed sidebar Class in America.

If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Barret, who herself grew up in Appalachia, explores the killing of a filmmaker that happened during a time when lots of reporters and filmmakers where trekking into that part of the world to, supposedly, expose the poverty that existed there. The media attention was an unwelcome presence when it became clear that the coverage was largely tilting toward sensational (there is also a Katrina sidebar - lots of fodder for discussion). The situation came to a head when a local killed a filmmaker. Barret delves beautifully into the relationship between filmmaker and subject, class in America, and the uneasy coexistance of issues and media coverage. It inspired me not only because of how beautifully crafted the film is along with Barret’s intelligent and thought-provoking narration, but because I realized then that filmmaking, and documentary in particular, has some role to play in what we know about the world beyond our own doors and maybe even in what we do with that information.

If you, like me, will not be at FullFrame, catch Big Mouth Productions newest film Arctic Son at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater on April 11 at 6:30 PM as part of the IFP Independents Night screening series. Be there or…you know.