It’s funny how life cycles, isn’t it? One day Bush, the next Obama. One day love and sunshine, the next rain and sorrow. Money, no money. I’ve very much been in a period of waning on my blog, but the doc days are heating up and so too must my little project here, or be I doomed back too obscurity!!

Through several channels has The Way We Get By by Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly come to me. If you click to their website, you can see they are consummate internet marketers. I have to say that is about as technologically advanced as a film website can be these days – especially after all, they just premiered at SXSW where they won an Special Jury Award. They clearly have their ducks in a row, as the other channel that the film came through on was the P.O.V. press release as it will be on late in the upcoming season.

A prize at SXSW and a slot on P.O.V. plus their outstanding website are about as good of a pedigree for a documentary as you get these days. A lot of people believe in this film. The filmmakers shared a screener with me so of course, I watched it. It would take a hard heart indeed to not be taken in by the folks who are the focus of this film.

My wonderful friend Hugo Perez is having a preview screening of his doc Neither Memory Nor Magic coming up at the Bowery Poetry Club. Here is his synopsis:

When the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti was executed and buried in a mass grave in 1944 after a two-month death march, he did not know whether his poems would survive. Eighteen months later, when his body was exhumed, a notebook was found in his coat pocket that contained his final poems. Neither Memory Nor Magic tells the story of a man who believed in the life of his poems even when he knew that he himself would not survive.

I don’t know much about obscure Hungarian poets and like many, I feel that Holocaust stories have been well-told, but Hugo has done a really lovely job, from what I saw in rough cuts, of elevating this story beyond its elements to dig down into the human experience. If you’ve loved and lost, if you’ve had a passion for your work or have simply experienced the tragedy of losing a loved one, there is something in this movie for you. It’s elegant and moving. Bring a tissue. Check it out on September 28 @ the Bowery Poetry Club. Tickets here.

Patricia Finneran is moving on from Silverdocs to head up the New York presence of the Sundance Documentary Program effective November 1. From the press release, she replaces Bruni Burres. I’m curiously out of the loop on that one – I’ve never heard of Bruni working with Sundance, but evidently she is moving on to more human rights work. Finneran’s work will include, “… Representing the Sundance Documentary Program internationally, [and] Finneran will be responsible for recommending film projects, maintaining the Documentary Program’s New York base and working on the Program’s initiatives such as the Sundance Doc Fund and the Skoll Foundation’s Stories of Change: Social Entrepreneurship in Focus Through Documentary.”

This is the second high-profile departure from AFI’s family of festivals in fairly short order, with executive director Christian Gaines leaving AFI Fest in Los Angeles for a position at Withoutabox.com. Who will take over Silverdocs? I’m on the edge of my seat. Nominations?