The Buffalo War Directed by Matthew Testa 2001/color/57min

The Buffalo War is the moving story of the Native Americans, ranchers, government officials and radical environmentalists who are currently battling over the yearly slaughter of America’s last wild bison. The film joins a 500-mile spiritual march across Montana by Dakota Sioux Indians who object to the killings. Woven into the film are the civil disobedience and video activism of an environmental group trying to save the buffalo, as well as the concerns of a ranching family caught in the crossfire.

The Buffalo War is Matthew Testa’s first feature documentary. He has worked on documentary productions for New York Times Television, National Geographic, Showtime, the Discovery Channel and PBS. He co-produced and directed Bill Briggs: Teton Pioneer for ABC.

Burning Man - The Burning Sensation Directed by Alex Nohe 2001/color/77min   World Premiere of New Cut Burning Man takes you into the heart of the Burning Man experience. In 1999 some 24,000 souls made a pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert to practice radical self-expression and self-reliance in a temporary, commerce free community. At the end, a 50-foot high, neon-lit wooden effigy is burned, igniting a wild, tribal, all-night celebration.

Vandana Raj has trained with Indian Express and Education Media Research Center and has worked in publishing and as a voice-over artist. She is the founder of Vama Communications.

Digging for Dutch: The Search for the Lost Treasure of Dutch Schultz Directed by Laura Levine 2001/color/88 min World Premiere

Dig just beneath the surface of this offbeat true tale of the search for a
gangster's buried treasure, and you'll find another story: a quirky and
charming portrait of rural small-town America. Digging For Dutch is a story
of obsession, faith, and greed, and the universal search for happiness. It's
about people who follow their dreams, and the discovery of life's true
treasures.

Best known for her photographs of music personalities, director Laura Levine has shot and directed music videos as well as the underground Super-8 film, Just Like a Movie (with R.E.M.). She illustrated the B-52's children's book, Wig! and the just-published Shake, Rattle and Roll: The Founders of Rock and Roll. Her award-winning illustrations have appeared in numerous magazines and on CD covers and she created an animated pilot for MTV. Her paintings have been widely exhibited and are in the permanent collections of several museums.

Her first documentary short film, Peekaboo Sunday, recently premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Digging for Dutch is her first feature length documentary.

Down From the Mountain Directed by Nick Doob, Chris Hegedus, D. A. Pennebaker 2000/color/98 min

In May of 2000, the artists featured on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack gathered to play music from the film for a concert at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium. Down From the Mountain documents that concert, complete with backstage preparations and rehearsals. D. A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob capture a joyous and free-spirited celebration of a truly American musical form. Featured on the soundtrack are Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, John Hartford, Ralph Stanley, David Rawlings and Chris Thomas King, among others.

Freedom Downtime Directed by Emmanuel Goldstein 2001/color/121 min World Premiere

Freedom Downtime is the story of computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, who has been imprisoned without bail for nearly five years. The film tries to uncover the reasons the authorities are so scared of Mitnick, as well as to define what exactly he did. As word of a Hollywood movie portraying Mitnick as a terrorist has spread, hackers have begun to turn to activism to get their message out. Through interviews with relatives, friends, lawyers and experts in the computer and civil liberties arenas, a picture of a great injustice begins to emerge.

Emmanuel Goldstein has been publishing 2600 Magazine, The Hacker Quarterly since 1984. He also hosts America’s largest hacker radio show on WBAI.

Garbage, Gangsters and Greed Directed by Fred Isseks of the Middletown High School Electronic English Class 2001/color/54 min New York Festival Premiere

Since 1991 Middletown High School students have been investigating and documenting the history and health implications of toxic waste disposal in the lower Hudson Valley, the primary source of drinking water for New York City. As part of their course work, they produced Garbage, Gangsters and Greed, which traces 30 years of environmental lawlessness. It is a documentary about the organized crime-figures, law-enforcement officers, politicians and state regulators who participated in pointless pollution, then kept it hidden.

How's Your News? is a documentary chronicling the travels of a team of reporters and crew across America in a hand-painted RV. Five of the people have disabilities ranging from Down’s syndrome to spastic cerebral palsy; they are the reporters. Each of the five reporters has his or her own style of gathering news, but the basic approach is the man-on-the-street interview. The interactions are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and sometimes sort of confusing but always honest.

Arthur Bradford has spent the past eight summers working at Camp Jabberwocky, a summer camp for adults with disabilities, where he teaches a video making class. His short stories have appeared in Esquire and The O Henry Awards Anthology and he has a book called Dogwalker coming out with Knopf this summer. How's Your News? is his first feature film.

Inside Out in the Open Directed by Alan Roth 2001/color/60 min Festival Premiere

Inside Out in the Open is an exploration of "free jazz" through the voices and music of over 20 musicians. Alive with personality and language, while addressing ideas on improvisation, the film reveals itself as musically as does its subject matter.

Featuring: Marion Brown, Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai, Alan Silva, Burton Greene, Joseph Jarman, Baikida Carroll, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Matthew Shipp, Susie Ibarra

In 1949, America’s first listener-sponsored, non-commercial radio station, KPFA, began broadcasting from Berkeley, California. The flagship station of the Pacifica Network, it quickly became a living testament to free speech and cultural diversity – a vital community of the air that often found itself embroiled in conflict.

KPFA’s story is the story of activist America from World War II to the present. The film takes us through the station’s passionate fifty-year history, from its founding by pacifists and poets, through its defiance of Cold War conformity, to the present day challenges that confront this unique, on-going experiment in democratic media. The film traces KPFA’s passionate 50-year history: its founding by pacifists and poets, its defiance of Cold War repression and current challenges to its commitment to democratic media.

Veronica Selver (Producer/Director) previously produced and directed an episode of Positive for ITVS. Her co-directing credits include You Got to Move, First Look, and Word is Out. A distinguished documentary editor, Selver’s editing credits include these films as well as On Company Business, a three part series on the CIA; Berkeley in the Sixties; Harry Bridges: A Man and His Union; Absolutely Positive, Coming Out Under Fire, and most recently Blacks and Jews. Listener-sponsored KPFA community radio, the nation’s first, is a living testament to free speech and cultural diversity.

Passages Directed by Gabriela Bohm 2000/color/66 min In this personal documentary, a filmmaker sets off on an odyssey through Eastern Europe, South America and the United States to uncover long-harbored family mysteries, myths and secrets. In the end, she derives strength from the connections between the lives of her parents and her own life. – a legacy she plans to tell to her child.

Gabriela Bohm was born in Argentina, later moved to Israel and is now living in Los Angeles, California. After graduating from NYU she worked in various films of her own including Voiceless, The Wild Side and now Passages. Her mission as a documentary filmmaker is to evoke questions about the human spirit, by telling stories that raise awareness to personal and collective meanings of identity.

Seeking Heat Directed by Mike Mills and Karen Kraft 2001/color/47 min A colorful and vivid exploration of David Byrne’s Luaka Bop record label.

Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker bring their fly-on-the-wall camera backstage to take a fresh, eye-opening, no-holds-barred look at the big bang adventure of producing a Broadway hit. The Broadway show in question is Moon Over Buffalo, starring Carol Burnett and Philip Bosco, a comedy about a low-rent Lunt and Fontaine, hell-bent upon recharging their careers. Cited by The New York Times as "the best documentary of the year", the film features hilarious turns by its leading actors - and even funnier behind-the-scenes sequences, as everyone mounting this high-risk Broadway production goes into nail-biting overdrive. The play's director, Tom Moore, and co-producers Rocco Landesman and Elizabeth Williams, help playwright Ken Ludwig through endless rewrites and finally to opening night, which Ludwig dubs "a bar mitzvah from hell." Only those few who have been lucky enough to glimpse backstage through the curtain have seen Broadway quite like this.

"Completely enjoyable and fascinating!" - Woody Allen

Since childhood, Itzik has lived his life in the shadow of fear as Katyusha rockets have continually fallen over his head. The film covers a five-year period seen through his eyes as he narrates a story spanning the "Grapes of Wrath" campaign to the IDF’s withdrawal. We observe the daily routine of Itzik and his friends as they try to live normal lives in an abnormal space and we watch as, when the dream of a child becomes a reality, Itzik is forced to make decisions about his future.

Jay Corcoran is a graduate of the Theater Program at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. His first documentary, Life and Death on the A-List, was released in 1997 by WaterBearer Films. He was a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Presented by Tapehouse, NY

Women in Jazz (Femmes de Jazz) Directed by Gilles Corre France/2001/color/80 min U.S Premiere

There are more and more women musicians involved in jazz music, today. Women in Jazz portrays 20 of them, some well known, others less so, who set out to brave the New York jungle and make a name for themselves in the Jazz Hall of Fame. Apart from the superb soundtrack played lively by this excellent line-up of musicians, this documentary explores their feelings about ethnicity and gender, from whose who adopt full-on feminist stances to those who, by contrast, just play without paying and heed to sexist attitudes in the traditionally male dominated realm of jazz music. Also it provides an overwhelming testimony to their talent and creative spirit as well their historical importance in the development of jazz.

Jazz is no longer the men's club that it might seem to be!

Cast: Susie Ibarra, Megali Souriau, Ellen Christi, Elizabeth Panzer, Jayne Cortez, Akua Dixon-Turre, Miri Ben Ari, Myra Melford, Muia Masaoka, Ingrid Jensen, Elise Wood, Virginia Mayhew, Maria Schneider, Rosetta Reitz, Jazzberry Jam!, Marilyn Crispell, Jane Ira Bloom. Sylvia Cuenca, Jeanne Lee

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You Don’t Know Me Directed By Cambiz A. Khosravi 2001/color/59 min World Premiere This documentary tells the story of teenager Dewin Vargas who killed his foster father and group home instructor in Shandaken, New York on January 23, 1999. Trapanese, an alleged sexual predator, was stabbed to death following his repeated sexual advances. Khosravi’s documentary captures both the systemic and isolated problems that permeate the state child-care system and ultimately the lives of children like Dewin.

Cambiz A. Khosravi is a director, producer, editor and teacher whose films have been aired on public television stations and are in the collections of museums and universities.