The Fifth Annual Camden International Film Festival

Contact Information

Camden International Film Festival
PO Box 836
Camden, ME 04843
617-817-5376

info@camdenfilmfest.org

This inaugural event is crafted for the New England filmmaking community and is free and open to the public. Points North will begin at 2 PM on Friday, October 2nd at the Theater at Union Hall, #2 Central Street, Rockport, ME (map). Union Hall is part of the Maine Media Workshops campus.

The afternoon will consist of two sections: A New World: Non-fiction Film Funding, Trends, and Players with a round table of industry veterans and funders presenting the current funding process, trends and players. This will be followed by The Survivor's Guide – a panel of filmmakers discussing "sustainable" filmmaking, DIY distribution and offering tips on how to make a living as a filmmaker in this unique economic climate. Panelists will include top doc filmmakers drawn from this year's festival as well as some CIFF alumni.

Sponsored in part by the LEF Foundation and Maine Media Workshops, Points North provides attendees an opportunity to connect with industry leaders in an environment conducive to discussion.

SCHEDULE

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2

2:00 - 2:15

Welcome/ intro

2:15 – 3:45

A New World: Non-fiction Film Funding, Trends and Players

• - 5-7 minute presentation from each panel participant, including clips, on their organization, the types of projects they fund and what they look for
• - 45-60 minute moderated panel discussion w/ Q&A on overall funding trends, with a specific focus on relevance to New England based filmmakers

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:

Sara Archambault / LEF Foundation
Sara Archambault serves as the Program Manager at the LEF Foundation's New England office. The mission of LEF New England is to fund the work of independent film and video artists in the region and broaden recognition and support for their work locally and nationally. Prior to her work at LEF, Sara was Managing Director for the Emmy-nominated "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North," and worked as a Producer for Christopher Lydon's "Open Source." Sara founded the Picture Start Film Series; which brought original, undistributed, independent film to Providence, RI; and served as Creative Director of the series until 2004. She is the former Executive Director of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities where she specialized in media grants and partnerships.

Patricia Finneran / Sundance Documentary Film Program
Patricia Finneran serves as Senior Consultant to the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and is based in New York. She supports Program initiatives including the Fund, for which she is responsible for recommending film projects, and the 'Stories of Change' partnership with the Skoll Foundation. From 2003-08, Finneran was Director of SILVERDOCS Festival and Conference. Presented in Washington, DC by the American Film Institute and sponsored by Discovery Channel, it is the largest documentary festival in the US. She previously served as Artistic Director of the IFP Market, the leading US market for independent film projects in development.

Ryan Harrington / Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund
Ryan Harrington runs the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, which supports roughly 10 films annually that deal with social issues missing from mainstream media. Ryan was formerly the head of IndiePix Studios - the production and filmmaker relation's arm of IndiePix Films - where he oversaw DVD and digital acquisitions, and orchestrated worldwide television sales. He has also worked as an independent producer, and his recent films include 21 Below, Entre Nos and P-Star Rising. Ryan managed production for A&E IndieFilms for four years. Throughout his time there he championed the Oscar-nominated films Murderball and Jesus Camp, and the Sundance hit My Kid Could Paint That.

Jalyn Henton / PBS National Program Service
Jalyn Henton is a Senior Program Associate in Program Development and Independent Film at PBS. Working as the first eyes and ears on hundreds of submissions a year, he provides feedback to producers and recommends projects for further review by the programming team for the national primetime schedule. Since 2006, Jalyn has represented PBS at the Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival in Silver Spring, MD, participating in such panels as PBS Office Hours and the HSUS/Animal Content in Entertainment Program Grant Pitch. Jalyn has worked in production on 15 feature films, including Remember The Titans, Sweet Home Alabama, and Diary Of A Mad Black Woman.

Greg Rhem / HBO Documentary Films
Greg Rhem is Director of Documentary Programming for Home Box Office, discovering new and distinctive documentary programming for HBO Documentary Films, Cinemax Reel Life, as well as HBO's America Undercover banner. His finds include the Oscar-winning Freeheld, Born Into Brothels, Thoth, Murder on a Sunday Morning, Breathing Lessons, Spellbound, The Collector of Bedford Street, They Killed Sister Dorothy, Billy the Kid, Watermarks and The Smashing Machine. Before joining HBO in 1995 as executive assistant to Sheila Nevins, Rhem served as an Assistant Producer of Commercials and Industrials for Morrison Media. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Coordinator, Office Operations at New Line Cinema.

MODERATED BY:

Louise Rosen / Louise Rosen Ltd.
Louise is a documentary specialist with over 25 years experience. She has set up co-productions and pre-sales on a wide variety of award winning projects. Current films include Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher's SilverDocs Award winning October Country, Natalia Almada's Sundance Award winning El General, and Leslie and Andrew Cockburn's American Casino - currently in theatrical release. Louise is a Masterclass Lecturer and Tutor each year at Documentary Campus Masterschool and has been a featured speaker and moderator at conferences and festivals, including the Real Screen Summit and Hot Docs Forum.

3:45 - 4:45

The Survivor's Guide: Filmmaker roundtable on Sustainable Filmmaking w/ Q&A, with topics including

• - DIY Distribution
• - How to make a living as a documentary filmmaker
• - Tips and tools on how to make films in the current economic climate

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:

Ian Cheney / Wicked Delicate
Ian Cheney grew up in New England and received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Yale University. He co-founded Wicked Delicate Films and also co-created and starred in the feature documentary King Corn, broadcast nationally on PBS in 2008 and now available on iTunes, Netflix and Blockbuster. Ian directed The Greening of Southie, a feature documentary about green building broadcast nationally on the Sundance Channel, and the short film Two Buckets which aired on WGBH-Boston. Currently the outreach producer for Kaiulani Lee's film A Sense of Wonder, Ian is also directing and producing a feature documentary about light pollution entitled The City Dark and Truck Farm, a new film and food project featuring the Old Gray Dodge.

Danielle DiGiacomo / Independent Film Project (IFP), Bugle B Productions
Danielle Digiacomo is the Community Manager at IFP, the nations largest membership organization for independent film. Previously, Danielle was Documentary Acquisitions Executive for IndiePix Films, building the documentary feature catalogue and spearheading successful multi-platform releases. She produced the first and second annual Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Film, and Associate Produced Billy The Kid and 21 Below. DiGiacomo has programmed for several film festivals and presented on panels at Woodstock Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Guth Gafa Film Festival, among others. Danielle has taught "Contemporary Documentary" and "Documentary Distribution and Marketing" at NYU.

David Redmon & Ashley Sabin / Carnivalesque Films
Redmon and Sabin have produced and directed Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005), Kamp Katrina (2007), Intimidad (2008) and Invisible Girlfriend (2009). Their current projects are Noah's Arc which received funding by Cinereach. Redmon and Sabin founded their distribution company Carnivalesque Films in 2008. Carnivalesque Films curates stories united by the raw and startling sensibilities of transgression, spectacle, and variations of truth and falseness. Named for Carnival, a celebration where societal norms are turned on their heads and excess and transgression rule the day, Carnivalesque Films seeks to disrupt a viewer’s most cherished beliefs in unexpected ways.

AJ Schnack / Cinema Eye Honors
AJ Schnack is the author and editor of the blog All These Wonderful Things, one of the most widely read online resources for non-fiction filmmaking, and founder and co-chair of the Cinema Eye Honors. His films include Kurt Cobain About A Son, for which he received Silverdoc's Cinematic Vision Award, and Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns). Both films were released theatrically and on DVD in North America and were broadcast in the US on the Sundance Channel. His new film, Convention, is an ensemble documentary shot during last August's Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Dana Rae Warren / Moody Mountain Media
Dana Rae Warren is a filmmaker, teacher, speaker, and consultant with over 20 years experience. Her work includes: producer writer on the Peabody Award-winning and twice Emmy-nominated PBS series Moon Shot; producer writer of PBS' NOVA Science Now including profiles on MacArthur Awardee Edith Widder and National Medal of Science Awardee Lonnie Thompson, and segment on the link between deep sea Arctic and space exploration; Series Supervising Producer for the weekly History Channel show Deep Sea Detectives; Series Consulting Producer and Episode Writer for Tougher in Alaska; Turner Broadcasting's two-hour special Abducted; ongoing award-winning public service ads such as a tobacco-free campaign Quit For Your Kids, and anti-domestic violence spots.

MODERATED BY:

Pamela Cohn / PFunk Productions, Still In Motion (Blog)
Pamela Cohn is a New York-based independent media producer, freelance writer, programmer and documentary consultant, and writes a well-regarded blog on nonfiction cinema called Still in Motion. Film credits include producing and shooting Lisandro Perez-Rey's La Fabri_K: The Cuban Hip Hop Factory (2003), and producing, directing and shooting The Kingdom Just West of Midnight (2005) and Riding Code 3: EMS in Nigeria (2007). In 2008, she programmed the first ever documentary symposium in Dubai, UAE called Documentary Voices: Pulling Focus, a small gathering of American, Iranian and Gulf Region filmmakers. She is currently curating a program of American nonfiction shorts and features for the 2010 DocPoint Film Festival in Helsinki, Finland. She writes on film for Hammer to Nail, FILMMAKER Magazine, IDA and DOX, the magazine of the European Documentary Network.

4:45 - 5:00

Wrap up and closing remarks

5:00 - 6:00

Cocktail reception at Maine Media Workshops (open to panel attendees), 70 Camden Street, Rockport, ME 04856

MAP

UNION HALL, ROCKPORT

View Larger Map

HELP SUPPORT US

JOIN OUR LIST

FEEDBACK