Many cinephiles consider the 12-year-old Camden International Film Festival the best programmed, best organized, and most accommodating all-documentary event in New England.
Add to those superlatives “most ambitious.’’
Earlier this month the festival announced a bold expansion of its operation into the Points North Institute, a year-round organization that will help new documentary filmmakers get started. Its goal will be to gather a year-round community of filmmakers, artists, journalists, industry leaders, and local audiences “where the future of nonfiction media is shaped.’’
Along with the annual Camden International Film Festival and Points North Forum (a conference program for documentary filmmakers and industry professionals established in 2009), it will host a number of artist development initiatives, including retreats, residencies, workshops, and fellowships. It will supplement the festival’s already established Points North Fellowship, the seventh annual Points North Pitch, and New York industry meetings.
Also new is the Virtual Reality Filmmaking Crash Course, in which documentarians get three days of intense instruction in VR filmmaking, and a 2-Day Short Form Documentary course.
Finally, submissions are now open for the CMG Action Grant, providing filmmakers and organizations an opportunity to win up to $10,000 to produce a short film related to healthy oceans or renewable energy solutions. The deadline is July 31.
More programs, including the 2016 Camden International Film Festival line-up and Points North Forum (both Sept. 15-18), will be announced in the coming months.
For more information go to www.pointsnorthinstitute.org.
Steampunk dreams
Is Steampunk passé? By design, perhaps. Byrd McDonald’s “Vintage Tomorrows’’ explores the world of the aesthetic movement that idealizes the obsolete but cool style of 19th century steam engine technology as seen in an alternative future. It can also be seen in the set design, props, and special effects of films like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’’ (1954), “The Time Machine’’ (1960), and, God help us, “Wild Wild West’’ (1999).
It has found expression in sci-fi literature, graphic novels, music, fashion, and DIY gizmos. More than that, according to Steampunkers interviewed in the film, it envisions a world where silicon chips, fast food, and the consumer culture never happened. If the term revolutionary seems inappropriate to such classy nostalgia, perhaps de-evolutionary might do.
Those interviewed include Steampunk pioneers such as writers William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, China Miéville, Cherie Priest, and Gail Carriger; graphic novelists Paul Guignon and Anina Bennett; musicians Abney Park and Erica “Unwoman’’ Mulkey; artist/filmmaker Shannon O’Hare; the Neverwas Haul gang (creators of a three-story, self-propelled mobile art vehicle that looks like Howl’s Moving Castle); and lots of other smart, interesting people in top hats, velvet Victorian gowns, and goggles.
“Vintage Tomorrows’’ will be available on VOD and digitally from Sam Goldwyn Films on Tuesday.
For more information go to http://www.vintagetomorrows.com.
‘Night’ to remember
Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog’’ (1955) may be the best documentary about the Holocaust that doesn’t mention the Holocaust.
Whether Resnais succumbed to political pressure from a French government anxious to restore its credibility, or hoped to make more universal the identity of those who suffered and perished in the death camps, the film never brings up the “Final Solution,’’ the Third Reich’s plan to exterminate the Jews.
The Criterion Collection’s new release of the film confronts the controversy by including an essay by critic Colin MacCabe, a video interview with Josh Oppenheimer (“The Act of Killing,’’ “The Look of Silence’’), and a 99-minute documentary that investigates the French response to the Holocaust in general and Resnais’s film in particular.
The best argument on behalf of the film is the film itself. Thirty-two minutes long, it consists of color sequences of Auschwitz in 1955 -- peaceful and somber and giving little indication of what happened there -- intercut with hellish archival footage of horrors that, even in this age inured by atrocities, is incomprehensibly awful. Such images, once seen, can never be forgotten.
“Night and Fog’’ is now available on Blu-Ray ($39.95) and DVD ($29.95) from The Criterion Collection.
For more information go to www.criterion.com/films/238-night-and-fog.
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.
