La Sierra
95 minutes, 2004 miniDV, USA/Columbia By Scott Dalton & Margarita Martinez

La Sierra is an intimate, meditative exploration of youth during wartime. A small neighborhood in Medellin, Colombia, La Sierra is ruled by a group of young men, mostly teenagers, affiliated with Colombia‚s illegal paramilitary armies. Over the course of a year, the documentary follows the lives of three young people and their experiences of war, death, and love.

Best Documentary Feature, 2004 IFP Market

www.lasierrafilm.com

Lalee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
89 minutes, 2001 USA by Susan Froemke

LALEE'S KIN takes us deep into the Mississippi Delta and the intertwined lives of LaLee Wallace, a great-grandmother struggling to hold her world together in the face of dire poverty, and Reggie Barnes, superintendent of the embattled West Tallahatchie School System. The film explores the painful legacy of slavery and sharecropping in the Delta.

62 -year old LaLee Wallace is the lifeblood of this film. Matriarch to an extended family that moves in and out of her house, LaLee is a woman of contradictions and hope. "Could have been worse," she says quietly, surveying the rat- and roach-infested trailer she has been granted through a government program after her own house was condemned.

Wallace grew up in a family of sharecroppers; she began picking cotton at the age of six, stopped attending school a few years later, and still cannot read. As happened throughout the South, sharecropping gave way to low-paid labor, but with the enforcement of minimum wage laws and increasing mechanization, even those jobs were hard to come by. Without education or skills, Wallace and other residents of Tallahatchie County had few options, and the poverty and hopelessness they felt was passed down to the generations that followed. The film also profiles educator Reggie Barnes, who is determined to stop this cycle.

Barnes was hired as Superintendent of Schools in West Tallahatchie in an effort to get the school district off probation, where it was placed by the Mississippi Department of Education because of poor student performance on statewide standardized tests (the Iowa Test for Basic Skills, ITBS). If Barnes fails to raise the school from its current Level 1 status to a Level 2, the state of Mississippi has threatened to take over. Barnes and his faculty oppose this, fearing that administrators in far-off Jackson would not do as well in addressing the special needs of the community. "It's a different world," he says. "We get kids in kindergarten who don't know their names; we get kids in kindergarten who don't know colors; we get kids in kindergarten who have never been read to." He adds, "If we can educate the children of the illiterate parent, we stop this vicious cycle."

www.mayslesfilms.com

Last Man Standing
87 minutes, 2004 DVCAM, USA By Paul Stekler

What are the Texas politics that propelled George W. Bush to the White House and that seem to be the blueprint for Republican grassroots success in much of the United States of late? Filmmaker Paul Stekler takes a camera to the Lone Star state to find out, in a lively, behind-the-scenes look at a pair of 2002 elections. One race is for state representative in a suburban/rural district that includes Lyndon Johnson's hometown. The other is the statewide campaign for governor that pits Bush's ascendant Republican Party versus an historic multi-cultural Democratic ticket. The characters include Karl Rove, Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and especially two, young ambitious candidates for state rep, who literally fight it out until late on election night, leaving one last man standing.

" Compared to the sounds bites that pass for coverage on the networks, and the yaps that pass for analysis on the primal-scream cable shows, this flying visit to a small election towers like De Tocqueville."
  - New York Magazine
" If everyone could see elections this gripping, more of us might get off the couch and vote."  - Austin American Statesman
" An illuminating and amusing nail-biter about two Texas campaigns and they would mean for the nation as a whole."  - IndieWIRE

Paul Stekler
RTF Dept., University of Texas
1 University Station, A-0800
Austin, TX 78712
512 471-6679
stek@mail.utexas.edu
www.pbs.org/pov/pov2004/lastmanstanding/

12 minutes, 2004 16mm, USA By Monteith McCollum

An exploration of our relationship with nature and our desire to control it, and how our perception of others is affected by the condition of their lawns. A man struggles to go chemical-free to ensure the health of his child.

Latent Films
677 Halsey Valley Rd.
Barton, NY 13737
(607)689-0376
hybridfilms@clarityconnect.com

Last Thoughts
72 minutes, 2005 Super 16mm, USA By Kevin Henry 2006 Big Sky Award

In 1926, a sixteen-year-old boy hopped his first train from Oklahoma to California, beginning a ten-year odyssey marked by life-changing experiences. He kept his stories from those Depression years to himself until the eve of his death, when he made a tape recording for posterity. Seventy-five years after that first train ride, his grandson would set out with that tape and a 16mm camera, looking for echoes of those experiences in the modern landscape. Last Thoughts is an impressionistic tour of the American West, past and present, guided by the voice of a dying hobo.

Kevin Henry
PO Box 1199
Carmel, CA 93921
www.last-thoughts.com
k@severian.com

Law and Order
81 minutes, 1969 USA by Frederick Wiseman

LAW & ORDER surveys the wide range of work the police are asked to perform: enforcing the law, maintaining order, and providing general social services. The incidents shown illustrate how training, community expectations, socio-economic status of the subject, the threat of violence, and discretion affect police behavior.

LAW & ORDER was the most powerful hour and a half of television that I’ve seen all year…

–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

www.zipporah.com

24 minutes, 2005 miniDV, Thailand By Laurent Gorse

Since 1975, thousands of hilltribe Hmong have fled Laos' communist government, which hunts them down for having sided with the US during the Vietnam War. In late 2004, Hmong refugees arrived in the northern Thai village of Nam Khao. On July 4th, 2005, the Thai government evicted the Hmong onto the street, denying them shelter, food and water, and preparing to send them back to Laos. For the government, these are not refugees. They are illegal migrant.

Laurent Gorse
LFG Productions
Whittayu Complex #23-C1
Bangkok, N/A 10400
Thailand
66 4 772 9236
laurent_gorse@hotmail.com

Let's Get Frank
75 minutes, 2003 miniDV, USA By Bart Everly

“Filmmaker Bart Everly trailed Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank for two years, including President Clinton’s impeachment hearings, and the result was Let’s Get Frank, an entertaining behind-the-scenes tour of the sausage factory that is Congress. Frank survived his own sex scandal in 1989, and that helped him defend Clinton fearlessly during the hearings. In this film, Frank turns his nimble wit on the prosecutor Ken Starr, committee chairman Henry Hyde, and other Republicans, at one point jokingly comparing the impeachment process to professional wrestling: ‘We’re going to grunt and groan, but it’s fixed.'

Most overlooked political documentary of 2004.” - Boston Globe

Bart Everly
46 Old Fulton St. #3
Brooklyn, NY 11201
barteverly@hotmail.com
www.barteverly.com

Life In a Basket
33 minutes, 2003 35mm, USA By Paul Haggar & Sheri Sussman

We’ve all seen homeless people pushing shopping carts down the street,
shopping carts packed to the brim with all kinds of "junk." But what’s actually inside those shopping carts anyway? In an almost surreal show-and-tell, this documentary allows homeless people to explain just what they carry in their traveling carts - and why. In this simple and humanizing film, some thirty men and women explain what they have in their carts, and why the items they push around are so important to their physical, psychological, and spiritual survival. You’ll never look at those carts the same way again!

Seri Sussman
4715 Orion Ave. #205
Sherman Oaks, CA 91403
SAYTHINGS@AOL.COM

Lifers: Stories From Prison
50 minutes, 2001 Canada by Sheona McDonald

Reflecting on their lives, their crimes and wondering when they’re going to get out, these men allow an intimate and humane glimpse into a world most of us don’t get to, or want to, experience.

Originally conceived as a documentary aimed at preventing youth violence, LIFERS evolved to become a deeper exploration of crime and humanity. A look at the prison system and the people entrenched in it, including inmates, their families and people who work with them. It also became the journey of a filmmaker looking to find answers to questions she hadn’t known she was asking.

In Canada, unlike the United States, people sentenced to life do, in most cases, get out of prison. Is it a more humane system, or is it letting murderers back on to the streets to kill again. It would seems looking at the statistics and a recidivism rate of less than 1%, that rehabilitation may be possible. A larger question comes into play: do these men deserve a second chance?

The five men who share their stories share one thing in common; they have all taken the life, or lives, of another human being. They also each bring with them their own lessons.

webmaninc.com/lifers

Los Angeles Plays Itself
169 minutes, 2003 Beta SP, USA By Thom Andersen

"Los Angeles Plays Itself, Andersen’s sprawling and incisive meditation on the many uses and abuses of the city of L.A. in the movies, may be the unlikeliest great movie of the year." - Newsday

"Andersen's idiosyncratic, three-hour masterpiece is both a dazzling work of film criticism and a fascinating piece of urban anthropology centered on the one city on earth where one could be mistaken for the other."
 - TV Guide’s Movie Guide

"Addressing the interplay of reality and representation in the city's geography, architecture, political history and omnipresent film culture, Andersen's movie is enormous in scope yet thoroughly engaging."
 - Eye Weekly

"Andersen's key accomplishment is to profoundly alter the viewer's assumptions of what is good in movies." - Varitey

"Mr. Andersen takes movies involving his hometown as his subject, his source of evidence, and the target of a thought-provoking indictment."
 - New York Times

Best Documentary of 2004 –Village Voice Critics Poll

David Shultz
Vitagraph Films
4553 Glencoe Avenue
Marina Del Rey, CA 90292
310.314.9567
info@vitagaraphfilms.com

Lost in the Baltics
15 minutes, 2003 USA by Andy Smetanka, Ben Hatfield

This is the third Volumen video created by Andy Smetanka and edited by Ben Hatfield. Andy followed Volumen for two weeks on their tour of Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Once again, the video was filmed using a Russian Super8 camera.

www.volumen.net/index.php/

Love and Diane
155 minutes, 2003 35mm & Beta SP USA by Jennifer Dworkin

Love & Diane tells the epic story of a family over three generations. At its heart lies the highly charged relationship between a mother and daughter, desperate for love and forgiveness but caught in a devastating cycle. For Love, the world changed forever when she and her siblings were torn from their mother, Diane. Separated from her family and thrust into a terrifying world of institutions and foster homes, the memory of that moment is more vivid to her than her present life.

http://www.wmm.com/loveanddiane/

Lowell Blues: The Words of Jack Kerouac
27 minutes, 2000 USA by Henry Ferrini

Lowell Blues remembers the place Jack Kerouac could not forget. By fusing visual history, language and jazz into a 30-minute film poem, Lowell Blues illuminates Kerouac's childhood holy land.

Ferrini paints an illuminated landscape rich in mystery and possibility. Lowell Blues is a canvas in motion. A canvas made even more vivid by a haunting soundtrack by alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, drummer Jim Doherty and Boston's own "godfather of punk" Willie Alexander.

The film interprets how place activates the writer's imagination, and how the writer's art reshapes his city with reverence and respect. Between the frames we recollect the life of a young writer exploring his origins - education, the Catholic church, birth and death. Kerouac's text speaks to the 1930s in which he grew up. By using both archival and contemporary footage, Lowell Blues melds modern experiences together with Kerouac's childhood to create a timeless sense of place.

Lowell Blues, like Kerouac's writing, swirls word and image, music and movement into ethereal images of America's abundant, ever morphing, character, and remembers the city on the river where "memory and dream are intermixed in this mad universe."

www.ferriniproductions