Full Frame Dispatch. 1.

Here's a telling thing the cinetrix overheard at Full Frame this morning: a journalist on his cellphone peering out the window and giving a pal directions: "It's between Pennebaker and the coffee cart." Yes, as in DA Pennebaker. Now in its 10th year, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is, more than ever, about the filmmakers. (A canvas tote is the extent of the swag here.)

A film geek standing as I stood on the mezzanine of the Durham Armory last night, looking down on the Catalan-themed Opening Night Party below, would be in heaven. There's Kirby Dick chatting with a striking woman clad in white. A server wafts another bottle of wine over to the table at which tall, lean Ariel Dorfman and petite festival founder and executive director Nancy Buirski chat with pals. HBO doc doyenne Sheila Nevins is rumored to be here this year - a fun game to play is to guess which woman is She. I looked for a queue of documentarians waiting to kiss her ring, but to no avail.

Outside I bum a cigarette from The Carpetbagger himself, David Carr, who's catching up with Andrew Rossi and his partner Kate. Carr appears briefly in Rossi's doc about Sirio Maccioni's restaurant Le Cirque, A Table in Heaven. Kate confided that they'd finished editing only the day before. She marveled at the party: "It's like a wedding." Or a family reunion.

But what about the films? An entire program could be built around hands. I caught the short Metacarpus this morning and am about to dash into The Hands of Che Guevara. On Sunday, Nathaniel Kahn screens his latest, Two Hands. Or another program about the project of bringing cinema to all corners of the world. Jamie Meltzer's Welcome to Nollywood was a crowd-pleasing look at the film industry in Nigeria, the third largest on the planet. Uli Gaulke's Comrades in Dreams took viewers even further afield, tracking dedicated exhibitors in Shingnapur, India; Congsan-Ri, DPR Korea; Ouagadougou, Burkina-Faso; and Big Piney, USA. What drives these folks, one says, "is a calling stronger than family." Speaking of which, a film calls. More soon.

Posted by dwhudson at April 13, 2007 4:12 PM