Fests and events, 11/14.

"As the name suggests, the two-week African Diaspora Film Festival's 72-film-deep program stakes claim to a vast territory—there's work here to represent almost every spot on the map that black people have made home," writes Nick Pinkerton. "A big, borderless family-reunion vibe, with shared memories and heartaches remembered, is at the center of this thing." November 23 through December 9.

Also in the Voice, Saul Austerlitz: "Perhaps because it never threw the industry into a tizzy of equal proportions, the advent of color on-screen is often given relatively short shrift—marginalized or ignored entirely as a fundamental turning point in the history of film. Glorious Technicolor, a series running at the Museum of the Moving Image from November 18 to December 2, and a new book from Wesleyan film professor Scott Higgins (who helped put the series together), may go some way toward changing all that."

Live Cinema/Return of the Image: Video from Central Asia, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Friday through February 17.

The BBC reports that Baghdad will host its first film festival in two years.

"'The body, and its pleasures and powers, is rarely far from the spirit in California,' Erik Davis writes in his introduction to Isis Aquarian's firsthand account The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and the Source Family," quotes Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Many generations of Californians have enjoyed a mix of healthy eating, nature appreciation, and magical thinking, but few have done so with as much colorful exuberance as the Source Family, a group of angelic longhairs that thrived in the Hollywood hills in the late 60s and early 70s under the guidance of Father Yod (aka YaHoWa, Shin Wha, and Jim Baker), a fast-talking rascal with the hair, beard, and robes of a latter-day Zeus.... Three events this week - an audiovisual-enhanced discussion at Artists' Television Access, a signing at Aquarius Records, and a live performance at Cafe du Nord commemorate the publication of Isis 'Keeper of the Record' Aquarian's Source Family primer, a stitching together of testimonies and primary documents."

IndieWIRE has the AFI Fest award-winners. The grand jury prize-winner, Lee Isaac Chung's Munyurangabo is easily one of the best American debut features of 2007," blogs Matt Dentler. And Mark Bell wraps the festival for Film Threat, while Doug Cummings offers his takes on three docs.

Meantime, see the latest entry on I'm Not There for news of an eyebrow-raising event in a modest German city.

Posted by dwhudson at November 14, 2007 7:41 AM