In addition to being an accomplished documentarian and community firecracker, founder and festival director Paula Lee Haller is damn good at programming films. Booking for the festival takes place in the fall, but each year she has consistently been able to nail down critics’ darlings and Oscar nominees in the documentary category before they’re announced. This year, she was able to gauge the mood of the community and the issues on American minds in the week following the presidential inauguration, when Barack Obama’s election to president was anything but a sure thing.

The festival opened with Burning the Future: Coal in America (2007), by David Novack and Alexis Zoulias, an indictment of the emerging coal-based United States energy policy.  A December coal ash sludge spill near Knoxville, TN revived the issue of “clean” coal.

“How many saw the last film?”   Several hands went up in the audience. “Are you mad as hell?”

If we were mad, we were quickly moved to a sweet and happy place by a 6-minute animated documentary, Montrose Avenue (Pat Shewchuk, Marek Colek), which documents an average day on the street of that name in Toronto, from the perspective of a 6-year-old girl.

With neighborhoods and daily routines on our minds, our shopping routines were challenged by Food Fight (Christopher Taylor, 2008). Watching Wolfgang Puck make pizzas at the natural lunch time produced a salivating crowd, as we moved out into the lobby for the mid-day break and refreshments.

“Got any nominees this year, Paula?” an audience member asked.  She didn’t. But it didn’t make the feat of her timely selections any less remarkable.

Docufest has built a loyal following of gray-haired intellectuals, college-aged hipsters, academics and filmmakers in its short history.  Until this year, the festival had been held in the 50-seat screening room at EUE Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, NC, touted as the largest television and movie production facility outside California (http://www.screengemsstudios.com/nc/).

Security concerns normally keep locals and film tourists at a controlled distance, so the old festival venue provided a seductive cache that helped initially to build the festival’s popularity.  But DocuFest had outgrown the venue.   Patrons were being turned away, and those who got in sat on the floor to watch documentaries.

By moving to King Hall, home of the Department of Film Studies on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, the festival effectively tripled its seating capacity.

“We’re a film town,” Haller said between screenings, as she thanked the many local movers-and-shakers in attendance.

Wilmington feels like a small Southern town, yet the city’s position an important cluster of film activity is difficult to deny.  The Department of Film Studies at UNCW develops filmmakers, who are then able to work as interns on studio and independent projects.  These students, as well as local amateurs and film professionals, participate in ridiculously fun interactive festivals like the One Take (which allows participants 24 hours to make a film, using only in-camera editing) and the Final Cut (which allows editing and some production). 

The city is also home to several distinctly different and successful film festivals.  The Cucalorus Film Festival (http://www.cucalorus.org/) is the flagship:  a five-day celebration of independent film which grows each year and has gained national and international attention.  Each spring, the Black Arts Alliance produces Cine Noir: A Festival of Black Film (http://www.blackartsalliance.org/).  Now in its 9^th year, the festival directors pull together a knockout lineup of shorts, features and docs from African-American filmmakers.  DocuFest Wilmington takes place each winter and focuses on the documentary genre.  Between film festivals, Wilmingtonians enjoy Cinematique, a partnership between Thalian Hall (a gorgeous pre-Civil War theater) and the local NPR affiliate, WHQR.  Cinematique screens foreign, independent, or otherwise notable films that wouldn’t otherwise make it to our local multiplex. 

Back in the screening room, the audience settled into a block of short documentaries, starting with KURM Radio: The Soapbox of the Air (2008), an account of the daily operations of a community-owned radio station in the Deep South of the United States.  Terrestrial radio is all but extinct in the age of information, but our committed protagonist used the medium in a way that reflected his community:  what all media do at their best.

A Day Late in Oakland (2008) documents the murder of reporter Chauncey Bailey, who covered the activities of Your Black Muslim Bakery, an Oakland, California business long respected by the community and its leaders.   On the day following the murder, police raided the business and exposed the dark side of its operation.  La Corona (2008, Oscar Nominated) took us inside a Colombian women’s prison for their annual beauty pageant. 

We ended the day with the feature documentary, The Wrecking Crew (2008), which introduced us to a group of musicians we never knew we always loved. The filmmaker, Denny Tedesco, is the son of Tommy Tedesco, a member of a ragtag group of session players known as the Wrecking Crew, who created an unbelievable string of hit songs between the 1950s and the early 1980s.  The billing attracted musicians and music enthusiasts to the audience. One attendee had gone to school with Tommy Tedesco’s brother, and later reconnected with his son Denny via DocuFest.

DocuFest has been described as an emotional rollercoaster, which it was on this day.  We got angry.  We were soothed.  We saw people at their best and at their worst.  We saw people at their worst, looking their best.  We saw something amazing in every block. 

In this film town, there is no better way to spend a rainy Saturday in January.

The Eighth Annual DocuFest took place in UNCW's King Auditorium for Sunday, January 30, 10:00 am - 6:00 p.m., 2010.  And the ninth is in the works.

Contributor details

Ann Howard organized a community partnership film series for several years in Wilmington, NC. She recently earned her MBA and now counsels small businesses on marketing and finance.