Following the steps of Robert Flaherty, Chris Marker, Joris Ivens and others, the filmmakers of this program step beyond the traditional conventions of the documentary genre and create poetic visual essays – turn the reality into poetry but at the same time preserve ingenuity of the subject of their explorations. Among the filmmakers featured are Lynne Sachs, Jonathan Schwartz, Philip Hoffman, Aleksei Vakhrushev and Leighton Pierce.

Den of Tigers 16mm, 18 min, 2002
Director: Jonathan Schwartz Director In Person

'Den of Tigers' was made from the opportunity to travel to West Bengal, India on an invitation from a teacher of mine, a filmmaker,
to record sound for a film he was making. while there I collected images/sounds for my own project. those images and sounds were made into this film - a reflection of my experience, feelings, and most of all, the participation of walking, looking, and listening.

Jonathan Schwartz has been making personal films/videos for a few years. He is employed at Emerson College to run the film post production facilities.

?O,ZOO! (THE MAKING OF A FICTION FILM) 16mm, color/sound, 23 min, 1986
Director: Philip Hoffman

"Philip Hoffman's ?O,ZOO! (THE MAKING OF A FICTION FILM) uses a diary format to skirt along the edge of someone else's filmed narrative (Peter Greenaway's A Zed & Two Noughts), and to trace the anatomy of pure image-making. 'Pure' is both the right and the wrong word: Hoffman is a man addicted to the hermetic thisness of filmed images, and plagued by the suspicion that these images, far from being pure, are really scabs torn away from the sores of the world. Found footage shot by his grandfather (a newsreel cameraman) is the starting point for Hoffman's meditations on the illusion of visual purity, and on the distance between the 'neutral' image and the value-laden narrative that it can be made to serve. It is a moral distance, one that this filmmaker surveys with a wary fascination." - Robert Everett-Green

"... Hoffman rewrites the Canadian documentary tradition into a family memory and romance." - Blaine Allan

Sermons and Sacred Pictures: the life and work of Reverend L.O. Taylor 16mm, 29 min, 1989
Director: Lynne Sachs

This experimental documentary profiles the life and work of Reverend L.O. Taylor, a black Baptist minister from Memphis, Tennessee. In the 1930s and 1940s Rev. Taylor built a reputation as a fiery preacher who laced his sermons with parables, fables and dramatic visual descriptions. In addition to his ministry work, Rev. Taylor was also an inspired photographer and filmmaker with a keen interest in preserving a visual and aural record of the social, cultural, and religious fabric of black American life. He photographed and filmed businesses and schools in the black community, trips to the National Baptist Convention, baptisms, funerals, social events, and individuals in the quiet dignity of their everyday lives. Over the years he compiled an extraordinary record of black life in the South before the Civil Rights movement captured the attention of the nation. Sermons and Sacred Pictures innovatively combines Rev. Taylor's black-and-white films and audio recordings with color images of contemporary Memphis neighborhoods and religious gatherings. Commentary by his widow and others who knew him forms an intertwined narrative focusing on Rev. Taylor as a pioneering documentarian and social activist. Taylor emerges as a man of humor, piety and intelligence, vibrantly involved in the community he loved. Supported by a Pioneer Fund Grant for Emerging Documentary Filmmakers and a Film Arts Foundation Development Grant.

"Sermons and Sacred Pictures has a magical quality....It brings to life the work of Rev.. Taylor through his community filmmaking efforts. The film in turn affirms African-American identity and spirit." Elaine Charnov, Margaret Mead Film Festival

"Viewers will be fascinated by this half hour documentary...among the highlights of the Margaret Mead Film Festival." J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Lynne Sachs' intricately layered films, web projects and installations explore the borders between genres, discourses, racialized identities, psychic states and nations. In 2001, Lynne received a Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to complete "Investigation of a Flame", an experimental documentary about a civil disobedience action in 1968. Her films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive and the Sundance Film Festival. Recently, she created several conceptually inspired installations using time-based media and sculpture. This year she and San Francisco artist Jeanne Finley collaborated on The House of Drafts (house-of-drafts.org), a fiction based web project they created with several Bosnian media artists while living in Sarajevo. Lynne lives in Brooklyn with her partner Mark Street and their daughters Maya and Noa. She teaches in the Film and Media Arts Department at Hunter College in New York. Lynne's website is http://www.hi-beam.net/mkr/ls .

You Can Drive the Big Rigs 15min, 16mm, 1989
Director: Leighton Pierce

An impressionistic documentary on the small town cafes in the rural Midwest. While the cafes function as a focal point for many aspects of the rural subculture, they also reveal the limits and somewhat closed nature of that culture. Awards: Oberhausen, Atlanta, Athens, Sinking Creek and Bucks County film festivals.

Leighton Pierce has made over 30 short impressionistic/experimental documentaries exploring the margins of memory and perception and the filmic construction of space and time. Many of his recent works focus on unsentimental close views of small events in domestic space. While always concentrating on the subtleties of sound/image relationships, these films are also visually unique as reflected in the cinematography awards these films have won. Before concentrating on film and video, Pierce studied music composition (musique concrete, and jazz). Many compositional tendencies still influence his production process. Parallel to that, he also worked as a ceramist and a sculptor. Most of these films (since 1985) were made while he has been employed as Professor of Film and Video Production at the University of Iowa. Every one of Leighton Pierce's films and videos listed in Canyon are festival award winners. For example, his two most recent films, GLASS and 50 FEET OF STRING won Best Cinematography and Best of the Fest respectively at the Ann Arbor Film Festival as well as top awards at Black Maria, Athens, Atlanta, and other national and international screenings. His work has also been screened and/or won awards at Oberhausen, Edinburgh, Marin County, New York Expo, Cinema du Reel, Hong Kong, European Media Arts Festival, Impakt and many other festivals. Retrospectives of his work have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive, Chicago Filmmakers and the San Francisco Cinematheque.

Time When Dreams Melt 35mm on video, color/b&w, 14 minutes, 1996 - Russia
Director: Aleksei Vakhrushev

The Times When Dreams Melt was shot in Northeastern Russia in the Providenia District of the Chukchi Autonomous Region, an area occupied by the Yupik Eskimos of Northeast Asia for millennia. The film made by a Yupik filmmaker creates a collective portrait of the Yupik Eskimos of the 90s. The summer walrus hunt, life in the village and also the insistent memory of a vivid past, an Eskimo childhood spent in harmony with the land before the turning point, the tragic year, 1958 (when the government policy forcefully removed the Native Eskimos from their seashore villages to a bay nearer the administrative center of the area), the consequences of the relocation, degradation, and hopes...