CLAIRE DUNCOMBE | AUGUST 2, 2021 | 7:55AM

Westword
https://www.westword.com/content/printView/12040557

The organizers behind Boulder’s Mimesis Documentary Festival, which runs from August 4 through August 10, don’t believe in documentary as a genre.

“Documentary is an impulse within the arts, something that exists within all art-making,” says Eric Coombs Esmail, director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, which is presenting Mimesis in collaboration with the Dairy Arts Center and the ATLAS Institute B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance. The festival will include traditional docs, as well as ethnographic, docu-fiction and experimental films.

“We have a broad scope of what we consider documentary,” adds festival director Curt Heiner, noting that the festival exhibits not just films but also theatrical, audio and even immersive works.

“The installation format of a documentary piece is older than the screen,” Esmail explains. Immersive techniques that are growing in popularity among artists and audience members today have a long history, and displaying such artwork at Mimesis gives audience members perspective into the many ways documentary art can be relayed.

The eighty artist-made films and installations cover a vast array of subjects — from how tumultuous political divides affect our inner landscapes to how couples form and infrastructure impacts human lives and the environment. In addition to hosting screenings and installation-based works, the festival will offer workshops and presentations by master filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Pedro Costa.

Sachs will screen and discuss her 2020 movie, Film About a Father Who, as the opening-night presentation at 6 p.m. Wednesday, August 4. Built from archival footage, home videos and interviews, the film portrays family dynamics across time, from multiple — often contradictory — perspectives. Sachs will also teach a filmmaking workshop that demonstrates how small, everyday moments can inspire film poems.

Costa, Mimesis’s featured artist, has gained recognition for his own “slow cinema” approach to documentary filmmaking. His signature docudramas often focus on Cape Verdean communities in Lisbon, Portugal, and he has received awards from Locarno and Cannes Film festivals, among others. He will offer a virtual masterclass about the art of editing, in addition to multiple screenings.

“He’s a touchstone artist” for a lot of the people submitting work, Esmail says.

But the festival’s focus is less on iconic filmmakers and more on exploring lesser-known artists. The bulk of selections were picked mostly from more than 300 entrants and many have been divided into smartly named programming blocks such as Towards an Architecture of Inclusion, Lessons for Unlearning, Borders Within, Motherese, A Place I Know, Impregnable, Untangled Archives and Zero for Conduct.

Organizers hope Mimesis will help documentary artists and scholars grow local, regional and international networks.

“There are so many documentarians from this region,” says Esmail. “I hope they will find this valuable and interesting to them.”

Mimesis Documentary Festival runs from August 4 through 10 at various Boulder locations; find a full schedule and tickets here. All films are also available for streaming online through the festival dates.

Daily Camera
By Kalene McCort
July 31, 2021
https://www.dailycamera.com/2021/07/31/second-annual-mimesis-documentary-festival-brings-over-80-projects-to-first-in-person-event/

Running Aug. 4-10, the artist-focused festival will feature workshops, installations and more

Mimesis is a word that carries many meanings, including “resemblance, receptivity, representation and the act of expression.”

The University of Colorado Boulder’s Mimesis Center — originally founded in 2016 as the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media — allows up-and-coming creatives to dive deep into the art form of documentary film making by exploring the many layered shapes it can take on.

With a focus on encouraging profoundly personal, underrepresented and culturally-specific works to bloom, Mimesis cultivates boundary-pushing material whose influence stretches long after credits roll.

Last year, the center launched its inaugural Mimesis Documentary Festival, but the event — in keeping with COVID-safe guidelines — was strictly virtual. This year, the fest returns with workshops, at-home and venue-based screenings, conversations with world-renowned film makers and other intriguing offerings.

The festival will open — on Wednesday, at The Dairy Arts Center’s Boedecker Cinema — with “Film About A Father Who” by award-winning documentarian Lynne Sachs. Through a series of thoughtfully curated home movies, images and interviews, Sachs creates a captivating collage steeped in nostalgia that also carries the complexities of familial relationships.

On Aug. 7, she will lead a workshop “Day Residue” that will prompt attendees to utilize fragments of their daily lives as fodder for film poems.

Award-winning Portuguese film director Pedro Costa — the festival’s featured artist — will give a master class on editing at 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 8 at Grace Gamm Theater, within the Dairy Arts Center.

His 2019 film “Vitalina Varel” will be screened at 7:15 p.m. on Aug 6., and his 2014 film “Horse Money” will be shown at 11:30 a.m. on Aug. 8, both at Boedecker Cinema with the Dairy Arts Center.

Aside from a variety of visually and emotionally compelling features and shorts, installations that utilize film and other materials to enhance the art of storytelling can be found at CU Boulder’s B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance.

“Blowback,” by Nima Bahrehmand, is a three-channel synchronized video and sound installation sourced from a found footage video, streamed online, from a location in the Middle East. It can be viewed from Thursday through Aug. 10.

“24 Cards,” displays the artful decades-long postcard correspondence between filmmakers Abraham Ravett and the late Donald Richie.

There are several audio documentaries; “Put the Brights On” sheds light on the experience of transgender individuals residing in rural Minnesota.

From docufiction to experimental selections, over 80 projects aim to stir something in viewers.

There are a variety of ticketing options and festival passes are $270. CU Boulder faculty, staff and students are eligible for a 50% discount on most tickets and passes. Some free tickets will be offered to CU Boulder students.

We caught up with Mimesis Center Director Eric Coombs Esmail to find out more about the upcoming festival, some of the documentaries that have had a lasting impact on him through his life and his latest film project that spotlights the stories of homeless citizens seeking refuge in the tree-lined national forests of Colorado.

Daily Camera: What inspired you to bring Mimesis to Boulder and what are you most looking forward to about this year’s upcoming fest?

Eric Coombs Esmail: Mimesis is an initiative of the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media at the University of Colorado Boulder. We support documentary production, pedagogy, and exhibition at CU and the festival serves part of that mission by acting as the focal point for building a strong documentary community in our region and exhibiting unique international work. As this will be our first year in-person with physical events, I am most excited to see that community come together on opening night on August 4, at the Dairy Arts Center, to celebrate the outstanding work of the programming team and all this year’s Mimesis artists.

DC: What do you think sets Mimesis apart from other festivals?

ECE: We are an artist-focused festival. For us, this means a commitment to programming at least 80% of our lineup from the open submission process, rather than through distributors or direct relationships. Our team actually watches each project submitted — more than once — and they are carefully curated into programming blocks so that every selected work really shines. We also are quite different in that we accept works of expanded documentary arts, including installation and interactive projects — installed in the B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance in the Atlas building on the CU Boulder campus.

Our programming is unique and brings international documentary to Boulder that you simply won’t see anywhere else.

DC: Do you recall the first documentary that had an impact on you and prompted you to want to get into this form of storytelling?

ECE: There’s not really one specific project, but I remember being blown away by a range of works, like Gottheim’s “Fogline,”, Flaherty’s “Man of Aran,” Jacobs’s “Little Stabs at Happiness,” Kopple’s “Harland County, USA” and so many others. What really captured my imagination was the idea that the documentary impulse exists in all art, from the experimental to the traditional. When art is articulated through the lens of documentary, we get so much more than simple information — we get to share in the lived experience of others in a powerful, embodied way. Mimesis is all about creating a space in our community for that to happen, and to celebrate the artists whose labor makes those experiences possible.

DC: I know this is the first in-person festival of Mimesis, but what would you say you hope for the evolution of the fest?

ECE: We have decided that Mimesis will always be a hybrid event. We learned in the pandemic that flexible access points for artists and audiences is critically important and that hybridity allows for productive participation that in-person only events simply do not.

We will always be a festival that centers artists and their work and that builds community in a grassroots way. While we welcome industry participation, we will never be industry oriented. Our goal each year will be to create an event that is valuable to our artists and unique for our audiences. With our community’s support, we intend to continue growing our festival and expanding our programming each year.

DC: I read that you are currently working on a documentary feature that focuses on houseless communities that live and travel through Colorado’s national forests. What has your experience been like capturing this so far and when can we look forward to a release?

ECE: “American Refuge” investigates the strange and complex history of the national forests around Nederland. Shooting is challenging, fast-paced and exciting. We’ve found so many amazing people — both housed and unhoused — who use the forest as a place of refuge and respite and of transformation and recovery — but not without significant risk. The pandemic put a hold on production for a year, but we are set to finish principal photography at the end of this summer with a festival run starting in 2022. Curt Heiner, our founding festival director, is also a producer on the project.

Film About a Father Who ⋅ A film by Lynne Sachs
From Silvia Nugara
July 9, 2021
https://www.cultframe.com/2021/07/film-about-a-father-who-%E2%8B%85-un-film-di-lynne-sachs/?fbclid=IwAR3eRtE4Ys3Us2WMN36q-qscANXduzH05UjZu3oGPY5li_of7V9WFi282mI

Presented in Italian preview at the 57th International Exhibition of New Cinema in Pesaro, Film About a Father Who by Lynne Sachs is the fragmentary portrait of an elusive, eccentric, excessive father, a real tangle, like the one that knots his long gray hair and that his daughter tries to comb him in the opening of the film. A Memphis-born Jew who became an entrepreneur, Ira Sachs Sr. has been involved in the hospitality industry by managing hotels and resorts in various corners of the planet. In the repertoire accumulated in over 30 years of life and filming, whose formats go from 8 and 16mm to video and digital, the director shows it both through the look of family films she herself shot as a young girl and in repertoires television and promotional. In the latter emerges the paradoxical and kaleidoscopic figure of a tycoon hyppie in multicolored outfits, intensely dedicated to work but also to joy, which as soon as the first, enormous,

Serial seducer with six marriages behind him and nine children not all equally recognized, the father is today a disarmed patriarch who has left behind a trail of pain, trauma, abandonment and mysteries, starting with his name and surname which perhaps in origin was not what the children have always known. But to the omissions and riddles disseminated throughout his life is added a kind of senile amnesia (perhaps yet another stratagem for not assuming his responsibilities?) Which prompts him to respond with a “I don’t remember” to all the questions he asks. daughter today.

So how to translate his silence? How to mend the scattered pieces of an existential puzzle? How to completely outline a father figure full of gaps and at the same time reconstruct a little even themselves? What Lynne, her sister writer Dana and her brother director Ira Jr., the fruit of their first marriage, choose to do is take on the responsibility of keeping the scattered pieces of the family together. The language, primarily cinematographic, takes on the role of witness and mediator of this process of encounter and collective re-elaboration. In one scene we see daughters and sons of different ages, social status and geographical origin gathered in the same room to talk about “him”, some sharing crazy anecdotes, some pulling out all the anger accumulated even towards half-sisters and half-brothers.

In addition to the archive materials and the sequences shot today in which the director recalls “her” father, the interviews with his eccentric mother, the various “girlfriends” he had over time and all the children between yesterday and today make up the mosaic of the many possible perspectives on a bulky father figure despite and perhaps precisely because of his absence. An absence suffered individually and which by now can no longer be filled but can be shared and perhaps weigh a little less. In a private repertory scene, the young director herself explains what years later this film would become: “in the past I made a film in which I aimed the camera lens all around me, another in which I looked at myself instead inside and now I want to make one in which I look both inside and outside ”. This intimate work,

The title of the film pays homage to Film about a woman who by Yvonne Rainer (1972-74) and that elision of the verb is both a reference to absence and an open space. As the director said: “The film is part of a series of portraits that I am making to understand the extent to which we can get to know another person. I hate when it comes to documentaries ‘that are based on the character’, I’m not interested in making a complete portrait of someone, I don’t know if it’s possible. This is also what the film is about and in this sense the missing verb opens up many possibilities: it is a film about a father who … jokes, misbehaves, has had many children. What interested me, however, was not filling a void, finding answers or finding secrets but following traces and asking questions.”

© CultFrame 07/2021

PLOT
It was not easy for the director to have a father like hers: always taken by the job of an entrepreneur, by the never satisfied desire for conquests, professional and sentimental adventures, full of women and children. A man who has done everything to be hated but to whom his daughter remains attached despite everything and to whom he pays homage with this film shot for more than thirty-five years and in various formats.

CREDITS
International title: Film about a Father Who / Director: Lynne Sachs / Screenplay: Lynne Sachs. / Editing: Rebecca Shapass / Photography: Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs Sr., Ira Sachs Jr. / Music: Stephen Vitiello / Performers: Ira Sachs Sr., Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, Ira Sachs Jr., Diane Sachs, Rose Sachs / Production: / Country: USA, 2020 / Running time: 74 minutes.

ON THE WEB
Filmography by Lynne Sachs International Exhibition of New Cinema in Pesaro