New Media Film Festival
A cinema event celebrating innovations of the digital era
Organizers of the New Media Film Festival held last weekend are conscious of the irony of hosting a “new media” film festival in old-fashioned movie houses in the center of the American film industry. “Websites like YouTube contain a lot of gold but most people lack the energy to sift through a billion home videos of cats flushing toilets. That’s why festivals still retain their significance in the Internet era,” Noel Lawrence, the festival’s director of programming, told the Examiner.
This fest proves Tinseltown’s chops; highlights included Double Take, a darkly funny Cold War tale that casts 20th century director Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor. Belgian director Johan Grimonprez was on hand for a panel discussion.
Other stand-out films included RiP: A Remix Manifesto (trailer below), a documentary made by web activist Brett Gaylor, who explores intellectual property rights in the digital information age. And 2012:Time For Change from Joao Amorim follows writer Daniel Pinchbeck‘s quest to integrate the wisdom of lost civilizations with modern science, all culminating in the end of times theories surrounding the theory of an impending apocalypse on 2012.
The categories included Documentaries, Feature Length and 3-D, as well as newer forms of the medium such as Webisode and Mobile. The festivities, 11-13 June 2010 at Downtown Independent Theater in LA, proved the creativity and ingenuity of film.
