COURTESY CINEMA GUILD ON THE BILL: The Second Annual Mimesis Documentary Festival, Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. Tickets and information at mimesisfestival.org.
The art of the real
Round two for the Mimesis Documentary Festival
by Michael J. Casey
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Documentary Festival (MDF) takes over the Dairy Arts Center’s cinemas for a simultaneous return and debut. A return as this is the second summer MDF will immerse viewers in screenings, workshops and conversations, and a debut be an in-person event. Not everyone plans to debut in the middle of a global pandemic, but MDF soldiered forth, bringing its artist-focused, community-oriented programming to the virtual world. Some reliance on virtual lingers as this year’s featured artist, the great will not be able to attend in person. Instead, MDF will screen three of Vitalina Varela, Horse Money and Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? with Costa Zooming in for post-screening discussions. Tired of Zoom? No worries, MDF is bringing Lynne Sachs in for the opening night festivities with a screening and conversation about her latest, Film
About a Father Who — a portrait of her father that ends up looking like no portrait at all. Pulling from home video and footage shot between 1965 and 2019 (on tal), Film About centers on Ira Sachs, a successful bohemian businessman who worked out of a shoebox, looked at Park City, Utah, the way others looked at a tropical beach and had an Achilles heel for women. Sachs finds asymmetry in her father’s story, but the longer the cameras roll, the more Film About becomes her story — and her sibling’s story. At one point in the movie, Sachs describes it as “looking at something from the inside and outside.” The more you watch, the more contradictions you find and the more your assumptions are punctured. programming. Costa and Sachs may
and graft. Gifford, who has been hailed as “William Faulkner
be the headliners, but most MDF takes shape in thematic blocks, 20 in all, each featuring a handful of shorts and features tackling a common theme from diverse perspectives. Take the Images, ing how humans and animals transform the landscape around them — and how information transforms the landscape of a narrative. Many movies playing MDF navigate the line between what we think we know and what is true, but Emma Piper-Burket’s Driving Dinosaurs stands out for its playful work-in-progress approach. with that level of playful investigation. Screening in the Sister Cities block, Roy’s World: Barry Gifford’s Chicago, from is a collage of Gifford’s writings, archival footage and narration telling how the Windy City came to be through corruption
and the bulk of Roy’s World concerns growing up in the 1950s, when the postwar boom was reshaping the American landscape and demographics. As Gifford’s words roll off the soundtrack, Christopher stitches together a river of images — still photographs, animation, newsreels and industrials — to compliment Gifford’s prose. Winters never looked this cold, newspapers never looked this culpable, and Mayor Daley’s cronies never felt so real. There are more than just a few passing similarities between Roy’s World and A Film About a Father Who, not to mention any number of the 100 features and shorts screening at MDF. That’s the disparate the perspectives, the more alities and connections emerge.
CGT from Page 13
between easy genre buckets. And a little nod to the unexpected. The band released their 16th long player, Elegy, in the late spring of last year, sadly orphaned of any tour support. Featuring an evocative three-part original suite commissioned by a Portuguese music festival and inspired by three rivers that hour east or Porto (“Guadela Trilogy”), the album also features covers of some of the band’s favorite composers, one Beatles tune, and a galloping read of “Diamond Head,” one of the Ventures’ big hits from the ’60s. Ever the democracy, where each player brings in tune suggestions to the collective, we made the reasonable guess that Richards — the only American in the trio — brought that one in. “I’ve always been a big fan of surf guitar music, but Hideyo was the biggest 14
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fan,” he says. “The Ventures were like the Beatles in Japan, so when he was learning to play guitar as a teenager, that’s what he wanted to do. He played in a surf rock ‘n’ roll band as a teenager, so he really had the surf thing down.” We asked Richards what he thought of the new breed of fingerstyle guitar players, the percussive, fretboard-tapping, flying harmonics school of solo acoustic guitar. One of its stars, of course, is Boulder’s own Trace Bundy. (After meeting Bundy at a festival in Bend, Oregon, CGT is working to put together some shows with him.) “It has been really interesting to see these guys, like Trace and Andy McKee, really blow up on YouTube,” Richards says. “Part of it is, it’s really amazing how much sound they can make as a solo guitarist, and then they add that JULY 29, 2021
percussive element. We’ve been doing some shows with the Montreal Guitar Trio, and one of those guys is really great at that percussive element, so when we’ve played with them, he brings a little of that into the mix. And another guy we’ve played with, Trevor Gordon Hall, we’ve done some shows with him as well.” Unfortunately for this leg of Crimson opening dates, the California Guitar Trio will be appearing as California Guitar Duo-and-a-half. While most of the world is sitting back watching the Olympics on TV from Tokyo, Hideyo Moriya is more or less quarantine-restricted in his native Japan (COVID’s not over, kids) and can’t make the trip. Richards and Lams will be joined by erstwhile CGT collaborator and Chapman Stick player Tom Griesgraber, filling a role that’s l
been seated in the past by Crimson’s Tony Levin, the Chapman Stick maestro with whom CGT has almost as long as a relationship with as that with Fripp. And as for Fripp, Richards credits extending past the fretboard. “He is a really... serious guy,” Richards says. “He also has a big sense of humor. ... Studying with him, I was totally maybe ‘easy-going’ isn’t the right term, but maybe a little less scary and serious. “If you’ve seen any of the videos he’s done with his wife (wherein Fripp and his wife Toya Wilcox goof on the likes of Metallica, GnR and Mötley Crüe), it really shows a side of him that most people have never seen before.”
BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE