Best of INPUT 2008

February 4, 5:00 PM

Feb. 4-10, 2008; Event locations noted in listings

More than 1,000 submissions from over sixty countries are reviewed each year by an international jury of peers, resulting in a final selection of 85-100 of the world’s most provocative productions. The point of INPUT is not just to screen these works, but rather to discuss and debate them among television professionals.

Visit the INPUT 2008 main website for full details on the festival, which takes place in Johannesburg, May 4-11, 2008.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Social Media, the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute, the Canadian Embassy and Government of Québec, the Goethe-Institut Washington, the Maison Française and the French Embassy, Silverdocs/AFI Women in Film and Video and WHUT/Howard University Television Channel 32

Monday, 4 February, 7:00 pm
Silverdocs/American Film Institute, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD 20910
Metro: Silver Spring
Reservations online: www.afi.com/silver
www.silverdocs.com
Souvenirs, (75 min), Israel. Directed by Shahar Cohen and Halil Efrat
Documentary filmmaker Shahar Cohen attends a reunion with his father, a WWII veteran, who reveals a secret: while stationed in the Netherlands he paired up with a few young Dutch women, and may have left behind a “souvenir.” The two embark on an arduous, often humorous road trip to retrace the father’s war experiences and discover if there may be a half-sibling or two. Winner of the SILVERDOCS 2007 Audience Award.
Followed by reception

Tuesday, 5 February, 6:30 pm
Goethe-Institut Washington, 812 Seventh Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001
Metro: Gallery Place/Chinatown
www.goethe.de/washington
Promised Paradise, (52 min), Netherlands/Indonesia, performance/current affairs. Directed by Leonard Retel Helmrich.
Indonesia, the land of the eternal smile, has suffered in the last few years from terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists. The confusion in the country is a source of inspiration for many Indonesian artists. In Promised Paradise we follow Agus, a troubadour and puppeteer who criticizes the turbulence in his country in his performances. After another bombing in Jakarta, Agus decides to go searching for answers.
RSVP: 202 289-1200 ext. 165

Wednesday 6 February, 6:30 pm
Embassy of Brazil, 3006 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20008
Metro: Dupont Circle, then Metrobus N2 or N4
www.brasilemb.org
www.bacidc.org
Southern Extreme (Extremo Sul), (92 min), Brazil, documentary, directed by Monica Schmiedt
In March 2003, five Brazilian mountain climbers decided to set up a camp in the Southern Extreme of Argentina’s Tierra Del Fuego, one of the most inhospitable and forgotten landscapes in the world. Having to cope with constant rain, cold weather, snow and strong winds, a film crew was there to document the expedition. Its ambitious goal: climbing Monte Sarmiento, a little explored mountain known for its beauty, isolation and dangers. Favorable weather aside, a new twist to the expedition puts at risk the climbers’ goal of reaching the mountain’s summit. Facing the “Ice Sphinx of Sarmiento” dramatically changes their most intimate feelings. “Southern Extreme” closely follows the reactions of these five friends and members of the film crew towards the fascination and splendor of a mountain – symbol of the human desire to conquer the unreachable.
RSVP: 202 289-1200 ext. 170; Please be sure to leave contact information
Note: Screening room is NOT handicapped accessible.

Thursday, February 7, 8:00 pm
WHUT/Howard University Television, Channel 32 (broadcast event)
www.whut.org
The Last Dog in Rwanda (Den sista hunden i Rwanda), (29 min), Sweden, Drama, directed by Jens Assur
Like many 10-year-old boys, David is fascinated by war. He builds plastic models of all kinds of military vehicles and plays war games with his friends. At the age of 24 he establishes himself as a news photographer, with the world’s theaters of war as his field of occupation. We meet him in Rwanda in May 1994 in the midst of the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Together with Mats, a reporter 30 years his senior, he travels through the war-torn country in order to depict the massacres. The Last Dog In Rwanda is a film about the fascination of war and the connection between the little boy’s exciting wargames and the attractiveness of real wars to the adult. How far can one push the limits and extend moral values and ethics to get the perfect picture? The movie is based on star photographer Jens Assur’s own experiences in Rwanda.

Thursday, February 7, 7:00 pm
Canadian Embassy (with Government of Québec), 501 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20001
Metro: Judiciary Square
www.CanadianEmbassy.org
Room 13: The Heart at Work (La chambre no. 13: Le coeur à l’ouvrage), 26’, Canada, drama, produced by Richard Angers and Geneviève Lavoie
A hit man, who is about to retire from a job he finds repetitive and increasingly tiring, goes to Québec City to carry out his last contracts. After a night in Room 13, Gilles arrives at his future victim’s home. Surprise! The man he has been hired to kill is Brad, a childhood friend. As a result of this meeting, he finds the heart to continue working.

Manufactured Landscapes, 83 min, Canada, documentary, directed by Jennifer Baichwal.
For almost three decades, internationally renowned Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky has been creating large-scale photographs of landscapes transformed by industry: quarries, scrap heaps, factories, recycling yards, dams. Manufactured Landscapes follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country capturing the evidence and effects of China’s massive industrial revolution. Rarely witnessed sites such as the Three Gorges Dam (50% larger than any other dam in the world), the interior of a factory that produces 20 million irons a year, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera. Shot in sumptuous super 16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, meditating on human impact on the planet without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, the film shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it. Reservations required: 202 682-7797

Sunday, February 10, 4 p.m.
La Maison Française, 4101 Reservoir Road, Washington, DC 20007
www.la-maison-francaise.org/
Cosmic Connexion, 68 min., (excerpt out of 150 min. broadcast), France, television/web/book event. Collage-style program.
Produced by Anne Jaffrennou and Marie Cuisset
A concept combining live broadcast, e-mail and the web, while keeping ARTE, the European Cultural Channel’s multicultural and multilingual audience in mind. How would you sum up all of human experience in 68 minutes of television? In the 1970s,the American space probes Pioneer and Voyager were sent off carrying a message for any intelligent life forms they might meet. More than thirty years later, a television channel launches another hopeful signal into the sky. In autumn 2006, the European space program put the COROT satellite into orbit. One of its main missions was to look for extrasolar planets, including so-called telluric planets, which are similar to the Earth. On 30 September 2006 at 20:45 a special program was shown on ARTE and simultaneously beamed into space by a CNES (French Space Center) antenna. The substance of the program is formed by the most incredible exchanges between Earth and space: fiction and documentary film excerpts, drawings, songs, animation, archives, and webcam images. With this program, we put the tremendous communication tool of radio waves to good use: they carry the images and sounds of CosmicConnexion at the speed of light over astronomical distances.
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Parking available on a first come, first served basis.