"An expansive take on the world in miniature, Jessica Oreck's documentary debut pursues all angles on a novel subject—the Japanese obsession with insects—until it assumes a worldview. That such an approach could work for just about any aspect of existence—academia subsists on such blinkered, max-effort specialization—doesn't make its conviction of purpose any less admirable or, in the case of Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, anything short of bewitching." The Village Voice

“Life is a progress, and not a station,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Life ebbs and flows with change. There are hurdles that must be scaled and personal character is built through adversity. People adapt their behavior to get through everything from war to displacement to growing up. These four films capture stories of people’s survival and their ways to cope with self-preservation.

Doxita is a traveling festival of documentary films that are under 40 minutes in length. The program, comprised of approximately 90 minutes of film, represents a wide variety of documentary – domestic and foreign, short and longer format, serious and funny. It is designed to profile the great content and artistic vision that non-fiction short films provide, but that people don’t often get a chance to see.

Steel Homes (UK, Eva Weber, 10 min.) Storage lockers provide a holding ground for memories of long-gone loved ones and dreams that still live. Striking cinematography and sound evoke the minds and personal spaces of average people.

Slaves (Sweden, Hannah Heilborn and David Aronowitsch, 15 min.) Colorful animation brings alive the tale of two Sudanese youth who were captured for slavery. The animation and documentary interview technique mask the children’s identity while also creating an engrossing story of survival.

The First Kid to Learn English From Mexico (USA, Peter Jordan, 20 min.) 9-year-old Pedro Lopez wishes he never left Mexico. Lush camera and music create this almost-surreal, yet honest and charming portrait of this struggling boy.

12 Notes Down (Denmark, Andreas Koefed, 30 min.) Jorgis is the star of his boys choir, until the onset of puberty affects what he loves most: his ability to sing. This beautifully tender portrait

In addition, six Doxita mini-documentaries are also screening as part of our “Short Attention Span Cinema” series, with shorts playing before our regular features through late August:

Loop Loop (Canada, Patrick Bergeron, 5 min) The view from a train, transformed. Winner, Innovation Award, Sheffield Doc/Fest; official selection: SXSW, True/False Film Festivals.

Close to Home (USA, Theo Rigby, 6 min) A father’s quest to find his son’s killers. National finalist, Student Academy Awards.

The Herd (Ireland, Ken Wardrop, 4 min) A brief portrait of a deer who thinks it’s a cow, from the director of His & Hers. Documentary Grand Jury Prize, Seattle Film Festival.

Trash-Out (USA, Maria Fortiz-Morse, 5 min) Cleaning out a foreclosed home. Official selection: Silverdocs, True/False.

Sell It to the Hedge Funds (USA, Haven Pell, 4 min) The hustle of cold calling. Official selection, Florida Film Festival.

Home (USA, Matt Faust, 6 min) An evocative memorial to the filmmaker’s Katrina-flooded home. Winner, Best Short documentary Tribeca.

In Person: Director Bradley Beesley (director of Okie Noodling, Summercamp)

“one of America’s most interesting, contemporary nonfiction filmmakers…
as pure a piece of movie-making that you will see…
one of the best films of the year.”
- A.J. Schnack, All These Wonderful Things

Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo goes behind prison walls to follow convict cowgirls on their journey to the 2007 Oklahoma State Penitentiary Rodeo. In 2006, female inmates were allowed to participate for the first time.

In a state with the highest female incarceration rate in the country, these women share common experiences such as broken homes, drug abuse and alienation from their children.  From 1940 – 2008, the Oklahoma State Penitentiary held an annual ‘Prison Rodeo’. Part Wild West show and part coliseum-esque spectacle, it was one of the last of its kind – a relic of the American penal system. Prisoners compete on wild-broncs and bucking bulls, risking life-long injuries. For inmates like Danny Liles, a 14-year veteran of the rodeo, the chance to battle livestock offers a brief respite from prison life.  Within this strange arena the prisoners become the heroes while the public and guards applaud.

Encore Screening for Doctober!

This gorgeous, historic, and inspiring new film from director & surfer Chris Malloy and his collective at Woodshed Films, documents the adventures of surfer and climber Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard (rock climbing legend and founder of Ventura-based Patagonia) and Doug Tompkins, on which they drove, mountain climbed and surfed their way to Chilean Patagonia. Along the way, Jeff encounters big surf, snowy mountains, a dangerous ocean crossing, pulp mills, cowboys, dams and more on his way to climb Cerro Corcovado in Patagonia. Jeff's life takes a turn when he meets up in a rainy hut with Chouinard and Tompkins who, once driven purely by a love of climbing and surfing, now value above all the experience of raw nature and have come to Patagonia to help use their influence to help protect it. The film is a road trip movie, a historic document, and an environmental call to arms, but mostly a meditation on what matters most in life –staying true to one's own vision and values.

"One of the more disturbing environmental documentaries in recent years — and that’s after we’ve already learned about global warming and peak oil and the destruction of the oceans — Gasland explores the widespread effect of hydraulic fracturing on people who have no apparent recourse for the damage that’s being done to their health, their environment and their rights as US citizens. Fox travels the country, meeting folks whose drinking water has been contaminated by natural gas extraction — we’re talking tap water that you can light on fire — and communities dealing with the chemical waste being evaporated into their atmosphere." Eye Weekly

Features Director Scott Crocker in Person

Generally speaking, bird-watching is a pastime that is extremely interesting to a few people and not at all interesting to anyone else. But Scott Crocker has turned a bird-watching tale into a multilayered story that will fascinate practically everybody in “Ghost Bird,” a witty, wistful documentary about the supposed rediscovery in Arkansas of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird thought to have been extinct for decades.

A film of startling craftsmanship and design, Bury Me in Redwood Country is destined to go places—its assured cinematography, accomplished sound design, and methodical pacing suggest comparisons to films like Rivers & Tides. The story of “the Redwood tree is a meditation on extremes: Its genus evolved hundreds of millions of years ago in Antarctica and persisted through the coming and going of the dinosaurs. Many still alive today are older than Christ. It is the tallest and largest tree on the planet, the scaffolding of complex ecosystems, and it is the most valuable timber known to man.” A meditative yet thrilling film that lets the trees, and a few select aficionados, tell their own story. 2009. USA. 60 min. Unrated.

An Encore screening for DOCTOBER

The Bellingham Ukulele Group (BUG) will be performing pre-show!

Until the 20th Century, if you wanted music, you had to make it yourself. Back then, music was embedded in our families, our communities, even our work. When the phonograph came along, none of us was good enough anymore and many became passive in relation to music: consumers rather than participants. Now, in the 21st Century, people are taking back the music, learning to make their own, forming communities, and the easy-to-learn ukulele with its wealth of old-time tunes evoking simpler times, is the instrument of choice.
Mighty Uke is a visual feast, filmed in vivid HD,counterbalanced by B/W historical footage and original animation, and accompanied by music, played, composed and introduced by the characters themselves.
Mighty Uke  travels the world to seek out ukulele players, documenting this third wave of popularity, exploring the rich history of the uke and learning about the healing effect of music self-played.

Director Lee Storey will be at The Pickford to answer your questions!

"Storey knows that the Up With People volunteer organization inspires giggles and derision in equal measure, so he opens with old footage of the troupe singing and dancing at the height of their late-'60s/early-'70s visibility and gets (most of) the chuckles out of the way early. What follows is a film that offers a withering critique of the organization's religious cult roots, right-wing political subtext, and insipid music, while also being very respectful of the fact that, to a lot of the young folks who signed on, the group offered the chance to affect positive, even progressive, change in the world." Village Voice

Features an appearance from Clara Kelly, author of The Flamboya Tree, available at Village Books NOW.

A fascinating documentary on a little known piece of WWII history...

March 8, 1942. The Colonial Army of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) surrenders to the Japanese invaders. Next day the Japanese calendar reigns: it is now March 9, in the year 2602.
In that year the colony counts 72 million Indonesians, plus 300,000 Dutchmen, who thus far ruled the country, and whose hold Japan strives to break. Japan imprisons fully half of them, those with relatively high European ancestry.

Japan occupied the Dutch colony, up to 15 August 1945. Wishing to remove the Dutch rulers from their visible positions of authority, Japan thought of interning them all but lacked the logistics to confine all 300,000 Dutch citizens. They then introduced a classification based on degree of mixed Eurasian ancestry, to intern almost half of the Dutch population, those with relatively high Dutch European ancestry.
The movie ‘The year 2602’ pictures Dutch survivors, children during World War II, who lived in what was then the Dutch East Indies, and who, from their current apparently comfortable situations, go back in time and relate to us how they gradually faced starvation and disease, and saw 15% of their numbers die. How in 1945 they found no liberation but were made to realize instead that they had no future in the new Indonesia, as pitiless nationalist fighters attacked them.

The nineteen interviews have been cleverly amalgamated into one single story line, interspersed with footage of Japanese war propaganda, pre-war home movies, and postwar documentary material of Indonesia's postwar independence struggle.

This movie contributes to an understanding of the end of Dutch colonial rule of Indonesia, of Japanese-Dutch relations at their 400-year low point. It is a monument to wartime experiences of direct relevance to 3% of today's Dutch.

In 1989, a group of unknown Utah actors starred in what would be crowned the worst movie of all time: TROLL 2. After two decades of running from this cinematic disaster, the cast can no longer hide from the legion of followers that celebrate them for their ineptitude.

BEST WORST MOVIE, directed by TROLL 2’s once-disgraced child star, Michael Paul Stephenson, unravels the stories of these unforgettable real-life characters and the colorful army of devotees who continue to revel in the film’s perfectly flawed brilliance.

"“Troll 2” is a consistent top ranker on the Internet Movie Database’s poll of the worst movies ever made, keeping a solid hold in the top (bottom?) ten, somewhere alongside “Manos, the Hands of Fate,” “Space Mutiny,” and the unrelated “Hobgoblins.” I usually don’t put stock in those IMDB polls, but this time, the list is pretty much right on the nose. “Troll 2” is one of the most inane, incompetent, and incoherent films I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of inane, incompetent, and incoherent movies. And as Bad Movies go, this is one of the funniest, with a new bit of laughable stupidity slapping you in the face every minute." efilmcritic

“A profound, and utterly relatable, contemplation of…. parenthood, aging and youth’s swift passing.”
- Anthony Kaufman, indieWIRE

Documentary filmmaker Doug Block (51 Birch Street) has captured much of his daughter Lucy’s life – and their relationship – on camera. Now his only child is 17 and preparing to leave home for college.  Lucy’s imminent departure is the springboard for The Kids Grow Up, a funny, moving and deeply personal look at modern-day parenting