Academy Collection [13 Discs]

DVD FEATURES:

• Number of Discs: 13
• Audio: Ultra Stereo, Dolby Digital Stereo
• Screen: Black and White
• Subtitle: Spanish, English
• Features:
  • • [None specified]

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Won Best Documentary Feature - 2001 (Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, Denis Poncet)
•     Won Best Documentary Feature - 1994 (Terry Sanders, Freida Lee Mock)
•     Won Best Documentary Feature - 1980 (Murray Lerner)
•     Won Best Documentary Feature - 1979 (Ira Wohl)
•     Won Best Documentary Feature - 1978 (Arnold Shapiro)
•     Nominated Best Documentary Feature - 2003 (Bill Siegel, Sam Green)
•     Nominated Best Documentary Feature - 2001 (Edet Belzberg)
•     Nominated Best Documentary Feature - 2000 (Josh Aronson, Roger Weisberg)
•     Nominated Best Documentary Feature - 1999 (Paola di Florio, Roko Belic)
•     Nominated Best Documentary Feature - 1998 (Barbara Sonneborn, Janet Cole)

• Independent Spirit Awards

•     Won Truer Than Fiction Award - 1998 (Barbara Sonneborn)
•     Nominated Truer Than Fiction Award - 2001 (Edet Belzberg)
•     Nominated Best Documentary - 2000 (Josh Aronson)

• National Board of Review

•     Won Special Recognition for Freedom of Expression - 2000

• New York Film Critics Circle

•     Won Best Documentary - 1980

• San Francisco International Film Festival

•     Won Best Documentary Feature - 2004

• Seattle International Film Festival

•     Won Best Documentary - 2004

• Sundance Film Festival

•     Won Special Jury Prize - 2000
•     Won Best Director (Documentary) - 1999 (Barbara Sonneborn)
•     Nominated Grand Jury Prize - 2004

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, Freida Lee Mock, Murray Lerner, Ira Wohl, Arnold Shapiro, Sam Green, Bill Siegel, Edet Belzberg, Josh Aronson, Adrian Belic, Roko Belic, Paola di Florio, Barbara Sonneborn

• Producer:

  Denis Poncet, Terry Sanders, Murray Lerner, Ira Wohl, Arnold Shapiro, Sam Green, Bill Siegel, Carrie Lozano, Marc Smolowitz, Edet Belzberg, Roger Weisberg, Adrian Belic, Roko Belic, Lilibet Foster, Paola di Florio, Janet Cole, Barbara Sonneborn

• Screenwriter:

  Freida Lee Mock, Ira Wohl, Arnold Shapiro, Roko Belic, Barbara Sonneborn

• Cinematographer:

  Isabelle Razavet, Don Lenzer, Eddie Marritz, David Bridges, Nick Knowland, Tom McDonough, William Moffit, Federico Salsano, Andrew Black, Wolfgang Held, Brian Danitz, Adrian Belic, Roko Belic, Peter Rader, David Safian, Daniel Reeves, Nancy Schiesari, Emiko Omori

• Composer (Music Score):

  Helene Blazy, Charles Bernstein, Dave Cerf, Amy Domingues, Mark Suozzo, Karen Childs, Todd Boekelheide

• Editor:

  Pascal Vernier, Ragnar Van Leyden, William T. Cartwright, Tom Haneke, Ira Wohl, Robert Niemack, Sam Green, Dawn Logsdon, Jonathan Oppenheim, Roko Belic, Ellen Goldwasser, Arthur Klein, Lucy Massie Phenix, Ken Schneider

• Associate Producer:

  Ralph Leighton, Cindy Rosenberg, Julie Du Brow, Elizabeth Rodgers, Daniel Reeves, Kathy Brew, Megan Jones

• Executive Producer:

  Christine Le Goff, Yves Jeanneau, Denis Poncet, Eileen Harris Norton, Walter Scheuer, Mary Harron, Christian Ettinger, Sue Ellen McCann, Janet Cole

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Peter Miller, Frank Stettner, David Westby, Edet Belzberg, Juan Rodriguez, John Murphy, Dan Brooks, Paola di Florio, Julie Konop, Elizabeth Thompson

• Artistic Advisor:

  Allan Miller

• Conception:

  Ira Wohl

• Sound Editor:

  Dave Ellinwood

• Sound Recordist:

  Lemon DeGeorge

• Technical Director:

  Ian M. Williamson, Ian Willimason

• First Assistant Editor:

  Judson Pratt, Eric Fried, Manny Madla, Dorene O'Malley, Diego Rivera, Frank Strauss, Byron Thompson

• Consulting Editor:

  Nathaniel Dorsky

REVIEWS:

• "I feel possessed when I play," Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg says in Speaking in Strings, the acclaimed documentary about this controversial violinist. Viewers may feel similarly possessed while watching this gripping, fascinating portrait of a woman with a spirit and personality that can fill any screen (or concert hall). Salerno-Sonnenberg is not always the easiest person to be around; she feels with an intensity that is sometimes frightening, and that intensity tends to envelop those around her, even extending off the screen to touch viewers. Such emotional honesty is daunting but also captivating, and it gives Strings the same character that marks Salerno-Sonnenberg's playing. Some viewers will possibly be turned off by this, just as some critics believe her playing to be distracting grandstanding. But there's no distance between the woman and her art, and so whether you love her or hate her, it's hard to take your eyes off of her. Director Paola di Florio has done an excellent job of capturing both the person and her music, blending the two into a portrait that is both illuminating and entertaining -- even for those for whom classical music is usually a bore. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi
• Sam Green and Bill Siegel's The Weather Underground attempts to cover an awful lot of ground in 90 minutes: tracking the rise of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) from a non-violent civil rights group to America's largest radical leftist organization; explaining how a militant wing of the group first took control of the SDS and then splintered into a violent, revolutionary faction called The Weathermen; chronicling the group's declaration of war against the American government (and later the American people) as they attempted to "bring the war home" through a series of violent actions; and how the revolutionaries learned to "hide in plain sight" until most of them independently made the decision to give themselves up. That it does so as well as it does is remarkable, and if the film is flawed, it's in what isn't there rather than what is. For example, it seems odd that there's not a single mention of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where the aggressive side of the Left met one of their most bitter defeats at the hands of the police; and while a handful of former Weathermen speak of their years underground, most are cautiously hesitant to discuss the details of their lives in hiding or how they worked with other radical groups, which isn't difficult to understand, but still leaves a significant chunk of this story untold. Also, while one FBI agent goes on record to discuss how the bureau tracked the Weathermen's activities, we learn little of the covert actions of COINTELPRO, the notorious FBI task force created to ferret out political dissidents. (Its ruthless disregard for due process and the Bill of Rights eventually caused most of the court cases against the repentant Weathermen to be thrown out of court.) As a complete overview of one of the most fascinating and troubling chapters in the political history of Vietnam-era America, The Weather Underground misses the mark, but as an introduction, it's compelling and thought-provoking stuff. Green and Siegel allow their subjects to explain themselves and their actions with little interference and the various degrees of their three-decade hindsight is itself one of the most fascinating aspects of the film. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
• In fewer than 80 minutes, Sound and Fury covers an amazing amount of territory, though in the end one wishes that it had actually covered a bit more. The central debate that threatens to rip apart a family, the Artinians of Glen Cove, NY, centers on the necessity for an operation, a cochlear ear implant, that will help two of its children to hear and speak. The problem is that the family is split between the hearing and deaf members. The deaf members -- Chris and his wife, Mari -- are articulate and passionate about their happiness with life in the deaf community. They make it clear that they fear losing their very bright five-year-old daughter to the land of the hearing, should she have the implant. Their insistence, reinforced at a picnic with friends in the deaf community, that they are not handicapped, that they are capable of leading normal and productive lives, is hard to refute. But the film also dramatizes the anguish that Chris' parents and his brother, Peter, with a child who is a candidate for the implant, feel as hearing people with a deaf offspring; they want to bring that baby into their own world. The film does try to be even-handed, and if the balance tips toward those who would insist on a deaf child having the operation, it might be that not enough evidence of the deaf community's nurturing aspects is presented. Even so, Sound and Fury is an emotionally gripping document of the mixed benefits of medical scientific breakthroughs. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi
• Filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade did not set out to make this stunning film about a rush to judgment; he was in Jacksonville on another project when this case broke, and fortunately, he was able to line up cooperation with several principals, as well as getting his camera inside the courtroom where Brendon Butler was on trial. Butler comes off as a poster child for racial profiling, but he's an unformed teenager. The real star here is public defender Pat McGuinness. Never far from a glass of whiskey, McGuinness comes off like a character out of a John Grisham novel, the hard-working, lone-wolf attorney who knows he's got a miscarriage of justice by the tail and won't let go. He's not flamboyant, just determined and amazingly tactful; he ingratiates himself with the local police to get important evidence and then lowers the boom on them during the trial, making it clear that a detective was much more interested in closing a case than in getting the right man. Interestingly, that detective, who intimidated Butler with a well-administered beating, is black, so the case is not all that, um, black-and-white. De Lestrade lets some scenes play out a tad too long, but otherwise this is a model documentary that lets its amazing story tell itself without resorting to overly dramatic narration or trumped-up visuals. Not as artfully presented as Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line, it is also the kind of heart-in the-right-place film that almost always wins the Oscar for Documentary Feature -- "almost," since Morris' film wasn't even nominated. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi