Today was the first day of the Full Frame documentary festival in Durham and I saw my first movie in the late afternoon. I'll write about it in a separate article but it was a great start.

I've done something quite unusual: I took a day off. I had such a good time last year at the festival that I'll spend a good chunk of tomorrow watching documentaries. In the afternoon I have to go to Raleigh to pick up my packet for Saturday's. So far it looks like it going to rain on Saturday morning. Rain is fine, as long as the race doesn't get cancelled.

I must say that I'm disappointed with the selection for opening movie of Full Frame this year, and we decided not to go see it. The movie is called Trumbo; various people are reading from the correspondence of Mr. Trumbo, a writer who in the 1940's got blacklisted as a suspected Communist. I'm sure it is a good documentary but it seems overly self-focussed for a documentary festival to start with a movie about a screenwriter. I suppose I'm just disappointed that it's not as brilliant as a choice as Castells was last year

For everybody living in the Triangle: the Full Frame Festival is starting soon. This year it will be from April 3 to April 6, in downtown Durham.

Last year I saw more than 10 documentaries in a few days and it was an amazing experience -- very enriching.

The schedule was sent out tonight; it should be on the Full Frame website tomorrow: http://www.fullframefest.org

This afternoon I saw Cloverfield, a monster movie for which we saw previews this summer before Transformers.

The movie was entertaining and pretty convincing, as far as monster movies go. Cloverfield leaves you guessing about the background of the story and this is refreshing. At least the makers didn't try to squeeze lots of explanations in 90 minutes. I found the movie quite enjoyable with nice special effects.

Saturday afternoon we saw The Bucket List in a movie theater in Wilson, NC. It's a story about two men who meet in the hospital and are told by their doctors that they only have 6 more months to live.

The main actors, Freeman and Nicholson were very well cast for these roles, and their performances made this a great movie. It was a touching, heartwarming story and reminded me a lot of that other great performance by Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt that we once saw in Haarlem.

Today Christoph, Hernan and I went to see Ocean's 13. It was a blast! My expectations were high as I really liked the first and second movie, and the third one was very entertaining.

We had dinner in the Cheesecake Factory afterwards. As always, the portions were huge -- I couldn't finish my burger.

Yesterday I went tubing on the Dan River, that was very nice. We spent about 3 hours on the river, slowly floating and chatting. We had a cooler for our drinks and lunch to that worked out great.

Last night I watched The Departed. A great movie!

The Departed is an brilliant police informant/mafia film with outstanding acting by Jack Nicholson, Matt Daemon and even Leonardo di Caprio.

The dialogs are great. Favorite quote: "You know past days, situations like this I'd kill everybody, everybody who works for me". Another one I liked: "I'm the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy". There's a remarkable amount of swearing throughout the movie.

The week before the festival I bought a ticket for the Sunday afternoon re-screening of the Award winners, obviously without knowing what the winners would be. When I arrived Sunday around noon I was curious to see who had won, and I read on the posters that For The Bible Tells Me So had won the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights, and I saw it in the same session as the award winning short.

Wow... what a movie!

This documentary by Daniel Karslake describes the various attitudes of different Christian churches in the United States towards homosexuality. Some churches condemn it as the worst sin possible, while others see no difference between homosexual and heterosexual relationships and allow gay people to become priests.

The intolerance shown by some in the movie was amazing and shocking and the movie was incredibly moving. Not just due to the struggle of the homosexual main characters but also because of the struggle their families went through, in various ways.

This was the best documentary I've seen at the 2007 Full Frame Festival. A very deserved award winner.

Cross Your Eyes, Keep Them Wide is a short documentary on a group of artist in New York with developmental disabilities.

It was the award winner of Full Frame 2007, it won the jury award for best short. Personally I didn't think it was the best short of the festival. I liked A Son's Sacrifice better.

More about this movie by Ben Wu: http://www.benwufilms.com/page3/page3.html

Greensboro: Closer to the Truth is a documentary by Adam Zucker about the Truth and Reconciliation committee that was set up in Greensboro in 2003. The committee's goal was to analyze the killings of communist activists in 1979 by members of the Ku Klux Klan. I saw it on the fourth day of the Full Frame Festival, now 2 weeks ago.

It was the first time this movie was screened in North Carolina. The large Fletcher hall was full and the Q&A session afterwards was very interesting. Many people in the audience had personal memories of the original trials and publicity around the events.

The Ku Klux Klan is something I've only read about, when I was younger, in the "far, far United States". It was really strange to see them in a documentary. I liked that the movie focussed on the work of the committee, and didn't try to assign blame to one of the two parties specifically. I didn't know anything of the Greensboro incident and the movie had a good introduction for people like me -- it isn't just for 'insiders'.

After seeing the movie the report of the Truth and Reconciliation committee is fascinating read .

The Saturday evening screening of the Full Frame Festival last week was The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, a 1987 movie by Japanese director Kazuo Hara. Sasha and I saw it in the Fletcher Hall in the Carolina theater.

This was truly an amazing documentary, about the search for answers in a war-crime case by Kenzo Okuzaki. As the New York Times put it in a great review (written in 1988):

"From everything the audience sees, Kenzo Okuzaki is a certifiable psychotic, though The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On never addresses this suspicion. He's the sort of fellow who writes long, crazily incoherent letters to editors, confronts people on street corners and harangues them with a loudspeaker from his van. It could be that Mr. Hara thinks the psychotic state is the only sane response to the contradictions in contemporary Japanese society."

Kenzo Okuzaki frequently uses violence and threats of violence to get the truth out the people he interviews, and at times it's easy to forget that this is an actual real-life documentary.

The movie was screened at the Full Festival in the "The Power Of Ten" series, a recommendation by film maker Michael Moore. The Q&A session with director Kazuo Hara after the movie was very interesting.

Michael Moore said he saw the movie when he was making his first major documentary, Roger and Me. While filming that he was somewhat concerned he was too harsh in his methods, but he joked that after seeing The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On he felt he was well within limits.

Mr. Hara said that after Kenzo Okuzaki came out of jail there was some talk about a follow up documentary but that Mr. Hara decided against it, because he feared that it would push Mr. Okuzaki over the border of sanity, an honorable choice.