Thin Line Film Fest has harvested the kind of films other documentary festivals have taken decades to attract
This weekend, Texas’ only documentary film festival will screen Academy Award nominees and one special jury prize-winner from Sundance Film Festival.
Thin Line Film Fest is just three years old.
Joshua Butler, festival director, said Thin Line gained momentum quickly because organizers never forgot about their audience.
“It’s all about the movies. It’s all about the movies and the filmmaking,” said Butler, who’s also the president of Texas Filmmakers Inc., a Denton-based nonprofit that produces and promotes filmmaking — especially local filmmaking — and offers training and equipment rental.
“We intentionally did a lot of post-festival evaluation, which was painful sometimes, to look at what was working and what people didn’t want to see. We dramatically increased the submissions from filmmakers. We got Oscar nominated-documentaries.”
Looking at the festival with critical eyes led festival’s board of directors to drop the conference that was part of the first festival in 2007. It also motivated organizers to pursue the kind of documentaries that get people talking, which usually get more people to screenings to see the movies.
Butler said he understands that documentaries are associated with social and political activism. However, the Denton event was named “Thin Line” because founders believe that the best of documentaries can braid fiction and dramatization with fact.
Butler said there are three films in the festival that are more fiction than fact.
“One of them you’ll be able to spot. Another will be harder to figure out. The third one you’re not going to be able to pick out,” Butler said. “It’s, to me, an entertaining lineup. I’m not an educational doc guy. I like documentaries that entertain me, the kind I can get sort of lost in.”
Melinda Levin, who directs the University of North Texas master’s program in documentary filmmaking, said Thin Line Film Fest is catching up with longstanding, prestigious documentary festivals in Hot Springs, Ark., and Toronto.
“Documentary film is a hot genre right now,” Levin said. “To have a festival in town where there is a terminal degree plan in documentary filmmaking, is great.”
Levin praised Butler, a UNT graduate who took a class in documentary film pre-production his senior year.
“What he has accomplished in three years is astonishing,” she said. “I’ve been going to documentary film festivals for years — Hot Docs in Toronto and the festival in Hot Springs — for years. They have taken years to accomplish what Josh has done in three years.
“Joshua has a good eye for trends and character-driven docs and different thematic elements. That’s the thing about his festival, it’s a thin line — what do you call truth, and what does it mean to represent something in a truthful way. He’s been very smart about it.”
Levin said there isn’t a formal relationship between Thin Line and UNT’s radio, television and film program.
She and her husband, Ben Levin, also a film faculty member at UNT, are on festival advisory boards.
“There is, however, a long-running unofficial relationship between the two,” she said.“Some of our students have had work screen there. A lot of our students go to the festival. It’s very beneficial for them.”
This year’s festival hooked documentaries that follow heroic struggles, love stories and fanciful things that leaven the social and political content that are also on the film schedule. Butler said organizers selected films for senior citizens, families and churchgoers. For instance, Live to Forgive tells the story of a man whose conversion to Christianity helps him forgive his stepfather, who murdered his mother.
When the festival opens Wednesday, North Texans will get a rare chance to see GasLand, an exposé about natural gas drilling in the U.S., including footage involving public health concerns that have emerged in Denton County’s Dish.
The documentary left Sundance Film Festival with the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize and the highest critical ranking of competition film in the festival.
“GasLand is a huge film, and it’s definitely the biggest thing ever for us,” Butler said.
GasLand’s director, Josh Fox, said in a telephone interview he joined the festival because Butler invited him.
“The other thing is that it’s very close to some of the places that I’ve filmed,” Fox said. “Barnett Shale is the first major shale I encountered outside of where I live in New York. [Mayor] Calvin Tillman down in Dish is in my film. I wanted to be out there where some of this stuff is going on.”
Fox said he took Butler up on his offer to get his message out about the public health consequences of natural gas drilling.
“I’ve been crisscrossing the country — I’m in Montana today and I’ll be in Texas in a few days,” he said. “I think that what I’m trying to do is show what’s happening all over the country and call attention to what is happening. If this happens above the Delaware River, and we’re asked to lease land near the river, it could destroy this country. I’ve heard horror story after horror story in 30 different states.
“Hydraulic fracturing [of the rock capping gas] is a simple process with a lot of repercussions. Air pollution and water pollution are very real issues that come out of this.”
The festival also will screen the critically lauded film The Cove, an Oscar nominee detailing activists and a former dolphin trainer as they expose a horrific conspiracy by a Japanese marine entertainment company that not only feeds a hunt for dolphins, but a black market in mercury-tainted dolphin meat.
The festival also includes Burma VJ, Beaches of Agnes, Garbage Dreams and The Most Dangerous Man in America, which all made the Oscar shortlist — the list that’s later whittled down to the nominees.
Levin said people shouldn’t underestimate the influence of a young, regional festival like Thin Line.
“Documentarians tend toward social issues, right? That’s probably why they are documentarians — they want to present issues in truthful ways,” Levin said. “Those filmmakers want the films out there so that they can be seen, not to go into distribution. But it can help.
“It’s like getting a grant. It’s easier to get a grant once you’ve gotten a grant. It’s easier to get a job once you’ve gotten a job. Once something goes through a curatorial process like this, it makes it easier for filmmakers to go further.”
credit: Denton RC
