Plenary Speakers
Professor David MacDougall, Australian National University
David MacDougall is an ethnographic filmmaker and writer on visual anthropology and documentary cinema. Born in the USA of American and Canadian parents, he has lived in Australia since 1975. He was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Los Angeles. His first film To Live with Herds won the Grand Prix “Venezia Genti” at the Venice Film Festival in 1972. Soon after this, he and his wife Judith MacDougall produced the Turkana Conversations trilogy of films on semi-nomadic camel herders of northwestern Kenya. Of these, Lorang’s Way won the first prize at Cinéma du Réel in Paris in 1979, and The Wedding Camels the Film Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1980. With Judith MacDougall, he then directed or co-directed a number of films on indigenous communities in Australia, including Goodbye Old Man (1977), Takeover (1980), Stockman’s Strategy(1984) and Link-Up Diary (1987). In 1991 he and Judith MacDougall completed Photo Wallahs, a film on photographic practices in an Indian hill town. In 1993 he made Tempus de Baristas, about three generations of goat herders in the mountains of Sardinia, winner of the 1995 Earthwatch Film Award. In 1997 he began conducting a study of the Doon School in northern India. This resulted in five films: Doon School Chronicles (2000), With Morning Hearts (2001), Karam in Jaipur (2001), The New Boys (2003), and The Age of Reason (2004). Recent projects include filming at the Rishi Valley School, a progressive co-educational boarding school in South India based on the educational philosophy of Krishnamurti. His experimental film SchoolScapes (2007), made at Rishi Valley, won the Basil Wright Film Prize at the 2007 RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film. His latest film, Gandhi’s Children(2008), concerns a shelter for homeless children in New Delhi. MacDougall writes regularly on documentary and ethnographic cinema and is the author of Transcultural Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1998) and The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, 2006).
Professor Annie Goldson, The University of Auckland
Annie Goldson has been producing and directing award-winning documentaries, docudramas and experimental film/video for 20 years in the United States and New Zealand. Her best-known titles include Punitive Damage, Georgie Girl, Elgar’s Enigma, and An Island Calling. All titles have also garnered major awards at international film festivals and have screened widely throughout broadcast outlets, including PBS, HBO, Channel 4 and Canalplus and through educational institutions. Her most recent film Brother Number One premiered in the New Zealand International Film Festivals in 2011, screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and at IDFA in Amsterdam, amongst other festivals. Annie showed the film as an F4 master at AIDC in Adelaide and traveled with it to London and to New York after it was included in Human Rights Watch Film Festivals. The film has had a theatrical release in New Zealand, and one is pending in Canada. Brother Number One is represented by Cargo Releasing, NYC. Annie is also a writer and has published articles in books and journals such as The Listener (NZ), Landfall, Screen, Semiotext(e), Social Text, and others. Her book Landscape, Memory, Dad and Me published by Victoria University Publications. Annie has also been director of the biennial New Zealand International Documentary Conference that has run since 1996, is a trustee of the New Zealand International Documentary Festival, DOCEdge and was the President of the Screen Directors’ Guild of New Zealand for three years. She received her PhD in Film and Television Studies from The University of Auckland and is currently a Professor at the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at that institution. In 2006 she received an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for services to film. She has also written extensive study guides which are available online. Her current film He Toki Huna (The Hidden Adze), that was commissioned by Maori Television, is exploring New Zealand’s involvement in Afghanistan.
Professor Michael Renov, USC School of Cinematic Arts
Michael Renov, professor of Critical Studies and vice dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, is the author of Hollywood’s Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology and The Subject of Documentary, editor of Theorizing Documentary, and co-editor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, Collecting Visible Evidence, The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies and The Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Peter Forgacs. In 1993, Renov co-founded Visible Evidence and is one of three general editors for the Visible Evidence book series at the University of Minnesota Press. In 2005, he co-programmed the 51st annual Robert Flaherty Seminar, a week-long gathering of documentary filmmakers, curators, and educators, creating 20 screening programs and filmmaker dialogues on the theme “Cinema and History.” In addition to curating documentary programs around the world, he has served as a jury member at documentary festivals including Sundance, Silverdocs, the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival and Brazil’s It’s All True. He has taught seminars on documentary film at the University of Stockholm, the Royal Film Commission and the Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts in Jordan, Hanoi National University and Tel Aviv University. He is one of three principal investigators on a U.S. Department of State grant, American Film Showcase, that will bring a selection of American documentary films and filmmakers to audiences in developing countries around the world.
Dennis Tupicoff, Writer / Director / Producer
After graduating from Queensland University in 1970, Dennis Tupicoff worked as an archivist and teacher before making his first animated film in Toowoomba. He moved to Melbourne and the Swinburne Film and TV School animation course in 1977. While sometimes making a living with TV ads and other commercial and sponsored work, and later teaching at the VCA School of Television (1992-4), he has made both animated and live-action independent films as writer, director, producer, and animator. Animation has often been called “the illusion of life”. And in live-action cinema there has always been a tension between “the reality of death” and “screen immortality”. These ideas, played out in the world of human experience and emotion, continue to exert a strong influence on the work of Dennis Tupicoff. Whether in his autobiographical The Darra Dogs (1993, 10 mins), the binocular “animated documentary” His Mother’s Voice (1997, 14 mins 30 secs), the cartoon violence of Dance of Death (1983, 7 mins), or his more recent television work, death is never far away.
Professor Brian Winston, University of Lincoln
Brian Winston, the Lincoln Chair of Communications, started his career in 1963 on Granada TV¹s long-running news documentary film series World in Action. In 1985, he won a US prime-time Emmy for documentary scriptwriting (for WNET, New York). He wrote the script for the feature documentary, A Boatload of Wild Irishmen (2010) on the life of Robert Flaherty, Winston has taught, among other places, at New York University film school and the UK National Film & Television School. His writing on documentary includes Claiming the Real II, Fires were started…, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. The BFI Companion to Documentary, which he has edited, in currently in preparation.
Professor Jane Gaines, Columbia University
Jane Gaines, Professor of Film, Columbia University, specializes in documentary, historiography, and critical theory. Earlier she was founder and director of the Program in Film/Video/Digital at Duke University where she was appointed in the English Department and Graduate Program in Literature, 1982 – 2007. Author of two award-winning books, she is completing a third book on women in the silent film era. She has published articles on intellectual property, documentary theory, feminism and film, early cinema, fashion and film, and critical race theory in Cinema Journal, Screen, Cultural Studies, Framework, Camera Obscura, Women and Performance, and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Most recently, her “Documentary Radicality” appeared in French translation in Nouveaux indices du monte-aspects du documentaire contemporain, edited by Jean-Luc Lioult.
Fujioka Asakon, Director of Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Tokyo Office
Born in 1966, spent childhood years in New York and Duesseldorf, Germany. Works with YIDFF since 1993, after working in film distribution. Established the New Asian Currents program, a collection of films and videos by emerging documentarists from around Asia during the years 1995 – 2003. Organized three documentary film workshops with young Thai, Japanese, and Chinese filmmakers in each country 2009 – 2011. Selection committee and advisor for Pusan International Film Festival’s Asian Network of Documentary (AND) Fund since 2006. Active in supporting Japanese films overseas. Freelances as interpreter and translator for international film affairs, bridging film cultures and audiences. Distributor of documentaries Bingai (2008 / China, directed by Feng Yan) and Bilal (2008 / India, directed by Sourav Sarangi) in Japanese cinemas.
