SDF is seriously representing at the 21st Annual Cucalorus Film Festival this week! Don’t miss a chance to see both SDF works-in-progress and completed films at one of our favorite festivals just down the road in Wilmington.

Thursday, November 12th

Olympic Pride, American Prejudice (4:00 PM) work-in-progress

Curious Worlds: The Art & Imagination of David Beck (4:15 PM) 

Friday, November 13th

Jig Show: Leon Claxton’s Harlem in Havana (10:45 AM) work-in-progress

Raising Bertie (1:30 PM) work-in-progress

Saturday November 14th

Chairman Jones: An Improbable Leader (10:30 AM) WORLD PREMIERE!

Congrats to festival director Dan Brawley and his team for another stellar line-up. See the full Cucalorus schedule here.

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The Center for Documentary Studies and the Southern Documentary Fund are pleased to present a free screening of director Lisa Sorg’s, A Sense of the Fitness of Things, a film that confronts the mystery and pain of impermanence in death. The film will screen at CDS and is presented as part of the Fresh Docs series featuring documentary works-in-progress; following the screenings, a moderated conversation with the filmmaker(s) will be held, during which the audience provides valuable feedback.

A Sense of the Fitness of Things
Friday, April 29, 7 p.m.
Full Frame Theater, American Tobacco Campus
320 Blackwell St., Durham, North Carolina

Don Byrne, his wife and two young children live on a rural Chatham County farmstead without indoor plumbing or electricity. As part of his meditative life, Don handcrafts pine coffins using wood from North Carolina: “When I set out to make a coffin, I try to donate one breath to the intention of making something that’s worthy of the person who will use it.” That person is 90-year-old Sarah Overton Partridge, who is in the final stage of Alzheimer’s. Sarah’s daughter, Ann, who has hired Don to make a coffin for her mother, struggles with the sadness of her mother’s decline but also welcomes her death as a release from suffering. As Don works to finish it before Sarah’s death, both families confront the mystery and pain of impermanence.

Lisa Sorg is a journalist, editor, documentary filmmaker and photographer. She earned a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications from Indiana University in 1992 and a certificate in documentary arts from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in 2010. While at CDS, she directed, produced and edited three shorts: “That Rockin’ Motion,” “The Pink House” and “Winged Invasion,” the latter of which screened at the Strange Beauty Film Festival and AliceFest. Since 1994, Sorg has won more than 30 awards for her work in news, features, public interest and investigative reporting, commentary, food, profile writing and sports. She served as the editor of the INDY for eight years, and now writes for the hyperlocal news outlet,BullCityRising.com, plus The Durham News and Coastal Review Online. She is also a contributing editor atOur State magazine. Originally from Indiana, she has lived with her husband, Dennis, in Durham since 2006. In her “spare” time, she photographs weird scenes, items and notes on the street, then features them on her blog, 36degreeslatitude.org.

Visit the Facebook for the A Sense of the Fitness of Things film here. 

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Celebrate Southern Documentaries and help support
SDF at our annual Spring Brunch and Showcase! 

Join us on Sunday, June 12, 2016 for a champagne brunch at Mateo Bar de Tapas.  Enjoy a fantastic Spanish-inspired feast prepared by James Beard Award finalist Matt Kelly, and meet filmmakers and members of the SDF documentary community who work to bring powerful southern stories to local, national, and international audiences. After brunch, make your way over to the the Full Frame Theatre for a Showcase Screening of SDF films-in-progress, followed by Q&A sessions with the filmmakers.  

Tickets: $100 per person/6 tickets for $500*
*a portion of the ticket price is tax-deductible 

Purchase Tickets:

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The Center for Documentary Studies and the Southern Documentary Fund are pleased to present a free screening of director Carol Thomson’s Liberty Warehouse, which explores the history of an iconic tobacco auction warehouse in Durham, North Carolina. The film is presented as part of the Fresh Docs series featuring documentary works-in-progress; following the screenings, a moderated conversation with the filmmaker(s) will be held, during which the audience provides valuable feedback. Watch a preview of the film here.

Note: Fresh Docs screenings are free, but attendees must RESERVE A TICKET via Eventbrite. 

Liberty Warehouse
Friday, May 13, 7 pm
Full Frame Theater, American Tobacco Campus
320 Blackwell St., Durham, North Carolina

Liberty Warehouse (working title) tells the story of the tobacco auction warehouse that, after the decline of tobacco, became the home of creative artists until it was condemned and later demolished. The half-hour documentary examines the ebb and flow of Liberty’s eighty-year lifespan, draws parallels with the evolution of downtown Durham, and reveals the often touching, interdependent relationship between the two. Liberty Warehouse is directed and produced by Carol Thomson, edited by Jim Haverkamp, and shot by Randy Benson and Carol Thomson.

Carol Thomson is an independent documentary filmmaker and web developer. She studied documentary film at QPIX in Brisbane, Australia from 2000-2001 and earned a Certificate in Documentary Arts from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in 2005. Carol is the recipient of the Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Award for her interactive documentary, Bridging Rails to Trails: Stories of the American Tobacco Trail. She received a Gracie Award for American Women in Radio and Television for the short video, HAND – Health Arts Network at Duke. Carol’s production company, FireStream Media, has been located in downtown Durham since 2006, where she has witnessed downtown’s renaissance first hand.

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The Center for Documentary Studies and the Southern Documentary Fund are pleased to present a free screening of director George King’s  Thumbs Up For Mother Universe: The Lonnie Holley Story.  The film is presented as part of the Fresh Docs series featuring documentary works-in-progress; following the screenings, a moderated conversation with the filmmaker(s) will be held, during which the audience provides valuable feedback. 

Note: Fresh Docs screenings are free, but attendees must RESERVE A TICKET via Eventbrite. 

Thumbs Up For Mother Universe: The Lonnie Holley Story
Friday, September 30 @ 7 pm
Full Frame Theater, American Tobacco Campus
320 Blackwell St., Durham, North Carolina

Thumbs Up For Mother Universe is a documentary feature that tells the tale of one man’s drive to succeed against all odds. Lonnie Holley, the self-taught African American visual artist and musician from Birmingham, Alabama, is an American original. He has overcome grinding poverty and a brutal childhood to become a creative powerhouse with an agenda to save the planet.

Peabody Award winning filmmaker George King has been documenting Holley’s life and work for the past 20 years. During that time Holley has been beaten-up by police, shot at by neighbors, jailed, and evicted from the land homesteaded by his grandfather. His famed “art environment” was bulldozed under, and his art stolen and destroyed. But somehow Holley has outwitted history, circumstance, and the ignorance of others to emerge as a star in the firmament of American culture.

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*Note: Tickets to the screening and discussion are still available here ($10 suggested donation)
Tickets to the reception are SOLD OUT.  

Southern Documentary Fund is proud to present:

The Loving Story

Produced by Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth Haviland James
Courtesy of Icarus Films

THE LOVING STORY is the definitive account of Loving v. Virginia—the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision that legalized interracial marriage.

Married in Washington, D.C. on June 2, 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter returned home to Virginia where their marriage was declared illegal—he was white, and she was black and Native American. At the time, anti-miscegenation laws were upheld in 16 states. The Lovings refused to leave one another and, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, took their case to the courts.  Their case made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, whose decision—under Chief Justice Earl Warren—finally struck down state laws against interracial marriage throughout the country. THE LOVING STORY takes us behind the scenes of the legal challenges and the emotional turmoil that they entailed, documenting a seminal moment in American history and reflecting a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.

While the Focus Features film Loving is winning accolades and awards, see the documentary that inspired the major motion picture! 

Join us for the fundraiser for Southern Documentary Fund.

Thursday, January 26th at The Cary Theater, 122 E. Chatham St., Cary, NC

6: 00 PM: Catered Reception featuring craft beer by Ponysaurus Brewing Co.

7:00 PM: The Loving Story

8:30 PM: Discussion with special guests: Elisabeth Haviland James (producer/editor), Susie Ruth Powell (writer) and Karen Anderson (Executive Director of ACLU North Carolina).

$25 Donation for Catered Reception + Film & Discussion.

$10 Suggested Donation for Film + Discussion.

Get tickets here:  https://sdf-presents_the-loving-story.eventbrite.com

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The Center for Documentary Studies and the Southern Documentary Fund are pleased to present a free screening of John Whitehead’s film Don’t Get Trouble in Your Mind: the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Story, a documentary portrait of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an African-American string band from Raleigh, North Carolina, and their mentor, black fiddler, Joe Thompson (1919—2012). The Chocolate Drops play “old time” music or Appalachian fiddle and banjo music. The film tells the story of how three African-Americans from the hip-hop generation embraced a 19th Century genre and took it to new heights, winning a Grammy in 2010. The story of the band’s meteoric rise, from busking on the street to playing major festivals is punctuated and informed by the history of the banjo’s origins in Africa, and the untold story of how blacks and whites collaborated to create the earliest forms of American popular music.

The film is presented as part of the Fresh Docs series featuring documentary works-in-progress; following the screenings, a moderated conversation with the filmmaker will be held, during which the audience provides valuable feedback.

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Join SDF and the Visual Art Exchange in celebrating Arts Access at our special screening of Tommy! The Dreams I Keep Inside Me by director Rodrigo Dorfman, accompanied by a performance by the Triangle Alliance Chorus and discussion with the film’s star Tommy Onorato. Hosted at The Cary Theater in downtown Cary.  This is part of A Series of Fortunate Events. 

About the film:
Tommy! The Dreams I Keep Inside Me follows Tommy into his community of adults with autism, the world of jazz musicians, his ups and downs, his work, his quirks and even his dirty laundry. The intention of the film is for the viewer to get to know Tommy devoid of all outside commentary and bring you as close possible to what it feels like to be him, a man full of vibrant contradictions, deep human insights and a contagious sense of humor.

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The Center for Documentary Studies and the Southern Documentary Fund are pleased to present a free screening of JIG SHOW | Leon Claxton’s Harlem in Havana, a feature documentary film by Leslie Cunningham who takes viewers on a tour of her grandfather’s Black and Cuban traveling show that endures racism, segregation and immigration laws to become popular in the 1940s through the 1960s.  Also unearthed is the legend of African American carnival king, Leon Claxton, arguably one of the fathers of modern American entertainment who leaves an extraordinary legacy despite the insurmountable odds against him and his dreams. A magical journey into the complexities of American entertainment, race history and family legacy, the film features breathtaking show photographs, rarely seen historical clips and on-camera interviews with a colorful cast of characters. Classic and new music remember the voluptuous showgirls and tenacious entertainers who bravely showcased their talents on the front-line of racial polarization and left an indelible mark on the history of entertainment around the globe. Visit www.jigshow.com.

The film is presented as part of the Fresh Docs series featuring documentary works-in-progress; following the screenings, a moderated conversation with the filmmaker will be held, during which the audience provides valuable feedback.

Note: This screening is a Fresh Docs screenings are free, but attendees must RESERVE A TICKET via Eventbrite. 

JIG SHOW | Leon Claxton’s Harlem in Havana

Friday, September 22nd @ 7 pm
Full Frame Theater
American Tobacco Campus
Blackwell St.
Durham, North Carolina 27701

Originally from Los Angeles, CA, Leslie Cunningham is an artist, filmmaker, multimedia producer, collaborator and founder of TRIBES Entertainment, a boutique digital media company headquartered in Durham, NC. A graduate of the Center or Documentary Studies at Duke University, Leslie’s collection of engaging film and videos have screened on public TV and at film festivals in the U.S. and internationally. Her debut feature documentary film, M.I., A Different Kind of Girl (2012), was recently chosen for Massimadi, the LGBT Film Festival of Africa and its Diasporas in 2016.  M.I. also screened at Gender Reel Film Festival (2014), The North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (2012), and Atlanta’s Out on Film (2012). M.I. paved the way for more projects that would educate, entertain and feature provocative subjects and subject matter.  Visit lesliecunninghamfilms.com to learn more.  

About Fresh Docs
Fresh Docs is SDF’s free, monthly, work-in-progress screening series. These screenings give SDF filmmakers an opportunity to show their work fresh from the edit suite, and receive constructive feedback on story, structure, and characters from a diverse audience. As a result, not only do our artists make better films, but SDF grows documentary audiences by engaging them meaningfully in the creative process. This season of Fresh Docs is dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of North Carolina Arts Council.

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