from full frame documentary film festival

Durham, N.C., – January 13, 2011 – The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has announced their Thematic Program, 2011 Career Award and the first US Premiere of the 2011 festival. Rick Prelinger will curate a series around archival footage for the Festival’s 2011 thematic program. The 2011 Career Award will be presented to Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, who will present the US Premiere of their most recent film “Burma Soldier” at the 14th annual event.

“I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with Rick Prelinger,” said director of programming Sadie Tillery. “I hope the series will encourage audiences to consider how archival footage is contextualized, while also giving viewers the rare opportunity to screen work that is less available.”

Archivist, writer, lecturer and filmmaker Rick Prelinger founded Prelinger Archives in 1982 in New York. At its peak, the archives held over 60,000 ephemeral (advertising, industrial, educational, documentary and amateur) films and over 50,000 cans of unedited footage. The core film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Beginning in 2000, Prelinger Archives partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,100 key films available online for researchers, scholars, media makers and the public to view and reuse without charge. With Megan Shaw Prelinger, he co-founded an appropriation-friendly research library in 2002, which is currently open to the public in San Francisco. He is a long-time advocate of increased public access to archives and cultural material, and frequently writes and lectures in this field. His long-form films include “Panorama Ephemera,” “Lost Landscapes of Detroit,” and “The Lives of Energy,” among others. He is currently in pre-production on “No More Road Trips,” a feature-length exploration of “peak travel” and our fascination with tourism and the road.

“While archival material has been an integral component of documentary filmmaking since the earliest days, I believe makers have just begun to explore its creative potential. As archives slowly open up to the public, as new collections come online for reuse, and as we look to history for clues to help us understand our accelerating present, once-ignored images and sounds are becoming increasingly relevant,” said Prelinger.

He continued, “archival imagery is ubiquitous today, appearing not only in documentary films but in advertising, educational media, and online. It’s invoked in countless tweets and Facebook pages every day. What grew our fascination with these images? Will we still be interested in them as they become available to anyone with a few clicks? Perhaps most pertinent, will ever-more-immersive dramatic recreations of historical events, places and personalities cause authentic archival images to fade into the background?”

The Festival will honor filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg with the 2011 Career Award. For more than a decade, Stern and Sundberg have collaborated on a critically acclaimed body of work including “The Trials of Darryl Hunt,” “The Devil Came on Horseback,” “The End of America,” and last year’s “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.”

“We have been proud to exhibit Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s films over the years and are incredibly excited to present their body of work at the 2011 Festival,” said Tillery. “Time after time they have put forward incredible subjects and stories, which are made all the more influential by the quality of Stern and Sundberg’s filmmaking.”

“We are elated to be honored with the Full Frame 2011 Career Award,” said Stern and Sundberg. “As we look through the list of past recipients, filmmakers whose work we have long admired, we are honored to be part of this community.”…more