Interview with Julie Moggan, Director of Guilty Pleasures from Independent Weekly on Vimeo.

Interview with Susan Saladoff, Director of Hot Coffee from Independent Weekly on Vimeo.

Outside, destruction reigned. And near the Carolina Theatre, businesses lost power, according to Twitter. But nothing stops The New York Times, evidently, for there was nary a flicker in Fletcher Hall.

Page One, Andrew Rossi's valentine to The New York Times was a suitable selection for the mid-afternoon, keynote film. Bruce Headlam and Brian Stelter of the Times, both of whom featured prominently in the film, joined the filmmakers and Pittsboro writer Duncan Murrell on the stage and projected an image of wit, affability and even a hint of coolness. Headlam admitted that there had been considerable resistance to allowing cameras in the Times' inner sanctum, but on the evidence of the film, the media-savviest heads in the company prevailed. As Murrell noted, Rossi's film makes the Times seems like a scrappy underdog—and Carr is indeed one—and the audience ends up rooting for the most important media outlet in the country against upstarts like Gawker Media's Nick Denton. Murrell also noted that when editor Bill Keller announces the Pulitzers at the end of the film, it seems—for a split second—like an underdog triumph.

While people outside in Harnett and Lee and Wake counties were dealing with all the reality they could handle, my personal reality-testing was Graça Castanheira's Angst. The Portuguese filmmaker, in a series of aching, beautiful images and a thoughtful voiceover, contemplates the end of civilization as we know it. Using lines from Thoreau's Walden and a string quartet by Schubert as examples of what humans are capable of creating and contemplating, her film is a devastating portrait of a planet that has become overrun by super-predators: humans. She takes the discovery of oil in the mid-19th century as the beginning of the end (and the mid-19th century is when Thoreau and Schubert were working, too). Our growth as a species, our extraordinary mastery of our environment, is due to oil, she points out, with one devastating shot after another.

At one point, Castanheira wonders if the Earth's climatological upheavals could be a means of eliminating the parasite that threatens it.

It was intense stuff, and afterward, she was asked—twice—if there was any hope. A tough place for a filmmaker who'd just said what she thought in her chosen medium, a film called Angst. But now, standing on stage with a lanyard around her neck, she was just another filmmaker being subjected to ordinary, mundane questions about the film.

Afterward, I asked Castanheira about her scientific reading. She cited the work of Richard Heinberg.

So, is there any hope? On the evidence of Angst, no.

I saw another film Saturday: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 was an extraordinary survey of the rise and fall of a certain period of African-American consciousness. Although it featured the footage of a group of Swedish filmmakers, director Göran Olsson seemed to be uncomfortable telling the story with that footage alone. An opening title disclaimed that the film "did not presume" to represent the entire history of the movement, but the subsequent film did take something resembling a narrative shape, beginning with the tensions between late-period Martin Luther King and the young firebrand Stokely Carmichael, and ending with the infestation of drugs into urban black neighborhoods. Olsson further removed himself from the narrative by enlisting African American poets, musicians, activists and scholars to contribute voiceover commentary. The younger commentators, like Talib Kweli and Erykah Badu, weren't as interesting as those who were first-hand witnesses, including Angela Davis and Harry Belafonte.

It's the 1972 Angela Davis, however, who scorches a hole through the screen in a lengthy, powerful riposte to her Swedish interlocutor's stock question about black militancy. Davis, an imperious, beautiful woman, nonetheless revealed pain and vulnerability as she described the terror and violence her family faced in Birmingham, Ala. (In this peroration, Davis noted that she was friendly with some of the girls who were killed in the notorious 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church; this is something Davis has in common with Condoleezza Rice. Who knew? One wonders if they knew each other back then. Now they're both academics in California.)

Errol Morris' Tabloid begins in 10 minutes. I'm off.

• dragonslayermovie.com
• Leslie Brown in DRAGONSLAYER

"Perhaps we should go to that after-party, have a drink, socialize and then go home," I often think around this time.

But for those in search of something bold and different, 10 p.m. is when some of the real gems of the festival emerge. But it's a gamble. In years past, I've stumbled out of the night's last film after midnight muttering angrily to myself—or groggy from a nap.

But last night, there was a wonderful film called DRAGONSLAYER. This film, by Tristan Patterson, is an impressionistic (but also linear) portrait of an athlete and subculture hero in decline. Specifically, the subject is a skateboarder from Fullerton, Calif. named Joshua "Skreech" Sandoval. A onetime star in the skating world. the film catches Sandoval on the downside. He's still recognized at events, and he still skates. But his body is banged up and he's suffering from depression, which he treats with a steady supply of alcohol.

We see him skating in abandoned swimming pools, hitting skate parks in California and Oregon. He's a gentle but scarred soul from a difficult family background. Skating got him through his adolescence and early adulthood, but now that his career is on the wane, the future is starting to resemble the past.

But that's only part of the impact of the film. Filmmaker Patterson evidently shot part of this film by giving a camera to his subjects, giving his story a first-person feel. Cinematographer Eric Koretz's images, aided by the famous Southern California light (and the HDSLR, more below), are luminous.

• dragonslayermovie.com
• Sandoval

There's a shaggy, Western romantic tale going on here. Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark have tried, with varying levels of success, to capture these quicksilver moments of youth dropout subculture. But Van Sant tends to over-aestheticize, while Clark's films are marred by his prurience. DRAGONSLAYER seems to hit the sweet spot, capturing a beautiful interlude between two characters whose very different lives are intersecting for a time. I left the theater thinking I should go re-read some Jack Kerouac.

[Patterson's film is also notable for being shot in HDSLR, which is simply a technological advance that allows HD video to be shot through the lens of SLR still cameras, thus giving video the short depth of field we associate with traditional 35mm movies. Here are video samples.]

The other surprise of Friday was Nancy Buirski's The Loving Story. While I was sure Buirski would do a fine job recounting the struggle of Richard and Mildred Loving to get the state of Virginia to accept their interracial marriage, I was unprepared for the impact of seeing the Lovings themselves. Mildred was a bright, elegant woman of African and Native American lineage, while her husband was fairly extreme in his whiteness. A gruff, taciturn man who was loathe to open up in front of cameras, Richard's anti-presence is a reminder of a time before reality TV and YouTube when people weren't so camera-ready. His simple fortitude was quite something to behold: As a white man, he could have solved his own predicament easily by simply divorcing his wife. But he didn't, because he loved her. There was nothing sentimental or soft about him, no post-Oprah sensitivity (a la Buck, another great film from Friday). He was a hard country man, but I recoiled when one of his own lawyers called him a redneck, in a present-day interview.

So, seeing the Lovings forced out of their rural Virginia home—where they were part of an interracial social group—and become reluctant soldiers for justice, was an experience that left me misty-eyed for a good hour. Buirski deserves credit for recognizing the power of the story, as well as unearthing the extraordinary, unused archival footage shot by Hope Ryden, who was present last night.

My first film today starts in 10 minutes, so we'd better get moving. Here we come, Blue Sky, Dark Bread and Angst.

• Virginia Tech survivor Colin Goddard in Barbara Kopple's Gun Fight

Kate Dobbs Ariail writes in about The Pipe:

My dumpster-diving vegan, abandoned building-sqatting, freight train-hopping niece alerted me to the story of The Pipe a couple of years ago. At that time, she was an aspiring activist journalista without much training in the separation of fact and passion, so I discounted her tale, which she’d picked up while in Ireland. I owe her an apology. The perfidy of Shell and the complicity of the Irish government with Shell and against its own people are horrifying. The Pipe—though a first feature-length film for its director, Risteard Ó Domhanill, is calm, lucid and utterly damning. The filmmaker was right there when people were willing to put their bodies on the line for their land and their waters: when they went out in rubber boots and storm coats to face the Garda and Shell’s mercenaries, in order to be dragged off to jail; when they took their fishing boats up against the tremendous ships of the multinational petro-colossus and the Irish Navy, again and again after making bail; when went go into the water in wetsuits, for God’s sake, to attempt to halt the dredging of an “environmentally protected” area—that’s courage way off the scale of 1 to 10.

We caught Peter D. Richardson's How to Die in Oregon, which lived up to its advance billing as a powerful, sensitive look at people who have taken advantage of that state's death-with-dignity law. Although Richardson and Full Frame programming director Sadie Tillery told the audience we were "brave" for watching this film, the whole point of the central character, Cody Curtis, and her struggle against terminal liver cancer, was precisely that she wasn't particularly brave. Death is a fate we all have to meet, whether we're brave or cowardly, a good person or a bad person. In Curtis, we had a fairly ordinary middle class woman in the prime of life who has to confront early death. Although she prepares to terminate her own life, it's clear that she prefers to die passively, to "drift off." I've seen other assisted-suicide films and I'm always a little frightened of the people we see, such as the first death in How to Die in Oregon, who loudly demand the right to die, grabbing the poison and gulping it down. That's not Curtis, and frankly, that's not me—at least not yet.

According to those of a stoical bent, life is a process of preparing to die. But not many of us are really prepared to welcome at death so openly; for most of us, death is a passive process and we hope to be taken painlessly, when we're not looking. Curtis seems to be no different, and the film's power comes in seeing this appealing, thoughtful and very normal woman spending a year composing herself for her premature death.

How to Die in Oregon is very fine film, though I wish Richardson had devoted a few more minutes to a serious examination of the ethical concerns about legally enabling people to take drugs to hasten their demise. Instead, opposing views are given very briefly to a embittered, wizened old guy who seems to live in a Dixie flag-festooned trailer park and a doctor who seems to be part of a Christian protest rally.

And now to Day 2... Today's heavy hitters are Barbara Kopple's Gun Fight (see below), Nancy Buirski's The Loving Story and James Marsh's Project Nim.

At 2 p.m. in Fletcher Hall, catch Raising Renee, a portrait of Durham artist Beverly McIver and her relationship to her disabled sister (Chris Vitiello's review is here; Ashley Melzer's interview with filmmakers Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher is here).

At 4:40 p.m., catch Durham filmmaker Josh Gibson's Kudzu Vine. Read Sylvia Pfeiffenberger's appreciation here.

In Durham Central Park at 8:30 p.m., there's a free screening of the parkour celebration My Playground, which received an enthusiastic reception last night in Cinema 3.

There are two films by career-award winners Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, The Devil Came on Horseback and Joan Rivers (read Neil Morris' interview with the filmmakers here; read Nathan Gelgud's 2010 Indy review of the latter film here).

But our pick hit of the day is is the double bill of Il Capo and Buck, playing in Cinema 3 at 1:10.. Find out why by checking out our capsule review blurbs.

Last week I spoke to Barbara Kopple about her new film Gun Fight. It premiered earlier this week on HBO and will be rebroadcast and shown on demand through May 8. Although Bowling for Columbine remains the seminal doc on the topic of American gun policy (and it was a watershed in the commercial viability of documentaries, too), I find that I prefer Kopple's lucid, restrained and non-sensationalist treatment of the issue.

But I also found it ironic: In 1977, the 30-year-old Kopple shot to fame with Harlan County U.S.A., for which she won the Oscar for best documentary. This riveting film told the story of a Kentucky coal miners strike and the women who assumed the backbone of the movement. The film achieved the force of a Western as the strikers faced off with the mine company’s hired muscle in an armed standoff, and there perhaps was no scene as memorable as the meeting where one union firebrand, a middle-aged woman, punctuated a speech by pulling a pistol from her bra. [See trailer here; the redoubtable Lois Scott appears at 2:00.]

Raising Renee screens at 2 p.m. Friday in Fletcher Hall. Read Chris Vitiello's story about the film here.