BERKELEY — A short documentary about the 10-month long tree sit at the UC Berkeley is one of the 65 films in this weekend's Berkeley Video & Film Festival.

The 28-minute film chronicles the celebrations, protests, ups and downs and daily life of the people living in a grove of trees near Memorial Stadium.

The film is called "The Big Game." "Needless to say, it's not about football," said filmmaker L A Wood of Berkeley.

Wood, a professional videographer and documentary filmmaker who has made seven films, said he shot 115 hours of video since late last year.

"I hope people will see the real picture of the oak grove with this film," he said. "They say a picture speaks a thousand words. A video speaks a thousand pictures and so this is probably the most accurate view of the oak grove."

"The Big Game," which screens at 6:55 p.m. Sunday, was chosen for the festival from hundreds of entries, festival director and co-founder Mel Vapour said. "The Big Game' is one of the most compelling documentaries in terms of a daily record. They were up at that site daily as any true, die-hard documentarian should be. By being there from day one, the story unfolds and you see the whole evolutionary process."

On Dec. 2, 2006, six people climbed into trees in the grove slated to be razed to make room for the university's $125 million athletic training center west of California Memorial Stadium.

The protesters took to the trees to save about 40 oaks that the university wants to remove before construction starts. Three lawsuits currently being heard in Alameda County Superior Court stopped construction and tree sitters, albeit not the original group, remain in the trees now.

The no-budget film does not aim to be objective, but is rather an advocacy tool for the tree sitters, Wood said.

"The (film) will show the grove in the most positive light, as it should be. The police call it the oak grove compound and it wasn't a compound to us. It was an oak grove," Wood said.

The three-day film festival begins with a filmmakers reception and awards presentation at 6:30 p.m. Friday. Screenings begin at 7:30 p.m. Friday and run through Sunday night.

Now in its 16th year, the festival has screenings of recent independent cinema from Bay Area, national and international filmmakers. Vapour said there are features, short features, documentaries, student films, commercials, music and cell phone videos and more.

The Berkeley Video & Film Festival is at the Landmark California Theatre, 2113 Kittredge St. The box office can be reached at 510-464-5983.

Tickets will be available at California Theatre Box Office on the weekend. Tickets are $11 general admission, students and seniors, and $8 for East Bay Media Center members. A general admission ticket is good for all screenings the entire day

In the four decades he's spent producing experimental film festivals, Mel Vapour has screened everything from Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome to Michael Snow's Wavelength, along with cult flicks by Lenny Lipton, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol. He premiered Godard's Sympathy for the Devil for New Line Cinema shortly after the company launched in 1967.

As founder and director of the Berkeley Video and Film Festival (now in its sixteenth year), Vapour helps cultivate some of the hottest young producers you've ever seen, allowing them to share the big screen with finished adults. "There's not the glitterati of Mill Valley," he explained, "but the grand festival award winners are really high-end." Furthermore, the student filmmakers all use sound trucks, Mitchell cameras, light crews, and adult-trained actors — these aren't homespun productions by any means.

This year's fest features the Mark Hammond's "high-buck production" Johnny Was, which stars British actor Vinnie Jones and the Who's Roger Daltrey, and also marks the acting debut of heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis. The documentary lineup includes Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf's Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, in which John Malkovich leads viewers through the strange, incredible universe of poets Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, Peter Anastas, Charles Boer, and their ilk. In the documentary "mash-up" Diary of Niclas Gheiler, director George Aguilar pieces together the story of his grandfather, who served in Hitler's army during WWII.

In The Big Game local director LA Wood — best known for his environmental Web site BerkeleyCitizen.org — covers the Oak Grove protest at Cal. Ever the diligent muckraker, Wood has been at the Grove since day one, interviewing all the principles, watching the demonstrators, watching the police, and hanging out in the trees. Vapour wants to make sure Wood gets his props. "From a local perspective I think it doesn't take on a saccharine approach that these are tree-huggers and tree-sitters," the festival director assures. "I think there are multiple dimensions that the piece deals with." (He'd prefer that the viewer extrapolate what those dimensions are.)

There's even a short film about man boobies.
The Berkeley Film and Video Festival runs October 5, 6, and 7 at Landmark's California Theatre. A one-day pass costs $11; $25 gets you a three-day pass. Call 510-842-3699 or visit BerkeleyVideoFilmFest.org for program information.

Moving Pictures: Festival Brings Out Best in Indie Cinema Justin DeFreitas, Berkeley Daily Planet, October 5, 2007

The Berkeley Film and Video Festivals marks its 16th year this weekend with another vast and varied program of independent productions. If there’s a theme to the annual festival, the theme is that there is no theme; it simply showcases independent film in all its unruly diversity, from the brilliant to the silly, from mainstream to left field, from documentaries and drama to comedy and cutting-edge avant garde.

The festival, put on annually by the East Bay Media Center, runs today (Friday) through Sunday at Landmark’s California Theater in downtown Berkeley.

Festival Director Mel Vapour takes pride in one participant’s description of the festival as a bastion of artistic integrity among film festivals, and one that remains blissfully celebrity-free. This year’s program is no exception, providing a feast of cinematic pleasures untouched by commercial considerations.

One of the most extraordinary films on this year’s program is George Aguilar’s Diary of Niclas Gheiler. Aguilar has created what he terms a “documentary mashup,” consisting of old family photographs and found footage combined with words from his grandfather’s diary. The result is a stirring poetic reverie on his grandfather’s life in Germany from World War I, when he served alongside a young Adolf Hitler, and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the run-up to World War II. It’s a 32-minute tour de force that approaches history from a deeply personal perspective.

The Big Game, by L A Wood, presents a sympathetic view of the Memorial Stadium oak grove tree-sit. Regardless of where you come down on the myriad issues surrounding the UC Berkeley’s plan to build an athletic performance facility along the stadium’s western wall, this entertaining 30-minute film is sure to provide grist for your political mill. Though university officials declined Wood’s invitation to comment on camera, he does little to fill that gap in the narrative, at no point providing the viewer with an account of the university’s reasoning behind its plans or its responses to the protest. The result is a film which may be endearing to the like-minded, but which will only fuel the ire of those on the other side of the debate, encouraging rather than tempering the tendencies of each side to paint the other in broad strokes. Familiar faces abound; in fact, the film is a veritable who’s who of Daily Planet opinion page contributors.

Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf’s Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place provides a compassionate portrait of the larger-than-life poet—his work, his humanity and his influence—using archival footage and audio along with testimonials from friends and colleagues. The central narrative concerns Olson’s quest to preserve the unique qualities of his hometown, a quest one fellow poet likens to a Superbowl match-up between the Minnesota Vikings and the Miami Dolphins, in which the Dolphins abandoned their game plan in favor of tactical improvisation that reached the level of poetry. It’s an analogy many tree-sitters would be loathe to accept, but in the context of Olson’s all-encompassing, all-embracing, big-picture view of life and community, such supposed polarities as football vs. poetry are exposed as meaningless.

Berkeley Film Festival Showcases ‘Untold Stories’ Sarah Dawud, Daily Californian, October 8, 2007

Eager film buffs and a variety of filmmakers attended the 16th annual Berkeley Video and Film Festival this weekend at California Theatre in hopes of viewing groundbreaking cinema. The three-day event, which drew moviegoers from Puerto Rico to Oakland, showcased 66 original features ranging from experimental to ethnographic.

Mel Vapour, the director and co-founder of the festival, said the event thrives in Berkeley because the community is open to unconventional art. “Berkeley is film-centric,” he said.

A jury of “media makers” screened the movies in theaters across Berkeley before presenting awards to entries in two dozen categories, including commercials and cell phone videos, Vapour said.

Since its inception in 1990 as a creative outlet for the Bay Area, the festival has continued to attract a larger and more diverse audience. It has also become a fixture for filmmakers, many of whom return year after year.

Numerous students raved about “Special Circumstances,” whose Saturday showing drew a capacity crowd. Directed by Marianne Teleki, the film presents the story of Hector Salgado, who was tortured and forced into exile by Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile. One of Salgado’s friends, Hector Logo, came from Puerto Rico to watch the film Saturday. He said the movie made him uncomfortable because he didn’t realize the extent of his friend’s suffering. “There are important stories that have to be told,” he said. “They have an effect on the family and the neighborhood.”

Director Peter Bolte made his third appearance at the festival this year. Bolte’s “Dandelion Man,” which tells the story of a man who is unaware of the pain he inflicts on others until he faces his dark past, won the Best of Festival award in the features category.

Bolte applauded the festival for giving young flimmakers a voice.
“It has no agenda like the major movie festivals,” he said.

Environmental activist L A Wood attracted attention for his documentary “The Big Game,” which follows the tree-sitters in the oak grove near Memorial Stadium since they began protesting a proposed athletic center in December.

Becca Danton, an Oakland resident and high school student, was drawn to the movie and festival in general for the “untold stories and for the outlet that allowed them to be heard.”

Like many audience members, Oakland resident Christine Whalen said she liked the scope of the films. “There was diversity,” she said. “The festival was amazing and touching.”

Her thoughts were echoed by event organizers. “A revolution has happened with the onset of the digital age and the filmmakers are empowered,” Vapour said. “Films like these won’t be seen in mainstream cinema.”