Video Wednesday: Well-Fed

Well-Fed TRAILER from Anna Moot-Levin on Vimeo.


This week is BIG in my neighborhood, it is the 10th annual AFI Silverdocs Festival. Hundreds of earnest, young-ish filmmakers take over downtown Silver Spring, MD. They are seeking a distribution deal and/or to learn more from each other about making great documentaries. They are also watching hundreds of each others' works. I attend the lunch-time shorts each day and most are terrific. Almost all expose you to a secret world you'd never encounter in real life from the hard-core fandom of the Insane Clown Posse to a man who makes sex robots to the secret life of cats.

The clip above is a trailer from one of the shorts I viewed today. Well-Fed is a documentary short by Anna Moot-Levin. She describes it as, "A journey into the world of carnivorous plants and their devoted caretakers." She spoke a bit after today's screening. The documentary was shot on real 16mm film which gives it a sumptuous look. Because film is so expensive to process, she shot a total of 40 minutes of footage for the final 6-minute film and planned each shot well in advance. Her subjects seem very at ease in front of the camera and she said that is due to two factors: 1. she interviewed them in their own gardens -- settings they felt comfortable and in-control in; and, 2. she first interviewed them via audio recording without a camera present so that they could tell their stories without distraction.