Unfortunately, full days at work caused us to miss the first few films of the festival, but once we got there, we hit the ground running. First up, and an amazing way to start the festival was Photo & Copyright by G.P. Fieret playing with Diary of a Times Square Thief. After finding myself with no tickets due to user error (ie. turns out the form never got submitted), the staff was kind enough to let me slip in the back into one of the last seats of this sold out show. So glad they did, as Photo & Copyright was absolutely stunning.

Frank van den Engel’s Photo & Copyright by G.P. Fieret combines the heartbreaking last years of Dutch photographer Gerard Fieret’s life with footage of his younger heydays in a way that made me celebrate youth/fear death in a way few others have. The raw and unabashed style of the photographer’s body of work is almost the antithesis of the way most approach the art, with him at one point stepping all over the images while showing them to a dealer. With his later years leaving him in some of the most disgusting and uninhabitable living conditions I have ever seen, the celebration of his work continues with some selling for tens of thousands of dollars. The director even asks one of the dealers at one point if she feels guilty making so much money off of his art while he lives completely destitute, and even though her words basically say “That’s the art business,” her eyes tell a different story. Was so moved by this piece that I had a difficult time even getting into the next film, Diary of a Times Square Thief, even though it itself had an interesting approach to looking to the past for answers to the present. The fact that the disc malfunctioned so many times that many people got up and left didn’t help either.

Watch the trailer. Even it will get you a little teary eyed.

Photo from this Dutch website I couldn’t understand