Forget for a second about the Oscars, Hollywood's annual ode to itself. Closer to home, two award-winning filmmakers -- Rolf Belgum and Mark Wojahn -- will be celebrating their recent $25,000 fellowships from the McKnight Foundation by giving us peeks at works that survey the dizzying wonders in our own backyard.
Made entirely in Minneapolis, Wojahn's "Trampoline" and Belgum's "She Unfolds by Day" are "complex family stories with a lot of humanity," said Emily Goldberg, who'll moderate a discussion with the two nonfiction filmmakers and screen clips from their work at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cinevegas festival, "She Unfolds by Day" (known in an earlier incarnation as "The Wild Condition") is an up-close and personal study of Belgum's elderly mother as her mind begins to deteriorate. "Trampoline," which Wojahn is currently sending to festival programmers, is an intensely riveting portrait of a year in the lives of a married couple, along with their four disturbingly unleashed teenagers.
"Both films have to do with how generations communicate or don't," Goldberg said. "There's a lot of difficult communication in these two stories."
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Goldberg knows from intimate, difficult documentaries. A McKnight Filmmaking Fellow herself in 2007, she earned international acclaim for directing "Venus of Mars" (2004), a searing portrait of the tricky marital relationship between college professor and radio host Lynette Reini-Grandell and transgendered glam-rocker Steve "Venus" Grandell.
Thus Wednesday's event stands to serve not only as a tribute to Wojahn and Belgum, but, under Goldberg's guidance, as a local state-of-the-documentary address.
Wojahn delivered the investigative travelogue "What America Needs: From Sea to Shining Sea" in the banner doc year of 2003, while Belgum remains best-known for "Driver 23" (1998), his hilarious and oddly poignant portrait of metal musician Dan Cleveland.