Local documentaries are all in the family

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.

Over the past several years, the market for documentaries has cooled somewhat, but Belgum's and Wojahn's work remains vital -- and thematically consistent.

Chatting with Wojahn and Goldberg at a Minneapolis coffee shop earlier this week, Belgum said "Driver 23," with its legendary scene of Cleveland trying to lug his musical equipment up a flight of stairs by rope and pulley, continues to teach him that he makes "nature films."

"Watching that scene is really no different from watching a bird build its nest," Belgum said with a laugh. "For [Cleveland], whether he's smart about it or not, his work is instinctual. It comes out of his essence."

The same could be said for Belgum, who made the thrillingly experimental "She Unfolds by Day" as a means of understanding both his mom and his dog, and who describes his current project as the "ultimate nature film" -- a study of his infant daughter, Nola.

"She's teaching me to see all over again," marvels the filmmaker and proud papa.

Regarding Wojahn's latest, Goldberg suggested an apt subtitle: "What a Family Needs."

Indeed, where "What America Needs" assembled a variety of short interviews with ordinary citizens, "Trampoline" digs deeply into the questionable ethics of one eccentric Minneapolis family, whittling 110 hours of footage down to a harrowing hour and a half.

Still, both of Wojahn's films can be read as attempts to create or maintain community among a diverse assortment of individuals.

"In making 'Trampoline,' I felt like I was actively trying to support the members of the family," said Wojahn. "I think of them as my friends. With 'What America Needs,' I was filming on the road, so the result was more rambling. Observing subjects closely for an entire year allowed me to mature as a filmmaker."

As Belgum offers: "The more you focus as a documentary filmmaker, the more you open it up. You reach the universal by being ruthlessly specific."