Girl Talk Doc Wins at Film Festival

Intriguing link-up with the Open Source Cinema project as well.

By Blurt Staff

12-2-08

At the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam recently the much-anticipated Girl Talk film, the Brett Gaylor-directed Rip: A Remix Manifesto, won the Dioraphte Audience Ward. The documentary takes an in-depth look at Girl Talk's mashups along with commentary on matters relating to sampling, copyright and piracy.

According to a report filed by IndieWire.com the film is described along lines of Girl Talk (aka Greg Gillis) going "under the microscope to demonstrate how he constructs music by sampling multiple pop tracks, and he joins a chorus of folks defending his use the samples to create new music... An Open Source Cinema project, the doc delves into contemporary copyright issues. As the filmmaker recently told IndieWire,  ‘I wanted to document and explore the war of ideas between those who want to share ideas - the Copyleft - and those who want to lock up ideas - the copyright.'"

Added Gaylor by way of further explanation, "We made the film in collaboration with the Open Source Cinema community. [It's] a remix website launched so that peers could remix and contribute to the film. We posted our raw footage under a Creative Commons license, and asked people to remix it around key themes. The resulting work was then included in the film -- the goal is for these stages of remixing to continue throughout our festival release, and then once the film moves from "beta" to 1.0 -- that we release it to the web."

In addition to the honor in Amsterdam, the film also won a "Special Jury Prize" at the Festival Nouveau Cinema Montreal and has been selected for a number of other film festivals.

To view the film trailer, see below, or go to the official website.

[Photo Credit: Christos Schizas detroitartist.org]