Over the weekend and throughout this week, The Atlanta Film and Video Festival is being held here in Atlanta. It offers some movies that have only been shown at SXSW and Sundance. So far, I have gone to see three movies, and all of them were really solid.
Scratch, which is a history of turntablism, was the best of the three in my opinion, and it did a really solid job of covering this one angle of the hip hop community. The history of the art of scratching and DJing in general was really solid. All of my favorite DJ's like QBert, Mixmaster Mike, and Cut Chemist were featured in the movie, and DJ Faust and DJ Shortee were actually at the showing. If you have any interest in this sort of thing, and an opportunity to see this movie, go see it.
Next, we went to see Burning Man: The Burning Sensation. Since I haven't been to Burning Man yet, it's hard for me to judge how well this film captures the spirit of Burning Man. The film did contain some very interesting art pieces and happenings at Burning Man, and there was excellent discussion with the film's director afterwards.
Finally, I went to see Revolution OS, a documentary about the Free Software movement and Linux. While I think this film did a great job of capturing the personalities of people like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, I did not think that all of the people that they chose to focus on would have been my first choices. I would have liked to have seen some mention of PERL, and more coverage of Apache in the movie because I think that these two things, more than any other, have contributed to the success of Linux as an operating system. I also would have liked to have seen more coverage of individual distributions rather than the focus on a VA Linux, a hardware vendor. Finally, I think that this documentary went out of its way to position Microsoft as the evil empire. I would rather have been provided with the raw data and then been able to form my own opinion rather than having the situation framed in such a biased manner. Still, this film was well worth seeing no matter how much or little you know abotu the Free Software Movement. Oddly, I was unable to find a live Web site for this movie.