The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Staff
DATE: June 1, 2003
PUBLICATION: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The (GA)
EDITION: Home; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
SECTION: Arts
PAGE: M7

Dozens of movies among the 130 works in the upcoming Atlanta Film Festival were shot with digital cameras. Here's a closer look at three of them:

> "Stories From the Road:

A Film About Following PJ Harvey" (10:30 p.m. Saturday at the downtown Atlanta-Fulton Public Library auditorium; $6-$7.50) -- Atlantan and first-time filmmaker Kyle Keyser's entertaining, off-the-cuff documentary of his persistent efforts to follow -- and hopefully meet -- his musical idol, PJ Harvey, during her European and American tour. It instantly becomes less a chronicle of Harvey's performances than a whimsical, in-his-own-face look at Keyser's novice filmmaking efforts.

"When I came back, all I had was the footage from the trip and all the mistakes we had made along the way," Keyser says. "We said, 'Let's make total fun of ourselves,' so it became all about making the documentary and the ridiculousness of it."

And does he ever run into Harvey in the movie? Well, maybe, if you count that time just as Keyser walked out of a stinking restroom.

> "A Certain Kind of Death" (first showing, 12:30 p.m. June 13 at the Rialto Center for the Performing Arts; $4-$5) -- This blunt documentary by former Atlantan Grover Babcock and his film partner, Iranian-born Blue Hadaegh, reveals exactly what happens to people who die without family or close friends. A prizewinner at the Sundance Film Festival, it shies away from neither gruesome details nor the ultimate truth of mass graves. This is the film for all those who base what they think they know about morgues and coroners' offices on "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

Babcock and Hadaegh avoided the usual approach filmmakers take when using small, easy-to-maneuver digital cameras.

"By this point with digital film, we've all kind of seen people jumping around," Hadaegh says. " 'Cops' even has people jumping around. We thought, 'What is it people aren't doing with digital cinematography?' And what that is is choice. It's how to film from a personal point of view."

They imagined their light camera as weighing 100 pounds and dealt with it like a normal camera. They avoided the herky-jerkiness of other digital films and often set their camera on a tripod.

The result is digital with the perspective that a regular film would have.

"We used the small tool but added something of our own," Hadaegh says.

> "Zero Day" (9:30 p.m. June 12 at the Rialto; $6-$7.50) -- Connecticut filmmaker Ben Coccio's chilling fictional feature depicts a video diary made by two students who've decided to arm themselves and randomly kill other students at their high school.

What can seem gratuitous in the wake of the Columbine High School shootings actually turns on the solid performances of Coccio's young actors and the filmmaker's involving cinematography. He has his characters' attitudes continuously shift as they speak directly to the audience in their "diary." They are conspiratorial one minute, adversarial or confessional the next.

"One of the things I really wanted to do was to make audiences feel they are as close as they can get to people like this," Coccio explains, "and yet there is so much they don't know about them and will never know."

Photo: Singer PJ Harvey performs in Europe in a scene from "Stories From the Road: A Film About Following PJ Harvey." / Kyle Keyser

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