Cinema Arts Festival Houston 2010

Moderator: Esther Robinson The directors of Gravity Was Everywhere, Back Then and Utopia in Four Movements, two of the most adventurous works in the festival, will be joined by two of the musicians accompanying them live in Houston and throughout the U.S. Brendan Canty and Todd Griffin, both experienced live film accompanists, are also accomplished composers of musical scores for documentary films. The filmmakers and composers will discuss their partnership and their methods of marrying music and film. Esther Robinson is the founder of ArtHome, a non-profit business that helps artists and their communities build financial assets and equity. Her feature documentary A Walk into the Sea, screening in this festival, won top prizes at the Berlin, Tribeca and Chicago film festivals. Best known as the drummer for the band Fugazi, Brendan Canty is an adept multi-instrumentalist. Canty composes soundtrack music for Discovery Channel and National Geographic documentaries and wrote the score for the Sundance Channel documentary series, The Hill. Brent Green is a self-taught animation filmmaker and artist whose films have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival (2006-9), MoMA, the Getty Center, Warhol Museum, and many other museums and festivals around the world including a current DiverseWorks exhibition in Houston. Sam Green's feature The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His work has won awards and been featured in many festivals, among them Sundance, the London Film Festival, and Locarno, where he won the Critics Choice Award. Todd Griffin, best known as leader of The Quavers, has scored dozens of film and theater projects. His work is distinguished by his commitment to find the music that emanates from an image, rather than music to lay on top of it. His recent composing projects include Prodigal Son, Children of Invention, and Utopia in Four Movements.