Black Diamonds to show in NYC at MOMA Doc Fortnight
Catherine Pancake, WV-raised artist now living in Baltimore
Black Diamonds will finally be shown in New York City - at the Museum of Modern Art’s prestigious “Documentary Fortnight” series on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 6 PM.
My friend William Sloan, a MLS librarian who left NY Public after founding its media collection decades ago, crossing the street in the early 1980s to manage its circulating film program, was one of the judges who selected it from a global search of the best new documentaries.
Congrats to Catherine Pancake and her sister Ann, the novelist, for making what I have called “the Harlan County of the 21st century.”
The film has won many awards after its world premiere at The South Charleston Museum on March 11, 2006. Awards it has won include The Jack Spadaro Award from the Appalachian Studies Association and the Paul Robeson Award.
Maria Gunnoe, one of the leading activists in the film, just won a major environmental award from the Rainforest Action Network. B.J. Gudmundsson, one of WV’s leading filmmakers, has made a biographical film about her.
Bill Sloan has shown other films during the last few decades from WV including Robert Gates’ “In Memory of the Land and People” in 1979 and recently Ray and Judy Schmitt’s film, “The Texture of Life.” Sloan is one of the leading experts in the world on the documentary, serving as president and a programmer for the Flaherty Seminar, judging films at the Pompidou Center in Paris each year for its documentary festival and other film festivals around Europe. He has received many awards and helped promote several generations of filmmakers from around the world as I have done in WV since 1978.
He gave me my lifetime achivement award in 1987 from the WV Intl. Film Festival in downtown Charleston. Earlier he had spent 10 days traveling around the state showing various documentaries from the keystone collection at MOMA. He was also a judge at the WV Juried Art Exhibition one year. I hope to show a documentary film being made about him someday.
Bill Sloan reading a Graffiti magazine while visiting WV in 1987 at my home in Kanawha City.
