Sam Blanchard will show off his Polaroid Matrix Flipbook at fifth annual Maker Faire
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th St., Flushing Meadows Corona Park
September 17-18, $10-$25
718-699-0005
www.makerfaire.com
www.nysci.org
The annual Maker Faire, being held this weekend at the New York Hall of Science, celebrates the cutting edge of creativity and innovation over the course of two days of talks, demonstrations, live performances, and workshops focusing on such topics as engineering, recycling, sustainability, and music. The DIY festival will feature hundreds of makers from all over the world showing off their latest projects, from Ayah Bdeir’s littleBits and Mark Perez’s Life-Size Mousetrap to Marek Michalowski’s BeatBots and Sean Casey’s Tornado Intercept Vehicle, from Tamar Ziv’s Projected Realities and Eben Upton’s Raspberry Pi to Patti Robinson’s Time Warp Souvenir and Lynn Pentecost’s Dogzilla. The schedule includes such programs as Custom Pet Applique Tote Demonstration and How to Sew a Skirt in One Hour at the Craft Demo Stage, Kinect Abnormal Motion Assessment System, Hacking Your Sleep, and PCR and DNA Barcoding at Health 2.0, Paul Rudolph’s percussive GLANK at the Music Stage, Coke Zero & Mentos Fountains, a deconstruction competition, acts from Circus Warehouse, and twi-ny fave Bill Shannon highlighting his Shannon Technique (in which he street-dances with crutches he needs because of a degenerative physical condition) on the Rocket Stage. Meanwhile, the Live Stage will showcase such projects as Christopher Olah’s Programmatic CAD and Its Future, Tim Lillis & Andy Turley’s Collaborative Gaming in the Twitter Age, Karen Kaun’s STEMGarden, and Hackerspaces: Schools of the Future. It should be quite a time for science geeks and computer nerds of all ages, and at heart, doesn’t that mean all of us?
The opening-night selection of the 2011 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is an illuminating, if at times overly self-referential, examination of the power of documentary filmmaking. In 1982, Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel made When the Mountains Tremble, which told the inside story of civilian massacres of the indigenous Maya people as government forces and guerrilla revolutionaries fought in the jungles of Guatemala; one of the film’s subjects, Rigoberta Menchú, became an international figure and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. “When I made that film, I had no idea I was filming in the middle of a genocide,” Yates says at the beginning of Granito. A quarter-century after When the Mountains Tremble, Yates was contacted by lawyer Almudena Bernabeu, who asked Yates to comb through her reels and reels of footage to find evidence of the Guatemalan genocide and help bring charges again dictator Ríos Montt, whom Yates had met with back in 1982. In researching the case, Yates speaks with Menchú, forensic archivist Kate Doyle, journalist liaison Naomi Roht-Arriaza, forensic anthropologist Fredy Peccerelli, Spanish national court judge Santiago Pedraz, victims’ rights leader and genocide survivor Antonio Caba Caba, and Gustavo Meoño, a founding member of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, each of whom sheds light on the proceedings from various different angles, from digging up bones in mass graves to discussing redacted documents that reveal U.S. involvement in Guatemala. Several of them are risking their lives by both continuing to fight the government and appearing on camera. Granito, which Yates directed with Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onís and was her sixth film to be shown at the Human Rights Watch festival, is a compelling look at how individuals can make a difference. The music is often overly melodramatic, and Yates does seem to like to show herself both in outtakes from her first film and in serious poses in the new film, but its ultimate point overrides those tendencies. Granito opens September 14 at the IFC Center, with the filmmakers present to talk about their work at the 7:40 showings Wednesday through Sunday as well as the 10:00 show Friday and Saturday night. 
