Widely revered as the “Dean of Documentary Filmmaking,” Albert Maysles joined us as our special guest and advisor in 2007. This year he will honor director and cinematographer Les Blank with the fourth annual Albert Maysles Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking. Please join us for this special conversation and screening of an early, classic music film The Blues Accordin’ to Lightin’ Hopkins (1969) – along with a selection of scenes from the best music and food films of Les Blank:
Hot Pepper, featuring Clifton Chenier “Zydeco Accordion King” (1973); Chulas Fronteras (1976); Always for Pleasure (1978); Burden of Dreams (1982); Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1979); Yum Yum, Yum: A Taste of the Cajun and Creole Cooking of Louisiana (1990); Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (including interview with Alice Waters) (1980).

There will be a surprise gustatory delight for all in attendance.

LES BLANK
Les Blank is a prize-winning independent filmmaker, best known for a series of poetic, exuberant and closely observed films that led Vincent Canby of The New York Times to declare, Blank “is a master of movies about the American idiom... one of our most original filmmakers.” Blank’s first independent films began a series of intimate glimpses into the lives and music of passionate people who live at the periphery of American society. This series grew to include Cajun, Polish and Tex Mex musicians and cooks.
Blank is most acclaimed for Burden of Dreams, an extraordinary feature-length documentary about the messianic German director Werner Herzog struggling against desperate odds in the Amazon basin to make his epic feature, Fitzcarraldo. For Burden of Dreams, Blank was honored with a British Academy Award for Best Documentary of 1982. Derek Malcolm of England’s The Guardian called it one of the best 100 films of the 20th century. In the late 1970s, Mendocino photographer Nicholas Wilson produced a six-week film series featuring Blank’s entire opus.