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The theme for the 2003 TCF ShortDocs was "Thirst,"
an idea that was arrived at on a day when Festival Director Johanna Zorn quite
literally found herself thirsty, during a brainstorming session in which she
and the rest of the TCF staff were trying to come up with an idea for the
inaugural ShortDocs theme.
Four ideas were chosen from 80 submitted proposals for the first-ever batch of
ShortDocs; the resulting stories were debuted at a listening room in Chicago in
September, 2003, and then presented at the 2003 Third
Coast Festival Conference. Here they are, listed alphabetically by
producer:
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In the late 1930s, Massachusetts flooded four towns in the central part of the
state to create a reservoir for the city of Boston. More than 2,000 people
lived in those towns. Some of them are still haunted by the memory of losing
their homes, so haunted that they still try to hold onto the lost communities
of Dana, Prescott, Greenwich and Enfield in whatever way they can. This is the
story of the towns and the people who lived in them, and what they think now of
the reservoir that drowned their collective past. (7:26)
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Much of the Sonoran desert between Tucson and Mexico is a haunting wasteland of
discarded shoes, shirts and empty plastic water jugs. People leave one place
for another in search of a dream. Some lose. They die from dehydration. "And I
walked..." is a soundscape of how the thirst for the American dream translates
into a literal thirst for the scores of illegal immigrants who risk their lives
as they cross the desert from Mexico into the United States in search of
better-paying jobs. (6:06)
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As a boy, George Bien, was sent thousands of miles away from Hungary to
Siberia, to the notorious GULAG-the prison camp system in the Soviet Union,
where millions of people perished. Alex van Oss came to know George Bien
decades later, and learned of his most personal and vivid experience of thirst.
(6:42)
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Misfire is an experimental sound piece that blends 1940s Dr Pepper radio ads,
original violin music and sounds of thirst and thirst quenching. (4:13)
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