The Circuit

Docuweek, the IDA’s annual LA-based doc fest, began last night with a screening of Jon Alpert amd Ellen Goosenberg Kent’s “Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq.” At the Arclight opening night party, Executive Director of the IDA Sandra Ruch, her colleague Nancy Willen, and Larry Flynt (photo by Alexandra Wyman/Variety via WireImage.com).  Flynt is the subject of another film at the fest, “Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone.”  Check out a Q&A with the film’s director, Joan Brooker-Marks – “I also felt that Larry had contributed more to the preservation of free speech than any single individual in the last three decades. I was also aware that many people often devalued these contributions because he was (and is) a pornographer. But in fact, none of us is any one thing, and that includes Larry Flynt. He has led a layered and complex life -- perhaps outside of the margins that many people consider ‘normal,’ but I don't feel that his chosen profession minimizes what he's done for his country, nor does it make him any less a patriot.”  (Mike Jones)