Featured Filmmaker: Les Blank

The 2010 Salem Film Fest is honored to have Les Blank in attendance as an artist-in-residence of sorts. Les Blank is a prize-winning independent filmmaker, best known for his series of intimate films about the lives and music of people who live at the periphery of American society, including The Blues According to Lightnin Hopkins, Always for Pleasure, and Sprout Wings and Fly. Currently, Les has a new documentary showing at festivals, All In This Tea about an eccentric tea importer who travels to China in search of the perfect leaf.

Among Les Blank’s numerous awards are the British Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary for Burden of Dreams, for which he also won the Golden Gate Award Best of Festival at the San Francisco International Film Festival, 1982; Grand Prize, Melbourne Film Festival, 1985 for In Heaven There Is No Beer? for which he also won the special Jury Award at Sundance.

In 1990, Les Blank received the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award for outstanding lifetime achievement as an independent filmmaker. In 1989-1990, Blank was the Distinguished Filmmaker-In-Residence at San Diego State University, and in 1991, Adjunct Assistant Professor in film at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also the Louis B. Mayer filmmaker-in-residence at Dartmouth College and a directing fellow at the Sundance Institute in Utah.