Oscar-nominated director Marshall Curry (STREET FIGHT) trains his lens on the fast-paced world of youth motorsports in RACING DREAMS, a character-rich study of three preteen racing sensations and one pivotal season on the World Karting Association championship circuit. Piloting modified go-karts capable of speeds of up to 80 miles per hour, this is Formula One in miniature—with all the attendant drama, crashes, joys and tears. Affectionately known as “the Little League for professional racing,” the World Karting Association racing series is a venue where young driving phenoms make their reputations, collect awards and attract sponsors—a necessity to sustain what becomes, for most families, a costly enterprise. Based on their performance in this championship season, three charming hopefuls—Annabeth Barnes, Brandon Warren and Josh Hobson—will decide whether their considerable talent justifies “graduating” to stock cars and professional racing. With its lively blend of exhilarating race footage, behind-the- scenes insights and winning principals, this emotionally resonant film moves beyond the racetrack and renders an evocative portrait of youthful passion, the bonds of family and even the blush of first love. Racing fans and the uninitiated will warm to this stirring account of three precocious young athletes and their drive to be the very best.

Filmmaker Q&A;

Introduce yourself:
Prior to directing RACING DREAMS, Marshall Curry was the director, producer, director of photography, and editor of the Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-nominated documentary, STREET FIGHT.

STREET FIGHT won numerous awards, including the Audience Awards at the Tribeca Film Festival, AFI/Discovery SilverDocs Festival, and Hot Docs Festival. In 2005 it aired nationally on the PBS series, P.O.V.

Before STREET FIGHT, Marshall shot, edited and directed a number of short films including THE DAY THE INDIANS WON (for the Rainforest Foundation US), which tells the story of the Panará Indians in Brazil who successfully won back their land, and NEGRIL ELEMENTARY, (for the Rockhouse Foundation), which chronicles an education project in Jamaica.

In 2005 Marshall was selected by Filmmaker Magazine as one of "25 New Faces of Independent Film", and he was awarded the International Documentary Association’s Jacqueline Donnet Filmmaker Award. In 2007 he received the International Trailblazer Award at MIPDOC in Cannes.

He has been a guest lecturer at Harvard, Duke, NYU, and other colleges, and he has served on juries for the International Documentary Association, Full Frame Documentary Festival and Hot Docs Film Festival.

He is a graduate of Swarthmore College where he studied Comparative Religion and was a Eugene Lang Scholar.

What inspired this film? How did you find your subjects?
I live in NY, and like a lot of New Yorkers, I didn't know much about racing before making this film. But I knew that NASCAR is the second most popular spectator sport in the country-- bigger than baseball, bigger than basketball. I thought it was interesting that there could be a huge part of my own country's culture that I didn’t know anything about, And one of the great things about making documentaries is that you get to spend a couple years learning about things that you don't know much about.

Then one day I read about the World Karting Association's series for 11 and 12 year olds who race karts that go 70 mph. It has become the unofficial Little League for NASCAR, producing some of the sport’s biggest drivers. I thought it sounded pretty amazing so I went to a race to scout it out, and it was better than I imagined. And the kids were smart and funny and perceptive. I found one of the racers in the movie-- Josh-- that first day. After I got home and showed the footage to people, it became clear that this was a film I had to make.

I went to an awards ceremony and met about 75 other kids, and Brandon and Annabeth popped out from the pack.

What were some of the biggest challenges/surprises?
I wanted this film to be photographed well—to capture the colors and spectacle of the races and the characters’ lives. But I also really like to keep a small presence when shooting, because I think that intimacy and comfort are the most important elements to getting magical moments.

I felt like the big, shoulder-mounted HD cameras were intimidating to our characters, and they don’t allow as much mobility as we ducked into crowded trailers, or jumped into the backseat of a car. So we decided to shoot with a new, compact HD camera that shot onto memory cards rather than tape. Now it’s becoming a lot more common, but just two years ago, no one was shooting verite docs this way, and each card only held 20 minutes of footage. At that point the cards cost around $1200 each, so we constantly had to run them out to our van, where one of the crew had a stack of hard drives that he’d download it onto, and then run it back to the shoot to reuse. It made for a complicated workflow, but I was really happy with the balance of beauty and intimacy.

The editing was also a huge job. We shot 500 hours of footage so it took about three months just to screen the material once. Selecting the best material and structuring it into a film that flowed like a narrative movie was a pretty grueling 16 month process. Our characters were constantly asking us how we were going to tell the story without a narrator, and when they watched it for the first time, we were happy to hear Annabeth’s mom say, “That didn’t seem like a documentary at all. It was just a movie.”

Who are some of your favorite filmmakers?
I like fiction films and documentaries, but I watch a lot more docs. I like the verite gang the best—Maysles, and Pennebaker/Hegedus, etc. It’s really hard to make a compelling, coherent verite film, but when it works, it’s so powerful to watch. I also really like Ross McElwee—Sherman’s March completely shifted my idea of what documentaries could do or be. But I’m not a purist—I like films that are narrated and films that aren’t, films that are beautiful and films that are clumsy but heartfelt. Mostly I just like a good story and good characters.

What is your all time favorite documentary?
That's really hard-- I love different films for different reasons. The documentary that most encouraged me to make films was Hands on a Hardbody. It's low budget, a little bit bumpy, but totally riveting. It showed me that if you have compelling characters doing interesting things, all else will be forgiven.

What other projects are in the pipeline?
I’m in post-production with a new documentary about a member of the Earth Liberation Front who burned two timber facilities in Oregon and is now in prison. I have another film in preproduction about a family with ten kids, half of which are adopted and are all different races. It’s a really interesting story about when idealism meets reality.

Why did you become a filmmaker?
I took a pretty zig-zaggy route to becoming a filmmaker. I'm a curious person-- I like to learn about new people and places that I don't know anything about-- and I like to tell stories. So I thought for a while that I might write for a newspaper or teach. I took a bunch of different jobs after college, trying public radio, web design, etc. But I loved documentaries, and so finally I decided to jump in and try to make one. I bought a camera and a Macintosh with Final Cut Pro editing software, and I spent about two years making Street Fight-- my first feature length doc. It was well received-- aired on PBS and was nominated for an Oscar and an Emmy. And so I've been doing it ever since.

What are some of your creative influences?
My mom is amazing at getting people to talk about themselves, and she's a great story teller. Her whole family-- aunts and uncles and cousins-- will sit around and just swap stories. "Tell that one about when you tried to get the honey from the bees' nest..." I learned a lot by just listening-- about suspense and pacing and humor. I also watch a ton of documentaries and learn a lot from them. If I notice the way a film uses a clever cut-away or weaves story lines together or whatever, I'll file it away for later.

I'm influenced a lot by music, too. I love the way it conveys emotion and excitement in such a quick and powerful way. And I’m amazed that you can listen to a good song a thousand times and continue finding things inside of it. Most movies are only watched once by an audience, but I strive to edit in such a way that the production team and I will continue to be engaged or entertained as we watch it again and again.

Did you go to film school?
I took a few weekend classes-- one in Final Cut Pro, and another in basic documentary techniques-- but I didn't go to film school. I saved up some money and decided that I could either go to film school or just take time off of work and make a movie-- and I decided to make the movie instead. I learned a ton just by shooting every day, and spending months and months alone in my apartment trying to figure out how to edit a scene dramatically.

What do you shoot on?
We shot Racing Dreams on the Panasonic HVX-200. It's an all-digital format that records to memory cards. For the races we also used an HDX-900, which is a tape-based HD camera.

What has been the most unexpected thing to happen since taking the film on the festival circuit?
We didn't really know how people would react to the film. The documentary crowd isn't exactly known for being NASCAR fans, and NASCAR fans aren't known for loving docs. But we had eight sold out screenings in NY at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the Best Documentary prize there which was a huge shock. New Yorkers who knew nothing about racing really connected with the characters and got swept up in the drama of their lives.

And it has also been a pleasant surprise to show it in NASCAR country and hear that people react to it as a Movie-- not a Documentary.

It was also really fun for the kids to be able to see themselves on a huge screen with hundreds of people laughing and crying and cheering them on.

Why did you want to screen your film at SILVERDOCS?
SILVERDOCS is one of the very best festivals out there. If you have a documentary, it's a no-brainer to apply to it. My first film, Street Fight, played at Silverdocs years ago, and we had a great time. It has creative and supportive programmers, really smart panels, and it pulls in energetic engaged audiences. And it's an opportunity to see the work of a lot of other talented filmmakers.