Pat Spurgeon is a professional musician whose dreams of being in a successful rock ’n’ roll band have come true.  But just as his band, Rogue Wave, starts to take off, his kidney starts to fail. “D tour” chronicles the life of a musician with “no back-up plan” as he’s faced with daily dialysis, a grueling tour, and a search for a new kidney. Featuring live performances from Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie), Nada Surf, Ryan Miller (Guster), John Vanderslice, The Moore Brothers, and Rogue Wave. For more about the film, visit http://autonomy16.net/Benefit_Doc.html. Please RSVP to roughcutsrsvp@yahoo.com before noon on Tuesday, November 11th.

Moderator Richard O'Connell is the Director of Production at ITVS (Independent Television Service), which is the largest supplier of independently produced programming to public television in the United States. A native of Ireland, he has a diverse background as a producer and director in narrative and documentary film production. Richard worked as a freelance journalist before coming to work at ITVS, and is currently completing a Masters in Film Studies at Exeter University in the UK.

Rough Cuts is a series of work-in-progress documentary screenings that are produced every other month at the LAB, a non-profit gallery/performance space in the Mission. For each evening, we screen one rough cut of a feature-length documentary and then moderate a conversation about the film. These post-screening discussions are designed to give the filmmaker a better, more objective sense of what is working and not working with his/her film, with particular attention paid to improving the film’s structure and narrative clarity. We hope that the series also provides a welcome space for local filmmakers, film professionals, and fans of documentary film to meet and talk. For questions about Rough Cuts, email Chris Holbrook at cholbrooke@yahoo.com. Rough Cuts thanks its partners Five Vintners and ReelChanges for their support of the series. View films that screened in the June ’08 series here.