Chico Colvard
This is an area plump with good and great nonfiction filmmakers, and 2010 added another name to the list. Chico Colvard’s documentary, A Family Affair, is loosely about his sisters’ incestuous relationships with their father. But that’s a little like saying Chinatown is a movie about a drought. Colvard, 43, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston, has brewed a brutal melodrama out of American race and daughterly devotion, with enough psychological complexity to keep a therapist busy for decades. The movie premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, will play theatrically, and will air on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network.
Diffusion spectrum imaging
It’s a brain scan fit for an art museum. Technology being developed at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital offers a new look at the intricate architecture of the human mind. As part of a federally funded project to map major pathways in the human brain, scientists are building a next-generation scanner that will show the brain’s bundles of crisscrossing fibers in ways not seen before. Ultimately, the goal is to use these images to understand whether connectivity is disrupted in disorders like schizophrenia and autism.
Tiffani Faison
Boston’s notoriously ruthless dining scene seldom grants second chances. A wobbly launch and a few lukewarm reviews can mean a restaurant gets relegated to a shadowy also-ran field impervious to mid-game tinkering. Such seemed the fate of Rocca, the South End Italian eatery that languished after its glitzy 2007 opening. Then Tiffani Faison achieved the improbable. Taking over the kitchen in April, the 33-year-old gastro-wunderkind (and Top Chef alum) so nimbly overhauled the menu that local critics lined up to reevaluate the place, transforming a fading neighborhood haunt into a multi-starred culinary destination. Turns out all it takes are sufficiently addictive signature dishes (like the crispy quick-fried artichokes with a smear of roasted-garlic puree) to secure second, even third chances – often in the very same sitting.
Giving food trucks a hand
