Each year the Happening invites a featured filmmaker to present his or her work to participants. This year's featured guest is the prizewinning independent documentarian Les Blank.

"In the best sense of the word, 'independent' means no allegiances except to one's own muse, and if ever there was a role model for the genuine idea, it's Les Blank," says the Minneapolis City Pages.Blank's films cover an eclectic mix of subjects—music and food are frequent choices—through which Blank explores the lives of people who live at the periphery of American society, yet whose cultural contributions form an integral part of our national consciousness.

Blank is best known for a series of poetic films that led Time Magazine critic Jay Cocks to write, "I can't believe that anyone interested in movies or America...could watch Blank's work without feeling they'd been granted a casual, soft-spoken revelation." John Rockwell, writing in The New York Times,adds, "Blank is a documentarian of folk cultures who transforms anthropology into art." And Vincent Canby, also in the Times,declared that Blank "is a master of movies about the American idiom...one of our most original filmmakers."