It’s the day before the unveiling and the National Veterans Art Museum shared a few photos from their Facebook album “War Made A New Me” – A Work in Progress.

The detail and shadow work makes Dominic's art pop off the wall.

In order to reach the top of the ten-foot-high walls, Dominic works from a ladder.

The detail is layered on top of the acrylic paint background with paint pens.

Here's a good example of how Dominic adds dimensionality to his work.

Where Soldiers Come From
Tuesday, May 29 2012, 6:30pm
Come to a screening of Where Soldiers Come From – the first film to kick off the Chandler Public Library’s summer documentary series. For more information, call (480) 782-2797.

Haverhill, MA

The City Dark
Wednesday, May 30 2012, 3:30pm
Teens: Head to the Haverhill Public Library for a sneak-preview screening of The City Dark. Enjoy popcorn and soda and discuss the impact of light and light pollution on our local community.

Portland, ME

Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
Wednesday, May 30 2012, 5:30pm
Join the Portland Public Library as they continue their Summer Documentary Film Series with Granito: How to Nail a Dictator. For more information, call 207-871-1700.

Newark, NJ

Revolution ’67
Saturday, June 02 2012, 1:00pm
Come to a screening and discussion of Revolution ’67 at the Monroe Township Public Library. This event is part of the library’s “Newark Series.” Filmmakers Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno & Jerome Bongiorno will be present for a Q&A. To find out more, call 732-521-5000.

Today, the National Veterans Art Museum shares a few photos from their Facebook album “War Made A New Me” – A Work in Progress

The paint pens are in three different widths, so Dominic can play with density and shadow, helping create the illusion of dimensionality.

Dominic works from sketches of the figures in the mural, taping them to the wall.

The soldier's mother.

Dominic has set up an area with painting supplies and his muse: music.

Day 2.

Got to the museum at 1015am and got right into it. I haven’t really planned the mural at all. My little brother insists that my best work comes when I just wing it so thats the way I have approached this project. Today I sketched and put up 2 subjects on the normal flag. A soldier figure holding a gun with a flower coming out of it and a woman/mother/girlfriend/ex-girlfriend, however you may interpret it. The soldier figure is to represent that even though I was a soldier I still had peaceful and compassionate thoughts throughout my military career and deployment. The flower out of the gun has become an image of peace during hardship. The woman figure is the honor and pride the opposite side must feel when going to war. Even though we went off to war, there must be a certain level of pride woman and family must feel when they wait at home.

The two figures went up really fast, I am pushing to get figures up on the black side flag by the end of the day 2morrow. That will leave me extra time to fill in spots with more graffiti style work and to help it flow a little better. It has been really exciting to work every day.

The journey through the city on the way to the museum is uplifting. I am generally in high spirits and think about home a lot while I am working. Wondering what people are doing. Ready to start again in the morning.

Dom.

Day 1: Chicago

Today I started on the Mural at the NVAM. Chicago has turned into a state of madness with the NATO meeting, so traveling to and from where I am staying has been interesting.

The Wall itself is roughly 25-30 ft long on both sides and its height varies from 8 to 10 feet. The hallway in between the 2 walls is about 6-7ft. I decided to use both sides of the wall, using 2 different American Flags. Although there will be many more layers to go upon them, this is my base. I used the normal coloring for the flag on the left, replacing its stars with peace signs. This flag will represent the honor I felt helping people during war, and not killing them. I believed that spending time with younger people and trying to be as human as possible with them would leave an impression much stronger than fighting would. It also represents freedom and peace, in general.

The flags opposite will be the black flag on the right. This flag will represent the horrors a war will do to a person and their families. I replaced its colors with solid black and its stars with question marks. I believe the mirror effect of the 2 flags will give the piece a lot of emotion, attitude, and sadness as the difference between the 2 is not that much.

This first day has been very emotional. The venue of a piece can alter your way of thinking alot. I am surrounded by works of Art mostly created through war and military, and they are both dark subjects. The music I have been listening to is very upbeat, and my style has become very emotional and out of control, which is great for the way the flags have turned out. 2morrow i start the figures that will fit in on each side, and hopefully start their outlines by late 2morrow.

Excited.
Dom

I drew this picture at the AMH conference this week. I attended the Conference for a screening of WSCF, but also attended Warrior Writers/Combat Paper Project as well. I went through all the steps from cutting down your military to pulling sheets out of the then beaten down material. While going through the steps and actually making the paper, the group (mostly Veterans of a service branch, not all war veterans, however) did writing exercises that would then be transferred to the paper we made later on.

I created the drawing while mostly thinking of the effects of PTSD on the brain and body. It was done on paper created out of a uniform that was overseas. It was a very emotional and powerful week. I met a lot of great people. I hope to stay in contact with Warrior Writers and the Combat Paper Project in the future as they are both very powerful tools in the healing process.

Please join us for a forum about funding and broadcast opportunities for independents.

We will answer questions about how POV and ITVS work together to champion independently produced programming on public television, with a focus on our award-winning series POV and Independent Lens.

Joining the conversation will be Donald Thoms, PBS Vice President of Programming, who oversees arts and independent film programming.

Navigating Funding and Broadcast Opportunities in Public Television
Thursday May 31, 2012
6:30 PM – 8:30 PM, followed by a reception

Galapagos Art Space
16 Main Street in Dumbo | Brooklyn, NY 11201

RSVP by May 25 to rsvpny@itvs.org

1964 by Natsko Seki. Start the slideshow.

Every seven years since 1964, director Michael Apted has returned to document children from varying economic and social backgrounds in Up series. The children are now in their 50s, and the latest entry in the series, 56 Up, premieres this month in the UK.

For the POV broadcast of 49 Up, we asked seven artists to create a visual representation of the politics and culture at the time of each installment.

Start the slideshow of Up-inspired art »

My Reincarnation will premiere on POV June 21st

Union City, CA

In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee
Saturday, May 19 2012, 1:00pm
Join African Cradle for a free screening of In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee at James Logan High School’s Little Theater. The screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem. To find our more, call 650-461-9192.

Iowa City, IA

My Reincarnation
Wednesday, May 23 2012, 1:30pm
Join Uptown Bill’s Coffee House and Community Center for a screening and discussion of My Reincarnation. For more information, call (605) 229-8327.

Portland, ME

My Reincarnation
Wednesday, May 23 2012, 5:30pm
Join the Portland Public Library as they continue their Summer Documentary Film Series with My Reincarnation. For more information, call 207-871-1700.

Chicago, ILL

Where Soldiers Come From
Wednesday, May 23 2012, 5:30pm
In honor of Memorial Day 2012, the National Veterans Art Museum will host a free screening of Where Soldiers Come From and unveil a mural painted by Dominic Fredianelli, featured in the film. Admission is free all day and the film starts at 1 p.m., with light refreshments served from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. Fredianelli will be in attendance for a panel discussion following the screening. For more information, call (312) 326-0270.

For a full listing of upcoming screenings, visit our local events calendar. Don’t see your city on the map? Interested in seeing a POV documentary near you? It’s easy! Join our Community Network. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @POVengage for the most up-to-date news from Community Engagement and Education!

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Has any other university produced more great doc-destined undergrads?

In honor of the 20th anniversary of my graduation from Brown University, which is being celebrated this weekend in Providence, Rhode Island, I want to throw down the gauntlet and ask: Has any other university produced more great doc-destined undergrads?

This notion has struck me many times during my years of covering documentary film, especially because there were three sterling examples right in my face: Liz Garbus, Rory Kennedy and Margaret Brown, all of whom attended Brown while I was there. Brown’s Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt and The Order of Myths have proven her to be one of the few directors able to achieve a perfect balance of style and substance. Garbus and Kennedy, who formed their Moxie Firecracker Films production company and have been closely associated with HBO, have cranked out an impressive list of socially relevant (and Oscar-worthy) films. And Garbus took a great leap forward, cinematically, with 2011′s Bobby Fischer Against the World, an assured film about the nutty chess champ.

What is it about this school that has led to nonfiction greatness? I think it starts with the students, many of whom are pop culture savants who want to make a difference in the world. And Brown has a unique cauldron of privilege, pedigree, people moved by social justice and a stellar Modern Culture & Media department, that together make Brown a breeding ground for some of the best documentary filmmakers working today.

The most notable ones predate me. Ross McElwee, who graduated in 1971, is one of the elder statesmen of the form, and his Sherman’s March is one of the best docs ever made. Also on the A-list is Davis Guggenheim, who shook the world with his An Inconvenient Truth. There are many others. Amir Bar-Lev (the hot doc director of The Tillman Story whom I first met when he was crashing parties), Ellen Kuras (who usually works in fiction features but took 20 years to direct the incredible doc The Betrayal), Oren Jacoby (Constantine’s Sword), Lynn True (Summer Pasture, Lumo), Kenneth A. Carlson (Go Tigers!), Stefan Forbes (Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story) and Philip (son of Albert) Maysles. And there are certainly more.

Of course, I am well aware that many of the graduates of other schools, such as Harvard and Yale, reach for loftier heights, and therefore become the subjects of documentaries. (Hello, Al Gore!) But I have to say my normally slumbering alumnae spirit (and guilt over not attending Campus Dance this weekend) is stirred when I consider all of this great nonfiction output.

Can any other school claim such an impressive list of documentary filmmakers? Hampshire College is a contender, with Ken Burns (The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball), Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk) and Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture) on its roster. But Brown still has it beat. Anyone else?

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Documentary filmmakers Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher (October Country, Off Label)

“It’s this strange zone,” says documentary director Donal Mosher. “These are not organic friendships. You end up having deep, caring relationships with your subjects. But they are not natural.”

Mosher is referring to the relationships filmmakers have with their subjects. It’s familiar territory for documentary filmmakers, but it’s rarely discussed in public.

In effect, directors act to gain the favor of their subjects. You can see it on the screen when Michael Moore puts on his soft, bedside voice when speaking with a woman ravaged by the injustices of the health care system in Sicko.

What’s he doing? He’s playing a part, altering his persona to better relate to the subject, which produces a better interview for his film.

I recently considered this issue when I wrote a story for The New York Times about couples — brothers, married couples, friends — and how they navigate the terrain of being filmmakers while maintaining a personal relationship. I noticed that one of the great assets of being part of a directing team is that subjects come to trust different people differently, and so being two filmmakers ups the chance of gaining confidences.

But to what degree does a documentary filmmaker construct whom he or she is to make the best film possible?

“You want people to know who you are,” Mosher continues. “But sometimes it’s not useful or appropriate to bring certain things up.”

Mosher co-directs with his working partner Michael Palmieri. They are a skilled doc team whose October Country, which focuses on Mosher’s own dysfunctional family, won a Cinema Eye Honors award for best debut documentary in 2010. Their second film, Off Label, is an unusual dissection of the health care crisis. It’s as damning of the health care system as Moore’s Sicko — if not more so — because it’s impressionistic, lyrical and more focused on story and character than it is on bombast or message. (Off Label premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival and is currently on the festival circuit.)

These guys, as it turns out, have given a lot of thought to how directors adapt to their subjects. “Documentary filmmakers are engaged, in a way, in performance in conjunction with their subjects,” Palmieri says. “And the good subjects are also aware of the performative aspect that they are a part of.”

We all put on different personas for different people, so it only makes sense that the same happens when a filmmaker is thrusting him or herself into a subject’s life, and hoping to win trust. In the classic Grey Gardens, Little Edie had a thing for David Maysles, and after winning her over, she “performed” very well for him.

In their case, Mosher says Palmieri is particularly good at engaging subjects and making them feel comfortable. (For his part, Mosher says he’s pretty good at winning over grandmothers.)

This subject takes a whole new level of complexity when the subjects make assumptions about the filmmakers, such as, for example, that they’re straight. Which Mosher and Palmieri are not.

“When you are gay, you are often in performative context to match the situation,” Palmieri says. “That’s where things get interesting.”

When working in the field, Palmieri and Mosher don’t wear their sexuality on their sleeves, any more or less than a hetero filmmaker would. “But when we are in the middle of Iowa,” Palmieri notes, “being gay doesn’t figure well.”

Of the Off Label subjects, some knew the filmmakers were gay, and others didn’t. A war veteran subject, whom you might think would be thrown by their being gay, “didn’t give a s—,” Palmieri says. “And in the situations that they don’t know, it wasn’t that we were hiding it.”

What their subjects would find out is that Mosher and Palmieri were a couple, although not any more. “There is not a socially defined term for the relationship we’re in,” Palmieri says. “It’s platonic, but deeply loving. It began as a romantic relationship and now the creative side has blossomed.”

It seems Palmieri and Mosher would just as much prefer to not put a label on their relationship with each other, as with their subjects.

How would you, doc filmmakers out there, describe your relationship with your subjects? How much do you reveal of yourself?

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Rosanne Katon-Walden
Autism, The Musical (2007)

Of the many valiant mothers in this film about living with autism, the one who stands out for me is the one who is most flawed. Rosanne Katon-Walden is an outspoken, bold and deeply loving mother. Plus, she’s got charisma. The former Playboy Playmate has a healthy ego, and in one particularly cringe-worthy scene when she perceives her autistic son as being slighted, she gets pretty unhinged. She may be in the wrong, but that doesn’t stop us from seeing what a passionate, caring mother she is.

Jackie Libby
Bully (2012)

For any parent who has ever felt in over his or her head, Jackie Libby is a sterling example of a mom who copes with a terrible situation the best she can. Having a son, Alex, who is ruthlessly bullied, but not knowing about it, and a husband, who might not exactly be helping things, is a tragic, and probably pretty common, situation to be in. And as lost as she seems, Jackie calls it like it is when she gets talked down to by a school principal who is clearly failing to protect Alex.

Kimberly Williams-Paisley
Also, Gisele Bundchen, Cindy Crawford, Melissa Joan Hart, Alanis Morissette, Molly Ringwald & Christy Turlington-Burns
The Business of Being Born (2008)

What mothers go through to become mothers. Phew! Anyone who’s been in the presence of a woman giving birth knows that there is no greater feat. And this documentary breaks down how most American women are being subjected to a birthing industry that does not help matters much. This is a film with a capital A, that is: Agenda. It makes many salient points, and others that I question, but it’s must-viewing for every woman who plans to become a mom.

A Humpback Whale
Earth (2007)

The 4,000-mile migration that the featured humpback whale embarks on, to find warmer waters where her calf can prosper, is the probably the greatest documentation of a mother’s instinct ever depicted. The beautiful creature is jaw-dropppingly rendered by directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield.

Grey Gardens

Edith “Big Edie” Beale
Grey Gardens (1975)

Why does this film keep appearing in my different “Best Of” lists? Because it’s one of the greatest docs of all time, and it has so many exceptional facets, including Big Edie, a mom unlike any other. Passive aggressive, vain, pathetic, proud, deranged and sweet, Big Edie is one of the sickest moms to ever grace a screen. Her relationship with her daughter is twisted, but it’s so powerful, you cannot help but be in awe of her.

Mother Earth
An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

Yes, this is a documentary about the original mother, that is, Mother Earth. Davis Guggenheim’s groundbreaking film took the environmental movement a huge step forward toward the mainstream. And although it stars Al Gore’s maverick environmental work, the true star is that big, beautiful, blue, white and green globe.

LaLee Wallace
LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (2001)

LaLee, a mother of many, and grandmother of many, many more, grew up in backwoods Mississippi as poor as dirt, without a spit of education. She’s a marvel, a mother who represents so much — the legacy of slavery — and yet is also so down-to-earth and immediately real, as depicted by Albert Maysles, Susan Froemke and Deborah Dickson. LaLee is a resilient spirit, and more than anything, she’s a true American matriarch.

I imagine you have your own ideas of great moms in nonfiction films, and I invite you to recommend them in the comments section below. (For one, I haven’t seen Extraordinary Moms, which was executive produced by Julia Roberts.)

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Morgan Spurlock calls it "buying in," not "selling out."

When the subject of documentaries and selling a product comes up, you have to consider with whom you’re speaking. The discussion might kick off with wariness about the dangers. Many documentary filmmakers are people with social justice backgrounds who are instinctively mistrustful of corporate interests using their medium to sell stuff.

This discussion has taken some new turns lately, what with the documentization (neologism alert!) of advertising and, well, television and film in general. So much of what we see, from car ads to The Bourne Identity to The Office, is made to look like it’s nonfiction filmmaking. It’s a way of making things seem more real, more visceral. And it means that line between branding and documentary filmmaking has grown ever thinner.

Morgan Spurlock took this bull by the horns and rode it all the way to the bank. Last year, he made POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a wink-wink-nudge-nudge critique of the commercialization of television and film, in a documentary that was lucratively (but ironically!) branded. Spurlock then doubled down by starting the Launch PAD initiative that sought to match brandmakers with filmmakers so both sides could reap the rewards of the partnership. The former get access to potential buyers and the latter get cold, hard cash.

Morgan Spurlock’s self-referential 2011 documentary POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold called attention to product placement and advertising in films.

And this leads us to that different set of people with whom we might have this conversation. Forget the issues of principles or politics, and let’s talk about one’s own livelihood. Many documentary directors aren’t exactly flush with cash, and they’d like to make a living doing what they do, so they work on commercials. (Yes, I call them commercials, even though many of the self-interested parties would prefer other terms, such as “documentaries,” “films,” “branded content,” “branded partnerships” and the like.)

You can’t spit without hitting a documentary director who hasn’t made some sort of commercial. And most do it without blinking an eye, because they aren’t conflicted about working for corporate interests. After all, they’re not necessarily making documentaries for social justice, but out of a passion to create. (Of course, the two are not exclusive, but permit me to go on.) I’ll just mention two of my favorite doc directors, who have made some good money directing commercials: Brett Morgen, who made The Kid Stays in the Picture, has made a lot of ads, for brands including Kleenex and Crocs, and Jessica Yu, director of In the Realms of the Unreal, made those “Swap Your Ride” ads for Ford.

There’s even an agency, Nonfiction, that identifies itself as representing nonfiction filmmakers who can deliver that authentic touch so special for branding content. Nonfiction represents such doc luminaries as Albert Maysles (Salesman), Steve James (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters) and Barbara Kopple (Harlan County U.S.A.), along with Yu.

Of course, Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) is at the top of the list of the most successful doc directors who’ve made commercials.

Errol Morris directed a line of commercials for Apple’s “switch” campaign, including this cult hit.

Morris must have pulled in millions of dollars for his commercial work over the past decade, including the subtle and substantive promotion of the worst beer on the planet. I poke fun at Morris, but I do so solely in jest, as I really have no judgment to pass over any of these filmmakers. (Except for Nick Broomfield — He went a little too far when he pimped his own process in order to sell Volkswagen.) These folks have to make money, and bless them for finding a way while still applying their craft.

I bring all this up because UnionDocs, the meeting space and place to engage deep ideas about documentary film in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is hosting a discussion this Saturday entitled “Branded Documentary: Work and Play.”

I’ll be moderating the discussion. Now, I can’t promise that the above thoughts will be the focus of the discussion, as there will be presentations by some amazing creative types, including Mssng Peces, Lost & Found films and Scott Thrift, each of whom have produced some pretty cool doc-type content on the web — and sometimes they’ve done it for money, working for interests like Levi’s, Chanel and Lexus.

So, come on down, y’all, talk some of this through with these smart dudes who are on the front lines. As for me, maybe I’ll chime in once in a while, but I’ll be absorbing the thoughtful thoughts while sipping margaritas, perhaps (Hey, it’s Cinco de Mayo!), on the side.

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Oscar sleeping with his surrogate father, Freddy.

The Hunger Games film to see this past weekend was not, as it turns out, called Hunger Games. It was the latest Disneynature documentary, Chimpanzee.

The film, which opened on Friday, reminded me of that big box-office dystopian smash about youth fighting to the death because it had many similar elements: lush cinematography, bands of cute characters struggling to survive, minimal and inconsequential dialogue, and lots of hiding in trees. But where Chimpanzee blows Hunger Games away is in its Hominidae characters, demonstrating more signs of humanity and identifiable emotion than any of the bubblegum acting did in that other film.

Despite my enthusiasm to see Chimpanzee — I wanted to be a nature photographer as a child thanks to watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the show that preceded The Wonderful World of Disney — I was wary of the Disneyfication of nature. And, indeed, the film, narrated by Tim Allen, does anthropomorphize its subjects, with several instances of Allen talking directly to the lead of the film, a young chimp named Oscar. We follow Oscar through his early life with his mom, his maturation, his loss of his mom (hey, it’s Disney film, after all), and his surprising adoption by another chimp.

Directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, who co-directed the first Disneynature release, Earth, in 2007, have a track record for capturing nature at its fullest. In Chimpanzee, I felt like I could touch the fur in the close-ups of the chimps in the trees. And the wide shots, which take us above and through the jungle canopy, are astounding. But where they’ve taken a great leap forward is in finding a way to tell a strong narrative tale, without being offensive or too reductive.

I’m not sure where it is exactly that they tweak reality to fit it into Oscar’s narrative, but anyone who’s aware of the subtle manipulations most documentary directors commit during the making of a film — editing events as if they happened sequentially even if they didn’t, using a shot of one thing (a man aimlessly looking out a window) and suggesting he’s doing something else (looking at a specific person through the window) — should give them some slack. My sensitivity meter was never tipped.

And, sure, perhaps a more serious nature film could have been made here. And Chimpanzee does feel a bit slight, but I was impressed that the film kept to Oscar’s story. It rarely wanders. And, anyway, the purpose of a film like Chimpanzee, in addition to making money, is to entertain a wide audience, which means children. Nothing wrong with that.

As for the older folks, I’d note the brilliant use of the natural world’s own special effects — phosphorescence of jungle fungi and the physics of rain drops, as captured by time-lapse photography — that are used to help animate Oscar’s tale. It’s brilliantly done, and lyrically recalls that Disney masterpiece of a mind trip, Fantasia.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

An outdoor advertisement for the Investigation Discovery show "Fatal Encounters"

It’s shows like “Fatal Encounters,” which premiered this month on Monday nights on Investigation Discovery, that give nonfiction filmmakers a bad name. The ever-lowering standards of reality TV keep plummeting, and “Fatal Encounters” is probably not the worst of them. But their new advertising campaign, which has posters plastered around New York City, caught my attention for its particularly unique style of brutality and ugliness.

“If I hadn’t opened that door I might be alive today” are the words that adorn the grim ad, which shows a scared woman behind an ajar door with a chain lock. What is this poster telling us to feel? A sincere empathy for that woman? Or a thrill, the sort of rubber-necking joy at watching just how someone died on the side of the road?

Imagine the genius creative behind the poster, who pitched the idea to his boss: “I promise you, every person who sees this image will be thinking, ‘Wow, I wonder how she got? I wonder if she did something stupid?’ And: ‘Gee, I’m glad it was her and not me!’”

They are selling the show as “true stories of decisions turned deadly.” I took it upon myself to watch last night’s episode so that I can have an informed response. Let me tell you, I took one for the team here. “Fatal Encounters” is the media-age version of digging up someone’s grave and gaping at the corpse.

The episode I watched tells of Mark Fisher, a college student from New Jersey, who, in 2003, went to Manhattan to party a little. He gets drunk, hangs out with a girl and ends up at a private party in Brooklyn, where he tangles with some thugs whom he doesn’t realize are thugs until it’s too late. They eventually shoot him in the back.

Using dramatic re-creations, which is to say, bad actors in bad lighting, the episode follows Fisher’s night as a countdown clock is displayed, showing how much time Fisher has left in his life. Fisher’s story is narrated by a woman with a solemn voice and through interviews with prosecutors and journalists.

We are repeatedly fed lines like, “He has no idea that the night will end in catastrophe,” and that he has “no sense of the peril he will face in five hours.” The narrator is mostly authoritative and sympathetic, but at one point she can’t help herself with a lightly veiled sneer. When Fisher takes a pill given to him by a stranger, she says, “Whatever the reason, he takes it.”

The pacing of the show is almost as painful as the premise. We are repeatedly told that an awful thing is going to happen before every commercial break, and then after each break, we are reminded of what an nice, innocent kid Fisher is. I almost threw my remote when a cute title card floated onto the bottom of the screen — Hey #ID addict! You know you’re guilty — as I watched this kid inch closer to death.

Sure, there may be something redeeming here. We might learn lessons about the folly of youth, or the incredible interlocking vicissitudes of life. And maybe TV doesn’t need to raise us up or teach us things. Some shows can be just about entertainment. But not at the expense of the victim of a violent crime.

The cheap aestheticization of Fisher’s death allows or, really, suggests that we not feel this person is a real person. Combine that with the teasing countdown, and you can’t help but actually look forward to seeing him killed. This is what the show wants us to feel — to look forward to his misfortune. And when he dies, the screen shows 00:00:00 left on the clock. I have to wonder if, for every episode, the producers reach out to the victims’ families and ask if they wouldn’t mind having their loved ones’ lives turned into a game show.

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Look at it this way — Crises tend to have a primary medium of expression. Social media was a driving information source for the Arab Spring. The first Iraq War was sometimes called “The CNN War.” The AIDS epidemic found voice in ACT UP, the activists who marched, plastered walls, leafleted and shouted from the roof tops.

In fact, if AIDS was just breaking out in the United States now, I bet there’d be a wealth of documentaries coming out every year on the subject, imploring us to pay attention and do something about it. But at the epidemic’s peak, in the 1980s, documentary filmmaking tools of distribution and production were relatively limited.

An image from Refrigerator Mothers (POV 2002). From the 1950’s through the 1970’s the medical establishment mistakenly believed it had found the root cause of autism: poor mothering.

I’d contend that the current autism crisis, and I don’t think I’m overstating that here, could be the first national emergency that gets the full documentary treatment. And we should be watching them. The number of documentaries about autism keeps increasing, unfortunately, for good reason. The number of children diagnosed with autism is going through the roof.

In the early 1980s, about 1 out of 10,000 children was diagnosed with autism. Today, that number has skyrocketed to about 1 in 100, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sure, perhaps you could explain away the spike as a new diagnostic approach by doctors, but that doesn’t dismiss the fact that it’s a big number.

Autism covers a range of neurological conditions that are often associated with a person having difficulty connecting and communicating with others, withdrawal and repetitive movement. The cause of autism is a very sensitive issue, with the medical community generally saying it doesn’t know the source, and a very vocal minority of parents who are saying it’s because of vaccines. There appears to be a genetic root, in fact. There was a study released just last week that verifies this, and there could be environmental causes — increased use of antibiotics or mercury — but it’s still a tragic mystery, in much the same way AIDS was in the 1980s.

This recent scientific finding could be a real game changer. Either way, it’s all happening right now, and so we “neurotypicals,” the term sometimes used by people affected by autism to refer to the rest of us, should be more aware.

April is Autism Awareness month, and that’s what prompted me to face this issue. Despite the number of autism docs that come out each year, I hadn’t seen a one, unless you count POV’s Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go, a documentary about a British school for emotionally disturbed children. Why had I sidestepped the others?

I didn’t think that they were really meant for me. I figured these were niche docs that catered to families affected by autism.

I didn’t want my heart to be broken by something I couldn’t help.

I didn’t want to be put in the unseemly position of watching these children in a voyeuristic fashion.

There’s so much mystery and contention about the cause of autism, I didn’t want to be subjected to documentaries with strident agendas.

In other words, I shut down. If my reaction is at all common, and I think it is, then the symptoms of autism, strangely, coincide with the way the neurotypical public responds to documentaries about autism.

I finally broke through this barrier recently by watching a report by Robert MacNeil, from PBS NewsHour. MacNeil has a grandson who has autism, and the veteran reporter says that this is the first time he’s ever done a story on his own personal life in his 50-year career. I found the segment riveting because MacNeil is a compelling guide to this world.

I have admittedly blind faith in the integrity of MacNeil, and to see him struggling with connecting to his grandson is poignant. And then to watch this kid, Nick, and his mother, Alison, struggling with the symptoms of autism is indeed heartbreaking. But it was also eye opening.

I then watched Autism: The Musical, a 2007 documentary about a teacher and parent of an autistic son, who creates a theater program in Los Angeles for autistic kids. The narrative of the film tells the story of the musical production that the kids put together, but that’s really just the framework to introduce us to several children and their families. The film is a touching depiction of these sweet, endearing children and their complicated parents, who are flawed yet valiant heroes. The moms are especially frank, and I almost felt embarrassed at how deeply the film pries into their lives.

Now, if I encounter someone affected by autism (so far, I only know a couple people peripherally), I will be more sensitive and aware of what they are going through. And knowledge is power, as they say. And only through understanding can we practice true compassion.

But I’ll get off my soapbox and instead leave you with a list of documentaries, many of which you can watch online for free, about autism. Although I can highly recommend Autism: The Musical, I can’t speak to the quality of the following films. I also warn viewers that some of these appear to be of a homespun quality, and could have agendas (as I mention above). If you know more about autism than I do, I welcome your input about these films. Let us know what you think are the best — and why.

A Mother’s Courage: Talking Back to Autism (2009)
As the title suggests, this is the story, narrated by actor Kate Winslet, of a mother of an autistic son, who wrestles with his pessimistic prognosis.

Normal People Scare Me (2006)
This is a collection of first-person accounts by people with autism. It was co-directed by Taylor Cross, a young filmmaker with high functioning autism.

Wretches and Jabberers (2011)
Two men with autism go on a journey to help change the way people think about their disability.

Autism Every Day (2006)
This film, sponsored by the organization Autism Speaks, is a portrayal of the mothers of autistic children. The stresses of parenting an autistic child are beyond what most “neurotypicals” can understand. But we can try.

Refrigerator Mothers (2003)
Refrigerator Mothers, which aired on POV, gets its name from the misdiagnosis of mothers of autistic kids, blaming them for being detached, and cold, parents. Update: Watch the film at snagfilms.com.

Her Name is Sabine (2007)
Sandrine Bonnaire, the fantastic French actor, tells the story of her autistic sister, through home videos and new footage that depicts a once-bright child turned miserable through her condition and questionable treatment.

Loving Lampposts (2010)
Filmmaker Todd Drezner, whose son is autistic, takes on some of the bigger issues surrounding the diagnosis, including the controversial “treatments.” You can watch the film at snagfilms.com.

George (1998)
Another filmmaker, Henry Corra, made this documentary about his son who has high-functioning autism. Corra asks the question about what is normal in a doc that was way ahead of its time.

Beautiful Son (2007)
This documentary confronts the issue of treatment for autism as it portrays a couple’s struggle with their son’s autism, and their frustrations with the medical community.

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Three. One to hold the camera, one to record the sound, and one to put it back in, in post.

OK, so maybe documentary bloggers deserve the reputation that we can’t tell a good joke. But when it comes to being entertaining, documentary filmmakers get a bum rap. For the mainstream, there’s still a notion that documentaries are the spinach of the film world, even after an amazing string of aesthetically assured narrative tales that include — and this is a very shortened list – Project Nim, Fahrenheit 9/11, Hoop Dreams, The September Issue, Capturing the Friedmans, Crumb, Undefeated and on and on and on.

I bring this up because I was recently asked to speak at the University of Missouri’s Based on a True Story conference for a panel on the subject of “Documentary Entertainment and its Audience.” I was joined by Los Angeles Times critic Betsy Sharkey and producer Andrea Meditch (Buck, Grizzly Man, Man on Wire and other very entertaining docs). The conference preceded the True/False documentary festival, and I can’t speak more highly of both events. This was a doclover’s paradise, and I have Mizzou professor Brad Prager to thank for bringing me there.

A transcript of my talk is below (with light edits). My biggest regret is not tightening it — and not sprinkling in more jokes. In other words, in not making it more entertaining! I should have learned from the doc filmmakers I adore…

Was Albert Maysles right in saying 'entertainment' is better defined as 'engagement' than 'diversion'?

I’m going to start with a definition of entertainment, which comes from Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens, Salesman): “If you look up the word ‘entertainment’ in the dictionary, it’s first defined as ‘diversion.’ But the second definition is ‘engagement.’ And the second one, I think, is the best one.”

I have a lot of respect for Albert Maysles, but I think he’s only half right on this one. Because I think we live in an age where both definitions are correct. Documentary audiences are sophisticated enough to hold two seemingly contradictory reactions to a film at he same time — being diverted and being engaged — and are able to balance both at the same time. And that’s why I think documentaries are so exciting at this time because it’s a new, enhanced way to appreciate film.

When did this kick off? You could look back to Nanook of the North. Or you could go back to Errol Morris’s Thin Blue Line coming out in 1988 and Michael Moore’s Roger & Me a year later, but what I want to focus on started happening about 10 years ago, with films such as Spellbound, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Control Room, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Winged Migration.

At that time, we started seeing documentaries that were depicting truth in an enhanced, or stylized, way. What I think was going on was that the human eye was changing. The way people could see reality, as it is mediated on a screen, was transforming in a way that was fantastic. And it was entertaining and truthful at the same time.

There is this term, ‘truthiness,’ which was coined by Stephen Colbert — People are now getting their news from many sources, but two primary ones are Fox and Comedy Central, two producers of entertainment from which people are getting their news.

Producer Fisher Stevens helped turn what would have been an advocacy documentary about mercury accumulation into an Oscar-winning "eco-Oceans 11."

At the same time that this is happening, feature films were changing. Look at a film like The Bourne Identity, which came out in 2002. It had a very real, visceral feel to it. Here’s a big blockbuster that had a gritty, almost cinéma vérité feel to it.

And so, yes, at the same time that fiction features started to look like documentaries, documentaries were starting to look like fiction features. And a great example is The Cove. It’s about dolphin slaughter. It had been cut and it was pretty much ready to go and it was a pretty dry film about mercury poisoning. Along came a producer a lot like Andrea (Meditch, who had just walked the audience through a “doc whispering” of the recent Buck). In this case, it was Fisher Stevens, who, along with other producers and an editor, totally reworked that film to make what Stevens called an “eco-Ocean’s 11.”

For me, that film was incredibly vivid and moving, and I’ll never forget those images of the dolphin slaughter. And, at the same time, it was very entertaining.

The best way for me to illustrate this transformation and integration of documentaries as a form of entertainment is to look at three films, each with differing degrees of entertainment value and social significance, but all about the same subject: Danny Boyle and co-director Loveleen Tandan’s Slumdog Millionaire, Louis Malle’s Calcutta and Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski’s Born into Brothels.

Let’s start with Slumdog Millionaire. This fiction film was a huge box-office hit in 2008, and the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture. The film is, in my opinion, quite good. Boyle has a very kinetic filmmaking style, and he depicts the slums of Mumbai with dizzying force, beautiful handheld digital camera work, fast-paced editing, and lively music.

The acting, some of it by kids from the slums themselves, is also good. The story, basically a romance between a boy and girl, is good enough, but it’s a bit saccharine for my taste. And I really hate the basic structure of the film — It’s told while the main character is in Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It just feels too pat and Hollywood for my taste. Still, it’s immensely entertaining, and we are exposed to the grim reality of life in India, of the power of human spirit, and the power of love.

Second, there’s Louis Malle’s Calcutta, a 1969 documentary that is little more than the raw footage of the everyday lives of the poor people of Calcutta. Malle had made a multi-part series for the BBC, but he cut his material together to make this theatrically-released film. I’d imagine if you were seeing these images for the first time — lepers and slums and a cremation — as most people were back then, it could be pretty riveting. But it’s far from thrilling from my current-day perspective. Although Louis Malle narrates some moments in the film, most of the images float by without context or meaning. And since his narration is in French, it didn’t have an impact on me anyway. In other words, it feels sort of voyeuristic. And although the images resonate, they didn’t really stay with me.

And, last, there’s Born into Brothels. It’s a hybrid of the two previous films. Here’s a documentary that told the story of the children who are raised in the brothel slums of Calcutta. Briski had gone into the slums to photograph the people there, and became close with the children. She and Kauffman shot a film that tells the story of these kids, and Briski’s attempt to help them avoid their terrible fate. It’s very sentimental, but it’s also very real — You get to know these kids and care for them. But it’s important to remember that it isn’t at all a form of direct cinema — It’s very much about the filmmakers impact on them, especially Briski’s. It is about the relationship between the filmmakers and the subjects. You see this when the filmmakers take the kids to the ocean, something they would never have done on their own. Here’s the clip:

I think someone who is suspicious of the notion of documentaries as a form of entertainment might respond to this by saying that the filmmakers created this moment for plot points, and to give audiences a lift and then to bring them down. And, although it’s true that it’s totally created by the filmmakers, to me, that’s not the case. This is an enhanced truth. This sequence shows that these children are capable of joy, and that they deserve to feel that joy. We see that there. And then we see what deplorable conditions they live in, so we see how that joy is taken away from them.

To me, this is an example of highly evolved filmmaking. When documentarians can use the technology and skills that we normally associate with artists — with the ability to craft narratives and shoot cinematically compelling images — and use those skills in a real-life setting to tell important, real-life stories, then we’ve entered a highly evolved realm. And that’s where we’re at with docs these days, with filmmakers creating nonfiction works that are entertaining because they are both diverting and engaging.

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I was recently checking out the new social media site Pinterest when I came upon this image:

 
Striking, isn’t it? I’ve been following the tragic killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a man who says he shot him in self defense, like most people. I’ve read some articles in The New York Times and I’ve read some coverage by some websites. The two pictures displayed at the top of the above graphic were immediately familiar to me. The bottom ones were not.

This graphic raises a lot of interesting questions about the power of the image, something that every documentary filmmaker is intimately familiar with.

Let’s start with the obvious: We see what we want to see. Having read details of the night, it’s easy to believe that Zimmerman was overzealous, at least, or a racist vigilante, at worst. And whatever Martin did, he didn’t deserve to die. Those two top pictures confirm that narrative.

But the bottom two pictures demand that we question those beliefs. In it, Zimmerman, who the Orlando Sentinel reports as being a well-liked loan underwriter, sure looks like a nice guy, while Martin looks like a punk who’s looking to provoke.

So these two bottom photos call things into question, but are they any more or less valid to sway my beliefs than the top two images? No, certainly not. What someone looks like in a photo can’t be used as evidence when determining what his or her actions might be in an extreme situation. That’s obvious. But it’s also naïve to suggest that such pictures don’t influence our feelings about a person’s ability to commit a crime.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has been great at tackling these issues. He writes about them frequently for The New York Times, which lead to a 2011 book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, about truth in documentary photography, and his 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line, which employed stylized reenactments persuasively, helped free a wrongly convicted man. I wish he’d have a go at this one!

But the way I stumbled onto this image continues to nag at me. Where did this graphic, which was spread by Pinterest and no doubt other social networks, come from? And would I be able to confirm its veracity?

I’m going to have to be the hater here. Everyone’s raving about Pinterest, with its bulletin board aesthetic and funky, po-po-mo mis-en-scene. Look, there’s Dave Eggers floating in the ether next to a quote from Hunger Games! Look, there’s a Van Halen album cover idling next to a copy of Little Women. And, yes, look at this compelling image of Zimmerman and Martin. Except that, as it turns out, after doing some digging, I came upon the truth that the bottom image isn’t the Trayvon Martin who was killed by Zimmerman. It’s an image that the blog Street Wise Pundit alleges a white-supremacist group began circulating.

Several outlets have since revealed this sham, and the woman who posted the image on her Pinterest board has since removed it. But that doesn’t mean that hundreds, thousands or millions of people didn’t already see it there, and that they didn’t get duped. A still image can be stunning and powerful. And social media sites can provide delightful ways to get information. But, from my very first introduction to Pinterest, I am seeing how dangerous it can be. Who curates this bulletin board? Who’s responsible for placing this hateful propaganda in a featured spot on Pinterest’s “Film, Music and Books” section? Was it some random algorithm? Or, what, it’s the people speaking?

There’s a long history of public witch-hunts, skewed by the narratives we hear and see in the tabloid media. Just think of Tawana Brawley or the Central Park Jogger. Now, we have platforms like Pinterest stirring the pot. They seem innocent and cool. All I can say is beware of the image.

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Last week, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign released a 17-minute documentary called The Road We’ve Traveled, directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for ‘Superman’), which makes the case that we all give President Obama another four years in the White House. In case it seems like an innovative, new way to speak to voters through the nonfiction form, I recommend you check out fantastic collection of similar documentaries on POV’s blog that date back to 1924, when Calvin Coolidge brought the house down by reading a speech on notecards.

So, yes, Guggenheim follows in a proud tradition. Well, maybe not so proud. Many of these documentaries are naïve and clumsy, dogmatic and jingoistic. Guggenheim’s is quite a different animal.

The Road We’ve Traveled has a clever beginning, starting with that lovely evening when Obama and his family walked out in front of a tearfully ecstatic crowd on the night of his election. It’s a moment of hope and dreams, which Guggenheim cuts down to size, reminding us that, in truth, the country was in an economic tailspin. The film proceeds to show how Obama started his presidency, having inherited a mess, and how he’s done what he can to bring it back to a better place, whether it’s through bailing out Detroit or killing Bin Laden.

The message is clear, but the approach is subtle. Guggenheim doesn’t deploy too many tricks to tug at our hearts or swell our pride. I’d say he, and the people behind Obama’s re-election, have a different read on the American public. Compared to the presidential docs of the past, there’s relatively little blind cheering going on. Nowhere is this more clear than in the title. Doesn’t The Road We’ve Traveled remind you of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”? And that American classic is all about looking back “with a sigh.” It’s melancholy about the decisions we have to make. When have you ever heard a standing president admit such ambivalence?

And yet, despite its impressively measured approach, I couldn’t help thinking about Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning Inside Job, when watching The Road We’ve Traveled. Ferguson’s incisive examination of the economic meltdown seriously questions Obama’s decision to double down by hiring the very same advisers (Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, etc.) who either committed or turned a blind eye to the economic malfeasance that got us into this mess.

It made me kind of sad to see how this President, whom I will vote for in the election, hasn’t fulfilled the promise of real change he made before he was elected. Not that Obama or Guggenheim would necessarily agree, but there’s certainly no room for such blatant self-criticism in a documentary created to win over a majority of American voters. Get ready for more stomach-turning promotion, even of the subtle variety, in the months to come.

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Filmmaker Liz Nord (Jericho’s Echo: Punk Rock In The Holy Land) is embracing transmedia as she produces a new documentary (and web project).

My current film, Battle for Jerusalem, started out as just that: a film.

It has since evolved, to my surprise, into a multimedia experience, with a website and a location-based mobile app. Oh, and a film!

But veering from conventional wisdom, the film will be the last piece to launch. So how did I decide on this topsy-turvy approach?

1. The Story

Originally, I thought Battle for Jerusalem would follow a group of artists and activists working to keep the city democratic in the face of growing religious fundamentalism. But, as with most documentaries, real life happened, and the story changed. As I began to delve into the happenings on the ground, I became intrigued with one character in particular, Rachel Azaria, a city councilwoman. Her story resonated with me the most and also showed the most potential for a traditional narrative: She’s fighting gender segregation policies, while her ultra-Orthodox opponents are trying to destroy her credibility and her career as she runs for re-election.

Even after discovering Azaria, I was reluctant to let go of the young Jerusalemites I’d already interviewed. They told fascinating stories that deepened my understanding of their city. But they simply had no place in a 90-minute story arc. What to do?

By embracing a transmedia approach and producing a series of short films for the web, I realized that I was giving viewers a new way to explore the story. (And it would also mean that I wouldn’t have to leave my beloved characters on the cutting room floor.)

2. The Storytelling Method

I was only able to begin to untangle Jerusalem’s complexities and land on a focus for the film by immersing myself in the city and speaking to many different people. It’s impossible to tell the story of a city as multifaceted as Jerusalem with just a film, but while a film can dive into one area or character and uniquely tug on emotional heartstrings, other media expressions allow an audience member to explore online as they might explore a city offline. I realized I could convey that experience with a virtual tour.

I’m now creating an online experience, where users can remix an interactive collage of Jerusalem’s diverse neighborhoods, people and interests to discover short films profiling dynamic political, social and cultural leaders who align with the user’s selections. The same short films can be viewed via the mobile app as “micro-stories” mapped to locations in the city.

Each of the elements informs the overall story, but each has its own function for the audience: The film tells the story by connecting to one pivotal character, the website allows visitors to discover the context and underlying issues, and the app is a tool for exploring the city of Jerusalem actually or virtually.

3. Timeline

The shift to a new protagonist, the city councilwoman, meant a shift in production. Azaria’s re-election campaign isn’t until fall 2013, so I have a year and a half before principal photography begins. But, I already have profiles of many colorful Jerusalem characters based on my original concept that I can use right now for the site and app.

I am still figuring out the most sensible release schedule for each piece and platform, but my overall attitude is, Why wait? It’s liberating to free the video and other storytelling elements from the confines of the feature film.

4. Audience Engagement

I’d already begun to build an audience for the project, through an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign, conversations over Twitter and Facebook, articles in traditional media such as The Jerusalem Post, and in-person speaking engagements. By creating multimedia elements, I am attempting to grow this core group and keep them engaged for the two or three years it will take to complete the film.

Each element can have a life of its own, but also help feed into the others, giving potential audience members many different pathways into the story.

5. Funding

If I had 10 bucks for every person or foundation that said to me, “We don’t fund films,” I’d have easily funded this film already. However, many of these same groups do have an interest in funding outreach or “new media” initiatives. I now have a new way of pitching my project to potential funders.

Next Steps

These factors are of concern to most filmmakers in one form or another, and I wonder whether more and more people might start taking a multimedia approach
to address them.

Since I decided go the web-first route, everything else has begun falling into place. I’ve created some pilot videos and have been invited to screen them and speak about the project at several events.

With this comes another realization: The “transmedia” experience isn’t just about technology. It includes live viewing experiences too. In my case, screenings of short films from the website can be organized topically around the interests of specific audiences.

The next step is to find design and technology partners to help flesh out my ideas, build the site and app, and make this vision a reality.

Liz Nord is a documentary filmmaker and multi-platform producer who has produced and shown work in Europe, the Middle East and throughout North America. Her first film, Jericho’s Echo: Punk Rock In The Holy Land, a critically acclaimed documentary about young Israeli musicians, screened at over 100 festivals and venues worldwide. In 2009, she shot a short documentary on-location in Haiti for musician Wyclef Jean’s NGO, Yele Haiti. In 2008, she ran MTV’s Emmy Award-winning election coverage.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs!

18 Days in Egypt Co-Creators Jigar Mehta and Yasmin Elayat

18 Days in Egypt, a crowdsourced documentary created by Jigar Mehta, a documentary filmmaker and journalist, and Yasmin Elayat, an interaction designer, aims to create a new form of documentary that enables participants to chronicle the Egyptian Revolution through their own voices by uploading their footage, photos, tweets, and Facebook status updates.

Both of the founders connected and experienced the Egyptian Revolution online, Mehta from a journalism point of view, and Elayat, from a personal point of view, having her family go through this major upheaval in her home country. They realized that the best way to tell the most authentic story was through the people who were actually there.

With the partnership of Emerge Technology, an Egyptian software company, the creators have created an interactive platform that allows an audience to explore the stories on their own and builds a community of wide-ranging narratives. I spoke with Mehta about the decisions, process, and adjustments made in launching a crowdsourced documentary.

What was the idea behind the project?

The idea behind 18 Days in Egypt is to really re-envision the documentary of the future and to get the audience closer to the storytellers. In our case, the storytellers are the people that actually lived these experiences and what we want to do is collect hundreds of moments through people’s social media they created in those moments and using the photos and the videos people took on their cell phones and cameras to be the start of their own storytelling experience.

We really believe that each individual media piece that someone created, whether in the 18 days or the time since, are the start of a much larger story. We want to encourage those stories to be told by people directly or through the assistance of our fellows.

How does the storytelling work?

A lot of the narratives are pooled by the fellows. You can see text cards to guide the user through the experience. It works in a lot of different ways. Some are more traditionally narrative-driven, taking you through a journey. Other people just upload the media they created, whether tweets or photos or videos, and they kind of just mash it together and say this was my experience on this day. Obviously some are more crafted. Those probably come from people who are more natural storytellers, whether they are journalists or filmmakers or our fellows. Others are just more for those who come to our site who want to tell a story and want to tell it quickly.

Can you talk about the decision to use fellows? Why did you start out with a small group of users?

The 18 Days in Egypt fellows are responsible for gathering media, conducting interviews and serving as a bridge between the online community and offline world.

We see this as a longitudinal project. It’s not something that we go, OK, we’re going to do it for two weeks, and then move on. This is a people’s history, and history takes a long time.

Two main ideas behind the fellows. One was to help set the tone of the project and for us, to really experiment and understand what are the stories that work best on the site, and having that close group that we can work immediately with. Second thing is that besides being able to rapidly prototype with them… this is essentially a new country, not in practice, but in mentality, and these young fellows that work with us, this is their country. They are going to be the next storytellers, journalists and filmmakers that will tell the story of Egypt five, 10, 30 years from now. For me, it was important to have a fellowship program that encourages them to take ownership of their story. One way to do that is to give them agency.

You mentioned in an article that the fellows act as a bridge. Do you think having a bridge between the online platform and the offline world (the Egyptians telling their stories) is a key element to producing a successful crowdsourced documentary?

Absolutely. I think every crowdsourced effort has to have that bridge. You need to have that core group of users who will either supply content to the site or be evangelists for the site, be out there promoting and saying why this thing is important. We only have so many hours of the day. There are so many things fighting for our attention. You really do need someone out there to be that bridge.

Some stories are in English, while others are in Arabic. Who’s your target audience and how is language factored into this?

The 18 Days in Egypt website features streams of crowdsourced stories.

We built this site both in English and Arabic. Right now, we do see the Egyptian population as more of the audience at this point. There’s this idea of the collective history, and the history still needs to be written. We’ll round out a larger experience for a more global audience, but to get there, I would like to see the best stories being told in both English and Arabic. We are at the equivalent of an “assembly edit” in a documentary. You need to come to the site having an understanding where the project is to understand what you’re looking at, and we get that. That’s why the audience right now is much more focused on the Egyptian audience, and not a global audience.

That said, the way the site looks now, it would never look this way again. It’s an evolving project. It changes every time. We learn from it. Recently, we released this feature where you can start following the different participants in the project. If you click on any of the bylines, you can actually pull up a user page, and it shows all the stories that person has been a part of. That’s a powerful way of saying there’s a thousands of stories, but I want to see the stories that Dina or Mustafa did or were a part of, in which, you can see their individual experience. These are some of the filters that we want to see more and more of.

What is the process of reaching out to people to tell these stories?

It’s a multi-faceted campaign. We definitely have a social media outreach. We try to be active on Facebook and Twitter, and where we can find the natural storytellers already. Secondly, we also have an on-the-ground effort through our fellows. We’re trying to become more robust with our partnership, working with organizations, whether they’re student groups at the American University in Cairo or NGOs who have been doing work throughout the revolution since it started helping to tell their stories along the site. The third partner we would like to work with are filmmakers who are there either having already done films or are doing films now related to the revolution.

How do users experience these stories?

The technology team has built a simple slideshow. We want users to have an instant story that they can share, but we realize that we need to build this site in a way that can always evolve – using the data to create new experiences. We haven’t actually settled on what the final experience will be yet of these stories, but we do know what we want is to have any audience coming into our site to feel empathy for the characters. We understand that the way most people who experienced the Egyptian revolution was that millions of people came out into the streets and overthrew a regime. The individual characters or participants in that movement has been lost, other than the few characters who have been amplified by the media. The millions of people have been boiled down to those few characters.

18daysinegypt.com solicits user-contributed stories with a beta tool called Groupstre.am.

We want to show that the millions of people that have experienced the revolution are real people, and they all have their own experiences. By showing you many many stories, and having the users decide who to keep following, we think that’s a strong way of building empathy with a character and getting that insight, the really interesting key moments on what was it like for them on their first day at Tahrir or their first time voting. Like how did Dina vote? What was her experience? Or Farah or Mohamed? More people are going on Facebook or Twitter to see the news that their friends are sharing. We all want to make a personal connection to every story.

What are some of the challenges of crowdsourcing a documentary?

Momentum, for sure. It’s easy to get people excited, but it’s hard to maintain the enthusiasm. We always have to think of new clever ways to get people back and getting more involved and sharing. Verification is a thing that comes up often. We try to use the community to verify stories as well and that’s a challenge.

We approach the project more as a startup rather than a documentary. The way I think about it is to get the first expressions out as soon as possible. The only way you can learn from [an] interactive [project] is to have the audience interact with the project.

Why do you see the project more as a startup than a documentary?

I always feel like it’s more dynamic and more of a living thing than a documentary in that sense. Having done documentaries, it’s much more of a smaller network. There’s the director, producer, shooter and editor. You go off and do it in your small group. You interact with your subjects but they’re not in the process. You make the film and then you debut the film. With this, the first thing we did was we made a statement saying, this is what we’re going to do — a crowdsourced documentary. We had to figure out what it is we’re actually going to do and then start testing it. What kind of stories are people submitting? People are not submitting clean, raw footage, but cut videos. How do we adjust the project to what people are contributing? The sooner you get it out, the sooner you learn how people are using it, and kind of adjust along the way.

What were the adjustments that you’ve had to make?

One was how to actually get people to include more context. We asked what day of the story it happened, who was with you, where did it happened. We created these extra graphs, data nodes. We can see where the spikes of the storytelling was happening. It’s happening on the anniversary, election day… We can do our own social graph of the entire network of the 18 days. It’s interesting to see those types of connections. It’s also important to not forget about film when you do an interactive project. I think it’s important to have debuts, to drive people to a site for a reason like how people go to a film festival to see a film for the first time or on an opening night.

In some cases, it’s important to have an authoritative voice in a project. In a project like ours, our voices are setting up the story world. This is the world that we want the story to be about. Everything else is authentic to the person who’s telling the story. So we don’t get involved in each of the story, but our involvement is much wider — that we want it to be a place where the Egyptian revolution is being told.

I think it’s important to know where the boundaries are as a filmmaker so the participant can give us their story, but we can edit and recut it. With projects like this, the audience being such a key factor in both the content and consumption, it’s really important to have a clear statement what the relationship is. It doesn’t have to be published, but just know internally what that relationship is because that drives a lot of the decisions along the way.

What are you guys looking for in the future?

We’re realizing the power of these tools in people’s hands at the front line of the story. It’s incredibly powerful. There’s such an incredible wealth of storytelling out there. We want to learn so much from this experience and start applying it to other stories. We’re really passionate about the Egyptian Revolution, but we know there are thousands and thousands of stories out there that want to be told. So our hope is that we really take the best of the project and start applying to other projects as well. We want to see the industry grow. We want to see more interactive works being done.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs!

Jackie, Lynn and Sue, as seen in Seven Up!,
the first film in the Up series (Photo: First Run Pictures).
View the slideshow.

The eighth film in the Up series, 56 Up, premieres this month in the UK. At seven-year intervals since 1964′s Seven Up!, director Michael Apted has interviewed a majority of the original fourteen children from varying economic and social backgrounds about changes in their lives, careers, families, viewpoints and hopes. (49 Up was broadcast on POV in 2007).

The series has provided an integral and culturally significant longitudinal study of ordinary lives in action — at once — personal and political.

In light of the premiere of latest installment, we compiled eight extraordinary documentaries whose stories have unfolded over many years, sometimes decades, and where time became a vital component of the unfolding narrative.

Start the slideshow of 8 then-and-now documentaries that transcend time »

EditShare's PC-based non-linear editor Lightworks comes out of beta on May 28, 2012.

Updated:

Has Apple’s shift to Final Cut Pro X, and the dissatisfaction of a legion of editors, created a market opening for PC-based nonlinear editing systems?

PCs are demonstrably less expensive than Macs with the same computing power, and programs such as Premiere, Sony Vegas and Avid have already made their appeal to editors on a budget.

In about a week or so, on May 28, 2012, a new competitor enters the market. And at a price that’s hard to beat.

Lightworks for Windows, which will have a free version and a $60 “Pro” version, will be released to great anticipation.

Filmmaker Chris Jones noted, “Using it feels very logical, like editing film back in the day. Plus it has all the bells and whistles of many new digital tools. It is a professional tool, not a semi pro or domestic tool that has been dressed up. So expect to invest time in learning how to use it.

Lightworks is not new in itself. It began in 1989 as OLE, then went through a variety of owners before EditShare acquired it in 2009. Lightworks has been used to edit narrative films such as The King’s Speech and Hugo. EditShare’s plans to develop the product as open source did not materialize, but the beta was made free to download. It’s now been downloaded by 250,000 users.

The official release boasts support for AVCHD, H.264, AVC-Intra, ProRes, RED R3D, DPX, XDCam HD 50, XDCam EX, DVD and BluRay. Paired with a 64-bit PC, it creates a perfectly serviceable setup for nearly all the kinds of editing a documentary filmmaker would need. (One disappointment for Mac users is that while EditShare is working on a Mac version of Lightworks, there’s no definitive release in sight.)

Features of the system are here.

The Pro version will support the DNxHD codec and such features as file sharing, a titling system and stereoscopic editing for 3D filmmaking. The Pro version also includes the codecs.

Lightworks offers a $140 dedicated keyboard, but users can import their FCP or Avid preferences so they don’t have to re-learn their way around the workflow.

While the comments out on the web from beta users are favorable, and the program seems to be quite fast on the latest generation of PCs, we’ll know more in the coming months. It seems unlikely anyone who is seriously going to use the program isn’t going to fork out the $60. It’s more than likely that the free download will serve as a proving ground for a lot of editors looking to see what it’s got.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs!

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Besides the sheer fun of being able to explore a film festival with unprecedented access as a teen filmmaker, my experience as a Tribeca Film Fellow has been invaluable.

Before the festival, the 18 Fellows met a few times a week to hear industry professionals talk about every aspect of filmmaking, from fundraising to reaching new audiences with transmedia to hearing from directors who’d recently had success with their films. I learned a lot about networking, pitching my films and developing my script ideas to meet their potential.

Once the festival began, the number of events skyrocketed. On one of the first days we had a brunch with our mentors, who are helping us improve our film pitches, and we worked on film treatments that we pitched to industry professionals. My mentor, Dara Bratt, is currently working on a short documentary that will premiere at Cannes and I got to observe as the final touches were put on that project.

We pitched our films to a panel of judges for funding — a college scholarship. It was nerve-wracking at first, but at the end I tried to put my nervous energy into my presentation. Here’s the elevator pitch for my film:

A feature-length narrative that follows a teenager as he develops his own sense of identity and how that affects his interactions with his community and family.

One of my films played at the “Our City, My Story” screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, which was amazing. There were 12 films selected out of 170 that were submitted. The 12 films were really diverse but mine was the only animated short. Here is my film, Zombie Dog:

The screening was held at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center, with hundreds of people in attendance. The screen was really large so it was thrilling to see my film in that professional setting.

I got to walk the red carpet and was interviewed by reporters along the way — you just have to pay attention because a lot of people want to talk to you. But it was fun — I felt like a celebrity! Throughout the festival there were actual celebrity sightings at the screenings. One of my favorites was seeing Kristen Wiig at the screening of Revenge For Jolly!

After my screening there was a Q&A on stage and it was fun to see the audience’s enthusiasm for my film and all the others.

The biggest thing I learned from the Film Fellows experience was the importance of social media and cross-platforming to reach a larger audience. A lot of the speakers I heard from talked about how their projects were successful because of the web components of their films. One of the speakers, from Mozilla, talked about how we can use media already on the web to create new projects. I also heard a variety of discussions about the rising importance of multimedia at TFI Interactive Day, another cool event from the festival. One of my favorites from that day was the discussion about “Game of Thrones” and how they tried to entice as many senses as possible with their marketing campaign.

The whole experience was extremely rewarding and I learned so much about the film industry, networking, the art of pitching a film or idea, and the importance of film festivals — on top of getting to see a ton of great films.

And, yes, I did win a scholarship from my pitch!

Now I will collapse from exhaustion and fulfillment.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs!

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One question was, how are films curated online? One host noted Doc Club noted having curation while Netflix lacked it. Another part of the question came back to platform availability, namely through Apple products such as Apple TV and iPads, and with finding alternatives to Flash-based video. An interesting point raised was about short-form documentaries — so many get made, yet they are often hard to see. Why not bring more of them online?

The audience’s experiences with and motivations for watching documentaries offered some of the more interesting exchanges and questions. One fun question came from Tsiokos: “What docs do you find yourself rewatching all the time?” Another, from Powers, was, “What are your favorite first-person docs?” A third, from Bell, was, “Are you more drawn to fiction films or documentary? Why?”

One question in particular struck me. Tsiokos asked, “Are you mostly interested in new docs or do you try to discover older films too?” Replies to this question were mixed, but mostly with a lean toward newer titles or a balance of newer titles with some older ones. Arguably, getting audiences interested in older titles might prove more challenging than getting them interested in newer ones.

One problem discussed briefly was related to global documentaries. Most media flow out of the United States quite easily and in abundance, but not as much media flow in. This imbalance is particularly noticeable with documentaries. Unless a title gets some kind of festival recognition or mainstream media showing, it generally remains unavailable.

A surprising theme centered on documentaries about people falling in love. Several titles were mentioned in connection with this subject, including Crazy Love, The DeVilles, Seventeen, and Billy the Kid. When it didn’t come up, Marshall Curry added his own film, Racing Dreams (POV 2012), to the conversation.

A common thread overall was just this massive sharing of favorite documentaries, both recent and historical. For those seeking some inspiration of documentaries to watch next, the thread offers an amazing array of ones generally available. An exception is Icarus Films’ offering of Jean Rouch’s classic Chronicle of a Summer — the $440 price tag would probably give most some sticker shock.

Some of the more readily available titles mentioned include Spellbound, Mad Hot Ballroom, Hands on a Hard Body (which is becoming a musical), Lost in La Mancha, Jazz, The Civil War, The Up series (with a new installment imminent), Nanking, Paris Is Burning, Salesman, Grin without a Cat, Sans Soleil, Dear Zachary, Hearts of Darkness, and Middletown, just to name a few mentioned by others participating in the thread.

Another Twitter conversation from last night was the live Tweeting of a DocU session about “The Future of Docs on PBS.” More information about that conversation can be found through the hashtag #docu or @idanews. To check out the SundanceNow conversation, search for the hashtag #sundancenow on Twitter.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

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I arrived at Hot Hacks in Toronto with a wicked cough and sore back from the inverted sofa bed I slept on the night before. Ready to hack.

Day One

Theo Rigby at Hot Hacks (Photo: Jen Gilomen, BAVC)

The Mozilla office was bright and airy, a la a San Francisco start-up, filled with coffee and an extensive selection of tasty snacks. No time was wasted. The international group of 25 filmmakers and engineers circled up to share a bit about ourselves, then we quickly broke into our groups to start the brainstorming. The Immigrant Nation team (myself, producer Kate Mclean, and technologist Bailey Smith) was paired with Mozilla developer Scott Downe, and we took the first two hours to figure out a plan of attack.

From the get-go we knew that a process of triage had to occur. We decided to drop the geo-location element of the piece, as well as the page where users will watch films, and focus on ‘The Wave’, which would visualize immigration data and give users a chance to tell their own story. We would also work on the Facebook element to enable users to access their images, and Immigrant Nation to access the user’s data. I asked Scott, “So, do you think all of this is possible in two days?” Scott replied, “I think so. It depends. We’re going to need help.” And then we were off.

The Immigrant Nation team works alongside Mozilla developers at Hot Hacks. From left to right, Mozilla developer Scott Downe, Living Docs co-director and Mozilla developer Ben Moskowitz, Immigration Nation producer Kate Mclean and Immigration Nation technologist Bailey Smith. (Photo by: Theo Rigby)

Scott started working on The Wave, figuring out how to visualize the immigration data we brought (from the U.S. Census Bureau), and Bailey began working through the Facebook element. I had never witnessed the process of coding before, and it quickly became apparent that it is a series of many small victories. As soon as each problem is solved, another presents itself, and each obstacle can be solved in myriad different creative ways. The collaborative element of the experience also quickly emerged. When Scott had a question, he walked over to a colleague and got an answer—when we needed an extra hand to implement the ambitious set of goals we had, multiple people stepped in to help us out. It was truly a group effort, and the end product could not have emerged without the help of many.

The vision for the future of the project is to have users populate the different Waves from each country with their personal immigration stories comprised of photos, video, and text — but this exercise would be much more simplistic. Since we wouldn’t be able to store users stories for this exercise, Kate and I decided to build out the waves of two countries, Mexico and Japan, with photos and text outlining key points of history. We researched a few flashpoints in the histories of Japanese and Mexican immigration to the United States, culled photographs and wrote descriptions of each point of interest. We originally thought about including text on the Wave, but after sage advice from Ben Moskowitz from Mozilla, we opted to record the text as voice over. The day was quickly over, and we found ourselves back at the hotel, midnight rapidly approaching, recording the voiceover into GarageBand on my laptop, using the microphone on a pair of iPhone earbuds. Truly a hack!

Day Two

We entered Day Two with a semi-working Wave, tweaky Facebook functionality, and a bunch of raw media. Scott mentioned, “This could take one day… or one week.”

All of the pieces were in various stages of construction, and the aesthetic design elements hadn’t been started — these would come last. “Lets get the thing working, then we can make it look pretty,” said Scott.

Time quickly ticked away as the functionality was refined and basic design pieces were thrown in. This wasn’t the time for new ideas or deviations from the plan — We were going in one direction and it was going to work or it wasn’t. The last four hours was a sequence of Scott periodically looking up at the clock, “We’ve got three hours. I think we’re gonna be OK… Two hours, OK… We’ve got an hour, it’s gonna work.”

We combined all of the pieces in the last hour, and the end product hints at what the finished project might include.

The Prototype

Click on the image to log in to the 'Immigrant Nation' prototype.

A few instructions if you want to check out the prototype:

• Use Chrome.
• Use a fast connection (I know, I know).
• If anything doesn’t work, use the refresh button and back button to navigate.
• When you tell your story, pretend to be from Mexico or Japan and you will see a more fleshed out Wave.

I think of this prototype as a starting point for the beginning of what could be. The biggest takeaway from Hot Hacks was the generation of many new ideas, and clarification of old ideas. Now, we have a much better sense of where and how to start the construction of the project, as well as a clearer idea of how the different parts fit together. Hot Hacks has brought Immigrant Nation from pure concept to something much more tangible. Although the future is not definite in any way, and the path to ‘success’ is not even defined, I’m energized and excited to see where Immigrant Nation will go.

Theo Rigby is the director of the Student Academy Award®-winning documentary Sin País (Without Country), an exploration of one family’s complex and emotional journey involving deportation that will air on POV this summer.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

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Miss Representation, directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, made its debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

Earlier this year I served on a panel to discuss the documentary Miss Representation. Directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the documentary made its debut at Sundance 2011, and it entered into educational distribution before finally hitting the consumer market in early April. The documentary got picked up by the Oprah Winfrey Network, and the DVD features introductions both by Winfrey and Rosie O’Donnell. I wanted to see the documentary again before analyzing it further, in part because it received (and still receives) such positive responses. Yet, after repeated viewings, I remain divided on it.

For those who study women’s representations in the media, the issues raised in Miss Representation come as no surprise. The talking heads, image montages, and shown facts note the lack of women in lead roles, the lack of truly women’s stories, the lack of older women’s roles, the lack of women writers and directors, and the lack of women in upper media management and even media ownership. Further, the documentary points out the hyperfocus on the spectacle of women — their clothes, hair, bodies, signs of aging — over the substance of their accomplishments. It even takes on the issues of the backlash that arises when women gain power in politics.

Miss Representation features an impressive array of voices, which is one of its strengths. For one, it brings together women who have succeeded in the media, including Katie Couric, Pat Mitchell, Geena Davis, Jane Fonda, Margaret Cho, Lisa Ling, and Rachel Maddow. For two, it brings together an impressive grouping of women in politics, such as Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi, and Dianne Feinstein. For three, it features a range of scholars and experts, including Jennifer L. Pozner, M. Gigi Durham, Martha Lauzen, Jehmu Greene, Jean Kilbourne, and Gloria Steinem. Finally, it features several young women and men facing these issues and trying to understand them for themselves.

While the dominant messages in the documentary focus on women’s issues, Newsom does take some time to note the pressures of masculinity and men’s roles in preventing gender violence. She raises these points through Jackson Katz, a noted expert on the subject who has his own documentary titled Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity, as well as several books and publications framing gender violence prevention as a men’s issue. Newark Mayor Cory Booker also contributes to this point through an anecdote.

Within all these voices and strong women’s presences lurks an amazing potential, but instead the documentary starts with the director’s own experiences, setting the dark stage for the world her own daughter might face. Commenting on the representations of women, Katie Couric explains, “We get conditioned to think this is what women should look like.” In the voiceover, Newsom notes, “If the media is [sic] sending girls the message that their value lies in their bodies, this can only leave them feeling disempowered and distract them from making a difference and becoming leaders.” Calling the media singular imbues them with even more power — the media are plural, like the Borg. Still, these opening messages point the finger of blame squarely at the media, and this blame attributes all the power to the media and offers little power to viewers. It also discounts the influences of other social, political, and cultural factors.

This kind of media-blaming for social ills is not new. It began in the 1920s with Hollywood and its “immoral” representations, which supposedly influenced people into imitating what they saw on screen. The panic renewed with the widespread adoption of television. It gained urgency with the popularity of video games and Internet technologies. It will happen again when the next medium comes along.

This finger-pointing, though, is at odds with the interview choices. Katie Couric is the first woman to anchor a national evening news program. Jane Fonda and Geena Davis have long careers in acting. Margaret Cho had the first television series featuring a female Asian-American lead. Rachel Maddow draws respect for her intelligence and insightful commentary on politics and news. All of them shared some stories about the challenges they faced in their careers, such as with expectations of and comments on their appearances. But if the media are to blame, then how did these women succeed so admirably? Why not focus on their successes and their places as role models instead?

Another troublesome point is the emphasis on the connection between violence in media and violence in people. Granted, the amount of violence in media has increased, and the graphic nature of it has increased as well (to wit: “Criminal Minds“). But the causal connection between violence in media and violence in people cannot be made conclusively. A primary reason why is that this kind of study cannot be done ethically — it would require measuring violent responses in participants, which creates dangers for the participants and the researchers involved in the study. Hence, most studies draw the line at aggression, or they focus on people’s emotional states through recall instead of on their actions. Let me be clear that I am not discounting all the scholarship done in this area, but I am suggesting that more caution is needed when making these assertions and that more factors are involved than just media representations.

The documentary features many statistics. The ones related to violence and media get attributed to specific organizations, such as the American Psychological Association. Other statistics, however, appear without context or attribution.

The documentary makes several suggestions for changes. It suggests the importance of mentoring both girls and women and the importance of being a role model to women and girls. It also suggests the importance of women and girls making their own media and sharing their own stories. This documentary offered an amazing opportunity to do just those things, so why did it not start there? It is easy to blame big media, advertising, capitalism, and society, so why not take the more difficult, but more rewarding, path?

In general, though, this documentary points to the importance of women’s independent media production, and, I might add, the importance of documentaries by and about women. I see a greater range of expression and more women’s stories there than I do in mainstream media. I hope that, after seeing this documentary, some makers out there are inspired to make their own documentaries about the women featured in Miss Representation (Rachel Maddow, anyone?) and other women role models in their lives.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

What’s the best way to ensure a successful a Kickstarter campaign? How do I self-distribute, or digitally distribute my film well? What should I post on my Facebook page as opposed to my Twitter feed? What if I’m not on Twitter?

For the filmmakers who attended the IFP/Film Presence/DCTV panel on social media for filmmakers on April 26, 2012 in New York City, the above questions could all be summed up with one answer that was emphasized and then re-emphasized by every member of the panel discussion: Engage your audience.

Seems simple enough, yet many people — filmmakers or not — fail to see that simply posting content relevant to your project or career will not necessarily engage an audience and get them interested. Just throwing a trailer up somewhere will not ensure that many people will watch it, especially when you are competing with a wealth of viral videos and blog posts that are crowding everyone’s Twitter and Facebook feeds.

So now that filmmakers have a focus, how should they go about achieving that engagement? There were a variety of tips and tricks coming from the panel, which featured Elisabeth Holm of Kickstarter, filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified), Julie La’Bassiere of the Cinetic digital sales arm FilmBuff, Mike Knowlton of the interactive studio Murmur (Him, Her and Them) and the storytelling non-profit StoryCode. Film marketer Sara Kiener (Film Presence) moderated.

Here are six golden rules, culled from the panel:

1) Be a person. First and foremost. No one wants to connect with at spam bot, or with something that seems like a shameless self-promotion. Whether its on your Kickstarter page, in your tweets or on your Facebook, write in your voice and make the audience feel like they are experience a human connection. As Elisabeth Holm put it, “We are all on the Internet starving for human connection.” No one wants to back a project or engage in a conversation with a film seemingly being made by a robot without heart. Gary Hustwit and Julie La’Bassiere even took this one step further in suggesting that filmmakers should not create Twitter handles for a specific film. The majority of people on Twitter follow individual people over projects anyways. So, create a Twitter handle for yourself and use hashtags to refer to individual films. This will help build an audience in one digital space which you can tap into for future films, helping the sustainability of your Twitter presence and influence.

2) Join the conversation. Documentary filmmakers are in a unique space in the digital realm in that the subjects and issues they deal with typically already have a strong community and dialogue online. Tap into those conversations, not by simply saying, “Watch my doc!” but by posting your interests and viewpoints, maybe giving some anecdotes. Engage and stay on top of the conversation because others will take notice and see that something is happening. The people you attract through this type of interaction are going to be more motivated to see your film because they feel like they know you and will be interested to see what you have to say at the end of your project.

3) Try transmedia. If you think it is suited to your project, tap into transmedia strategies and the possibility of expanding your stories over multiple platforms. Mike Knowlton provided an example of an initiative from the narrative film The Sound of My Voice, where the filmmakers released the first 12 minutes of the film with embedded buttons and social media links within the viewer window before the premiere. These links jumped off to other content on YouTube, essays, photos and more, which built excitement around the project and expanding the film’s presence online through sharing on social networks.

4) Fish where the fish are. On the subject of distribution, La’Bassiere said she’s worked with too many filmmakers who want their film to be on every platform and everywhere. If you are making a film about young hip-hop artists who struggle to make it during the trials and tribulations of coming of age, why waste money marketing it on Amazon, where the demographic might be mismatched? Once you’ve garnered interest in your film by “fishing where the fish are,” you can you expand your audience on universal platforms.

5) Don’t sell something people can’t buy. Your Twitter feed should never look like this: “3 weeks till our film is on iTunes!,” “In 3 weeks you will be able to get our film on iTunes,” “Excited for our film?,” “Another week down, you will have it soon.” In other words, don’t talk at your audience. Instead give them something to do. Maybe post related content online, whether created by you or not, so that they become interested in your Twitter handle and then will be prompted to download your film once it is out. Audiences want to be prompted with an action, not with a wait.

6) Ask your audience. Filmmaker Gary Hustwit explained that many times he has tweeted or posted asking people “Hey Portland, what’s the best indie theater by you?” or “Should we have a screening at this theater, or is there some place cooler?” which then sparks dialogue about your film screening and builds an engaged audience that will be ready to go when you finally announce your screening. Also, filmmakers can ask for suggestions on where to find shooting locations, if anything related to your topic is happening in their community, and even if crew members are available if you need them. You audience will now feel like they have something invested in the success of your film and will in turn evangelize your film through their own social media outlets.

In the end, it all comes down to making your audience feel like they mean something to you, and they should. They are the ones who you are counting on for the success of your film, so show them a little love!

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

Theo Rigby, director of the Student Academy Award®-winning documentary Sin País (Without Country), is taking his next project to the web. In this post about his experience working with Mozilla developers at Hot Hacks, which is about to get underway at Hot Docs in Toronto.

'Immigrant Nation,' is a web-based documentary project that Theo Rigby ('Sin Pais') is prototyping at Hot Hacks.

Like many other documentary filmmakers, I know how to update my film’s website, and that’s about it. I don’t know HTML, let alone HTML5. And the semantics of transmedia, cross-platform, interactive, new media, etc. makes my head spin. With a brand new project, untested ideas, and a whole lot of passion, my team and I will dive headfirst into the Hot Hacks event Mozilla is putting on at Hot Docs this weekend. We will be paired with Mozilla engineers for two caffeine-infused days to ‘hack’ together a prototype for the interactive element of a new project I am directing, tentatively titled Immigrant Nation.

The stories I tell are often intimate and emotional, deal with complex issues, and are in general, pretty heavy. My mom often asks me, “When are you going to make a comedy?” “Soon mom, soon,” I tell her.

The prospect of creating an emotionally and intellectually engaging storytelling experience on the web — a place where extremely cute kittens, flop-hair Justin Bieber, and astonishingly short attention spans reign supreme, is honestly a bit daunting. The last thing I want to do is put a huge amount of time, effort and resources into something that nobody will use.

Enter the hack: A quick way to make something that represents a proof of concept that uses relatively little resources to answer the questions: Will this idea work? Is this using the storytelling advantages of the web to the fullest? Will people want to use this? Are we on the right track? Is this cool?

The crux of Immigrant Nation is to make immigration issues personal by connecting users to their own immigration story. The working idea is to build the project out of a series of dynamic short documentary films that address immigration issues across the country, in addition to an interactive component where people can create and share their own immigration stories. Users will be able to plot their own immigration story on a data-rich timeline to see how their immigration story fits in with the immigration waves that have populated the United States. The idea behind this approach is to highlight the collective immigration story we all have in the United States in an effort to de-politicize hotly contested immigration issues, and shift the often vitriolic dialogue to a more personal, human and productive conversation. We have created a short demo for the interactive part of the project:

We’ve had a few brainstorming sessions with Mozilla this week, and will try to focus on one specific part of the project at the hack. Our ideas are constantly in motion, but the working plan is to put most of the time and energy into developing “The Wave,” where users can submit their own immigration stories, place themselves in the history of immigration to the United States and see immigration trends over many decades. We will arrive with prepared media from the recently finished first film of the project, The Caretaker, as well as still images from the project, design elements from the interactive demo we created, and U.S. census data of immigration numbers. On Saturday morning we meet our Mozilla engineer collaborators, and we have two days to make it happen.

I’m excited, kind of nervous, don’t really know what to expect, and definitely feel out of my element. I’m trying to let the optimist in me take over and tell myself that failure is not a possible outcome of this venture — whatever comes out of the weekend will be one step closer to creating a story-world that works.

Theo Rigby is the director of the Student Academy Award®-winning documentary Sin País (Without Country), an exploration of one family’s complex and emotional journey involving deportation that will air on POV this summer.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

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Even though its price was significantly lower than previous versions of FCP, the price of sealed packages of Final Cut Pro 7 shot up on eBay like a fine vintage. Apple responded by releasing upgrades that slowly restored some of the features deleted from FCP7.

Now that the dust has settled, where do we stand?

In a post last week, Philip Hodgetts noted one surprising fact: Installations of FCPX have surpassed those of FCP7. It makes sense in a lot of ways — At $299, more people can make the leap than with the $1,599 price they had confronted in the past. For newbies, the program builds from their iMovie experience. Hodgetts notes that, according to research, Apple’s share of the professional market has dropped, from 55 percent to 52 percent. Users are shifting to Avid and other programs. Hodgetts also notes some of the initial FCPX purchasers may have been people simply willing to try it:

First challenge [to the statistics] is that they all purchased Final Cut Pro X “to test it out” and no one’s using it. Well, Apple had already demolished the “no professional is using Final Cut Pro X” canard the week before NAB with the Final Cut Pro in Action stories. But could it be that only one copy was sold to each facility and that gives them 52% of the “pro” market. I don’t find that particularly credible, given that we know that Bunim Murray alone purchased at least 40 or 50 Media Composer seats in that time.

So are professionals warming up to FCPX?

Tor Rolf Johansen of Post Magazine feels FCPX was rolled out prematurely, but has gained back some credibility with its updates. FCP 10.0.4, he says,

…has returned to stake its claim in the pro NLE market. Many of the pro features missing from FCP 7 have been restored and many of those features are actually better and faster now than they ever were in FCP 7. FCP X is lightning fast with get-up-and-go performance. The speed gains (from 64-bit code and multicore support), the two-thirds price cut, and some innovative new edit tools make this update a true contender.

Not all agree.

In the April/May 2012 issue of Streaming Media magazine, Jan Ozer’s “How Apple Took The ‘Pro’ Out Of Final Cut Pro” says that while some features of FCPX are commendable,

Overall, though, I abhor the program. When I run FCPX, my reaction is visceral; I feel the walls pressing in and my blood pressure rising. I adore the clean slate of Adobe Premiere Pro and its doppelganger Final Cut Pro 7. FCPX has so much structure, so many completely foreign concepts, that it feels like my 31? monitor has shrunk to 17?. With such a supposed focus on simplicity, how could a company run by (Steve) Jobs produce such a program?

Meanwhile, programs such as Adobe Premiere CS6 are gaining some ground. For serious filmmakers balancing cost and performance, the variety of choices for editing is making Final Cut Pro less of the go-to program it was.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

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Voting for the People’s Voice Award for the 16th Annual Webby Awards will close tomorrow, April 26, 2012, so register and get to voting for your favorite PBS programs, apps and websites!

(Note: To ensure redirection to the correct ballot, make sure that your Webby Ballot is set to Category Shuffling: OFF before following the links to new pages in your browser window)

Here is the full list of PBS nominations this year:

Online Film & Video – DOCUMENTARY: SERIES
Women, War and Peace Documentary Shorts
Online Ballot: http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/104
 

Websites – TELEVISION
pbs.tv
Online Ballot: http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/37
 

Websites – YOUTH
PBS Kids & Sesame Street Muppets
Online Ballot: http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/30
 

Websites – RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY
Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly
Online Ballot: http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/28
 

Websites – BEST HOME/WELCOME PAGE
Sesame Street Muppets
Online Ballot: http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/14
 

Websites – CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS/NON-PROFIT
Sesame Workshop
Online Ballot: http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/57
 

Websites – FAMILY/PARENTING
Sesame Street for Parents
Online Ballot: http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/25
 

Mobile & Apps – ENTERTAINMENT (TABLETS & ALL OTHER DEVICES)
PBS for iPad
Online Ballot: http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/87

The 16th Annual Webby Awards Show will take place on May 21, 2012.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

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Blackmagic's Cinema Camera, announced at NAB 2012, will be available starting July at a base price of $2,995.

For years, Blackmagic Design has been associated with products meant to help connect the camera to the computer — basically unassuming tools that help get the job done. They’re products you don’t see — capture cards hidden inside a Mac or a switcher tucked out of eyeline.

So when Blackmagic announced it was introducing a camera at NAB 2012, the crowd was taken by surprise.

What isn’t surprising is that it has the look of something built out of a computer rather than out of a traditional film camera. Blackmagic Cinema Camera, launched Monday, basically looks like an external hard drive with a lens stuck to its side. It has none of the panache of the in-development Digital Bolex I wrote about recently, but it also promises some mighty specs (see below).

The camera will go for $2,995 starting in July 2012, but the total “dress-up” package of the camera will be higher when you account for lenses and other accessories. The Blackmagic will accept Canon EF and Zeiss ZF lenses, and it lends itself to aftermarket bits from companies like Zacuto and Cinevate. And because it is devoid of the ergonomics of other cameras, the camera looks eminently droppable — it does not seem suited to handheld work. The dress-up will include handles (Blackmagic Cinema Camera Handles sell for $195).

It’s either a 1080p or a 2K, depending on whether you output in a codec such as ProRes or as RAW footage. In RAW, it produces 12-bit files, meaning more robust footage that lends itself to post-production. The camera promises a 13-stop dynamic range, meaning it will reach deep into the blacks while also capturing usable detail high into the whites.

Blackmagic’s announcement signals a change in the industry: The making of cameras is no longer the provenance of traditional film-camera and tape-based camcorder manufacturers. The quality of any camera has become more about the processing abilities of the device, so it isn’t a surprise that a company well-versed in moving footage from one place to another could jump in. The ability of filmmakers to get their hands on equipment that rivals the high-end stuff is getting better and better…

Here are the tech specs from the manufacturer:

• High resolution 2.5K sensor allows improved anti aliasing and reframing shots.
• Super wide 13 stops of dynamic range allows capture of increased details for feature film look.
• Built in SSD allows high bandwidth recording of RAW video and long duration compressed video.
• Open file formats compatible with popular NLE software such as CinemaDNG 12 bit RAW, Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD. No custom file formats.
• Includes no custom connections. Standard jack mic/line audio in, BNC 3 Gb/s SDI out, headphone, high-speed Thunderbolt I/O technology, LANC remote control and standard DC 12-30V power connection.
• Capacitive touch screen LCD for camera settings and slate metadata entry.
• Compatible with extremely high quality Canon EF and Zeiss ZF lenses.
• Supports 2.5K and 1080HD resolution capture in 24, 25, 29.97 and 30 fps.
• Thunderbolt connection allows direct camera capture via included Media Express software and supports live waveform monitoring via the included Blackmagic UltraScope software.
• Includes a full copy of DaVinci Resolve 9.0 color grading software.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

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I always a get a bit anxious as the Tribeca Film Festival approaches. With the sheer number of features and shorts, it’s hard to know where to begin. To get the most out of a large festival, it requires a combination of due diligence and risk-taking as well. I read through all the synopses over a number of days, and start notetaking. Once the festival begins, word of mouth begins to spread as well.
 
To help you out I’ve decided to break it down into digestible categories.
 
Rock the Doc
 
Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey directed by Ramona Diaz (The Learning, POV 2011), follows the unbelievable trajectory of Arnel Pineda. Whisked out of an ordinary cover band in his hometown of Manila after being discovered on YouTube by Journey guitarist Neal Schon (the email to Arnel’s friend who uploaded those videos is priceless). The film gave me a whole new respect for a band that was long written off in my mind as a nostalgia act. While it’s true the band required the new frontman to copy Steve Perry’s sound to the note, Pineda’s spirit and passion refueled the band’s own sense of identity. The final concert in the Philippines is a lump in the throat that will dissipate as you inevitably sing those classic rock anthems over the next week or two.
 
In Malik Bendjelloul’s film Searching for Sugar Man, Mexican-American folk rock singer Rodriguez has been long forgotten in the United States but an icon in South Africa. Rumored to have committed suicide decades ago – on stage, no less — Bendjelloul’s film will leave you stunned by its turns of events. At once, it’s a portrait of the artist and a critique of a racist music business. This is one you don’t want to miss.
 
Safinez Bousbia, an architect by trade, was talked into a visit back to her native Algeria by an Irish friend who wanted to tag along. By fate, a walk through the Casbah led to a visit at a small shop where a shopkeeper wove a story about his glory days in pre-revolutionary Algiers, when chaabi music (Mediterranean big band music), was all the rage. Set on reuniting the estranged still-living musicians, many of whom had fled to Europe, Bousbia decided to film this story herself. The result, El Gusto, is positively joyous.
 
Painful Histories / New Beginnings
 
Ballroom Dancer is Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed’s moving film about former international Latin dance champion Slavik Kryklyvyy who, back from a decade-long retirement, encounters challenges both on the dance floor and in his relationship with his current dance partner and lover, Anna Melnikova.
 
Downeast, directed by Girl Model filmmaking team A. Sabin and David Redmon, follows Italian ex-pat and Boston resident Antonio Bussone, who re-opens a recently shuttered sardine canning factory in Gouldsboro, Maine, where time seems to have stood still. With a plan to remake the factory as a lobster processing plant and hire the majority of its previously laid-off workers, Bussone encounters both support from the community (despite some initial xenophobia) and resistance from the town’s government and harbormaster.
 
The Flat is likely to be a hit at this year’s festival. In a recent interview, festival Executive Director Nancy Schafer expressed her admiration in particular for the film. Israeli filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger (The Komediant) lost his 98-year-old grandmother and filmed this documentary while packing up her Tel Aviv apartment (hence the title). In going through her belongings, documents reveal shocking truths from his family’s history.
 
Provocative Stories
 
Sexy Baby has a great deal of relevance in this age where porn is so easily accessible online. Ronna Gradus and Jill Bauer’s film follows a trio of remarkable subjects: A precocious 12-year-old who is growing up fast and terrifying her parents in the process, a 22-year-old having a series of vaginal reconstructive surgeries to please her porn-obsessed boyfriend, and a 32-year-old adult-film retiree who now makes her living giving pole dancing lessons to housewives and college students. The film is more disturbing than titillating.
 
Let Fury Have the Hour is an often thoughtful and mostly philosophical discussion of what author-filmmaker Antonino D’Ambrosio calls “creative response.” Spawned from his book of the same title, the film makes the case that the best way to fight the right-wing ideologies is through activism in the arts and sciences. Among his talking heads are Rage Against the Machine front man Tom Morello, filmmaker John Sayles, playwright Eve Ensler, Hip Hop legend Chuck D and myriad others. 
 
It’s remarkable that a documentary about this subject had not already come out years ago. Then again, with the rise of reality television over the past decade, Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie makes one miss the crude cigarette-smoking showman that Downey was. More bluster than anything else, the show was designed to attract attention and ratings. The film, directed by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger (The Linguists), even-handedly profiles the man behind the personality with entertaining archival footage.

The 2012 Tribeca Film Festival runs from April 18 to 29 in New York City. You can find out more about the documentary slate and how to buy tickets for individual films at tribecafilm.com.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

What strikes me is how these ideas of art in cinema rarely intersect with documentary. Discussions of documentary center on reality, argument, conventions, modes, voices, subjects, truth, and bias, but rarely does the question of art arise. Even in the dozen or so times I taught that cinema course, I dedicated a session to documentary, but I myself didn’t raise those points either.

So why the separation of art and documentary? Some of that might come back to the influences of early documentary photography, which showed the gritty realities of the Civil War and the Great Depression. Photojournalism (which is part of documentary photography, and probably its most visible practice) also places priority on capturing these realities, though the most memorable photographs draw on techniques from art.

Another part of the separation might come back to the documentary commitment to the truth. Art reveals its own truths and comments on them, but art also has the potential to make its own truths, drawn from reality and separate from it. This ability creates a potential conflict in that the art aspects might interfere with the documentary commitment to reality.

A third part comes back to the primary conceptual location for these discussions. As my opening comments show, the ideas of film and art usually address fiction film, not nonfiction film. Arguably, making art is easier when its makers have complete control over process and product. But what happens when you throw the messiness of reality into the mix? Does the reality overtake the art, does the art overtake the reality, or is there a way for the two to coexist?

Despite all these complicated questions, there are some beautifully shot documentaries out there. Take something simple, such as framing, which refers to how the cinematic subject is located within the frame. Framing occurs with people, landscapes, and objects. In terms of people, good framing might avoid cutting parts off, such as their heads or feet. But framing also offers the opportunity for commentary on the subject and even on the idea of documentary interviews.

Trinh T. Minh-ha, for example, combines framing with camera movement during the interviews in Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989). Instead of centering the speaker from the waist or chest up within the frame, Trinh migrates the camera around the subject, moving in for extreme close-ups on hands and eyes while the person continues talking. Instead of focusing on the face while a person talks, the camera might remain on a person’s hands. The overall effect is unsettling, but that is part of Trinh’s point with not only this piece, but also some of her other works, particularly Reassemblage (1982).

A more traditional example comes from Pare Lorentz’s classic The River (1938) with the simple framing of these two children, with one looking right at the camera and one looking away:


Also consider this silhouette from the same film:

Both of these images convey strong emotions through their choices of subject, their forms of framing, and even the choice of lighting, particularly in the second shot.

The River makes for a nice segue to talk about landscapes. The framing of landscapes conveys so many different meanings. In Lorentz’s film, for example, the Mighty Mississippi ignores its banks and wanders where it chooses:

The more recent documentary Sweetgrass (POV 2011) also offers some compelling shots of the Montana mountains alongside the challenges of sheep herding:

The BBC’s Planet Earth documentary really shows how framing and landscape work together. Granted, those makers had a beautiful subject to start with, but they still emphasized that beauty throughout the entire piece:

Not all landscapes are visually beautiful, but the framing still helps show us what we need to see. Consider this shot from Haskell Wexler’s hybrid drama-vérité film Medium Cool (1969), which uses the car door as a frame within a frame to show the city of Chicago:

The framing reminds us of the urban grittiness of the city, and it also connects to the tensions that underlie Wexler’s complex piece.

Framing further reveals objects. It can reinforce the everyday as the everyday, or it can make the everyday seem extraordinary. A key documentary to consider here (and the one that inspired this post) is Gary Hustwit’s Objectified (2009). Objectified addresses the intersections of the everyday objects with the ideas of design. So much design goes into everyday objects that most of us fail to notice it, such as with a toothbrush, a drain, cookware, dishware, and even a simple chair. We might notice more when the design interferes with function. The documentary frames these objects in such a way as to reveal them in new lights:

This tiny, simple alarm clock is an everyday object that many of us unfortunately need. Yet by placing this white alarm clock against a white field, by situating it off-center in the frame, and by adding the index finger on the button, it becomes something more, something for us to contemplate in ways we might not have before. The documentary’s subject, thesis, and interviews really bring the ideas of design forward, but the attention to framing in these shots provides a powerful visual reinforcement as well.

Framing is just one part of the discussion of art and cinema, and it can become part of the discussion of art and documentary. The form need not be just function. When feasible, careful choices in framing can really make an impact.

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The Lives of Animals, a program of innovative documentaries curated by The Flaherty, screened in March and April at New York City's 92YTribeca.

In Theory of Religion, Georges Bataille attributes the difference between animals and humans to the idea that animals live in a state of immanence, in continuity with the world, without self-consciousness, subscription to limits or conceptions of the future.

A recent series of screenings at Flaherty NYC series, The Lives of Animals: Speculative Empathy, attempted to turn this notion on its head by either imagining how animals may come to possess these human attributes or, more radically, how we, as humans, can think beyond this difference.

The New York City series, an offshoot of The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, took place at the 92YTribeca. You can read our preview of Flaherty NYC.

The short films in the Speculative Empathy program included animator Jim Trainor’s Moschops (2000), Harmony (2004) and The Magic Kingdom (2002) and artist Nancy Andrews’s On a Phantom Limb (2009) and Behind the Eyes are the Ears (2010). The animals, creatures and phantoms in their collective works do not subscribe to the reductive anthropomorphism found in some nature documentaries or in Disney’s animated films. Jim Trainor was even once called “the Walt Disney of sexual anxiety.”

In Harmony, animals reveal their Christian guilt. A hyena, a lion and a chimpanzee admit to murder and abuse, while dolphins come across as jarring in their confessions to rape (“We raped her… We couldn’t not do it any more than we could remove the built-in smiles from our faces, which in turn is not to say that we were not happy, which is not to say that we were not weirdly happy all the time.”).

Watch Jim Trainor’s Moschops (in two parts):

Putting these animal behaviors in the language of human transgressions chips away at the familiar representations of moral animals in popular films. The dolphins’ confession is negated, in part, as it resorts to a claim that they exist as is — there is no meaning to ascribe to their perpetual smile. One should not imbue meaning into a dolphin’s actions, but one should also not be blind to the dark and instinctive side of Flipper either.

In Moschops, a dino-like female cooly reminds us of the animal’s nature: “We didn’t love each other exactly, but at night we all slept together in one big, stupid pile.”

It is similarly the lesson put forth by Werner Herzog in Grizzly Man, where his narration foreshadows Timothy Treadwell’s death as footage shows Treadwell becoming increasingly chummy with the bears. Treadwell, after successfully rebuffing aggression by an older grizzy boasts, “I know the language of the bear.” Herzog lingers on this shot and poses that this may have been the bear that killed Treadwell.

One can only speculate, not know the language of animals. It is perhaps with this logic that in Trainor’s most observational piece in the series, The Magic Kingdom, he abstains from the explicit voiceover narration that forms the dark humor of his two strictly animated pieces.

The Nancy Andrews film "Behind the Eyes Are the Ears" screened at Flaherty NYC at 92YTribeca in March 2012.

If Trainor is interested in mapping unique human subjectivities on animals, then Andrews’s work is interested in placing the distinctive sensory realities of animals onto humans. Her work, which explores human humility, nicely succeeds Trainor’s forays into guilt and the limits of knowing.

The two also serve as a nice juxtaposition in their differences. Andrews is more explicit in her desire to explore beyond animal-human dualisms to highlight hybridity through phenomena such as phantom limbs.

On a Phantom Limb is an autobiographical, mixed-media film that brings together animation, photography, a musical score and archival footage and examines the director’s battle with a life-threatening condition. Within the film, the surgical procedure that saves the protagonist’s life also partly transforms her into a bird. This is visually symbolized throughout by the Dadaist assemblages showing birds with animal parts, and vice versa.

In the post-screening Q&A, Andrews cites the bird “as a mythological surrogate or avatar that helps us transcend Earth.” She noted that films such as Bride of Frankenstein and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes were inspiration for her shorts, but her films also undoubtedly take up Donna Haraway’s “cyborg manifesto” to embrace the lived contradictions and subjective multiplicities of the self and body.

Nonetheless, in all of their musings, both Trainor and Andrews’s work end on an ambivalent note on the nature of existence. The male moschop in Moschops upon his death reflects, “Nothing on earth has the right to live, only a chance.” On a Phantom Limb reminds us by the end, “We are each condemned to contemplate our skeleton.”

The Flaherty NYC: The Lives of Animals series ran at the 92YTribeca in March and April 2012. Find out more about the series and future events at flahertyseminar.org.

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After weeks of a publicly fought battle between The Weinstein Company and the Motion Picture Association of America, Bully has been granted the PG-13 rating that it petitioned for. It initially receiving an R rating and lost a subsequent appeal by one vote.

“This is a great victory for us all!,” Bully director Lee Hirsch declared on his Facebook page yesterday.

Notable celebrities and politicians such as Mike Huckabee, Anderson Cooper, and Ellen DeGeneres came out in recent weeks in support of the film and a petition on Change.org by Midwestern teenager Katy Butler to reverse the rating garnered over 500,000 signatures in recent weeks.

The film had received an R rating for numerous instances of the F-word. The directors and producers of the film held that the language was necessary for maintaining the efficacy of the film’s message. Producer Cynthia Lowen, in a recent Msnbc video, maintained that this was the language that was heard everyday by teenagers in schools and censoring those words would do a disservice to the reality of the pain inflicted on bullied kids.

Hirsch previously told POV’s blog, “The uses of f— are real and integral to understanding what happens and I don’t think those experiences should be watered down.”

Many also argued that it was absurd that a film like The Hunger Games, whose premise revolves around young teenagers violently killing one another, had received a PG-13 rating while Bully had not. The Weinstein Company rejected the initial R rating before the film was released in New York and Los Angeles last weekend and it went to theaters “unrated.” Theater chains reacted differently to that news. Regal declared it would treat the film as an R-rated film and AMC said it would allow teenagers to see the film with written permission. The film opened to a strong $23,000 per-theater-average in five theaters.

A few compromises have been made to appease the MPAA. According to a Weinstein Company statement, the new version of the film will remove three uses of the F-word. However, the film retains a particularly powerful scene on a school bus where the word is uttered three times. (Two F-words usually guarantees an R.)

“This was about drawing the line but not being utterly unreasonable,” Hirsch told the Los Angeles Times.

The film will forego the 90-day wait typically imposed by the MPAA between releases of a film that have been re-rated. The Weinstein Company was also lucky to have this rule go un-imposed last year when it similarly edited the R-rated The King’s Speech for language in order to attain the family-friendly PG-13 rating after its numerous Oscar wins.

The PG-13-rated Bully will be released in theaters as the film expands to 55 markets next week.

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The latest release differs significantly from the first one. Gone are Jason Russell, his son, and those patronizing sequences. Gone is the hyperfocus on what possibilities social media might offer. Gone is the singular focus on arresting Joseph Kony, the Lord’s Resistance Army leader. Gone is the relentless intensity. In their place lies a more tempered, and better supported, message.

A key strength to this new piece is the inclusion of more voices and more authorities closer to the issues. The sequel includes a montage of African voices, of those “on the ground,” including Jolly Okot, labeled as “Country Director” for Invisible Children. Acaye Joseph tells more of his story — he now works for a law firm trying to further social justice issues.

The sequel also addresses the controversy and critiques that the first video generated by noting the changes that resulted from it. It explains how the African Union agreed to step up efforts to pursue Kony. It notes how resolutions in the House and Senate attracted a hundred co-sponsors.

The video further explains the scope of the problem, something the first video failed to do effectively. It outlines a “comprehensive approach” for a solution, including civilian protection, peaceful surrender, rehabilitation and reconstruction, and arrest of the top LRA leadership. Within this comprehensive approach it gets more into the human costs of the child kidnappings and other atrocities, showing how people escaping from the army require assistance in returning to their homes and showing how people work together to rebuild from the destruction caused by the army. Some footage shows the army starting fires and walking with guns, but the video wisely stays away from more gruesome footage, which easily could overpower any other messages the group is trying to get across. The video also shows how previous efforts, such as peaceful negotiations, have failed, and how the LRA managed to turn those peace efforts around to redouble their own strength and strategies.

As much as this video provides a fuller, more nuanced picture than the previous one, it still draws on that all-inclusive rhetoric, and it still places Invisible Children — and “we” — at the center of this change.

The video consistently reminds us that it is made by, and in part about, the group Invisible Children. Many of the interviews are with members of the organization. Charting the response to the first video becomes a sequence, with the segment explaining how the group received a flood of e-mails and phone calls. A lot of the archival stills show events organized by the group.

Invisible Children CEO Ben Keesey, replacing Russell, offers a new first-person perspective with a more level and reasonable narration and story. He explains his connection to the group and his involvement. Those narratives occupy little time in this piece, thus removing the ego that fueled the first video.

Keesey’s voiceover quickly invokes the “we.” He says, “We have seen that stories can change lives, and inspire young people toward action.” Also: “Progress is being made and we are not stopping.” Last: “We can all do our part, where we are, with what we have.” After a while, these kinds of statements begin to ring hollow.

While the first 16 or so minutes this piece in general offer a more level and informative overview, the last few minutes revert back to the impassioned plea for our participation in the Cover the Night activities planned for April 20. The voiceover recedes and the music swells, as title cards and images explain what “we” should do that night. After a disclaimer, it even outlines a specific plan, which includes gathering friends, contacting policymakers, serving communities, and (of course) promoting “justice for Joseph Kony.” Images show a range of possibilities for getting that message out, such as signs, stickers, banners, T-shirts, and even street art. All of these items feature the branded message and inverted triangle symbol.

This sequel will not get the same reach and exposure as the first one. In its attempts to be more expansive and rational, it loses the overly dramatic arcs of the first one. For better or worse, those overly dramatic techniques of the first video hooked viewers, kept them watching and sharing, and ultimately polarized them. Keesey lacks the same mania that Russell possessed. The pace is not as driven. The message is not as single-minded.

Overall, while this version answers some of the critiques and gaps of the first, it lacks the same grab to the gut. There is no telling just how people might have reacted if this video had been released first, but my guess is the reaction would have been nowhere near as dramatic or widespread. These two videos raise some interesting questions about the connections among arguments, emotions, and activism; their best representations; and their connections. Unfortunately, they offer no easy answers for those who might be looking to mimic their success.

Get more documentary film news and features: Subscribe to POV’s documentary blog, like POV on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @povdocs.

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With so many wonderful documentaries taking the macro view of issues and questions (I just again viewed Danfung Dennis’s remarkable Hell and Back Again and its story of a war through one man’s journey), it’s yet again heartening to see a director (along with co-director Harold Crooks) take on something so massive and so potentially troubling.

The film is a chilling omnibus of Wall Street misdeeds, environmental plunder and cultures in collision, executive produced by some big names in the doc world, including Martin Scorsese (for whom Roy was an assistant on The Aviator) and Mark Achbar (of the Canadian-produced doc hits The Corporation and Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media).

Its ambition is an example of what the best documentaries do, which is exposing unflinching truth.

“It took six and a half years to make the best film we could,” said the Montreal-based Roy, as his project goes into release. “We thought at time, ‘Should we take it a bit easier on the audience? But this is the way the world works, and when you learn it, you do feel more [peeved].’”

“Harold and I didn’t want to scare off our producers and distributors,” Roy said of the early phases of producing Surviving Progress. “But the opening movement [with the chimp] sets the tone. What took so long was that it became an effort to make a coherent structure. The more the film unfolded itself, the more it became a bigger snowball.”

With inspiration from the book A Short History of Progress by author Ronald Wright, the film reveals the ultimate plot twist: Have we become so productive that our consumption is killing the planet? Has medicine become so remarkable we don’t know what to do with the booming population? Has the lust for progress itself sent us hurtling into the ultimate regress?

The film takes us from such far-flung places as the rainforest of Brazil to the “new” China (with a priceless open-camera argument between a father and son, a Communist-era professor and a businessman sitting on their sofa); it brings in people as diverse as primatologist Jane Goodall to economist Michael Hudson, a chorus of voices saying all is not well, and American Idol isn’t going to fix it.

Documentaries such as this make for hard viewing in one way, but it is infused with imagery that makes it a worthy journey. The film was edited (by Louis-Martin Paradis) using 100 additional hours of archival and secondary video, and 100 hours of primary video shot on HD tape with the interview subject looking dead-on at the viewer — made possible by the EyeLiner, which in turn comes from Errol Morris’s Interrotron.

The film was funded with $1.8 million of “envelope funding” thanks to Telefilm Canada and based on the success of Achbar’s The Corporation. Scorsese’s contribution was not funding, but mentoring. “He looked at cuts and sent me notes, because he just supports projects he likes,” Roy said.

The film, especially as it explicates Wall Street’s shark-like affinities to accumulate money to degrees that go to the greater detriment, premiered at Toronto Film Festival last September, but it may have caught a zeitgeist. The Occupy Wall Street movement took hold later that month.

“I thought, after what I learned in making the film, ‘Why aren’t people coming out on the streets about this?’” Roy said.

“And then they did.”

Surviving Progress opens in New York City today (Friday, April 6, 2012) before playing in Los Angeles and other select cities in April and May. Find out more about screenings at survivingprogress.com.

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Beware Of Mr. Baker received the Grand Jury prize for best documentary at SXSW’s 2012 Film Festival last month. It’s an entertaining bio doc about Ginger Baker, perhaps best known as the jazz-rock drummer of the 60′s rock supergroups Cream and Blind Faith.

Jay Bulger, the film’s director, lied his way into the life of the notoriously cantankerous and now reclusive Baker, now 72, telling him he was writing a piece for Rolling Stone magazine. In a twist, the piece became real — “The Devil and Ginger Baker” was published in Rolling Stone, after Bulger lived embedded with Baker in his South African home, which does, in fact, have a sign out front that reads “Beware of Mr. Baker.”

The article provided Bulger an opportunity to create a next piece, a documentary that captures the chaos, humor and turmoil that surround Baker. The film, which had its world premiere at SXSW 2012, begins at the end, with Baker braking Bulger’s nose with his walking stick.

How is your relationship with Mr. Baker these days?

Jay Bulger, director of Beware of Mr. Baker: We talk about once every week or two. Sometimes for a while. Sometimes he just hangs up when he hears my voice. Depends on the time of day, his drug intake, and the current state of affairs. He’s much easier to talk to when there is drama, because he likes to have someone to talk to about them, whether it be suing the African Bank or relationship issues.

He can be quite a sensitive person, actually. I’m sure that if I knew more about horses, we could talk more. But for me, I just like to leave things on a good note and call when there is good news. I don’t like bothering him. He said, “Good job” about winning SXSW.

Ginger Baker has a reputation for living a chaotic lifestyle. Did you have any hesitation about writing about him or filming him?

What drew me in was the fact that if he was less chaotic and had a better reputation, not only would the music most likely have sounded much different, but some safe documentary filmmaker would already have made it. When I heard that he was at the end of the world, forgotten, that he had burned through so many bridges, I thought, “Now he’s ready to talk.”

He knows how great his story is, and he wanted to tell it. On a personal basis, I am attracted to people who reside in obscurity, who are at the end of their life, who are misunderstood, because they have the best stories. More importantly, I knew that being around him was going to be completely unpredictable and fun.

Was there a plan going in?

There was no plan. I called him up on the phone because he sounded like the most fascinating character I had ever come across. We spoke for many hours, and then one day he said, “Just come here! I have bad hearing!” And I said, “Where am I going to stay?” And he said, “With me, you idiot!” So I borrowed a camera and some money and just went there. I’m not big on planning. When Ginger Baker asks you to come live with him, there is no time for planning. It was an opportunity of a lifetime. I knew that while I would be in debt, I would at least have that experience. I always wanted to make a film, but the reality of such happened over time, after writing the Rolling Stone article, raising funds, etc. It took me two years to get back there.

In the documentary, you show pieces of interviews with a number of music icons from Baker’s life, including Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, Johnny Rotten among many. Did you have any difficulty getting them to open up about Ginger Baker and their relationships with him?

Everyone was incredibly helpful and receptive and honored to be a part of such an important story. No difficulties whatsoever. Well, Johnny Rotten did insist that we finish a case of beer before beginning the interview, which made it a bit more difficult to formulate my thoughts. More fun though!

Does Ginger Baker have any plans to help support the film?

I wouldn’t expect or ask him to do anything he didn’t want to do as I know he hates going so many hours on the plane without a smoke, so I’ve got to make it worth his while.

I know he’s had visa problems and financial difficulties lately. Has his financial situation improved at all since the film was finished?

No. He’s blown everything — didn’t expect to live long enough to spend it. But in his own words, “God is punishing me for my past wickedness by keeping me alive and in as much pain as he can!” Ha! That’s his life story.

Beware of Mr. Baker continues its festival run, with screenings continuing later this month at Hot Docs and Independent Film Festival Boston. Find out more about the film on its official site and on Facebook.

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The marketers of 'Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance' created an event out of a film premiere with a theatrical simulcast for ballet fans. (Photo by Flickr/joffreymovie)

Sheri Candler and Jon Reiss are film marketers who always have great advice for DIY filmmakers working to get their project to an audience — especially when it’s a film that will be appreciated by a niche group of viewers who might not be found through the traditional film channels.

Their recent joint post at Tribeca’s blog makes an example of a film they are both involved with, Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance, a new documentary by Bob Hercules (Forgiving Dr. Mengele).

With tens of thousands of films on the festival circuit, there’s a lot of competition. But if you’ve made and marketed your film well, having a small but enthused viewership can still be thoroughly fulfilling — and profitable.

The advice that Reiss and Candler give is a testament to the technology that has turned documentary filmmaking into something grassroots and democratic. From the ever cheaper gear to shoot with to laptop editing, the task of making a film continues to change in the favor of the saavy filmmaker. But so has the task of distribution.

Two major elements are huge: The ability for digital projection at theaters, auditoriums, universities and libraries, to name a few — the filmmakers used the Emerging Pictures network for a low-cost theatrical simulcast — and the use of social media to get the word out.

But, as the pair point out, the premiere is not enough — you need something to promote.

You should always strive to create your live events to be as unique as possible, both from the perspective of media coverage and from the perspective of the audience, to create that need to attend. Many subjects in the Joffrey film are iconic dancers in the ballet world, what ballet fan would not want to interact with them? We created a post-screening panel of former dancers that the audience in the theater could interact with and meet after the screening, but we also enabled audiences even across the country the ability to interact as well.

The event created a larger word of mouth for the Joffrey premiere, which was quantified with TweetReach, a Twitter tracking tool. According to the film’s marketers, 270 tweets containing the hashtag #joffreymovie reached more than 200,549 people on its premiere day.

Not everybody lives the Sundance/PBS/national-release dream, but Joffrey has found its audience.

Here’s a video from the Joffrey team about the simulcast:

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A 2K camera that shoots 24p, costs around $3,000, and comes in a retro package that stands out visibly in a world of black boxes? Easy. It’s called the Digital Bolex. That camera has gone from the design phase to a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that has raised $286,662 as of this writing, and will fund the first run of cameras that should be out by October. Rubinstein recently had a prototype as SXSW that got a lot of attention.

“Other companies could have made this camera already, but they don’t want to — it would cut into the market for the high-priced cameras they sell,” says Rubinstein, who came into the project as an offshoot of his photo-booth business, Polite in Public.

“That business involved using software that worked with the RAW photo format,” he said. “I was doing technical development working with software people on these video booths, and I was seeing that there was a need for a camera that could shoot 24 frames per second in RAW format. The Arri Alexa was just out, but that’s a $75,000 camera, and I began to research companies who might be able to make something like this for a lower cost.”

He began calling this idea the “Digital Bolex,” after the line of Swiss-made 16mm cameras that a generation of pre-digital filmmakers had grown up with. What also makes the camera striking is its retro design. It looks like an old spring-wound Bolex, right down to a crank handle that will serve as a selection device.

A protoype of the Digital Bolex

“My take on it is that a Bolex was the camera that really represented a sense of discovery and fun for so many filmmakers, as much as it was also a tool for professionals. I remember getting a Bolex, shooting with it, then processing the film myself on a reel-to-reel processor, and projecting it on a screen that night. I thought that what’s missing from digital cameras out there now is that sense of fun.”

The project didn’t have any association with Bolex at that time, although Bolex has since lent its name to it as a partner overseeing quality control. But initially, Rubinstein worked with a company called Ienso to develop the technology.

He downplays the notion that a $3,000, 2K camera was ever that hard to make, despite the well-documented odyssey of the RED Scarlet, which promised similar great things and emerged much different and more expensive.

“Our camera is much simpler than a RED Scarlet,” he says. “All the pieces that go into the Digital Bolex have been around already.”

That includes a Super-16-sized sensor. But what it doesn’t include is the typical compression technology that squeezes footage down to codecs such as H.264. RAW at 24p and in 2K will require 4 gigabytes of storage per minute (as a comparison, my Sony’s XDCAM format can put 57 minutes of HD footage on a 16 gigabyte SxS card).

“RAW isn’t for everybody,” he says, “but it does allow for lots of room for color grading.” RAW can be converted with programs such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4, ARRIRAW Converter and others, he says.

The Digital Bolex will have a removable front that allows both for sensor cleaning and different lens mounts. Initially, M and PL mounts will likely be available.

The Kickstarter campaign worked on the basis of taking $2,500 pre-orders for the camera, and the interest has been such that the camera will be otherwise hard to get.

If it is as successful as he hopes, can Sony and Canon be far behind with their own versions? That goes back to why this camera is coming out from a small startup like Rubinstein’s. If any one of them had wanted to make this camera, they could have for years,” he says.

“We’re in a post-PC era with devices like the iPad. Like in the 1980s when PCs were all beige boxes and the only thing that mattered were the specs, and bigger numbers. iPads are not as powerful, but more fun. The camera market has been in that kind of race for a long time.”

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KONY 2012 Campaign

KONY 2012, a 30-minute video produced by the nonprofit organization Invisible Children, calls for the capture of Joseph Kony, the Ugandan leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The video that went viral in the past weeks has now received almost 100 million views on YouTube and Vimeo.

Since March 5th, #stopkony, the campaign’s hashtag, Invisible Children, and Uganda have been trending on Twitter worldwide. I, for one, had my Facebook feed flooded with the same link shared by more than 25 of my friends.

The advocacy group “aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” While the video has received widespread support and international attention, at the same time, it has also garnered a fair amount of criticism.

Despite the oversimplification of the complex issue at hand, and whether you support the campaign or not, Invisible Children achieved a goal which documentarians strive for, raising awareness and visibility for an issue they care about.

So what made this particular video immensely popular? Here are some takeaways for documentarians hoping to duplicate the virality of Kony 2012.

Targeting a Pre-Existing Social Network

An analysis by SocialFlow showed that, by March 5, Invisible Children had already cultivated a network of high-school, college-aged and churchgoing youth that would seed the social media explosion.

“We had already an army of young people who’d been supporting us for years,” former Invisible Children chief operating officer Margery Dillenburg told Boston University. “They’ve been fully aware of this date and they were ready to jump… and make it go viral.”

The initial spread, according to SocialFlow, was thanks to Christian youth in small-to-medium-sized towns (Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City and Noblesville, Indiana). The video resonated with youth — The Wall Street Journal notes the average viewer was 24 years old — and it was constructed as such.

Invisible Children’s chief executive told The Wall Street Journal they asked themselves, “How do we make this translate to a 14-year-old who just walked out of algebra class?”

As social media researcher Danah Boyd points out in a Huffington Post blog post, “If you’re a teen, you see this and realize that you, too, can explain to others what’s going on. The film is powerful, but it also models how to spread information.”

A Clear Call to Action

What sets this self-professed documentary apart from others is its specific and direct call to action.

The video begins with a theme of online sharing, illustrating the act of clicking on “Share” and “Send” buttons, laying the framework for how Invisible Children will ultimately be asking for support.

By demonstrating groups of hundreds of people coming together for the same cause, it brought the audience from all different parts of the world as one community. This sense of collectivity encouraged people to take action and to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

Then, much of the last quarter of the video is devoted to the request to make Joseph Kony famous and the various ways the viewer can help. We aren’t left wondering, “What do we do next?”

We are told that there is a bad guy named Joseph Kony, and we can stop him by simply sharing the video, purchasing an action kit or signing an online pledge, or taking the leap to participating in a “Stop Kony” postering campaign offline on a specific day (April 20, 2012). One of these actions is sure to resonate with a viewer.

And to give viewers another push, there’s even an expiration date for action — December 31, 2012.

Celebrity Outreach

Invisible Children already listed celebrities such as Kristen Bell among its supporters, but it sought more stars by asking video viewers to flood a defined list celebrities and policymakers with pre-made tweets, an approach termed “attention philanthropy.” Celebrities started to take notice, including Oprah and Rihanna (both on Invisible Children’s “Culturemakers” list), as well as Kim Kardashian and P. Diddy, which only served to accelerate interest in the video.

Visual Variety

“No one wants a boring documentary on Africa… Maybe we have to make it pop, and we have to make it cool,” Jason Russell, the director and narrator, told The New York Times.

Motion graphics and a variation in editing style maintain interest over the course of the video, even if it didn’t create fans.

In a criticism of the video on the Huffington Post, college senior Patricia Vanderbilt wrote: “There’s a toddler! A dramatic voiceover! Shots of the earth from space, neat graphics, a catchy tune — even a couple of explosions make it in. The formula is working really well, but the approach is almost insulting and cheap.”

A Compelling Narrative

KONY 2012 is an expository documentary that employs a powerful and compelling narrative that resonates with viewers. Russell, also a co-founder of Invisible Children, uses a fundamental narrative based on the story of our generation and the influence of social media to mobilize action.

In addition, he uses the prime archetypes of good versus evil in his storytelling. In one scene, a newspaper headline states, “The World agrees Kony is the ‘Worst.’” There’s no mistake that Kony is packaged to be the ultimate enemy, comparing him to pictures of Hitler. In turn, this heightened image of him urges viewers to participate in the mission. When we simplify the characters into those terms, it is no longer just an ordinary mission, but it becomes a mission of our responsibility to capture THE baddest guy in the world.

As Alicia Eler has stated in Read Write Web, it’s a “classic narrative that America buys into and loves,” in which we follow the white American male who saves the poor and helpless, and becomes a hero that provides a safer and better future for children.

More than anything, this documentary is centered around Russell’s life, from the moment his son was born following his journey to meeting one of the children named Jacob in Uganda to discussing with government officials in the United States of his plan to arrest the Ugandan warlord.

In essence, he transformed his own personal story into a story of common humanity. “Nothing is more powerful than an idea,” the video states in the beginning. Stories can inspire, empower, and create change and his message is clear.

Though making a trendy video is what gets the message across, it also misleads the audience and doesn’t paint a complete picture, including the historical context of the political conflicts in Uganda, as has now been written about at length. However, we can learn that the video took off due this capability to communicate a convincing story and encourage the effective use of mobilization to promote justice and peace. In the end, the story that was conveyed was the key to spreading its message rapidly over social media.

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Wonder Women: The Untold Story of the American Superheroines, directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan (Going on 13) provides a context for the hows and whys behind the portrayal of female action stars in the pop culture. By using the figure of Wonder Woman at its core, the film explores the relationship between how she and her fellow heroines have changed over the years in relation to concurrent trends in sexual politics.

When Wonder Woman first appeared in comic books in the 1940′s, women had left the confines of the home and, because husbands and brothers were fighting the war, they went into the workforce. Wonder Woman, a Greek goddess who came to America and fought crime, kept her own with other superheroes of the day, such as Batman and Superman. A few years later when soldiers came home and women were back to being moms and wives, in her comic book series Wonder Woman was almost entirely stripped of her powers.

Wonder Woman: The Untold Story of American Superheroines

It wasn’t until the Women’s Movement and a campaign led by Gloria Steinem — a talking head in this film — that Wonder Woman’s powers were restored and, ironically, a new wave of sexy independent women cropped up on TV in particular. Interviews with Lynda Carter and Lindsay Wagner (Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman respectively), the film reminds us of just how broad the term ‘role model’ really was a few decades ago. The film shows that those women seemed to have paved the way for the next generation of superheroines, including the Alien franchise’s Ripley and Terminator 2’s Sarah Connor. Guevara-Flanagan’s film weaves together interviews along with film clips and comic book panels, resulting in an informative and entertaining firlm. One last surprising morsel that I learned in the film was that as many times as the Wonder Woman character has been revamped, it was only recently that the book got its first female writer in Gail Simone.

So how are our superheroines doing these days? In this clip, Guevara-Flanagan gives her opinion with a dose of skepticism.

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There have been countless documentaries concerning the lives of artists going back at least as far as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film about his pal, Pablo Picasso. Other recent memorable examples include David Carson’s Helvetica and John W. Walter’s How To Draw a Bunny. Truthfully, one could curate an entire film festival just with bio docs about musicians, dancers, singers and filmmakers.

Just why certain artists stand out always makes a fascinating story. With Ben Shapiro’s Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, while we do get a good chunk of biography, the film is more concerned with the seminal photographer’s creative process. It manages to succeed. By the end of the film, I had the urge to both attend a Crewdson exhibition as well as to visit the Berkshires.

Gregory Crewdson's "Untitled (Ophelia)" from the Twilight series (Photo via SXSW)

By way of full disclosure, I should mention that I grew up going to summer camp in the Hudson Valley with Crewdson and so when I met Shapiro at an IFP party over the holidays and learned about his project, I made a point to see his film at SXSW at first opportunity. The film did not disappoint. And while Crewdson was not in Austin with the film, I did feel that by the end of the film, I had caught up with him on some level.

Shapiro followed Crewdson around, off and on, over a 10-year span. The crux of the film centers on a period of his artwork where the photographer was creating a series extraordinarily detailed set pieces (which can sell for as high as $125,000). We don’t know much about the locals that populate the towns in Western Massachusetts where he shoots these cinematic portraits and are sometimes recruited to act in them, but that is not necessarily part of the filmmaker’s responsibility. The movie is about Crewdson’s artistic process within the context of a life.

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