If you are an IDA Member and would like your news to be featured in the Members News column, please send your blurb (150 words max) to Documentary associate editor Tamara Krinsky at krinskydoc@ca.rr.com. You must include your name and the words "Members News" in the subject line.

Ewa Bigio, Managing Director, Smilery Film Distribution and World Sales, reports that her company has been appointed to represent Freeheld, Cynthia Wade's 2008 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Short Subject. The film chronicles Detective Lieutenant Laurel Hester's unforgettable battle with cancer and the local county officials who deny her dying wish to transfer her pension to her domestic partner, Stacie Andree. This is the second year in a row that a Smiley-represented documentary has won an Oscar in this category, following The Blood of Yingzhou District (Dir.: Ruby Yang, Prod.: Thomas Lennon) in 2007. Smiley continues to represent The Blood of Yingzhou District for worldwide sales.

Miriam Cutler scored the documentary Bloodline, which opened May 9 in Manhattan and May 16 in Los Angeles. According to Cutler, "This film picks up where The Da Vinci Code leaves off-only for real." www.bloodlinethemovie.com.

Juan Farre (Lacandon Jungle-A Vanishing Paradise) completed the documentary Nino Fidencio from Rome to Espinazo. This 90-minute documentary will show in competition in the XXIII International Film Festival in Guadalajara, Mexico. www.ninofidenciothefilm.tv.

ITN Source has signed an exclusive global clip sales representation deal with Northern Ireland-based broadcaster UTV to represent its news and regional programming content, giving ITN Source customers access to almost 50 years of unique Northern Ireland footage across politics, entertainment, wildlife and sport. As well as featuring video tracing the Northern Ireland troubles, the UTV collection features rare interviews with Bing Crosby, car inventor John DeLorean and a range of celebrity interviews from Kelly, UTV's chat show, which ran for almost 20 years until 2004. The collection also features rarely seen interviews with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles in their heyday. ITN Source has also signed a six-figure global deal with Al Jazeera, giving the network access to over 800,000 hours of video content for use in its programming. Al Jazeera and independent production companies making programs for the network now have unlimited access to all footage libraries represented by ITN Source, including the Granada, ITN, Reuters, Channel 4 and British Pathe collections, as well as a growing catalogue of HD stock footage. The license agreement covers unlimited global transmissions on the Al Jazeera Network, their associated carriers and online outlets including Al Jazeera's YouTube pages for a period of five years. www.itnsource.com.

Oscar-nominated documentarian Oren Jacoby was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning this past April about his film Constantine's Sword. The film is an astonishing exploration of the dark side of Christianity, following acclaimed author and former priest James Carroll on a journey of remembrance and reckoning.

Rock 'n' roll pioneer Wanda Jackson is profiled in a new documentary, The Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice, by Vincent Kralyevich and Joanne Fish. The film screened at SXSW and premiered on Smithsonian Channel this past May.

Tilapia Film announced the DVD release of Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer's award-winning feature documentary, Plagues & Pleasures On The Salton Sea, on New Video's Docurama label. Crisply and hilariously narrated by oddball auteur John Waters, and featuring music by desert lounge rockers Friends of Dean Martinez, the film melds high camp with stark realism, offering both a sobering message about the consequences of tampering with nature and a heart-warming tale of individualism on the shores of Southern California's Salton Sea. www.saltonseadocumentary.com.

Tom Miller's feature documentary film ONE BAD CAT: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story, which is screening in IDA's DocuWeek, played at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and won Best Documentary honors at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Miller directed, produced, co-wrote and co-edited the film.

Barbara Rick's Road to Ingwavuma was selected as the Opening Night Film at the 2008 Boston International Film Festival. Road To Ingwavuma documents a unique delegation to the heart of post-apartheid South Africa by some of America's most respected artist activists and their families. Led by Artists for a New South Africa in support of that country's children, their journey celebrates South Africa's beauty, progress and remarkable constitution. Their mission: to help end extreme poverty and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Ben Shedd celebrated the 30th anniversary of the premiere of his 1978 Academy Award-winning documentary short subject The Flight of the Gossamer Condor film with four screenings of the newly remastered 30th Anniversary DVD at this year's Experimental Aircraft Association's [EAA] AirVenture 2008. The new DVD was remastered in HD and digitally restored from a new preservation print made by the Academy Film Archive. The DVD is also being licensed by high schools across the country for their "Project Lead the Way" Introduction to Design Engineering program, where students who are half the age of the film are seeing the story for the first time.

Thelma Vickroy's Ahmed, Say Something Funny won the awards for Best Documentary and Best Comedy Feature at the Action on Film International Film Festival.

David Zeiger (Sir No Sir/Displaced Films) and Bestor Cram (Northern Lights Productions) are producing a documentary film about the antiwar events Winter Soldier/Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitnesses to the Occupation, held by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) this past March. Over 100 active-duty soldiers and veterans publicly testified, from their own experience, about what they consider to be the immoral and illegal nature of those wars. They demanded immediate and unconditional withdrawal, with the intent to force this issue onto the national stage.