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A review of Michael Donaldson's 'Clearance & Copyright: Everything the Independent Filmmaker Needs to Know,' 2nd Edition

Author, educator and filmmaker Michael Rabiger sees a bright future for the documentary. "There has never been a better time to become a documentarian," he says. "I think there's an important shakeout coming in the way films will be made and shown. Once the Internet becomes capable of delivering films at decent quality, it will function as a huge library. There are so many stories, so many cultures that have not been touched yet by serious and accomplished filmmaking." Rabiger should know. He has been educating documentary filmmakers for more than three decades. Rabiger will receive the 2003

Editor's Note: This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared in the March-April 2003 issue of Editors Guild Magazine . For the complete version, click here. The task of the documentary editor is not simply to tell a story, but more often to find that story, embedded in a enormous mass of material that initially seems to have no structure at all. Larry Silk, Tom Haneke, Jonathan Oppenheim and Bob Eisenhardt are among the most highly respected editors of long-form documentaries in America. Working out of New York, they've spent their lives informing audiences as much as

A review of 'Cine-Ethnography: Jean Rouch'

By Carina Rubin Asked to write a zeitgeist piece on documentary filmmaking in South Africa, I readily agreed. I am a South African citizen, born in Jamaica of Finnish parents. I worked in film in the United Kingdom for a year, then in the USA for 12 and finally returned home to Cape Town, where I started a production company, Åland Pictures. I had to travel the world to discover that everything I needed is in my own back yard. Together with South African directors Craig and Damon Foster I make documentary features and have a number of large-format films in development that all reflect a

Eccentric, heroic, tragic and charismatic characters are at the heart of some of the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival's most memorable documentaries. Winner of the Golden Gate Award for Documentary Feature was The Overnighters, about a compassionate Lutheran minister who provides shelter for impoverished job seekers in Williston, a small North Dakota community that has become a boomtown for fracking. Rents have skyrocketed, and many of the migrants, even those who find work, can't afford to live there. Director Jesse Moss spent two years in Williston, filming without a crew and

The Black Documentary Collective (BDC) was founded in 2000 by veteran documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne after he organized a series of screenings and discussions in New York. To his surprise, over 100 people showed up at the first event. Through the series, established and emerging black filmmakers expressed a need to have a forum for sharing creative ideas, receiving professional support and networking. Bourne had been concerned about the lack of structure and collaboration among black cultural producers and activists, elements that had been so crucial to the Black Arts and Black Power

"The idea of OneWorldTV.net is to have a place where filmmakers and non-filmmakers alike can come to share stories—whether that's contributing stories or viewing stories that others have contributed." -Alyce Myatt Multimedia Editor OneWorld TV.net If you have dial-up capabilities, if you have a digital camera, if you have a laptop, and soon, if you have a camera phone, you can be part of OneWorld TV. No zip code, no language barriers, no censorship. What is OWTV? OneWorld TV is a public space on the Internet for individuals and organizations, media makers and non-professionals, to get their

It's been over a year since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a new set of rules for qualifying documentary features and shorts for Oscar consideration, and everyone in the documentary world, from filmmakers to distributors to foreign buyers, has something to say about it. "I think the intentions behind the new rules are good," says Jay Rosenblatt, who sits on the academy's documentary committee and whose short film I Used To Be a Filmmaker was short-listed for Academy Award nomination consideration. "I think it's still difficult for filmmakers to abide by them. But the

It's difficult to get too far along in a discussion about British documentaries without Kim Longinotto's name coming up. Over the last 20 years she has built a unique body of work, and is much admired in the UK for her integrity, compassion and, above all, her memorably compelling films. Her documentaries succeed in telling unique personal stories at the same time that they show the universality of womanhood: how woman everywhere, no matter how different their circumstances, have the same types of hopes, fears and aspirations. A graduate of the prestigious National Film School in London