The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored three student documentary winners at the 41st Student Academy Awards ceremony, held June 7 at the Directors Guild of America Theater in West Hollywood.

The Gold Medal went to Helen Hood Scheer of Stanford University for The Apothecary; the Silver Medal, to J. Christian Jensen, also from Stanford University, for White Earth; and the Bronze Medal, to Zijian Mu from the New York University School of Journalism, for One Child. With the top two honors, Stanford's MFA program in Documentary Film continues to dominate these awards. Since 2000, students from Stanford have won awards in nine of the last 15 years. The runner-up programs in terms of representation over the same time frame are UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, having won awards in five of the last 15 years; and USC School of Cinematic Arts and Columbia University's MFA program in film, with four appearances each. The three runner-up programs in number of honors are UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, with five; and USC School of Cinematic Arts and Columbia University's MFA program in film, with four each. Counting the years when Stanford won two of the three awards, its students represent 11 of the 45 possible winners. This is an extraordinary achievement.  (UC Berkeley has a total of six winners.) Since 2000, four programs have produced 26 of the 45 winners.

These annual awards offer a good reality check on film training programs. With 73 films submitted to the Documentary category from 45 different schools, the results should be evenly distributed among the schools from year to year. Since the production of films is no longer a function of having giant sound stages and expensive cameras, editing and audio facilities, I think the top films are a function of the training, since all other elements (students and facilities) are more or less equal. All three of this year's winners praised the process and their mentor-teachers for support and structure. The key faculty members at Stanford have been there for this entire 15-year period, although Kristine Samuelson retired as professor and director of the Film and Media Studies Program at the end of this past academic year. The other suburb Stanford faculty member, Jan Krawitz, the director of the MFA program in Documentary Film and Video, continues there. In the last few years, the relatively new documentary program at the New York City-based School of Visual Arts is also coming on strong, with multiple Oscar nominee Deborah Dixon among the  faculty, along with a strong group of industry-savvy teachers. The SVA program was been well-represented in the Student Academy Awards over the last several years as a regional finalist, and has won one award.

The Winners:

Gold Medal: Helen Hood Scheer, Stanford University, for The Apothecary

The Apothecary is a moving, character-driven work about shop owner Don Colcord's struggle to both stay in business and support his community, and have a personal life. The film, set in Nucla, Colorado, just an hour's drive from Telluride, has seen hard times since the US uranium industry collapsed in the late 1970s. It's a hardscrabble town, where the folks who haven't fled barely eke out a living. The one oasis of activity is The Apothecary Shoppe, the sole pharmacy within 4,000 square miles. Colcord gamely juggles multiple roles as druggist, surrogate doctor, life counselor and community benefactor. Colcord's sanguine public persona, however, belies a long-suffered private pain for which there is no drug, no cure and no relief.

Prior to making her own films, Scheer worked on documentaries for HBO, PBS, A&E, National Geographic and other networks. Her documentaries tend to be about emotionally complex individuals who subvert expectations and embody intriguing contradictions. Using a cinéma vérité approach, she makes intimate and provocative films. Scheer made her directorial debut with JUMP!, an upbeat, award-winning documentary feature film about competitive jump rope that premiered at the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival and was acquired by Showtime. Subsequently, she directed/produced/shot/edited four short documentary films that have screened at numerous festivals, including Hot Docs, True/False and Full Frame. The Apothecary premiered at the 2013 DOC NYC, and it won both Special Jury and Special Audience Recognition at Aspen ShortsFest. In addition to developing new documentary projects, Scheer is teaches film and TV studio production at Diablo Valley College and documentary production at Chapman University. 

Silver Medal: J. Christian Jensen, Stanford University, for White Earth

White Earth is a stunning portrait of the desolate landscape of North Dakota's oil fields in the middle of a brutal winter. Working 24/7, the residents there are dwarfed by giant machines, and they live in flimsy mobile homes. The young people in the film seem lost in this wild west-like boomtown. The adults focus on their work and making money, and one gets the impression that as soon as they make enough, they'll leave. Unlike the community of Nucla, Colorado, this place has no sense of  community.

The process of making this film was a challenge; Jensen slept many nights in cars, on floors or in camps. Most oil activities had to be filmed clandestinely, under cover of darkness and fog. Some of the pivotal moments of the film were shot on Christmas Day in 2012, and much of the landscapes were filmed alone or with the assistance of a Stanford classmate. The film would have never come to fruition without the aid of countless individuals in North Dakota who generously opened their homes, restaurants, bars and trailers to Jensen, who describes himself as "a wandering stranger with a camera in his hand."

Jensen has been doing film and media work for over ten years. He began in the broad­cast realm, working on productions for National Geographic, FRONT­LINE and American Experience. His first film, Sou da Bahia, was shot in Brazil; it explores art and Afro-Brazilian identity. This film received support from the University Film and Video Association.

Bronze Medal: Zijian Mu, New York University School of Journalism for One Child

Zijian Mu's One Child follows the journey of three families as they try to restore a sense of normalcy and struggle to move past the loss of their children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, China's deadliest disaster in three decades; 90,000 people lost their lives, including 5,000 children. This powerful film looks at both its characters and the devastation of the earthquake-destroyed city. The film is well directed and produced. The viewer connects on an emotional level with the characters, who were clearly devastated themselves by this natural disaster.

The title of the film, One Child, refers China's policy of limited families to one child. Among the 90,000 lost in the Sichuan earthquake included 5,000 children. In response to that massive loss of life, China's government allowed for those who had lost their children to conceive another.

A native of Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County in China, Zijian Mu is now based in New York. One Child, his first documentary, also earned  the 2013 Sidney Gross Memorial Prize for Investigative Journalism. Mu has also contributed video works to The Economist, Vice and CNN. Free Advice Girl, another short documentary he produced, was a finalist for the 2013 Hot Docs International Documentary Challenge and premiered at the festival.  He hopes to pursue making documentaries in the US and in China.

Mitchell Block is the producer of Diana Whitten's Vessel, which won a Special  Jury Recognition and an Audience Award at South by Southwest, as well as the Peter Wintonick Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest. He was also a producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary Big Mama and the Academy Award-nominated documentary Poster Girl (both for HBO). He is also executive director of programming for the Internet channel Raw Science; an adjunct professor at the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC's School of Cinematic Arts; a member of AMPAS and the Television Academy; and a  life member of the IDA. Contact: mwblock@aol.com  ©mwblock 2014 All Rights Reserved

This week the world commemorates the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches, but audiences at this year's Cannes Film Festival have already been immersed in reflections on war. So many films in and out of competition dropped us onto the battlefields and frontlines of Syria, Chechnya, Ukraine, Iraq, Russia, Mali, Sarajevo, Ivory Coast and Burkino Faso. The French newspaper Le Monde referred to the 67th edition of the festival as "Le Grand débarquement."

The festival's tone, mood and atmosphere felt different this year: the world projected on the screen inside the Palais mirrored more closely than ever before the world we faced outside.

A selection of no-nonsense films in the Main Competition was matched by an equally strong, and dedicated team of jury members, headed by filmmaker Jane Campion, the only person to have won both the short film Palme and feature film Palme, and the only woman to receive the Palme D'Or, in 1993 for The Piano. Equally satisfying were the films they awarded : intelligent, sensitive, poetic works that audiences really connected with.

Lines blurred between fiction and documentary, starting off in the Main Competition with Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako's powerful Timbuktu, which originated as a  documentary. At the press conference Sissako said it was rage and revulsion at the indifference of the public to such brutal events in Mali that drove him to make the film. Taking a few moments to regain his composure, he added, "I am crying for those who are not here to cry."

Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan's's Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait opens with fluidly abstract images photographed inside of raindrops on Paris window panes as Mohammed laments his exile with anguish and despair: "I've become a coward; I left Syria." Midway through the film, he uses footage sent to him by Bedirxan, a young Kurdish girl in Homs, to set us wandering through mountains of dust and rubble ruins of bombed-out buildings in what is left of the besieged city. The many close-ups of bloody body parts, open wounds, discarded limbs and charred corpses that line the streets are overwhelming. We see Syrian government soldiers gleefully waving banners that read "Bashar, or We Scorch the Country." We follow a small boy hopping through deserted streets to avoid sniper fire while picking wildflowers to put on his father's grave, which he visits each afternoon. Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait pulls at your heart; the abondonment of the the Syrian people by the international community is incomprehensible and unforgivable. 

For lovers of Russian history, politics and sport, Red Army, from Gabe Polsky, an American born to Ukrainian parents, is exciting, dynamic, action-packed, funny and informative. The film probes into the complicated, troubled lives of the Soviet Union's national ice hockey team while focusing on one of the greatest players who ever lived: "Slava" Fetisov, who eventually defected to the West and went from national hero to enemy of the state. He refused to let the government fleece him of 90 percent of his National Hockey League salary; today he is Russia's Minister of Sport. We see how ice hockey symbolized Russian  power, virility and supremacy in the KGB's  ideological propaganda war against the West and the harsh, Gulag-like constraints and captivity the star players endured. The clever fusion of art, science, technique, ballet, gymnastics and poetry made the Russian hockey team's brilliant strategy and performance on the ice a completely unpredictable counterpoint to the crude, "brute force and ignorance" tactics that characterized the Canadian and American professional teams.

Maidan, a work-in-progress by Serguei Loznitsa, is also the name of Kiev's Independence Square-"ground zero" for the protest movement that began in November 2013 and eventually forced President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia in mid-January. With locked-off wide shots that run far too long, from a camera planted right in the middle of (mostly peaceful) activity, accompanied by wild sound, we observe the days and nights punctuated by patriotic songs, inspirational speeches and poetry readings. Things gradually deteriorate into violent chaos as Ninja-like riot police beat up protesters, throw tear-gas canisters and bricks, and fire into the crowd, killing hundreds of people. There is no commentary; the spectator has to interpret what is going on around them. On May 19, the Ukranian Pavilion screened other Maidan documentary projects in progress, and despite a cold, blistering rain, the tiny tent was overflowing with enthusiastic supporters.

Of Men and War is a rigorous document from French director Laurent Bécue-Renard (and executive- produced by Thierry Garrell, formerly one of the pillars of the French-German cultural television channel ARTE) that takes us inside Pathway Home, a Napa Valley, California treatment center for US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. The film is raw, angry, hostile and uncomfortable to sit through, but necessary viewing to understand how permanent the psychological scarring is, with memories that cannot be forgotten and wounds that will never heal. While writing this, the scandal exposing the systemic flaws and dysfunction within the Veteran Administration's medical and health care infrastructure has broken.    

In the Cannes Classics section, festival director Thierry Fremaux presented the tiny, flaming-red-haired 86-year-old legend that is Marceline Loridan, widow of legendary Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens, to introduce  Regards sur la Révolution, the National Centre of Cinematography's (CNC) restoration of four of the 12 short documentaries the couple made in China from 1972 to 1976, at the end of Chairman Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. These landmark films were among the first subjective looks inside the program to transform and re-educate the Chinese population to socialism's collective values. A precious historical testimony,  Regards sur la Revolution serves as a time capsule for that period, filmed with intensity, sincerity and humanity. It was a privilege to sit before Holocaust survivor Marceline Loridan, a survivor of Birkenau-Auschwitz, whose story can be found in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's classic 1960 documentary Chronique d'un 'Été.,  

Overlapping screenings is always a problem at Cannes. I only saw half of Les Gens du Monde, a faithful tribute to one of the most respected newspapers in the world that this year celebrates its 70th birthday. Most of the team featured in Yves Jeuland's film watched themselves arguing over each word of the front page headlines or the paper's editorial stance. Today's preoccupation is how a printed newssheet stays relevant in a world of media consumers addicted to the Internet's blogs and tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, Instagrams, and other brands of gossip/rumor/opinion that are indifferent to fact-checking.

Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy, from French director Stephanie Valloatto, is a wonderful, funny, but alarming portrait of 12 courageous artists who comment, with pen and ink, on corrupt politicians, military dictatorship, the Mafia, religion and economic and social injustices. Risking their own personal safety and working under police threats and government surveillance, the cartoonists sometimes live under house arrest or go underground. The film honors the work of these Tunisian, Palestinian, Russian, Algerian, Chinese, Mexican, Ivory Coastian, French, Burkino Fasoan and American cartoonists who took their places on the red carpet alongside "Plantu," renowned illustrator at Le Monde and L'Express for over 40 years. In 2006, Plantu created "Cartooning for Peace" with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to denounce intolerance after a cartoon depicting Mohammed that was published in a Danish newspaper set off violent protests throughout the Arab world, calling for the assassination of the artist and anyone else who draws this image.

Roger Ebert loved Cannes, where he was a fixture for over 20 years, and Cannes loved him. Scurrying along the Croisette with his wife, Chaz, in between screenings, he would politely respond to strangers who approached, asking for opinions or advice. Fremaux delivered a heartfelt tribute to his good friend at the Cannes Classics screening of Life Itself. The audience patiently waited for the digital projector, which had suddenly popped halfway throguh the screening, to be repaired while Chaz Ebert and director Steve James fielded questions  Very emotional for all, but the question remains: for societies that place such a high cultural value on film, where are the programs that discuss, debate, analyze and critique "the Seventh Art"? Who will carry on Roger Ebert's legacy?  

The Salt of the Earth was at once my most "boulevarsant" and my most uplifitng moment at Cannes. A spiritual journey through the life and art of renowned photographer Sebastiao Salgago, the film is sensitively assembled in a quiet narrative by Wim Wenders, the co-director with Sebastiao's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. We already know from his photo exhibitions and books that Salgado’s black-and-white imagery is truly miraculous, but the experience is even more powerful and life-changing when this document is projected on a large screen, with the greatest living photographer revealing his feelings and emotions as he tells the story of his life.

In the Directors Fortnight category, Frederick Wiseman's three long hours of observation at London's National Gallery uses the painted treasures as a backdrop that absorbed the vacant stares and bewildered gazes of passers-by who stomp noisily across the wooden floors. Some next to me fell asleep until the very animated lectures delivered by enthusiastic art historians caught their attention. The behind-the-scenes jousting between the museum's administrative board and its chairman reveal a growing disconnect between the priorities of the educated, intellectual or upper-class in Britain and ordinary members of the public who assemble, demonstrate or sleep in tents outside the Trafalgar Square fortress. Wiseman uses the booming drone of chatter as a soundtrack, but there are a few moments where lines of dialogue have a particular significance, although brittle, posh accents will be lost on un-trained ears—and to those reading the subtitles, which this audience was. Erudite? Elitist ? Anachronistic ? Fred is a wise man, and he makes no comment. He leaves the viewer to draw their own conclusions. 

On a mild Friday night, a little light relief came with the screening of Go- Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films, by Hilla Medalia, after which Israeli first cousins Menahem Golan and wheelchair-bound Yoram Globus took to the stage of the Bunuel Theatre to reminisce about the period in the 1980s when this festival was referred to as the "Cannon Film Festival." In those days, the elegant hotel façades became one long garish billboard advertising Cannon's current and future production roster of B movies packed with machine guns, explosions and car crashes. The film offers a critical but sympathetic look at the indulgences and ultimate downfall of the contrasting personalities, but wounds appear to be healing as the moguls announced their new movie venture, soliciting financial investment from the audience.

Leaving a post-screening reception at the Plage de La Quinzaine, we watched a large orange moon hover over the bay, lighting up the sands, where hundreds were nestled in their beach chairs watching Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini's 8 ½ on an enormous screen that stands out in the water at Cinema de la Plage.

Most documentary makers at Cannes gravitate to the Doc Corner in the Marché du Film, where seminars, meetings, brunches, round tables, and pitching sessions take place daily. I attended a terrific roundtable hosted by Sunny Side of the Doc—"Navigating the New International Documentary Financing Scene," which was organized by Julie Bergeron and moderated by Nicole Guillemet of OffCenter Films. Panelists Isabel Arrate Fernandez, manager of IDFA Bertha Fund; Joslyn Barnes, producer at Louverture Films; Annie Lai of the Sundance Institute; Dorota Lech of Hot Docs; and producer Heidi Fleisher clearly and thoroughly explained to an international audience the many sources of funding from all over the world for cinema documentaries in the US and Europe and what specific information these agencies look for from potential candidates.  

Madelyn Grace Most is a member of French Film Critics, Union of Cinema Journalists, Foreign Press Association, Anglo-American Press Association, Reporters Sans Frontieres Paris and Frontline Club, London. She writes about film and develops documentaries and fiction films.

Editor’s Note: On October 1 at the Lakeside Theater in Oakland, IDA will present a special Bay Area edition of its Conversation Series, featuring The Black Panthers director Stanley Nelson talking with Orlando Bagwell, director of the Documentary Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Learn more and purchase tickets. 

Award-winning filmmaker and MacArthur "genius" Fellow Stanley Nelson is known for making historic documentary films. He does an impeccable job capturing personal experiences and sentiments of a particular era. Whether the film is The Murder of Emmett Till, Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple or Freedom Riders, viewers gain a deeper understanding and knowledge of the given period in history. But Nelson did not intentionally focus on making this type of film. "I just fell into a niche of doing historical documentaries and I became known for it," he says. Masterfully crafting films through interviews, archival footage and audio recordings, Nelson delves deep into lives and events that history books often neglect. 

The beauty of Nelson's latest film, Freedom Summer, is his ability to craft an engaging story. Based very loosely on the book by writer/historian Bruce Watson entitled Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy, the film is packed with many surprising stories. "You can't put in nearly as much detail and tell all of the stories you can tell in a book," Nelson explains. The film layers less familiar stories with more known ones and masterfully weaves together storylines using audio conversations, archival photos, illustrations, inspiring interviews with dynamic subjects, original letters read on camera, and freedom songs.  

Nelson shares the credit for finding those rare photos and other material with his team. "We start looking for audio and footage from the first day of production, and this production took a year and a half," he says. Communication and the constant effort of discovering new material is a priority for his films. "If you see something that you like, no matter who you are on the team, let us know it's there and that it exists," he asserts. With that mindset, Nelson's Firelight Media team ended up with 5,000 photos in its database.

The so-called "Freedom Summer," which happened 50 years ago, was a time of fear. The black residents were intimated by the unfair voter registration testing process, and they feared violence, the risk of being fired and even death. The local segregationists feared black people taking over if given the opportunity to vote, so organizations like the Citizen's Council maintained the status quo. The student volunteers, once optimistic and naïve, now feared violent retaliation. President Lyndon B. Johnson feared losing the support of the South and the upcoming presidential election.

Nelson tells the stories of the residents, volunteers and activists who overcame their fear to fight for civil rights and helped to change the country. "A lot of times, the story of Freedom Summer is told as one story—the story of the volunteers who go down to Mississippi—and that's an incredible story," he says. "What we fought to include and give the weight it deserved was also the story of the Mississippi residents, the people who, for 100 years, tried to have the right to vote, and who let people into their houses and did this incredibly brave thing—and had to stay behind in Mississippi after the summer was over. We really wanted to make sure people understood their story and the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers like Bob Moses and others who were down there early on by themselves, and their call and why they needed Freedom Summer."

The Mississippi Summer Project, now known as Freedom Summer, was led by Bob Moses, SNCC field secretary and co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). After a couple years of trying unsuccessfully to get a larger number of blacks registered to vote, this campaign was started to bring more attention to the violence and injustices taking place in the state. 

At the time, less than seven percent of Mississippi-based African-Americans were registered voters, compared to 50 to 70 percent in other Southern states. Driven by that stark reality, white students from the North disbursed throughout the counties in Mississippi and joined black Mississippians in this grassroots movement. The students came from various parts of the country and were trained at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, by SNCC. The volunteers lived with local black families for 10 weeks from June to August.

The three components of Freedom Summer were (1) voter registration, in which volunteers traveled door-to-door to get people to register; (2) Freedom Schools, where volunteers taught subjects that blacks weren't allowed to learn about, like culture, history and literature; and (3) the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was designed to sign up and send delegates from the movement to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with the goal of unseating the all-white Mississippi delegation. 

Two more stories anchor Freedom Summer: those of Rita Schwerner Bender and Fannie Lou Hamer, two heroines impervious to fear. When Bender's husband, Mickey Schwerner, and two other volunteers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, went missing after leaving early in the summer to investigate a church bombing, she was intent on finding answers. She spoke to the media and got people to pay attention. She went to the White House to meet with President Johnson, and she demanded additional help in finding the three men.

 "We always wanted Rita to be a central figure in the film," Nelson says. "Part of our challenge was to get her to agree to do the interview. She doesn't do a lot of interviews, and she added an extra dimension to the film." Bender's unwavering persistence angered President Johnson, evident in the recorded conversation with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, in which the president deemed her "worse than a communist." But Johnson did send sailors to help find the missing men, and the bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were later discovered by the FBI in an earthen dam.

Fannie Lou Hamer—a Mississippi native, a sharecropper and the youngest of 20 children—was beaten by the police for attempting to register to vote. "She's got Mississippi in her bones," Moses says in the film. An exceptional speaker, Hamer was a highlight at the Democratic National Convention. Moses explains in the documentary, "The President, Lyndon Johnson, he's not afraid of Martin Luther King's testimony; he's afraid of Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony and decided that the country should not see her testify." Johnson called an impromptu press conference at the time Hamer was scheduled to speak, but Hamer made such a great impact at the convention that the media replayed her speech over and over again. "When we realized the footage exists of her speech, and it's incredible, we then had to figure out how we can heighten her and give the audience a feeling of her journey and who she is before that speech," Nelson says. 

Change for Mississippi and the rest of the country grew out of the fear that summer. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party rejected the proposal of two seats by the credentials committee during the Democratic National Convention. "When we were organizers, that was okay," civil rights activist Julian Bond states in the film. "But when we tried to have power, the power rose up and knocked us down." They went back to Mississippi empowered and more determined than ever to secure the right to vote. "The Voting Rights Act of 1965 got its birth during Freedom Summer," author Bruce Watson continues in the film. "It was signed in August of 1965 and one of the most important things it did was abolish literacy tests, and it put voting in seven Southern states under federal supervision. That, above all else, is the legacy of Freedom Summer. It really changed American politics. By the end of the year, 60 percent of blacks in Mississippi were registered to vote."

In concert with the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer in June, PBS' American Experience will rebroadcast Nelson's 2010 film Freedom Riders June 17, and Freedom Summer will air June 24. "During the summer, we are working with a number of different groups to get the film around and to get younger people involved because we are still in the struggle for voters' rights," Nelson says. 

Up next for Nelson: a three-part series for PBS entitled America Revisited, which will roll out one film at a time, beginning in 2015 with a program on the Black Panthers; continuing in 2016 with the story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU); and concluding in 2017 with a four-hour examination of the business of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Tracie Lewis is a writer and producer.

Given the vicissitudes, volatility, capriciousness and downright struggle that is the documentary career, a sidelight career is in order: Teaching, shooting music videos, producing commercials, crewing on reality shows—whatever it takes to keep the cash flowing to pursue your nonfiction dreams. The sidelights may primarily pay the bills, but they just might also provide a rich mother lode of material for your next documentary.

Doug Block has managed just that. Paralleling his impressive canon-highlighted by the acclaimed 51 Birch Street (2006), about revelations about his parents following the death of Block's mother, and The Kids Grow Up  (2010), about Block's daughter's last year at home before she goes off to college—he has, for the past 20 years, forged a successful sidelight as a wedding videographer, capturing the angst, tears, joy, pageantry and bacchanalia that is arguably the most epochal day of one's life—whether you are the couple, or the couple's respective parents.

From that rich trove of material, Block has crafted his latest work, 112 Weddings, in which he returns to a handful of his former clients to talk to them about marriage, love, hope and expectations. Each couple has their own set of joys, challenges and heartaches, and two couples had divorced by the time Block made his return visit. On the other side of the spectrum, two couples marry in the film—one, for the first time; the other, after many years of living on their own terms as partners, with Block having filmed their custom-made commitment ceremony.

The film, having screened on the festival circuit at Hot Docs and Full Frame, with Sheffield and Ambulante on tap for June, premieres June 30 on HBO. 112 Weddings will also play in theaters in Canada and the UK through Dogwoof Global.

Documentary spoke with Block by phone in New York City. This interview has been condensed and edited.

In looking at 51 Birch Street, The Kids Grow Up and 112 Weddings side by side, do you see these films as a trilogy of sorts, or as a triptych?

Doug Block: I guess they are a related triptych. I see a more obvious connection between 51 Birch Street and The Kids Grow Up. And clearly the connection between 51 Birch Street and 112 Weddings—that's where I introduced the whole idea that I've been shooting these weddings and I had this very arrogant attitude that I thought I could tell who would make it as a couple or not just by looking at something and getting a feel for it on their wedding day—which, of course, got totally upended by my own seemingly happy parents, when the secrets emerged around my mother's death. And then The Kids Grow Up seemed to be about my daughter going off to college, and this whole concept as parents of letting go of your child and dealing with the empty nest. But it certainly was an awful lot about marriage as well—my marriage in particular.

I thought about whether this film would touch on that autobiographical element again. It certainly could have gone in that direction, but in the end I decided I would look outward this time instead of inward.

What factored in that decision?

I wanted to keep the option open. First, I thought that this was the only way to create an arc to this. Why would I be looking back at these marriages? And what would I have learned from them? It's this classical thing we fall into with "story," and the "story" becomes all the more important than documentary. I certainly thought it was justified because I was going into starting the serious work on the film after years and years of thinking about it.

It was a tough year; the 25th anniversary had me thinking about marriage. The empty nest was a real readjustment, and there's a very real reason why so many marriages break up when the kids leave home. I toyed with the idea, and there was a humorous element to that too, but in the end, by the time I did start working on the film, we had sort of worked that out. And I thought, "Do I really want to impose this kind of false narrative on the film to make it work, and mess with chronology for the sake of art?" I work on instinct a lot on this. I was already sort of going there in my mind, but both Maeve O'Boyle, my editor, and Lori Cheatle, my producing partner, felt it just didn't need it. Lori kept saying, "Curiosity is all you need." And she was so right. I remember when Dogwoof came on board after we pitched at Toronto two years ago. They basically said, "It may well be a better film if your marriage is in there, but it will be a bigger, more commercial film without it." So all of this combined had me thinking that I had never come up with a more commercially mainstream idea for a film. Did I really want to jeopardize the chance of it getting out there more widely by sticking my own story in there again? I don't know if it would have been a better film. It would have been an interesting film, but my wife is very happy she's not in the film.

You've expressed your debt to Ross McElwee as an inspiration for your career, and I see it in 51 Birch Street and The Kids Grow Up. But with 112 Weddings, I see more The UP Series as more of an inspiration—the idea of Michael Apted going back to his characters every seven years and asking them about their lives, their hopes and their expectations. Here, you manage to get 10 couples to really open up about what marriage is. Did The Up Series play a role in helping you rethink how you wanted to tackle this project?

Not really, strangely enough, because time is such a key element in my film. Apted also did a series called Married in America that HBO wanted me to see—not to model myself after, but to know what was out there. It was interesting because I only saw the one that was seven years after; I didn't see the one where everyone got married. There was a key difference: He had the crews shoot the weddings. It was a very critical difference that I shot the weddings; it was just me spending the day with them in a very fly-on-the-wall manner, but there was a strange, interesting, quick bond you form with couples when you share that kind of day with them—and it's an amazing day. Then I'm showing up years later to interview them—and it's only me; I don't have a crew. It's an intimate conversation with them, and I'm narrating the film. I thought it was very important to keep in the film those references to me when they ask me questions and we go back and forth. Even just hearing my questions made it a bit more personal; I think that's a big part as to why they're so candid.

The dynamics change in your relation to them as a wedding videographer versus as a documentary filmmaker. They knew you in a certain context then, but you come back some number of years later in a very different role. Was it difficult for them to reach that kind of interpersonal engagement that they had in a different way?

I think what helped was that when I was first hired, the fact that I was a documentary filmmaker was a selling point. I made it clear that I'm primarily a documentary filmmaker. I do these weddings on the side, and I do very few of them, as a way to support the documentaries. That's the kind of style I'm going to bring to the video—shooting in vérité style, just me being as much of a fly-on-the-wall as I possibly can and hopefully they won't even know I'm there. They did know me as a documentary maker as well as a wedding videographer. Part of the reason I called on the first few couples was I had stayed in touch as my films had come out over the years. I knew they'd be more amenable to doing it.

Did you have all the couples review their wedding videos prior to the interview?

No, I just explained what I was doing with the film: I'd be interviewing for an hour and a half, and I'd shoot whatever was going on that day. I saw from the first interview, when we put our sample together for HBO, it was to see if that style was going to work, if just an interview was enough, with the wedding performing the function of the cutaways. Initially, I thought we might follow three couples in more depth. What I found very quickly from one fairly brief interview was that to me it was more fun and probably just as revealing to do a more superficial look at the marriage. Then you get to project more, in a way. You don't really know; I could have been there for a year. It could have been like An American Family, and I'm not even sure if that captured the total truth of that marriage and family.

But you did manage to capture some real candor—particularly from the divorced couple, who were very forthcoming in articulating their pain, as well as the couple who was married for five years and she was struggling with depression, and the couple whose child had a terminal illness and she was initially reluctant to talk about that.

The interviews were far more revealing that the couples knew, largely because I filmed them predominantly in a two-shot, so you can see their body language and reaction to what the other was saying. It was so interesting because for Maeve and I, our challenge in the edit room was to try to tell in five to seven minutes a story of a couple as dramatically as we could, but balance it with real fairness, and not get cheap laughs at their expense. Or do it so we're judging them, which would have been easy to do. Part of the fun is projecting: Do they have a good marriage? It's also interesting where they disagree about things. I wasn't trying to make any statements about marriage myself; I really found that I was in this incredibly privileged position of having shot these weddings, having this really wonderful wedding footage and being able to go back to these couples and find out what they expected marriage was going to be and what it's turned out to be. It was almost that simple a premise: Let's find out. And of course, we wanted to get as wide a range of experiences as we could. But we were so focused on the individual stories and making them work. What we had hoped was, "Is this going to say something interesting about marriage in the weaving together of it? Will it create almost a mozaic-like portrait of marriage?"

Going back to your sideline career as a wedding videographer, how did it help inform your documentary filmmaking prior to making 112 Weddings?

With every wedding, I'm honing my craft. I'm shooting basically a feature-length documentary every time I shoot a wedding. For many years, I edited in the camera and only took out stuff I hadn't meant to shoot. I just didn't have the time to go back and edit, and it wouldn't have been quite as worthwhile for me to do. So it was really helpful to shoot that way in that I had to really listen. You have to wait for somebody to finish saying something so that you can cut the camera off as soon as they're done, to make the edit point work. Likewise, if there was music playing in the background, I had to wait for the beat. I always had to keep the editing in mind as I was shooting, so that helped enormously in my shooting over the years.

Weddings get a bad rap. I had an attitude about weddings when I first started seeing wedding videos; I just thought they were cheesy and silly. So when I took my first wedding, I just thought, Why not? Somebody called and said they didn't mean to insult me but they needed someone to shoot their wedding. Did I know anyone I could recommend? I said, "I'll do it." And I went. And I just thought it was amazing. As a vérité documentary shooter, what do we want most when we shoot documentaries? Access. And they were paying me good money to have the most amazing access you can possibly have to a couple on their wedding day.

But as Jonathan, the rabbi, hinted at in the film, it is a spectacular day, and everyone's happy. It's tremendous pageantry, and it's a ritual that is thousands of years old—and there is a bit of artifice to it. Janice and Alexander had a real resistance to it. They wanted both a wedding and marriage on their own terms.

Janice and Alexander were extraordinary. They're the only couple who, when I shot their partnership ceremony, I knew that whenever I got around to making this film they absolutely had to be in it. When I called and said I was doing this film, Janice said, "Good timing! Come back in a few months because we're getting married." When it came time to edit the film, it shifted a bit because that question became a central question to the film: What does change by the nature of your signing on the dotted line? In one sense, it's really about long-term relationships as much as it is about marriage, but the fact is, they all signed on the dotted line. 

You talked about exploring the idea of including your marriage but decided not to. After making the film, and screening it, and screening it for the couples in your film and hearing their reactions, what did it teach you about your marriage?

I did come at it from a perspective of knowing that marriage is hard work and not easy. I don't know if I can say what I learned; I certainly confirmed a lot my feelings about marriage and the work involved, what it takes to make it work.

This didn't come up in the interviews, so this is pure speculation on my part, but it could well be that there are so many more things to distract us on our free time—there's Facebook, email, work. We're always working harder than we used to. Whatever the reason was when I interviewed them, they seemed to not only enjoy the interviews but they craved talking about [their marriage], even the ones who were most reluctant. They didn't want me to stop; we kept talking long after the interview.

You asked me what I learned about my own marriage; we've learned how to work things out and we're both committed to our own growth as individuals, which is really important. And I just think the film reinforced the importance of that. It's hard to say what I learned because I don't use these films as therapy. I'm so focused on the audience and what they might learn. So I bring to it my own experience of being married. I know it's a roller coaster. Olivia says she goes through these periods where you love your partner and then you stop; you respect them, then you don't, then you do again. "It's like riding waves," she says. I would find these moments in what all the characters were going through, and I would relate to them all because I've been there.

Thomas White is editor of Documentary magazine.

In the summer of 2013, directors Ben Cotner and Ryan White found themselves on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, filming the thrilling victory of a long legal battle to overturn Proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage in California. Who could ask for a better third act for a documentary? There are all your beloved subjects, walking hand-in-hand down those dramatic white steps as the crowds cheer them on.

But when Cotner and White first started filming The Case Against 8, they had no idea they would end up with such a beautiful conclusion. As White explains, "We didn't know that it would just be the type of case that was filed on paper briefs. So we didn't even really know how cinematic our film would be, or if there was a film."

White and Cotner actually met only a few months prior to teaming up on The Case Against 8 back in 2009. Neither filmmaker had any experience directing such a high-profile story. White had a couple documentaries in the works (Pelada; Good Ol' Freda). Cotner, an acquisitions executive at Paramount, had worked on such hits as An Inconvenient Truth and Mad Hot Ballroom, but had never directed anything.

Armed with nothing more than an all-access pass to the offices of the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the activist organization trying to overturn Prop 8, they blindly started shooting. Hoping to be as unobtrusive as possible, they worked with a miniscule team, and in fact shot the vast majority of the film themselves. "To be honest, I don't think we were prepared, organizationally, from the beginning," Cotner admits. "We were literally just labeling tapes and dropping them into a safe deposit box as we were going."

Cotner and White didn't have much to film other than a bunch of activists scribbling legal strategies on white boards—until AFER recruited a very unlikely celebrity to lead its legal charge. Ted Olson had not only successfully argued Bush v. Gore in front of the Supreme Court back in 2000, but he later served as Bush's solicitor general. He was the most famous conservative lawyer in America but, as the film shows, he had no qualms about breaking ranks from the Republican party line to defend what he calls the "conservative value" of marriage, describing his work with AFER as "the most important thing that I've ever done as a lawyer, or as a person."

Olson then recruited none other than his Bush v. Gore opponent, constitutional lawyer David Boies. The warm camaraderie of this unlikely pair sets the calm, clear-eyed tone (nicely accentuated by composer Blake Neely's gentle score) that distinguishes this film from all the partisan hyperbole this story usually gets in the national media.

But it's the four plaintiffs in the AFER case that give The Case Against 8 its powerful emotional core: Kris Perry and her partner, Sandy Stier; and Jeffrey Zarrillo and his partner, Paul Katami. These four average, everyday people initially joined AFER's campaign thinking they would just be lending their names to a mess of legal documents. They never expected to become figureheads in a seething national debate.

The filmmakers capture the personal journey each plaintiff takes as the AFER lawsuit quickly transforms from a case "filed on paper" to a very public trial. "Kris and Sandy especially were pretty wary of us," says White. "Well, they were wary of the whole process. They were the ones that were most thrown off with the fact that it was going to go to trial because they were these private moms with four boys, and suddenly they were going to have to be in a courtroom testifying in front of the entire world."

We see the plaintiffs learning to face the kind of public scrutiny they had never experienced before as they are prepared for court by Olson and Boies, address the national press for the first time, and discuss the trial with their families. As Perry shares in the film, "The first day of trail, we just laid there in the dark holding hands thinking, ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no.' For Sandy and me, the fear around what could happen to us as women and mothers and bosses...I just remember feeling stricken and very anxious."

The testimonies the plaintiffs ultimately made in court were moving for everyone involved in the AFER case. But because of a ban on cameras in the courtroom, none of it was captured for the film, so Cotner and White had to find a way to re-create those emotional moments. Their solution was a last-minute decision, but it turned out to be the best part of the movie.

While filming the final interviews with the plaintiffs, Cotner and White decided that if they had a little extra time they would have each plaintiff read their testimonies out loud on camera from printouts of transcripts they were holding in their laps. The filmmakers were stunned with what they had captured. White recalls, "The first time we showed the film to Sheila Nevins, our executive producer at HBO, she said, 'That should never work'—and then she's like, 'It's my favorite part of the film.'" Adds Cotner, "What comes through is that these aren't hysterical people who are going for some sort of fringe group. These are people just trying to live their lives. They're not doing this for attention and they're not doing this for a big political statement. They're doing this because these are issues that affect them in a very real and normal way. And I think that's why their emotions come across so clearly."

That AFER trial ended with a federal judge striking down Prop 8. But the proposition's proponents then appealed that decision with the Supreme Court. Although that appeal put marriage equality on hold in California for the next three years, it changed everything for Cotner and White. "Ben and I had to have some serious conversations about like, ‘Wow, we could really have a really good movie here,'" says White.

HBO soon came on board, and the filmmakers retrieved from their safe deposit box a total of 600 hours of footage that had never been logged. They were thrilled when veteran editor Kate Amend joined the project. "It was huge for our film to have gotten Kate on board," says White. But they had just seven months to lock a cut for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, and had a lot of painful decisions to make. "That was torture," says Cotner. "I think the first assembly was somewhere around six hours and we had to whittle that down over a couple of months to two hours. So there was a lot of heartbreak in that process."

On June 26, 2013, the Supreme Court finally ruled on the AFER case, dismissing the Prop 8 proponents' appeal, meaning the ruling that came out of the 2010 court case where all the plaintiffs had testified was official: Prop 8 was overturned. "We definitely had chills," says Cotner. "Here we were, four years later, standing on the steps of the Supreme Court where so many historic decisions—Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board of Education—were made. It felt like you were living in one of those moments."

The Case Against 8 airs June 23 on HBO. In an unusual move, the company will release the film in theaters June 6, followed by extensive community-based screenings around the country through 2014. "We're really lucky that HBO not only believes in the film as a piece of film, but also they are really passionate about the message itself," says White.

Same-sex marriage is currently legal in 19 states and the District of Columbia. But recently, federal courts in eight other states have struck down anti-gay marriage bans like Prop 8. As in The Case Against 8 story, those rulings are on hold as the decisions make their way through the appeals courts. "I think it's particularly important for us, the message of what these people did," says Cotner. "Even though it didn't get marriage for all 50 states, it does inspire this whole new round of lawsuits that are cropping up around the country, and it will hopefully bring marriage equality to all 50 states soon."

Elizabeth Blozan is the director of Rebel Beat: The Story of LA Rockabilly and is known around Hollywood as "the world's greatest transcriber."

Over the weekend of May 17-18, POV produced and presented its 6th POV Hackathon—and the first one staged outside of New York. In partnership with IDA and CreatorUp!, an online platform for producing video content, the latest POV Hackathon took place at The Hub, a creative shared workspace in the arts district of downtown Los Angeles.

Hackathons are primarily associated with the technology sector, where a group of computer programmers, coders and others involved in software development get together and  collaborate intensively on projects. But within the documentary community, hackathons are about exploring new ways of non-linear digital storytelling, says Adnaan Wasey, executive producer of POV Digital. "I believe that what's happening here are the kinds of things that everyone will be doing, not just POV," he asserts. "This is the way that we're going to start thinking about nonfiction media. There's no way to separate the Web from the kind of work that we do."

The impetus to bring the POV Hackathon to Los Angeles came from Mike Tringe, co-founder of CreatorUp!. Tringe says he "planted the seed" after attending a POV Hackathon in New York last year. Tringe had attended other hackathons, but, he says, "I feel there is more creative freedom here. In a typical hackathon it's more about shipping code and making sure everything is functional. Here it's about, How can we reconceive or re-imagine this to have a deeper impact, or be more interesting?"

POV produces hackathons to see what's out there, and what can be done with non-linear documentary storytelling, says Simon Kilmurry, executive director of POV. "How does storytelling get shaken up when you put a storyteller and a technologist together? Long-form documentary will continue to exist, but we want to explore what else can be done with the form. We want to create the sandbox where people can play."

Day 1: The POV Hackathon Begins

The POV Hackathon gets underway at 10:00 a.m., with opening remarks by Wasey: "This is the place to take risks; stick with the bold ideas. Do the safe ideas on Monday. Good luck; it's time to start hacking!"

And with that, the teams get down to work. Composed of three to five people, including a media-maker and technologists (coders and designers), the teams are working together for the first time. While the media-maker has come with an idea (detailed in the proposal for the hackathon), it's more like a starting point and it changes as soon as the team meets. The teams decide what it is they want to pursue, and then they do it together. "Immediately everyone knows that it's a collaboration and everyone is equal," says Wasey. "Even though the media-maker is bringing the video, that doesn't make them better than the other side. If you think about it, the media-makers are bringing the video and the technologists are bringing the code, so they're all bringing something equal." Over the next 30 hours, technologists, designers and media-makers will work together to create a prototype of a project. The goal is to create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) by Sunday at 5:00 p.m., to present to an audience and a panel of judges that night.

The Projects  (for descriptions and prototypes, click here.)

Aerial Viewing (Participants: Greg Prentice, Kelly Sears, Michael Scherotter)

Home Unknown (Participants: Chris Cornwell, Stephen Dypiangco, Taylor Ferrari, Vivek Kaliraman, Julia Wells)

Problem Me (Participants: Evan Pavlica, Byron Q, Vincent Scatliffe)

Return of the Native: Hawaii (Participants: Lucas Allmon, Natasha Florentino, Hugh Hou, Laurie Sumiye)

The World in Ten Blocks (Participants: Jack Cody, Stan Dyro, Marc Serpa Francoeur, Hank Knaack, Robinder Uppal)

10:15 a.m. : Brainstorming

For the next couple of hours, the goal is to figure out how the project can be done in the amount of time given. Groups work in different ways—some writing and drawing ideas on whiteboard, others working on computers.

The team from Return of the Native: Hawaii—an iPad documentary about the restored but rarely seen native Hawaiian forests, as described by locals—discuss, among  other technical matters, what software to use such as Java Script, Dropbox, etc.

The Problem Me team is trying to figure out front-end layout for an app that uses documentary storytelling to connect people around their shared life obstacles. Team members are discussing what order the user should answer questions to use the app. Wasey steps in to guide the project so it keeps on track. "You can decide this later," Wasey advises. "Don't get ahead of the process. There is limited time and a lot to do." There are nine additional mentors on hand to help push projects forward. As Wasey puts it, "We're very hands-on during the creation. The other mentors and I are listening and we're guiding them.

"Hackathon is a really nice buzz word and for the most part it does describe what's happening here," Wasey explains. "It's hacking, it's a marathon. But we make the teams and we think of these as experiments, not as products that are going to immediately go into the workplace. I like to call it a lab because I feel like that's what it is. I like that framing of experimentation, testing hypotheses, trying things out, mixing chemicals together and seeing what reactions occur."

12:30 p.m.

Wasey announces that the brainstorming phase should be coming to a close. Now it's time to start coding-or encoding, as the case may be. Just getting into the coding phase, participants hardly stop for lunch. Moving to content creation is where the real magic begins.

5:30 p.m.: Show and Tell of Works-in-Progress

Each team presents a sampling of what they've come up with and where they're planning to go with it. For some groups this phase affirms the direction they've chosen; for others it's a "redirect"--maybe the project is unclear, or too ambitious.

Teams leave with their work cut out for them, with some working late into the night and the next morning

Day 2

3:00 p.m.

When I arrive mid-afternoon, the foreboding aura of a looming deadline pervades The Hub.

At this point all the teams know what their problems are, says Wasey, meaning they know what they have to work through in order to create an MVP. "One hundred percent of the time, a prototype is made, and 100 percent of the time, the projects are really interesting. Every time, I'm blown away by what people are able to do and how they're able to solve problems, and how they're able to rethink how media can work for the Web."

4:30 p.m.: Tech Check and Reflections from Participants

The participants have been concentrating on creating a prototype; now it's almost time to take it public, so they practice their presentations. It's hard to believe what they've accomplished in less than two days.

The final hours of the POV Hackathon afford a chance for participants to take a moment, while some technologists are still hacking away,  to reflect on expectations, challenges and achievements over the past 30 hours.

Vincent Scatliffe, a coder/designer on Problem Me, sheds light on how the project was "redirected and refocused" after Saturday's Show and Tell: "Essentially, after the presentation everything got scaled down significantly. This helped us because we did not have to do as many revisions or as much work as we would have if we had kept it the way we had during the presentation."

Taylor Ferrari, a designer on Home Unknown, describes the process of coming up with a workable prototype that shares personal information: "We had to wrestle with the ideas of, Who can contribute? Who can use these profiles? Is this public? And we came up with a version where you will create profiles and you will be able to share them with people of your choice, and these people will also be able to contribute."

Laurie Sumiye, media-maker on Return of the Native: Hawaii, reflects, "I've done hackathons before, but this is insane to try to build something in two days with people you've never worked with before." Sumiye continues, "My team is totally amazing. They figured out how to get everything working and we've totally gone past what I thought we were going to finish. I thought if we had one of these panorama scenes I'll be really happy, but we have three. And we have lots of content."

Indeed, the time crunch was woven throughout the participants' experience of the POV Hackathon. Veteran coder Greg Prentice, who worked on Aerial Viewing, says it's always balancing an ambitious idea with the time to get the work done. "We had two days—and not even two full days—so you have to be really smart and make quick decisions like, Is this too big an idea to get done in two days? or, How far should we go with the technology so we don't jeopardize the feel of the final product?"

Of course the idea is to broaden the media-makers' idea of what is possible, but again, it's finding that balance of using the technology to help tell the story. "I was actually scared that it was going to get so many bells and whistles," says Kelly Sears, media-maker on Aerial Viewing. "As somebody who works with 14 layers of composite video, I am absolutely a control freak, so for me there was a lot of feeling out of my element. Trying to open up the way I tell stories, I had such an encouraging team. They were great listeners and really heard what I was saying, and the project grew really naturally."

Technologist Michael Scherotter, who also worked on Aerial Viewing, sees the process as a way to open the media-makers' eyes to what is possible."This is a golden opportunity to be able to have a technical conversation and try to get the directors, the people who are creating films, to the sense of an expanded palate."

And finally, one of the true benefits of the POV Hackathon is leaving with a working prototype to move the project forward—and new collaborators, say Marc Serpa Francoeur and Robinder Uppal, media-makers of The World in Ten Blocks. "We have a programming skeleton that allows us to continue to expand the content," says Francoeur. "When you're dealing with something that's interactive, you can be like, ‘Yes, I think these images are going to work in such a way,' but the difference between that and actually being able to see it is huge. For that alone, this will have been a valuable experience."

"Now we have collaborated with these great gurus who have helped us through a lot of challenges," Uppal adds. "Hopefully we'll be able to continue to work with those guys from a distance and keep building what we have here."

7:00 p.m.: Reception and Public Screening

As people fill The Hub for a lovely reception hosted by the IDA, Wasey tells the audience the hackers stopped working about an hour ago. "What you're going to see is a synthesis of collaboration. When you think there might be two opposing kinds of views—technologists and filmmakers—we have found a structure to get these people to work together."

And that is a big part of what the POV Hackathon is all about. It's putting technologists and media-makers together to foster collaboration. In many cases, technologists have film experience, and filmmakers often have a little tech experience, so they do share a common language. Wasey believes this hybrid media-creator is likely to be the future of interactive documentary-making.

As each team presents its prototype to the judges and the audience, I watch with the privileged perspective of having witnessed the process. Starting with the nugget of an idea and working away with a group of people under an impossible deadline is astonishing.

The judges, which include David Craig, professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC; filmmaker Lyn Goldfarb; Cooper Harris, founder of the social donation platform Klickly; and Lori Kozlowski, columnist at Forbes magazine, come with fresh eyes, and their feedback is invaluable.

First up is Problem Me, a mobile-based app with user-generated videos to help someone with a problem such as "How do I find my passion?" Judges ask pertinent questions such as: ‘What's your end goal with this project?" and "Is it for emotional support or a practical how- to?" Media-maker Byron Q responds, "To begin a conversation on how to solve that problem." Judges make suggestions that will help in developing the project further.

The World in Ten Blocks, which is an extension of the filmmakers' thesis project, takes the user inside a very diverse neighborhood of Toronto. In this prototype, users have the choice to learn more about, say, a Nicaraguan restaurant owner by clicking and entering the restaurant. Craig observes that the filmmakers are sitting on the cusp of something akin to Google Maps, but more interactive in letting users download menus, recipes, etc. Kozlowski points out the potential to connect people as well as the relatively "low tech" approach that will give access to the less media-savvy generations.

Home Unknown, a private family scrapbook that invites contributors to share stories in a space for a richer narrative of family members, evokes a range of responses from the judges. On the one hand, Harris notes that it's "lovely, simple and integrates tech really well." But it also asks the contributor to do a lot of work and perhaps the process of sharing family memories can be simplified. Craig points out that there are larger applications than just sentimental, suggesting this might be a way to share medical histories.

For Return of the Native: Hawaii, judges asked questions about the target audience, and how hot spots within the app will be used to cue audiences about what they are looking at. Craig suggested that the app would be great for education science and ethnography—which expanded upon media-maker Laurie Sumiye's original concept of a game for teenagers.

And finally, Aerial Viewing , an interactive experimental film, plays upon peoples' surveillance anxieties by replicating the tracking experience as viewers are watching the film. Kozlowski conjectures that this may possibly be the most timely of all the projects, alluding to Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA. Technologist Michael Scherotter, a veteran coder at Microsoft, closes out the presentations by eloquently summing up the hackathon: "It's the experimental stuff that I love at this hackathon. Expanding the media-maker's palette was the whole idea."

Judges were there to offer feedback, not to select a winner. The Participants' Award went to The World in Ten Blocks.

To screen the prototypes created at the POV Hackathon and learn more about the projects and the participants, click here. 

Laura Almo is a Los Angeles-based journalist and documentary filmmaker. Currently she is an instructor at El Camino College teaching classes in film analysis and editing. She can be reached at lauraalmo@mac.com. 

Korengal is Sebastian Junger's follow-up feature documentary to the 2010 Oscar-nominated Restrepo.

Two journalists—Junger and the late photojournalist Tim Hetherington—embedded with a platoon and captured 150 hours of combat footage in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan from May 2007 to July 2008. Korengal is Junger's second feature documentary made from this footage.

 "We saw Restrepo as an experiential movie," he says. "You have something close to the experience of combat. It's unfiltered, untainted by a musical score or narration. With Korengal, we didn't feel constrained like that. We really wanted to make a film that strove to understand that experience conceptually. And that was why we used interviews where we asked the soldiers, How does fear work? What does courage mean? Why do you miss the war?"

Korengal delivers on its promise to show us what war feels like. Shot in vérité and as a series of post-deployment interviews, it invites the audience to experience empathy for a role people have played for thousands of years: The Combat Soldier.

No one in the movie talks politics, though a soldier's presence is inherently political. No one discusses at length the moral implications of war—although the moral complexities are implicit—or why they're willing to fight in it. The entire content of the film is singularly devoted to the soldiers' perspectives.

 "We did the interviews two months after the deployment ended," Junger explains. "The soldiers talked about their feelings because their feelings were extremely powerful. And so were ours. There were interviews where everyone was crying. All of us, including the two filmmakers, had a pretty good case of PTSD. So you have people with PTSD interviewing other people with PTSD."

Junger shapes a film where physical conflict begets internal conflict. Two wars are presented: The war on the ground, and soldiers at war with themselves. "There are unpleasant truths about war," he notes. "On one hand, you can see in one bit of footage how much fun they're having. They're just whooping it up during a firefight. They look like grade-school kids in a water balloon fight. It's pretty remarkable. And that makes civilians uncomfortable."

For a filmmaker, evoking discomfort can be a good thing. "I feel like the film will help civilians confront some of those uncomfortable truths that they'd rather think are not true," Junger maintains. "I start with a sound byte of a soldier saying, ‘I miss it. I wish I could go back tomorrow.' That has to be explained."

Junger uses the language of paradox to explore the question, as soldiers' actions are often at odds with their beliefs. Brendan O'Byrne, a soldier interviewed in the film, is not religious, yet he worries that he'll have to explain his actions to God someday. "And," Junger explains, "Brendan didn't even believe in God. He wasn't religious and he was worried about it. The longest single sound byte is Brendan talking about the tragedy of war and what it does to a person morally.

 "I put that in to counterbalance the other things that are true," Junger points out. "A lot of soldiers play ‘war' when they're little boys. They join the Army because they want to know what combat is like. And they get into combat, and they love it. Then they get home, and they miss it. I'm trying to report all of that moral complexity, trying to report it honestly, and not censor it."

An honest look at a complex situation reveals an experience constructed as a series of paradoxical moments:  The soldiers describe combat as an experience other people "can't understand," yet they often reflect about not understanding their own combat experience and the love/hate cycle it provokes. Another soldier mourns having to do terrible things, yet says, if given the chance, he would make the same choice again. The soldiers pretend to be in friendship with the local elder council, yet the platoon captain describes the elders as a "bunch of liars." In a rare moment of tranquility in the film, a soldier strums "Dust in the Wind" on an acoustic guitar. But before the deployment ends, a soldier smashes the guitar to pieces for fun. One soldier admits he's experienced racism within the platoon, but insists he would give his life for anyone, including the ones he believes have acted in a racist manner.

Such a close examination of soldiers in combat is evocative, offering the audience an immersive, riveting, and, at times, meditative window into a usually unseen world. The platoon's story is told in a simple, direct way. But like the experience it documents, Korengal is also challenging and complicated.

Ultimately, Junger believes, Korengal will foster understanding. "We send them off, and they come home. They come home changed. And I thought if I made a film that helped soldiers unpack and understand their own experience at war, if I could do that, civilians might also understand that experience better. It seemed like having a work that tries to understand that experience would help everybody."

Korengal opens in theaters May 30 in New York and June 13 in Los Angeles, through Goldcrest Films.

Suzanne Curtis Campbell is a Los Angeles-based writer, currently working toward her MFA in screenwriting at the UCLA School of Film, Theater and Television. She has worked with Ladylike Films on the award-winning documentaries Somewhere Between and Code Black, and on PBS' Makers.

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 following Pastor Jay Reinke as he struggled against community opposition. Moss' unobtrusiveness afforded him intimate access to Reinke and his "overnighters," earning their trust and eliciting remarkable confidences. "There is a mystery and complexity about Jay; his compassion for broken men comes from a deep place inside him," Moss said, by way of explaining a bombshell revelation at the end of the film to a stunned audience.

Two other "broken men" are the focus of first-time director Sara Dosa's lovely, elegiac The Last Season, winner of the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Documentary. Every autumn, a motley group of misfits gathers in Chemult, Oregon, to hunt the valuable matsutake mushroom. In Japan the prized delicacy fetches hundreds of dollars a pound, and during the two-month season, hunters can earn thousands. Dosa, who had learned about Chemult as a graduate student in cultural anthropology, followed several hunters during the season, but ultimately concentrated on two: Roger Higgins, a Vietnam veteran who suffers from PTSD, and Kouy Loch, a Cambodian refugee who survived the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. How the two men bonded over their shared experiences is at the core of "a search for healing, meaning and family in the wake of profound violence," Dosa wrote in the festival's blog. Fittingly, The Last Season had its world premiere at the festival, where Dosa worked before leaving to make the film.

When Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren began filming The Dog, the real-life inspiration for an iconic movie character was still basking in a spotlight that had moved away from him decades earlier. The directors spent years filming John Wojtowicz, a gay New Yorker whose quixotic 1972 effort to finance his lover's sex-change operation inspired the 1975 hit film Dog Day Afternoon, which starred Al Pacino as a bank robber based on Wojtowicz. They found him not only willing, but eager to tell the rest of his story. There's a lot more to tell, and it's all fascinating, if not always absolutely factual. "This isn't a journalistic piece; it's his version of what happened," Berg warned. It took ten years to finish the film, and Wojtowicz, who died in 2006, would probably be thrilled to finally be the star of his own movie.

Unlike Wojtowicz, who enjoyed his brief notoriety, Burt Shavitz, the subject of Jody Shapiro's Burt's Buzz, is visibly uncomfortable with his worldwide celebrity. Walk into any drugstore, and you'll see Shavitz's face as the bearded elderly hippie logo of Burt's Bees lip balm and other grooming products. The real-life Burt, who abandoned his former career as a photojournalist in New York in the 1960s to live a simple, solitary life in the country, casually fell into beekeeping, and earned a meager living selling honey by the side of the road. His life changed when he fell in love with an entrepreneurial woman, who began making candles from his beeswax, and the business blossomed into a multimillion dollar enterprise. "Roxanne Quimby wanted money and power, and I was just a pillar on the road that success," a chagrined Burt recalls in the film. The relationship soured, Quimby bought out Shavitz, and sold the company to Clorox. Shavitz reluctantly remained the face of Burt's Bees, and the contrast between his hermit-like life in a rustic Maine cabin and his personal appearances in places like Taipei, where he's greeted by hordes of screaming teenage girls, gives Burt's Buzz its resonance.

 

Directors Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker also profiled a reclusive outsider in  Art and Craft. But their subject, Mark Landis, has something to hide. For decades, he's been forging works of art, and donating them to 46 museums in 20 states. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, Landis, who says he's done nothing illegal, since no money changed hands, calls himself a "philanthropist." What makes the film even more intriguing is that Landis has an implacable foe, just like in the old movies to which he's addicted: former museum registrar Matthew Leininger, the Javert to Landis' Valjean. The two finally come face-to-face, in the most dramatic way imaginable, at a museum exhibition devoted to Landis' forgeries.

Indie rock singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, who died in 2003, is remembered in Nickolas Rossi's wistful biography Heaven Adores You, which had its world premiere at the festival. Produced by Smith's high-school friend Kevin Moyer, the film features previously unreleased tracks and interviews with Smith, who spent years making music in Portland, and battled depression and substance abuse. Rossi said his film was "not necessarily a biography, but a tribute, a gift to all the fans."

 

Only the most dedicated pop music fan knows the name of talent manager Shep Gordon, but Gordon's address book is filled with names of celebrities who consider him a friend, from longtime client Alice Cooper to actor Michael Douglas, to celebrity chef Emeril Legasse. In Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, directed by comedian Mike Myers, many of them tell outrageous stories, and testify to what a mensch Gordon is. But it's Gordon himself who is the best raconteur. From tales of his wild youth as an occasional drug dealer and rock 'n' roll hustler, to sharing joint custody of a stray cat with neighbor Cary Grant, to making yak butter tea for the Dalai Lama, Gordon's stories are a delight. Fond, funny, gossipy and consistently entertaining, the film shows why, as Myers says in the film, "Shep is the nicest person I've ever met, hands down."

 

French filmmaker Agnès Varda has had several careers, from photographer to New Wave icon to documentarian. At 85, she could be forgiven for resting on her laurels. Instead, she used invitations to retrospectives and awards ceremonies around to world to indulge her adventurous appetites for all kinds of art, documenting her travels in a five-part television series, Agnès Varda From Here to There. Like a Gallic Sister Wendy, Varda explores whatever form of art takes her fancy: Renaissance Madonna paintings and Brazilian superheroine totems; walking on a Paris street with a cartoon cat created by famously reclusive filmmaker and longtime friend Chris Marker; or dressing up as a potato to promote her own mixed-media installation, Potatotopia, at the Venice Biennale. Far from a dilettante, Varda is a knowledgeable and delightful guide to all things artistic.

In Julie Bertuccelli's School of Babel, the characters are a group of immigrant middle-school students from around the world living in Paris and spending a school year in a "reception class" to bring them up to speed so they can integrate into regular classes. The film shows the students' struggles in their own words and without narration, and their issues are about more than just learning a language and customs. A boy from South America refuses to speak French because he doesn't want to forget Spanish. A girl's devout Muslim family won't allow her to go on a school trip. Another must leave school when her family has to move to public housing in another city. With the help of a supportive teacher, the immigrant experience becomes a bonding one, and most of the students emerge confident and, ultimately, triumphant.

Another group of characters brings history to life in Stanley Nelson's Freedom Summer. In 1964, 700 college students, black and white, spent ten weeks in segregated Mississippi registering black voters. It was a perilous mission: three of the participants went missing early on, and were later found murdered. Now in their 60s and 70s, some of the participants share their stories, often moved to tears by memories of their naïveté, passion and terror. Nelson's superb use of archival material includes audio evidence of President Lyndon Johnson's casual racism in a conversation with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, as well as a look at fearless and fiery activist Fannie Lou Hamer in action. The film airs on PBS in June to mark the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer.

Margarita Landazuri is co-editor and writer for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and writes for the Turner Classic Movies website.

"...O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave"

So concludes the American national anthem, sung proudly, earnestly and frequently at stadiums, arenas and sports fields, and on the 4th of July. But with a prison population of over 2.2 million, the US is the world's biggest jailer by far. The nation comprises less than 5 percent of the world's population, yet accounts for a quarter of the world's prisoners. Its incarceration rate is five to six times greater than its European counterparts. These are baffling statistics, which cannot simply be explained by lenient gun laws or trite "tough on crime" observations.

For those of us seeking insight as to why and how this happened, Al Jazeera America will premiere The System with Joe Berlinger, a new eight-part documentary series directed by veteran filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost Trilogy, Whitey: The United States vs. James Bulger). Focusing on two cases in each episode as a departure point, the series examines critical issues in the justice system: flawed forensics, false confessions, faulty eye-witness testimony, mandatory minimum sentences, and prosecutorial misconduct, to name a few.

In a marked departure from his previous films, the series features Berlinger on camera, navigating the murky world of crime and punishment, speaking to prisoners, prosecutors and victims' families, and frequently getting rejections as some subjects adamantly decline to be interviewed.

"That's the first time I ever put myself on camera and it was a very considered decision because I'm not that kind of filmmaker, usually," he admits, during a phone conversation from his New York office. "It was important to me and to Al Jazeera, not to just wag a finger and say, ‘The system is broken,' and to show just one side. In covering these stories over the years, I have learned that there is great complexity and ambiguity. And by seeing the filmmaker's journey, grappling with the complexity of the issues, we help the viewer understand that."

Berlinger's extensive, two-decade experience in the field of criminal justice certainly makes him the right conduit between the wrongfully incarcerated and the victims' families still seeking closure. He explains, "With any other kind of show, I would not necessarily feel qualified to be on camera, but my ‘specialty' in the documentary business has been legal cases and the legal system, so I feel like I'm a qualified tour guide in that particular world. To explore the criminal justice system and come up with some solutions, you have to show both sides. When botched forensics means that you should give the prisoner a new trial, you still have to have sympathy for the victims' families, who believe these guys are guilty. Their whole healing process is predicated on believing that the police caught the right guy.

 "Originally we were just going to do a series on wrongful convictions, but there's a much wider lens that we need to look through," the filmmaker confides.

 "We have a criminal justice system in dire need of reform." Berlinger continues. "As a longtime observer of it, I have moved along a continuum, because Paradise Lost was my wake-up call that wrongful convictions can happen. But there are huge systemic problems beyond wrongful convictions that need to be addressed, and that's really why I am doing the series."

The first episode in the series, False Confessions, features the renowned case of Jeffrey Deskovic, who was eventually exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence after spending 16 years imprisoned for a brutal rape and murder he did not commit. As a shy 16-year-old, Deskovic was subjected to a ruthless, seven-hour interrogation by detectives, and he finally caved, admitting to a crime he did not commit. Deskovic, now an activist for those wrongly convicted, is one of many. In 27 percent of cases overturned by DNA evidence, the defendant gave a false confession.

"One of the great benefits of DNA is that prior to DNA testing, the general public was much less willing to believe that there could be such a prevalence of wrongful conviction cases," Berlinger explains. "And DNA, which is an unassailable science, has forced people to recognize that false convictions are far too common. The problem—and where we need greater attention—is that most cases don't involve DNA. So you have to look at prosecutorial misconduct, a botched FBI crime lab, and policies that intend to help but actually hurt, such as policing strategies.

 "Ninety-seven percent of cases don't end up going to trial but are ‘pled out,'" Berlinger notes. "On the surface you might think that's a good figure, but because there are so many problems with the integrity of convictions, sometimes people are forced to plead something they did not do because they don't have the resources to fight, and it disproportionally affects the poor and the minorities."

He adds, "The other impetus for the series is, I can't tell you how many letters I get from people claiming to be innocent. At face value I don't just think that everyone who sends me a letter is innocent, but you have to believe that a good percentage of those letters are in earnest. There's a real problem, and the series just scratches the surface."

Though the show is not solely focused on prisons, it does dispel some generalizations and misconceptions about convicts propagated by fictional shows on television. The most striking aspect is how articulate, gentle, resilient and remarkably devoid of resentment the wrongfully incarcerated are.

 "I have over the years been really struck by the lack of bitterness that people have even after they have been abused by the system," Berlinger maintains. "Sometimes people falsely view the lack of outrage demonstrated by people who claim to be wrongfully convicted as evidence that they must be guilty because, ‘Why aren't the pounding the table more?' And I learned long ago that that is a foolish way to look at it. Anger and bitterness will consume you, and a lot of these people, somehow—in order to survive—learn to put that aside. Those who make it under the pressure of the unbelievably unfair circumstance of being wrongfully convicted, have to let the anger go. Not the resolve to exonerate yourself, but the anger."

As each episode examines individual cases, what transpires is the fact that sometimes justice is not blind, but random. So much depends on the accuracy of police work or the willingness of a judge to reopen a case and re-examine evidence. As a consequence, many prisoners are often warehoused and forgotten.

Berlinger points out, "Most prosecutors don't ever want to have a wrongful conviction, and I've met many outstanding prosecutors who care about justice, and many law enforcement people who take their responsibilities seriously. But people in positions of power don't want to admit they made a mistake, and are afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing; they would rather let someone rot in prison. That propensity of not wanting to come to terms and correct mistakes is exactly why this series is so important, and why media attention to the legal system is necessary."

When asked about how the justice system has evolved since he started with Brother's Keeper, Berlinger identifies the growing privatization of prisons, for deincentivizing rehabilitation and incentivizing incarceration. "We have exponentially moved away from rehabilitation as a concept," he explains. "The privatization of prisons has made rehabilitation a dirty word." In addition to an systemic racial bias and a failed war on drugs,  this has resulted in "draconian drug laws that have been disproportionately impactful on minority communities."

That said, Berlinger goes to great lengths to cover different viewpoints, giving voice to victims' families, and he regularly reframes the narrative from the law enforcement perspective.

"In all of my work, I believe you have to show both sides and let the truth rise to the top," he maintains. "By treating the audience member like a jury, instead of dictating specific points of view, if you let them weigh the pros and cons instead of being passively lectured to, it creates a much more emotional connection. That was the idea that I wanted to bring into the series."

Berlinger concludes, "The most fundamental thing that separates America, in theory, from any other country is the idea of personal liberty as the most important, basic, core American value. When we have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, set against a backdrop of a country that believes in the sanctity of personal liberty, there's a problem there and it needs to be addressed. That's really what drives the series."

The System with Joe Berlinger premieres Sunday May 18 on Al Jazeera America. For more information on the series click here.

Darianna Cardilli is a Los Angeles-based documentary filmmaker and editor. She can be reached at www.darianna.com.

Even during the annual  Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival's celebration of everything nonfiction, not every Canuck obsesses over documentaries. Some are more concerned about hockey, the weather and, if in Toronto, Mayor Rob Ford. Still, it's heartening to note that while hiz-dizhonor was making international headlines by allegedly smoking crack, and local sports fans found their attention divided by, of all things, a basketball playoff, a record number of 192,000 Torontonians and visitors stood patiently in downpours of rain to attend screenings of the 197 films selected to play at Hot Docs.

What made them brave the inclement weather—truly, the worst suffered at the festival in more than 15 years? It's the films, of course, and the sad reality that they're rarely funded or seen on television anymore. Audiences in Toronto react much as they do at IDFA in Amsterdam every November. They come in droves to see work by independent filmmakers with singular attitudes, who are unafraid to investigate societal ills, or profile distinctive figures in arts and culture or create essays about philosophical and communications issues that ensnare many of us.

It's the kind of filmmaking that used to receive munificent financing by broadcasters ranging from PBS to Canada's CBC and TVO to Britain's BBC, France and Germany's ARTE and Japan's NHK. Those organizations, and often the same people, are still at the oblong table, accompanied by representatives from new digi-channels, distribution companies and foundations, for the heated pitch sessions at the Hot Docs Forum. A festival highlight, the Forum is a two-day event, which offers 20 spots, including the randomly chosen Mountie's Hat, to filmmakers who want to get their films properly financed.

It's a modern theater of dreams—or nightmares, depending on the mood of the assembly of financiers who sit in judgment of the imaginative pitches presented by directors accompanied by their producers and main funding partner. The clearest indication of the dysfunction beleaguering the whole system is the inconvenient truth that budgets have dropped in half over the past decade and a half. While it's true that equipment and post-production work is way cheaper than before, what happened to million-dollar budgets for docs?

None of the films presented at the Forum were million-dollar babies. The winning project, which received the $10,000 Shaw Media-Hot Docs Forum Pitch Prize, was the modestly budgeted Tempest Storm, a profile of the legendary burlesque queen, who is still alive and kicking at 84. The production team of Nimisha Mukerji and Kaitlyn Regher allowed themselves $40,150 in fees for a project listed as costing a modest $285,000.

Would Shaw Media, which owns 19 channels, actually show the film, if made? While one can't answer definitively, the group owns a mainstream over-the-top channel Global-TV, plus HGTV Canada, Food Network Canada, National Geographic Channel, Showcase and HISTORY; none are likely to air a doc on Tempest Storm.

This is the great conundrum of Hot Docs and its Forum: Audiences flock to the festival, but there are hardly any institutions left to finance or broadcast the point-of-view films embraced by crowds just outside of the Decision Makers' purview.

There were, as always, a number of controversial projects being pitched. Director Sarah McCarthy (The Dark Matter of Love) and producer/director Mike Lerner (Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer) have come together for a new film, Putin's Number One Enemy, which will tell of billionaire Bill Browder's attempts to bring his former ally to justice. Browder showed up for the pitch, which created quite a stir at the Forum. Several commissioning editors wondered how much influence the wealthy Browder would have on the film—with the appropriate claims of denial being placed on the doc community's radar by both McCarthy and Lerner.

Other intriguing projects include In the Shadow of the Dream, a portrait of Clarence B. Jones, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s lawyer at the height of the civil rights movement; The Babushkas of Chernobyl, a film featuring septuagenarian and octogenarian women who continue to survive in the famously radioactive zone in the Ukraine; and Amina—A Gay Girl in Damascus, about an Internet hoax set in motion by a "pathetic white academic," according to a Forum quip uttered by the avuncular Nick Fraser of BBC's prestigious Storyville slot.

Participants at the Forum went from dreams to reality at the festival's awards presentation at the prestigious Windsor Arms Hotel. Out of Mind, Out of Sight, a compassionate vérité look at the lives being led by four violent offenders, who are now inmates at the Brockville (Ontario) Mental Health Centre, was the $10,000 Best Canadian Feature Documentary Award winner. Veteran director John Kastner, who has won four International Emmys for some of his previous clear-eyed, perceptive work, gratefully accepted the prize for "bringing insight to the emotional complexity surrounding the issue of mental illness."

Before the Last Curtain Falls, a stylishly shot and edited film about the final performance of Gardenia, a play starring transvestite and transsexual performers, won the Special Jury Prize. Moving back and forth between the final theatrical performance of Gardenia and intimate looks of the lives of the actors, director/writer Thomas Wallner's film, edited by Manfred Becker, won $5,000.

A funny and lively eco-doc, Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story, won the Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award. Director Grant Baldwin and producer Jenny Rustemeyer recorded what happened when they took a vow to eat the discarded food of our society. Funny and instructive, their film shows how one can cook and consume wonderfully well with the detritus of our society.

A special jury prize was accorded to the radical doc The Secret Trial 5. Producer Madeline Cohen-the co-winner of the Lindalee Tracey emerging artist award-and director Amar Wala worked with a dedicated crew to document the story of Canada's "Guantanamo North" in Kingston, Ontario, where a small group of Muslims accused of acts of terrorism were held for years. Well-researched and presented, this film exposes the terrifying practice of using "security certificates," powerful and unchallengeable weapons, to imprison accused but not convicted individuals.

The Best International Documentary Feature Award went to the heart-warming Waiting for August, director Teodora Ana Mihai's year-long vérité portrait of a Romanian family held together by Georgiana, a vital and impressive 15-year-old girl. With their mother away in Italy working to support them, it's up to Georgiana to make sure that her brothers and sisters go to school and stay focused and healthy. Waiting for August—the title implies when their mother returns—is a wonderful humanist film.

Other award winners at Hot Docs include the diving doc Walking Under Water, which won a Special Jury Prize for International Feature Documentary; director Orlando von Einsiedel, who won the Emerging International Filmmaker Award for his eco-doc Virunga; and for Best Mid-Length Documentary, the circus-doc  Kings of the Wind & Electric Queens. Finally, the highly regarded and multi-talented Canadian producer/ writer/director Michael McNamara won the Don Haig Award for best producer.

Hot Docs will be back next spring. But will funding for docs improve during that time?

Based in Toronto, Marc Glassman is editor of Point of View magazine and Montage magazine.