Here's a rundown of what's coming to US theaters this month:

Opening: May 1
Venue: Quad Cinema/New York City
Film: A Wink and a Smile                                                    
Dir./Prod.: Deirdre Allen Thomas; Prod.: Jack Thomas
Distributor: First Run Features
Web: http://firstrunfeatures.com/winkandasmile_synopsis.html
An intoxicating mix of private thoughts and public behavior, A Wink and a Smile exposes more than the human body by putting gender, power, sexuality and social identity under the glittery spotlight, as it follows the lives of  ten "ordinary" women who do something extraordinary--learn the art of burlesque dancing and striptease.  Through their adventures, we see how a homemaker, a reporter, a doctor, an opera singer, a taxidermist and a college student join the American cultural revival of burlesque, as it moves from fringe fascination to mainstream obsession, engaging a world where performance art and showgirl spectacle, music, theater and sensuality crash into over-the-top glamour--a world where many want to go, but very few dare.

Opening: May 1
Film: Naked Ambition
Dir.: Michael Grecco
Distributor: Lantern Lane Entertainment
Web: http://www.nakedambition.com/
From the trailblazing naughtiness of Bettie Page to the pole-dancing craze of modern housewives, the continual mainstreaming of adult entertainment is undeniable. Now comes Naked Ambition, An R-Rated Look At An X-Rated Industry, from renowned celebrity photographer Michael Grecco, which offers an unabashed peek under the silken covers of one of the few remaining concealed idiosyncrasies of pop culture: the multi-billion dollar porn industry.

Opening: May 8
Venue: IFC Center/New York City
Film: Objectifed
Dir.: Gary Hustwit
http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/
Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It's a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It's about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It's about personal expression, identity, consumerism and sustainability. 
Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world's most influential product designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Opening: May 8
Film: Outrage
Dir.: Kirby Dick; Prod.: Amy Ziering
Distributor: Magnolia Pictures 
Website: http://www.outragethemovie.com/
A searing indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted politicians who actively campaign against the LGBT community, Outrage boldly reveals the hidden lives of some of our nation's most powerful policymakers, detailing the harm they've inflicted on millions of Americans, and the media's complicity in keeping their secrets.

Opening: May 8
Film: Brothers at War
Dir.: Jake Rademacher
Distributor: Goldwyn Films
http://www.brothersatwarmovie.com/
Brothers at War is an intimate portrait of an American family during a turbulent time.  Jake Rademacher sets out to understand the experience, sacrifice and motivation of his two brothers serving in Iraq. The film follows Jake's exploits as he risks everything-including his life-to tell his brothers' story. Often humorous, but sometimes downright lethal, Brothers at War is a remarkable journey where Jake embeds with four combat units in Iraq. Unprecedented access to US and Iraqi combat units take him behind the camouflage curtain with secret reconnaissance troops on the Syrian border, into sniper "Hide Sites" in the Sunni Triangle, through raging machine gun battles with the Iraqi Army. Ultimately, the film follows his brothers home where separations and life-threatening work ripple through their parents, siblings, wives and children. Brothers at War provides a rare look at the bonds and service of our soldiers on the frontlines and the profound effects their service has on the loved ones they leave behind.

Opening: May 13
Venue: Anthology Film Archives/New York City
Film: Revue
Dir.: Sergei Loznitsa
Distributor: Icarus Films
Website: http://icarusfilms.com/new2008/revu.html
As he did with his critically-acclaimed Blockade, a documentary re-creation of the WWII siege of Leningrad, filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa has once again scoured the Russian film archives for Revue, selecting excerpts from newsreels, propaganda films, TV shows and feature films that present an evocative portrait of Soviet life during the 1950s and 1960s.
With scenes taken from the length and breadth of the Soviet Motherland, Revue illustrates industry and agriculture (dam construction, steel plants, Stakhanovite labor competitions, farmland seeded by hand and plowed with horse), political life (local elections, abundant Lenin iconography, speeches by Khrushchev, the threat of capitalist spies), popular culture (a village choir, a dance troupe, a travelling cinema, poetry readings for workers, a propagandistic stage play), and technology (space exploration, astronaut Yuri Gargarin, new industrial development).

Opening: May 15
Film: Kassim the Dream
Dir.: Kief Davidson
Distributor: IFC Films
http://www.kassimthedream.com/
This is the story of world champion boxer Kassim "The Dream" Ouma--born in Uganda, kidnapped by the rebel army and trained to be a child soldier at the age of 6. When the rebels took over the government, Kassim became an army soldier who was forced to commit many horrific atrocities, making him both a victim and perpetrator. He soon discovered the army's boxing team and realized the sport was his ticket to freedom. After 12 years of warfare, Kassim defected from Africa and arrived in the United States. Homeless and culture-shocked, he quickly rose through the boxing ranks and became World Junior Middleweight Champion.
Kassim, now age 29, seems to have obtained the American Dream with his jovial nature, fame and hip-hop lifestyle. As Kassim trains for his next world title fight against Jermain Taylor in Little Rock Arkansas keeping his demons out of the ring becomes increasingly difficult. His desires to reunite with family in Uganda intensify when Kassim's only hope for a safe return is a military pardon from the president and government responsible for his abduction.
Director Kief Davidson received unprecedented access to Kassim Ouma during a pivotal time in the boxer's career. Filmed in cinema vérité style, the documentary blends current events with brutal revelations of a stolen childhood. The parallels reveal a complex and haunted fighter surviving against incredible odds.

Opening: May 19
Venues: GoggleWorks Theatre/Reading, PA; Allen Theatre/Annville, PA; Whitaker Center/Harrisburg, PA
Film: Rough Cut
Dir.: Todd Klick
http://www.toddklick.com/roughcut/documentary.php
Would you kill to make a movie? The scary thing is, two independent filmmakers did.
In January 2003 a woman was found beaten, strangled and stabbed in her Pennsylvania home. Eight months earlier, an independent horror film was shot on the nearby Appalachian Trail.
Rough Cut is a feature length documentary that explores the twisted true tale of two first-time filmmakers who had a dream of making a horror movie and the bizarre events that followed.

Opening: May 20
Venue: Film Forum/New York City
Film: Burma VJ
Oscilloscope Laboratories
Dir.: Anders Østergaard; Prod.: Lise Lense-Møller
http://burmavjcom.title.dk/burma-vj/
Armed with small handy cams, undercover video journalists in Burma keep up the flow of news from their closed country. Going beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, acclaimed director Anders Østergaard brings us close to the video journalists who deliver the footage. Though risking torture and life in jail, courageous young citizens of Burma live the essence of journalism as they insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country. The Burma VJs stop at nothing to make their reportages from the streets of Rangoon.
Their material is smuggled out of the country and broadcast back into Burma via satellite and offered as free usage for international media. The whole world has witnessed single event clips made by the VJs, but for the very first time, their individual images have been carefully put together and at once, they tell a much bigger story. "Joshua," age 27, is one of the young video journalists, who works undercover to counter the propaganda of the military regime. Foreign TV crews are suddenly banned from the country, so it's left to Joshua and his crew to keep the revolution alive on TV screens all over.
With Joshua as the psychological lens, the Burmese condition is made tangible to a global audience so we can understand it, feel it and smell it. The film offers a unique insight into high-risk journalism and dissidence in a police state, while at the same time providing a thorough documentation of the historical and dramatic days of September 2007, when the Buddhist monks started marching.

Opening: May 22
Film: The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story
Dirs.: Gregory V. Sherman, Jeffrey C. Sherman
Distributor: Walt Disney Pictures
When asked how long it takes to write a song, the Sherman Brothers would often say, "It takes your entire life . . . plus the time required to jot it down." And what unexpected lives surface in this intriguing story of the sibling songwriting team behind such classic scores as Mary Poppins (1964) and The Jungle Book (1967) and the most translated song on earth, "It's a Small World," told against a backdrop of some of the most popular works of our time. As staff songwriters for Walt Disney and popular hit makers of their own, the Shermans' credits read like a virtual history of the American family musical: Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), The Aristocats (1970), Charlotte's Web (1973), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and many more.
The brothers' personal relationship, however, is far from child's play. The two became so estranged that their own sons grew up without knowing each other, despite living only a few blocks apart. How the brothers could collaborate so extensively on Oscar-winning soundtracks, most of which defined wholesome family entertainment, and yet have a relationship so volatile they could never bring their own families together, is at the heart of this remarkable dissection of creativity, genius and family dynamics. It's made, after all, by the sons themselves, first cousins Gregory and Jeffrey Sherman, who upon meeting for the first time as young adults were moved to do some collaborating of their own.

Opening: May 22
Film: Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight
Dir.: Wendy Keys
Distributor: Arthouse Films
http://www.arthousefilmsonline.com/2009/03/milton-glaser-to-inform-deligh.html
For many, Milton Glaser is the personification of American graphic design. Best known for co-founding New York Magazine and the enduring I ♥ NY campaign, the full breadth of Glaser's remarkable artistic output is revealed in Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight. From newspapers and magazine designs, to interior spaces, logos and brand identities, to his celebrated prints, drawings, posters and paintings, the documentary offers audiences a much richer appreciation for one of the great modern renaissance men.
Artfully directed by first-time filmmaker Wendy Keys, the film glances into everyday moments of Glaser's personal life and capture his immense warmth, humanity and the boundless depth of his intelligence and creativity.

Opening May 27
Film: Pressure Cooker
Dirs.: Mark Becker, Jennifer Grausman
Distributors: BEV Pictures/Participant Media
http://www.participantmedia.com/films/coming_soon/pressure_cooker.php
Pressure Cooker profiles the lives of three high school seniors from Northeast Philadelphia, each with unique hardships but with the shared goal of winning scholarships to the country's best culinary schools. Their unlikely hero is the irreverent culinary arts teacher, Mrs. Stephenson, whose teaching style is hilariously blunt. Mrs. Stephenson is both a surrogate mother and a culinary boot-camp instructor, as she pushes her kids to achieve beyond what anyone else expects from them.

Maysles, regarded as one of America's foremost non-fiction filmmakers and the master behind Salesman, Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens, will get his recognition at the Charles Guggenheim Symposium during the Washington, D.C. eight-day documentary festival, running from June 15-22.

As part of the Symposium, SilverDocs will screen a series of excerpts from Maysles' body of documentary work. Following the screening, Maysles will be joined by special guests to engage in a discussion of his career, including Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Barbara Kopple and other special guests.

"With a career spanning over five decades, Albert Maysles' body of work covers the most iconic figures of our time and exemplifies Charles Guggenheim's passion for his subjects and keen awareness of the importance of documentary in both capturing events and framing history," said Sky Sitney, SilverDocs Artistic Director in a press release. "We are thrilled to recognize his vast contribution to cinema and the documentary form."

Maysles has directed over 35 films and was the cinematographer on 64. He is currently in production on In Transit, Scapegoat on Trial and Handheld and from the Heart.

Get all of the information about SilverDocs here.

Earth, the debut film from the Walt Disney Company's Disneynature division, has, since its record-breaking premiere on Earth Day April 22, grossed a total of $15,217,689 through Tuesday, making it the sixth highest-grossing docs of all time, according to boxofficemojo.com

The Disneynature team ought to know how to sniff out a hit: Earth is helmed by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, whose Planet Earth, footage from which is repurposed in Earth, was a high-visibility project for Discovery Channel and BBC. Jean-Franco Camilleri, one of the co-producers on the Oscar-winning March of the Penguins, heads Disneynature, and the next film out of the Disneynature label, Oceans, is directed by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, whose Winged Migration grossed $11,689,053 in 2003.

Earth is the second doc to top the $1 million mark in 2009; the first was Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, now at $2,273,903. Here's a rundown of the top ten highest grossing docs of the year so far:

1) Earth (Dirs.: Alastair Fothergill, Mark Linfield):                    $15,217,689

2) Waltz with Bashir (Dir.: Ari Folman)                                   $  2,273,903

3) The Cross: The Arthur Blessit Story (Dir.: Matthew Crouch)  $   675,000

4) Valentino: The Last Emperor (Dir.: Matt Tyrnauer):               $   571,977

5) Every Little Step (Dirs.: Adam Del Deo, James D. Stern):      $   151,200

6) Brothers at War (Dir.: Jake Rademacher):                            $   113,674

7) Ballerina (Dir.: Bertrand Normand):                                      $     98,616

8) Enlighten Up! (Dir.: Kate Churchill):                                     $     93,311

9) Examined Life (Dir.: Astra Taylor):                                       $     87,700

10) Tyson (Dir.: James Toback):                                              $    85,046

Sky Sitney has been appointed Artistic Director of the AFI Discovery Channel SilverDocs Festival, having served as the fest's director of programming since 2005. She succeeds Patricia Finneran, who stepped down following the 2008 SilverDocs to assume the role of consultant to the Sundance Institute Documentary Program. SilverDocs, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, runs June 15 to 22

Sitney was formerly programming director at the Newport International Film Festival, as well as film programmer at the New York Underground Film Festival, and was co-founder and curator for the Fresh Film Series at the Anthology Film Archives in New York. She has also held industry positions at C-Hundred Film Corp. and Fine Line Features.

"Sky's deep knowledge and appreciation of cinema, her track record for spotting emerging talent and her leadership skills make her a natural fit to lead the festival," said Ray Barry, director of the AFI Silver Theatre, in a statement. "We're very pleased that Sky will be serving as SilverDocs' new artistic director."

"It's been a privilege to be part of the team that grew SilverDocs into the leading festival of its kind, and I am honored to expand my role and lead the festival into its next phase," Sitney said. "We will remain true to our core values: celebrating excellence in cinema, honoring filmmakers, facilitating surprising dialogues around film and helping to build a meaningful community for filmmakers, media professionals and audiences."

Grey Gardens is that rare documentary that has spawned its own industry of artistic renderings. Over three decades since the debut of the Maysles Brothers masterpiece (Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer also directed and edited, and Susan Froemke is credited as a producer and editor), the film has achieved the kind of cult status reserved for Harold and Maude and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The phenomenon came to a head in 2006, when Grey Gardens premiered Off-Broadway as a musical, before its Tony Award-winning run on Broadway (Read Tamara Krinsky's article from the May 2006 Documentary here.). Albert Maysles himself released The Beales of Grey Gardens in 2006, culled from outtakes from the original, and now comes the HBO feature that debuted Saturday and runs throughout the month. A number of critics and bloggers have weighed in, including Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times; David Hudson of The IFC Blog; Eugene Hernandez of indieWIRE; and, from across the pond, John Patterson of  The Guardian.

The story of the Beales—Edie and her daughter, "Little Edie," sequestered or trapped in their decaying, dilapidated Grey Gardens mansion, fiercely dependent on one another for comfort, entertainment, love and survival—struck me, when I first saw it, as a long-lost play that Samuel Beckett might have set aside and forgotten about, or perhaps as the film that Beckett wished he had made. Beckettian tropes abound in Grey Gardens. The ever-widening hole in the wall as a visual counterpoint to the ever-sedentary Edie recalls Winnie sinking in the sand as she chatters away to an unresponsive husband in Happy Days. Of course, Little Edie is anything but unresponsive; she chatters away too—to her mother, to the camera, to herself—and I also thought of Footfalls, Beckett's meditation on a mother-daughter relationship, staged on a tightrope. Grey Gardens itself, in all its squalid glory, could well serve as a stage setting for Endgame, about two characters who live in isolation, are mutually dependent and cannot seem to leave. The Beales' propensity to bring out the old scrapbooks and newspapers and sing the songs from their salad days of haute culture and high society reminded me of Krapp's Last Tape, in which the protagonist sits at a desk rewinding and replaying a tape recording of him reminiscing about his life. And Beckett's most celebrated play, Waiting for Godot, is there in Grey Gardens too, for, like Vladimir and Estragon, Edie and Little Edie Beale entertain each othe—and keep each other alive—in a happy/sad, farcical/vaudevillian continuum, in which they spend each day in reenactment. "It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present," confessess Little Edie in the HBO film.

I don't know if Samuel Beckett ever saw the original Grey Gardens, and if he did, I wonder if he smiled—not necessarily in recognition of the conceits that he had conjured up in his own work, but with the fact that Life Itself, that messy, tragicomic concatenation of strange effluvia, would make a richer work of art, when captured in the loving lenses of the Maysles Brothers.

I had a phone conversation with Albert Maysles about Salesman a few years ago, and I noted how much his film had reminded me of what Arthur Miller had sought to achieve in Death of a Salesman. Maysles proceeded to read me a quote from Miller himself, praising Salesman: "Salesman is an adventure into the American dream where hope is a sale and a sale is a confirmation of existence itself. It seems to me to penetrate deeply the men who make the wheels go round in a form of cinema that has never been used in quite this way."

We see beauty and poetry and tragedy and comedy every day—sometimes all at once—but it takes the artistry, craft, patience and passion of filmmakers like the Maysles Brothers to capture it all in one work of art—and inspire other artists to follow their example.

Members of the delegation are Chuck Workman, former IDA President with The People's President, David O'Shields with IDA Pare Lorentz Award Winner America's Lost Landscape and Betsy A. McLane Director Emerita of IDA as specialist.

The delegation will visit the Prague Film Academy (FAMU), the film school in Ludz as well as the Andre Wjada Directing School, Jagiellonian University and others.

The American Documentary Showcase is a curated program of contemporary documentaries that is offered to US Embassies for screening abroad. Funded by, and as a cooperative program with, the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State, the Showcase is designed to promote American documentaries and their filmmakers at international overseas venues, including US Embassy-organized events and/or US Embassy-supported international documentary film festivals.

The goal of the Showcase is to offer a broad, diversified look at life in the United States and the values of a democratic society as seen by American documentary filmmakers. The Showcase is intended to demonstrate the role documentary plays in fostering understanding and cooperation.

The American Documentary Showcase is funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to the University Film and Video Association.

For more information about the ADS and the featured films and filmmakers, go here.

Ken Brecher has resigned as Executive Director of the Sundance Institute, effective April 30, after a 14-year tenure. He will assume the role of Strategic Advisor for the Institute over the next two years. Brecher's exit is the second major departure from the Sundance Institute in the past two months, following Geoffrey Gilmore's resignation as director of the Sundance Film Festival in February.

Brecher took the helm in 1996, following a distinguished career in arts administration, during which he headed a foundation, a museum and a theater company. "I have completed my work in building an outstanding leadership team," he said in a statement. "I could not be more confident that the Institute is now poised for the next phase of its innovative work in supporting independent artists." 

Brecher's primary responsibility has been the Institute's core programs. On the doc side, he was a key participant in establishing the Sundance Institute's Documentary Fund. Working in more than 50 countries, the Fund is one of the biggest funders of documentary projects devoted to human rights, civil rights and freedom of expression, having supported such celebrated projects as Born into Brothels, Iraq in Fragments, and Trouble the Water.

Brecher also reconceived the Composers Lab and expanded the Institute's support of film composers through the creation of the Sundance Institute Film Music Program. Brecher also established the Sundance Collection at UCLA, where the history of independent film is preserved and conserved in perpetuity. The Collection now contains over 200 films thought to be among the seminal works of this genre. In addition, the Sundance Film Festival expanded its commitment to documentary and world cinema film, and nurtured its New Frontier program as the intersection of art, technology and the moving image.   

Brecher has been responsible for establishing the Institute's strong and diverse base of support for the $26 million annual operating budget. He has attracted major grants from The Ford Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, The Doris Duke Foundation, The Open Society Institute, The Annenberg Foundation and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others. 

Wally Weisman, Chair of the Board of the Sundance Institute, said of the departing executive director, "Brecher's efforts will stand the Institute in good stead in the years ahead." A search for a successor to Brecher will be commenced in the near term.

(Made in America was part of the IDA's 2008 DocuWeek, by the way. The 2009 DocuWeeks Call for Entries is now happening. Get information here.)

Posted on The Huffington Post, his story is a common one for most doc filmmakers: he had trouble rounding up funding, he reveals what he learned from his subjects, and discovered that it's tough to change the world through filmmaking.

It's a great read, especially when he reveals how he twisted his pitch about the movie which covers the four-decade-old gang war between Los Angeles gangs, the Crips and Bloods.

So I began wondering what I could say in my pitch that I wasn't saying to get people interested. I needed to say something about this subject that was more complete than what they've learned from the evening news, the local newspapers and gangsta rap. So I came up with a question to pose to potential funders: "If affluent white teenagers in Beverly Hills were forming neighborhood gangs, arming themselves with automatic assault rifles and killing other affluent white teenagers who were also living in upscale neighborhoods and were also arming themselves with AK 47s and shooting to kill, what would the response of our society be? Would society respond or would society ignore it? Would our government respond, if so, how would our government respond?"

Well I finally hit on something because it was this question that I asked a Silicon Valley businessman named Steve Luczo. He thought for a moment and then answered: "Affluent white kids would never be allowed to gang-bang as our society would do whatever means was necessary to make sure a problem of this magnitude was stopped immediately."

See the fruits of his labor in the trailer here:

Find out more about the film at www.cripsandbloodsmovie.com.

The call for entries of our annual DocuWeeks™ program is now live. Get the full 2009 entry information here.

IDA DocuWeeks™ helps to qualify outstanding new feature and short documentaries for Academy Award® consideration, by providing its participants with a seven-day commercial theatrical run in Los Angeles County and in the Borough of Manhattan. (Shorts will screen in the County of Los Angeles only, per Academy requirements.)

Why should you enter? We'll let our ever-expanding list of past DocuWeeks™ participants fill you in.

"Kudos to DocuWeek and its Theatrical Showcase, a wonderful screening program that is well-curated and generous to films that don't have distributors in place. thanks to Docuweek, important, little noticed films can qualify for the Academy Awards and be seen in great theaters."

-- Alex Gibney, Academy Award winner, Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)

"The IDA provides an extremely valuable service to filmmakers with Docuweek. It's unlikely I would have been able to qualify my films for Academy consideration without it."

--James Longley, Academy Award nominee, Sari's Mother (2007); Iraq in Fragments (2006)

"DocuWeek is a must! In a highly competitive and ever-changing theatrical market, DocuWeek allows documentary films to be qualified for the big awards. It's a great way to showcase films at a theatre with other documentaries before deciding on a release plan or a distributor."

--Amy Berg, Academy Award nominee, Deliver Us from Evil (2006)

"In 2006, the selection of our film The Blood of Yingzhou District for IDA's DocuWeek marked the beginning of the road to winning an Oscar that year.

Our recent short film, Tongzhi in Love (2008), is every bit as beautiful a film—maybe more beautiful—but (ominous music starts here) it wasn't ready in time for the IDA and we handled Oscar qualification, yes, ourselves. We made the Academy Short List in October 2008, so we now had a better than 50/50 chance of a nomination. The devil had us in his hand; we were rehearsing our speech, picking out (in Ruby's case) her gown (I wasn't going to wear a gown) and...you know what happened next.

The moral of this story is clear: Go with IDA.”

--Thomas Lennon & Ruby Yang, Academy Award winners, The Blood of Yingzhou District (2006)

Not convinced? See the rundown from last year's event here. Read more past participants' quotes, see a list of notable past documentaries selected for IDA's DocuWeeks™ and find out more about the 2009 program here.