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.

The Cinema Eye Honors brought the 2008-2009 Awards Season to a crescendo last night in New York City, with co-chairs AJ Schnack and Thom Powers presiding over the ceremony IndiePix, the New York-based online film distributor, was the presenting sponsor and producing partner for this year's event. The Cinema Eye Honors was launched in March 2008.

And the awards went to...

Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking: Man on Wire (Dir.: James Marsh; Prod.: Simon Chinn)
Outstanding Achievement in Direction: Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir)
Outstanding Achievement in Production: Simon Chinn (Man on Wire)
Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger (Encounters at the End of the World)
Outstanding Achievement in Editing: Jinx Godfrey (Man on Wire)
Outstanding Achievement in Grapic Design and Animation: Yoni Goldman and David Polonsky (Waltz With Bashir)
Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition: Max Richter (Waltz with Bashir)
Outstanding Achievement in International Feature: Waltz with Bashir, (Dir./Prod.: Ari Folman; Prods.: Serge Lalou, Gerhard Meixner, Yael Nahlieli, Roman Paul)
Outstanding Achievement in Debut Feature: Up the Yangtze (Dir.: Yung Chang)
Audience Choice Prize: Up the Yangtze (Dir.: Yung Chang)

For more on the Cinema Eye Honors, click here.  And for some candid reflectrions from Cinema Eye co-chair/founder AJ Schnack, click here.

It's not often that documentary news make Entertainment Weekly's Hit List, but when the subject is our high profile Secretary of State, none of the usual rules apply.

Actually, the Supreme Court is trying to decide exactly which rules DO apply to Hillary: The Movie.  The 2008 attack film, by the conservative group Citizens United, was released while Clinton was running for President. It features a number of critics, includng Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter. The Court has taken on the case to determine whether or not the project should be considered a film or an ad. 

Hillary: The Movie was funded in part by corporate money from Citizens United. Federal law currently forbids corporations and unions from spending directly for/against candidates. According to CNN,

A conservative group behind the movie wanted to promote it during the heat of the presidential primary season last year, but a federal court had blocked any ads, as well as airings on cable TV video-on-demand.

The film later aired in several theaters and was released on DVD, outlets that were not subject to federal regulation.

Challengers are framing the challenge as a free speech issue.  The Chicago Tribune says:

Citizens United sued to challenge those restrictions. Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the group's attorney, urged the court to declare that corporations have the same free-speech right as others. "Freedom is being smothered," he said of the regulations.

Key questions that have come up in the case include determining whether or not a film like this differs from news information programs on public or broadcast television; why the film is allowed to be shown in some places but not others, and  how the length of a piece affects its standing as an ad. 

Read more:
Variety
Chicago Tribune
CNN.com
Doculink.org - There's a spirited discussion going on here over the last week. You'll have to become a Doculink member to read it. 

Peter Scarlet, who stepped down as artistic director of the Tribeca Film Festival a little over a week after the announcement that Geoffrey Gilmore would be leaving the Sundance Film Festival to head Tribeca Enterprises, will assume executive director responsibilities at the two-year-old Middle East International Film Festival. Scarlet replaces Nashwa al-Ruwaini, who will join the board of the festival. In addition, Jon Fitzgerald, co-founder of Slamdance and a past artistic director of the AFI Fest, who was brought on as the original festival director in 2007, did not have his contract renewed by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, which funds the festival.

The Middle East, and the United Arab Emirates in particular, has been a hotbed of recent mediamaking activity. According to Variety, in addition to launching the Middle East International Film Festival, the Abu Dhabi-the capital city of the seven United Arab Emirates-launched a $1 billion production company, Imagenation, and developed co-funding deals with Participant Media, Hyde Park Productions and National Geographic Films. What's mpore, both Tribeca Enterprises and the Sundance Film Festival have been in talks to launch adjunct festivals in the Middle East-Tribece in Qatar, which will launch in November, and Sundance in Abu Dhabi, but plans have yet to be finalized there.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto, the controversial new doc by Montreal filmmaker Brett Gaylor, opens with a startling scene. A musician is prepping backstage for a club date, donning shades and putting on his hoodie. Prancing through a stream of young acolytes dressed in jeans, t-shirts and sneakers, he yells, “Make some noise!” Many scream, arms thrust in the air, as their star reaches the stage and dramatically starts to play his instrument—a computer.

As the crowd gyrates to the raucous, eminently danceable music unleashed by Girl Talk, a 20-something Pittsburgh computer geek who’s real name is Gregg Gillis, Gaylor’s film grinds to a halt several times. He wants us to know that the catchy, rhythmic work driving the club dancers wild is a complex remix of songs ranging from rock anthems by Queen to the charming bubble-gum soul of the early Jackson 5. It’s all been slowed down or speeded up and overlaid with so many other samples that the piece has been turned into a sonic gumbo cooked up by a digital master.

Girl Talk’s music may be hugely enjoyable but, according to current copyright laws, it’s illegal because copyrighted artists aren’t being paid. What’s does Girl Talk think he’s doing? Gillis grins, aw-shucks style: “Putting Elton John in a headlock and pouring beer on him.”

Though Girl Talk is featured throughout RiP, this is no bio-pic. Gaylor isn’t shy about his intentions, explaining early on that he’s making “a film about a war of ideas. The Internet is the battleground.” If more ink—or Web space—than blood is being shed, it’s not because this fight lacks issues. Count the buzz words that electrify the film: Copyright, Copyleft, intellectual property, Creative Commons, Public Domain vs. Private Interest, Fair Use and Fair Dealing.

Joining Girl Talk is a cast of characters ready to animate those concerns. There’s Lawrence Lessig, Barack Obama’s old teaching colleague at University of Chicago and, according to Gaylor, the country’s “coolest lawyer”; he believes in Copyleft, a system that would modify copyright laws, allowing for limited downloading and remixing to occur. Uhere’s Cory Doctorow, an award-winning science fiction writer, blogger and essayist, who is an articulate supporter of Creative Commons, a group that wants to extend the amount of cultural works that could be used creatively by others. And there’s Dan!O’Neill, the ’70s underground cartoonist whose parodies of Mickey Mouse landed him in the Supreme Court, where he was judged to have misused Disney’s famous rodent.

What Gaylor doesn’t supply is a group of sensible pro-copyright representatives. The film decidedly has a point-of-vidw that leans leftward. For Gaylor and his generation, the creative process has changed. Consumers are no longer passive; they’ve become creators, remixing music and film, transforming it into something that pulsates and is wildly new and expressive.

Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media Director at American University, isn’t persuaded. “RiP is a great beginning to a better conversation about creativity, culture and copyright,” she observes. “Gaylor and others note that owners can become censors. But we should be careful not to exaggerate the problem.

“Doc filmmakers in the US enjoy the right of Fair Use—the right to quote copyrighted materials without permission or payment and have used it to make films like Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes and This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which have shown in theaters!and on TV,” Aufderheide continues. “Canadian law also lets makers of new culture quote copyrighted material for free under some circumstances. [It’s called Fair Dealing.] It’s important that people both know their rights and use them and also document where they are stopped in creative work because of copyright restrictions.”

Gaylor structures RiP around its subtitle, A Remix Manifesto. When asked, he can recite it verbatim: “Number one: Creativity always builds on the past. Number two: The past will always try to control the future. Number three: Our future is becoming less free. Number four: To cuild something free, you must limit the control of the past.”

Gaylor offers several examples of how creativity is built on the past, none more ironic than the twisted tale of the Rolling Stones’ baby-boomer ’60s hit “The Last Time.” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had actually appropriated an earlier gospel song by the legendary Staple Singers while “writing” their tune, and, in turn, it was recorded again in an orchestrated adaptation by their agent, Andrew Loog Oldham. Thirty years later, the Verve sampled Oldham’s version in their most popular song, “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” At that point, Jagger and Richards’ publishing company sued the Verve for copyright violation—and won hands down, garnering the rights to their song. As the younger group collapsed during what should have been a triumphal international tour, Jagger and Richards made more money selling the Verve’s song to Nike for a commercial.

RiP is filled with complex tales as bittersweet as that one, each illustrating a position in the Manifesto. The avant-garde group Negativland’s battle with U2’s record label over their parodic use of the hit “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” is expertly retold. So is O’Neill’s epic legal battle with Disney, along with the artist’s claim the he “stole the mouse fair and square.” Gaylor shows O’Neill playing guitar and piano, singing and drawing. The point is clear: The man is an artist; he chose to use Mickey as a rich source for satire, not because of a lack of creativity; and his sad saga clearly demonstrates that “the past will always try to control the future.”

Eventually, the film moves from the copyright-laden Disneyland to the Promised Land: Brazil. Under Minister of Culture and world-class musician Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian government partnered with Creative Commons to give people living in impoverished areas of the country a chance to learn and be educated in current music technology. Going far beyond accessing free cutting-edge club music, Brazil now offers patented medicine free, or at a low cost, to its citizens.

Girl Talk, whose day job as Gregg Gillis was, until recently, a bio-medical researcher, would approve of Brazil’s radical solution. Neither Girl Talk nor Brazil is willing to pay license holders, citing higher artistic and ethical claims.

Aufderheide, for one, doesn’t endorse Gaylor’s subjects and their tactics. “We don’t need to blow up copyright policy in order to get a more generous and participatory culture. Copyright is unbalanced right now, but we can act to change that with tools that already exist in both policy and practice. Digital didn’t destroy the basic logic of copyright law. Copyright law will adapt and change if new creators demand it.”

When asked about the characters he sympathetically portrays in RiP, Gaylor is quick to counter Aufderheide’s critique. “The film doesn’t really advocate the abolition of intellectual property rights; it advocates for a reasonable truce in this war. Look at Lessig. He isn’t proposing an abolition of copyright, but a creative commons. He’s saying, ‘Can we look at the existing copyrights, can we look at what is intellectual property, and do we need to have this really rigid, maximalist, all-rights-reserved approach, when we know that everybody is able to distribute work around the world with or without the copyright holder’s permission?’”

Gaylor pauses, then adds, “We have to think about ways to encourage that without completely negating an artist’s rights. In our case, we’re asking, ‘What rights are we comfortable with giving away? What rights will actually move us further along, to a broader audience that we’re able to keep?’ That’s the type of conversation that really needs to happen. Even though the film is a manifesto—and it’s a very pointed argument—I don’t actually think the solution is black-and-white.”

Gaylor and his colleagues at EyeRteelFilm, Daniel Cross and Mila Aung-Thwin, have created Open Source Cinema, a digital approach that allows them to collaborate online with other filmmakers and their audience. Gaylor has been posting iterations of RiP online for over a year—and the audience has responded. Sixty-four students who were enamored with the project created a rotoscoped animated scene of hipsters dancing to Girl Talk.

“One of the cool thhngs that I’m really excited about is the concept of remixing our Times Square scene,” says Gaylor. The devastating sequence shows Gaylor not being able to shoot in the massive New York City tourist spot because all of the walls are covered with logos and advertising. “We’re rushing to do that right now, getting ready for our South by Southwest US festival launch. There’s a page on Open Source Cinema right now for the Times Square remix. I’ve had somebody cut up the shots of Times Square that appear at the end of the current cut. We’ve started a process of saying ‘OK, can we remix Times Square from this private space to a public one?’ We posted what we’d cut together and people are starting to come back with their responses. It’s really exciting: People are rotoscoping them, Photoshoqping them, all sorts of things. We’re going to put that into the end of the film.

“I feel that it’s only when we can give the film away, no excuses, online, that things will really take off,” Gaylor maintains. “The idea is that we’ll show the film in 2010 online after a year of remixing to see what's happened to RiP after it’s had its life on the festival circuit, hopefully a theatrical run and a DVD.

“There’s a call to action at the end of the film that says ‘Take the film, remix it, do what you want with it and see what happens,’ Gaylor continues. “So we’ll collect that back again and add more material about what’s been happening to some of our main characters. I’d like to revisit all that after a year to see what’s changed, what are the new battles—what did we win and what did we lose?”

Marc Glassman is the editor of POV, Canada's leading documentary magazine and Montage, the publication of the Directors Guild of Canada. He's one of the founders of the Toronto new media festival Images and a former programmer at Canada's Hot Docs festival.