Day 4--Still Lost in Amsterdam

Following a seven-film jury session, we repaired to the Escape club, the hub of social activities at IDFA, including the Guests Meet Guests happy hours, the TalkShow and the Dance Club. While I haven't been able to partake in any extra-Jury screening, panel or The Forum, the Escape lends a high school reunion feel; I ran into journalist/educator/2006 IDA Preservation and Scholarship honoree Pat Aufderheide, filmmaker/educator/2008 IDA Preservation and Scholarship honoree Marina Goldovskaya, filmmaker Peter Wintonick and journalist Marc Glassman, and met a host of filmmakers, programmers and journalists through them..

My dinner-mates lost me in the crowd, so they left for a Thai restaurant without me. Despite my notoriously bad sense of direction, I decided to track them down, making my way through the maze of long, unpronounceable street names that aren't conspicuously visible on the street, heading south instead of north, finding myself on the west side instead of the east side. But after an hour, I reached my destination.

Day 5--Rough Aunties

You can lose sense of what day it is at a festival like this, so let's call it Day 5. We've been sequestered at the Binger Film Institute, where they keep us happy and well fed with sumptuous lunches. We're starting to get a sense of one another's tastes and sensibilities, and we've seen three films that have risen to the top. Since we're sequestered, we're not impacted by the audience reaction or the Q&As; we have spirited discussions after each film, but when there's a film that truly captivates all of us, the energy in the room as the credits roll is palpable. One film actually inspired us to stand up and cheer.

That night, following a pleasant Indian dinner with Marc Glassman (editor of POV, the Documentary of Canada, and Montage, the DGA Magazine of Canada) and his partner, journalist Judy Wolf, I headed off to my first extra-jury screening: the world premiere of Kim Longinotto's Rough Aunties- her fourth documentary in five years! Here, Longinotto travels to South Africa to document the daily lives of the caregivers at Bobbi Bear agency, a nonprofit facility for the care and education of sexually abused children. In her trademark unobtrusive style, she captures the most intimate moments-often painful, always poignant-as the "Aunties" cope with a succession of wrenching tragedies and show a remarkable resilience and rectitude, and a deep love for their charges.

Day 6--APD Blue

One of our jurors had her wallet stolen at Escape on Night 4, so we accompanied her to the police station after our jury session. There we got a sense of the Dutch citizenry, who wander off the street to tell their stories to the desk sergeant, who patiently listens, as if she were tending bar at the local pub. There was a grandmother who wanted to show her drum that she had just bought for her grandson-and she proceeded to play it. Then there was the ponytailed gentleman who wanted to file a police report against the Dutch government-as well as The Hague, the CIA, the FBI and the UN-because, according to him, the water was poisoned with nitrogen and gas was coming out of the taps. We waited for more-perhaps a juggler, then a clown, then an anarchist carrying a very large tree. But the conspiracy theorist concluded this day's episode of The Precinct-which we juror later discussed over dinner at an Indonesian restaurant.

And while we were judging films, Senagalese superstar Youssou N'Dour was wowing the crowd at the Tuchinski Theatre, following a screening of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi's Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love. N'Dour had to return to Senegal, but the Escape club showcased an Afro-Pop band that scorched the place with their shimmering guitare lines and propulsive rhythms.

Although Documentary magazine has regularly published dispatches from IDFA, I have never attended, due to the overlap with Thanksgiving and the proximity to the IDA Awards. But I was honored to be invited to serve on the jury for two competitions-the Silver Wolf, for mid-length documentaries; and the Silver Cub, for shorts-so here I am.

But my first visit to Amsterdam was actually 27 years ago, when I, a college student taking a semester off to study at University of London, traveled there to launch an extended European junket. All I had known about Amsterdam at the time was its Dantesque depiction in Camus' The Fall, and the fact that John and Yoko had staged a bed-in at the Amsterdam Hilton (later memorialized in "The Ballad of John and Yoko.").

But there was so much more-and I'm not talking about the famous abundance of pot and porn, Amsterdam afforded me two epiphanies--actually, three, counting the hash-fueled freak-out vision I had at the Melk Veg. But the first two came from a clean and sober place. Number one, at the Stedilijk Museum, was an Edward Keinholz installation entitled The Beanery. So, imagine a young, impressionable post-adolescent walking into a bar like this, where you hear the conviviality and the music...and you see the decay and the depression that envelop the bar patrons-each one alone, with an inoperable clock for a face, and tinged from head to toe in battery-acid brown. This was the kind of transformative experience that comes around like a comet. I knew I had to return to The Beanery, and six weeks later, I did. And six years later, I moved to Los Angeles, and casting about in that new and strange city, I walked into a bar, and everything about it was instantly eerily familiar. But visit after visit, I couldn't quite graft this place to that unmoored memory. But one night, I looked above the bar, and there was a photo of The Beanery. And there I was.

Epiphany number two came courtesy of one of the true Dutch masters, Vincent Van Gogh. The museum in his name had just opened when I arrived in Amsterdam, And it was Wheatfield with Crows, his penultimate painting, that took me to a deeper, darker place. Maybe it was the thick, violent brush strokes of ochre and black that turned a sunny day on the farm into a rural apocalypse. Or perhaps it was knowing that just days after completing this painting, Vincent Van Gogh fired a bullet into his brain. But a print of Wheatfield with Crows hangs above my work space and greets me every morning.

And with those memories in mind, I boarded the plane, whose passengers included IDA director emeritus Sandra Ruch, a juror on the prestigious Joris Ivins Jury Competition; Senain Kheshgi and Geeta Patel, who were showcasing their film Project Kashmir in the First Appearance Competition; Luciano Blotta, traveling with RiseUp, a Reflecting Images-Panorama; and Diane Weyermann of Participant Media, representing Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman's Pressure Cooker. Lots of schmoozing to do, at 10,000 feet!

The Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program has announced its latest round of grantees. 20 film projects out of the almost 800 submitted were awarded financial and creative support from the Sundance Documentary Fund. The group includes six first-time feature documentary filmmakers as well as familiar names such as Thomas Allen Harris, Pamela Yates, Edet Belzberg and Macky Alston.

Cara Mertes, Director of the Sundance Documentary Film Program, said in a statement, “The films funded in this round tell stories of perseverance and dignity in the face of our  world's greatest contemporary challenges. From journalists and lawyers who take on international war criminals, to a small American town confronting its own homophobia, nonfiction storytellers are leading us down new paths as we search for common ground.”

The next deadline for submission to the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund is February 9, 2009.  

Here’s the full list of projects:

DEVELOPMENT
Elinyisia Mosha
TANZANIA PROJECT (Tanzania/U.S.)
This film explores the impact of foreign direct investment in the filmmakers native Tanzania.

Priya Giri Desai and  Ann S. Kim
MATCH +: A STORY ABOUT LOVE IN THE TIME OF HIV (U.S./India)
At the Y.R. Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education (YRG CARE) clinic in Chennai, India, Dr. Solomon and her staff launch a matrimonial matchmaking service for their positive patients.

Tina DiFeliciantonio and Jane C. Wagner
SEEKING REFUGE (U.S.)                                                                        
At the Bellevue Hospital Center N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, three patients from around the world come together in a journey of healing.

Marianna Kaat
THE PIT (Estonia/Ukraine)                                                                                    
Once prosperous during the Soviet era, the small town of Snezhnoje in East Ukraine now lives in poverty. The town’s desperate residents decide to start mining on their own.

Macky Alston
THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE (U.S.)                                                      
An openly gay bishop from New Hampshire travels to London, where the Anglican Communion will decide to either retain or split gay leadership from their ranks.

Patricio Guzman
NOSTALGIA DE LA LUZ (Chile/France)                                   
In the desert of North Chile, astronomers study the ancient universe above, while women search below for signs of their family members disappeared under Pinochet’s dictatorship of 1973.

Mahmoud Al Massad
THIS IS MY PICTURE WHEN I WAS DEAD (Jordan)                                               
This is a film that artfully imagines the future of a four-year old boy who almost died in the assassination of his PLO lieutenant father 25 years ago.


PRODUCTION/POST-PRODUCTION
Lynn True and Nelson Walker, with Tsering Perlo
A NOMAD'S LIFE  (U.S./Tibet)                                                                            
In the mountains of Tibet, Locho and Yama struggle to maintain their family and way of life, and to reconcile their nomadic traditions amidst rapid modernization.

Andrew Berends
DELTA BOYS (U.S./Nigeria)                                                                                             
In the oil rich Niger Delta, Chima is a 21-year-old who is swept into the world of armed militants after a prison break. His story is part of a complex tale of oil, power, poverty and corruption.

Petr Lom
LETTERS TO THE PRESIDENT (U.S./Iran)                                                    
Across Iran, villagers share their hopes and fears through letters to President Ahmadinejad and his Presidential Letter Writing Center.

Mona Nicoara
OUR SCHOOL (Romania)                                                                         
Roma children struggle to break the barriers of segregation in a small Transylvanian school. Rejected by teachers, they find strength in the friendship of Romanian classmates.

Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer
OUT  IN THE SILENCE (U.S.)                                                                 
The filmmaker's same-sex wedding announcement in the local newspaper ignites a firestorm of controversy in his rural Pennsylvania hometown.

Eric Daniel Metzgar
REPORTER (U.S./Congo)                         
New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof  journeys into the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, inviting a consideration of the future of journalism.

Danae Elon
THE EVIL TONGUE (U.S.)                                                                                  
In the Orthodox Jewish family, those affected by sexual molestation may be unable to disclose the information to secular authorities.

Pamela Yates
THE RECKONING (U.S.)                                                                          
The film chronicles the history and launch of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, the world’s first institution created to prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

DISCRETIONARY
Edet Belzberg
WATCHERS OF THE SKY (U.S.)                                                                       
Drawing from Samantha Power’s book "A Problem from Hell" four exceptional visionaries traverse time and continents to explore the world's response to genocide.

Oren Jacoby
INJUSTICE  (U.S.)  
This film uncovers the backroom maneuvering during the waning days of the Bush Administration which led to the unprecedented and illegal firing of U.S. Attorneys David Iglesias, John McKay and three of their colleagues.

Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman
SEMBENE: REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST (U.S./Senegal)   
The story of independent filmmaker Senegal's Ousmane Sembene, providing an alternate history of contemporary Africa and a window into world cinema.

Thomas Wallner
THE GUANTANAMO TRAP (Canada/Germany)                                             
Murat Kurnaz, born in Germany of Turkish heritage, was detained, tortured at the U.S. military base in Kandar, Afghanistan and in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and held for five years. This is his story.

Thomas Allen Harris
THROUGH A LENS DARKLY: BLACK PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE EMERGENCE OF A PEOPLE  (U.S.)
Using an experimental approach, Harris shows how black communities use photography and imagery to construct political, aesthetic, and cultural representations of themselves in the world.

Documentary Editor Tom White has been at in Amsterdam, at IDFA, over the past few days, serving on one jury for two competitions: the Silver Wolf, for mid-length docs; and the Silver Cub, for short docs. The Queen Mother of all doc fests, IDFA is unspooling over 300 films over a ten-day period; Tom and his fellow jurors are reviewing 31 of those-in five days. He'll be filling us in on his adventures in The Netherlands this week.

IDFA: Day One: Taking Flight

IDFA: Days 2 and 3: Meet The Jurors

IDFA: Days 4 through 6: Still Lost in Amsterdam, 'Rough Aunties,' APD Blue

IDFA: Days 7 and 8--Deliberation Day, ParaDocs, 'Capturing Reality'

The minute I opened my hotel room door, I went right to work-on Documentary magazine-related matters back home. Working through a jet-lagged and sleep-deprived fog, I managed to get things done-and being nine hours ahead of my colleagues helped! I went out into a raw and rainy Amsterdam to catch opening night-and I got lost. Many times. After asking three people for directions, I stumbled upon the theater. But the screening had started 15 minutes earlier, and I was in a somnambulant state of mind, so I made my way back to the hotel, asking three times for directions again, navigating through the labyrinthine nexus of canals, streets and alleys, dodging bicyclists, trolley cars and taxis on the way.

I awoke the next morning to finish up my magazine tasks, then met my fellow jurors and IDFA programmers for brunch. Although not everyone in my quintet was there, our fab five included Nishtha Jain, from Mumbai, India, whose Lakshmi and Me was a nominee in the Silver Wolf category in 2007; Rik Stallaerts, a producer for Brussels, Belgium-based VRT Television; Jeanne Wikler, a New York-based consultant in arts management and cultural policy, who worked in the Dutch public broadcasting system and media arts community for 23 years; and Jess Search, chief executive of the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation.

Then we plunged into the screenings, and for obvious reasons, I can't talk about what we saw, but I will share my extra-Jury Duty experiences. Like the IDFA Media Talks, a nightly program from the Escape club, hosted by distinguished Canadian docmaker Peter Wintonick and moderated this evening by Dutch journalists Sophie Hilbrand and Daphne Bunskoek and Women Make Movies executive director Deborah Zimmerman. Chess master-turned-political activist Gary Kasparov, subject of Masha Novikova's In the Holy Fire of Revolution, which tracks Kasparov's campaign for President of Russia. Kasparov engaged in a spirited debate with Derk Sauer, a Dutch publisher of over 35 magazines and newspapers in Russia, about the supposed disconnect between Sauer's readership and who the politician is reaching and Kasparov's constituency. Following that dustup, the inimitable Marina Goldovskaya, IDA's 2008 Preservation and Scholarship Award honoree, who discussed her latest film, Three Songs about Motherland, which looks at the past, present and future of Russia through three stories, set in different cities.

Next guest on Media Talks was Renzo Martens, on hand with his Opening Night film, Episode 3-‘Enjoy Poverty', in which the filmmaker calls to question the good intentions of NGOs, journalists and photojournalists who in promulgating the reality of poverty, arguably exploit it for their own gain. IDFA Festival Director Ally Dirks that she had received so many docs about Africa by Western filmmakers, and this one stood out as a provocation, in the template of a postmodern conceptual art piece cum documentary.

To view the Opening IDFA Talk of the Day in its entirety, click here.

And here's a clip from Renzo Martens' Episode 3--‘Enjoy Poverty':

Following the talk show, we jurors went out for dinner, courtesy of our gracious jury guide, Jannie Langbroeek, also an IDFA programmer.

LOS ANGELES, November 21, 2008 — Winners for the International Documentary Association’s 2008 IDA Documentary Awards competition were announced today in several major categories, including Limited Series, Continuing Series, Music, and Student, leaving Feature, Short, and Audience Awards for the night of the program, to be held December 5th at the Directors Guild Theater in Los Angeles.

For the second consecutive year, Ira Glass’ THIS AMERICAN LIFE has nabbed the Continuing Series Award. Glass plans to attend IDA’s December 5th honors to accept his award in-person, as he memorably did in 2007. In the Limited Series category, the prize has gone to SIN CITY LAW, Denis Poncet, Jean Xavier De Lestrade, and Remy Burkel’s eight-part episodic chronicling the criminal justice system in Las Vegas.

Now in its second year, the IDA/Alan Ett Music Documentary Award, sponsored by the veteran music industry figure and composer, has honored Stephen Walker’s YOUNG@HEART. HEART also competes against KASSIM THE DREAM, STRANDED: I’VE COME FROM A PLANE THAT CRASHED IN THE MOUNTAINS, MAN ON WIRE and WALTZ WITH BASHIR for IDA’s top feature prize. Director Walker will make the trek from his native England to receive the Music Award.

The IDA/Pare Lorentz Award, in homage to the pioneering filmmaker’s legacy, was given to David Novack’s BURNING THE FUTURE: COAL IN AMERICA, a hard look at the coal industry and its efforts to promote “clean coal technology” in the face of true environmental hazards. Earning an Honorable Mention in the category is GARBAGE WARRIOR from filmmaker Oliver Hodge.

The IDA/ABCNEWS VideoSource Award, for best use of archival news footage, has gone to WAR CHILD, the story of a Sudanese child solider who emerges as an international rap star. C. Karim Chrobog’s film also participated in IDA’s DocuWeek Theatrical Showcase earlier this year.

IDA continues to recognize the next generation of documentary filmmakers with its prestigious David L. Wolper Student Filmmaker Award. This year’s prize has been awarded to AS WE FORGIVE, directed by American University student Laura Waters Hinson. The film documents two Rwandan women coming face-to-face with the men who slaughtered their families during the 1994 genocide.

Voting continues for the inaugural Audience Award, where all IDA members can vote for their favorite doc from a wide-ranging list of the year’s nonfiction features simply by logging on to www.documentary.org.

This year’s IDA Documentary Awards, hosted by filmmaker Morgan Spurlock and honoring the legendary Werner Herzog, are sponsored by HBO Documentary Films, Magic Rock Entertainment, the Directors Guild of America, Kodak, Border Grill and Ciudad Catering, The Standard Hotel, Heineken, Sort this Out Cellars, Aquarius & Langenburg Oxygen Water, and The Hollywood Reporter. Tickets are available for purchase now at www.documentary.org/awards08.

Winning films from the event will be screened at DocuFest, held the day after the awards, on December 6th, from 10:00 AM to Midnight at the Eastman Kodak Screening Room, 6700 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, California. Most filmmakers will be in attendance for Q&A’s following these films. Ticket information can also be found at www.documentary.org/docufest.

The International Documentary Association is a nonprofit, public interest organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the art of documentary film. The IDA Awards selection process began with peer group juries who viewed all submissions to select nominees in each category for final review by blue-ribbon panels.

For more information about IDA, visit www.documentary.org or call 213-534-3600.

Media Contact: Amy Grey/Ashley Mariner
Dish Communications
(818) 508-1000
amyg@dishcommunications.com/ashleym@dishcommunications.com
 

CONTINUING SERIES – WINNER
This American Life
Created By Ira Glass/Chicago Public Radio
Chris Wilcha, director, co-executive producer
Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, Nancy Updike, producers
Julie Snyder, Alex Blumberg, Ira Glass, Banks Tarver, Ken Druckerman, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, Katie Roumel, executive producers
Left/Right, Killer Films, Chicago Public Radio, Showtime Networks
Episodes Submitted:
Escape
Two Wars
Going Down In History
John Smith

LIMTED SERIES – WINNER
Sin City Law
Denis Poncet, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, Remy Burkel
Maha Productions, Arte, Sundance Channel

IDA/ALAN ETT MUSIC DOCUMENTARY AWARD - WINNER
Young@Heart
Stephen Walker, Sally George
Walker George Films, Channel 4 Television Corporation, Fox Searchlight Pictures

IDA/PARE LORENTZ AWARD - WINNER
Burning The Future: Coal In America
David Novack, Alexis Zoullas
FireFly Pix, Sundance Channel

Honorable Mention:
Garbage Warrior
Oliver Hodge, Rachel Wexler, Patrick Wilson
Open Eye Media, Sundance Channel, Documentary Channel, ITVS International

IDA/ABCNEWS VIDEOSOURCE AWARD – WINNER
War Child
C. Karim Chrobog, Afshin Molava
18th Street Films, Independent Producers Alliance, Interfact Media Group, Porchlight Entertainment

IDA/DAVID L. WOLPER STUDENT DOCUMENTARY AWARD
As We Forgive
Laura Waters Hinson
American University

The Awards Season is in full effect! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the short list for the entries in the Documentary Feature category. These 15 will advance in the voting process for the 81st Academy Awards. A record 94 pictures had originally qualified in the category.

And the lucky 15:

At the Death House Door (Dirs.: Peter Gilbert, Steve James)
The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) (Dir.: Ellen Kuras; Co-Dir.: Thavisouk Phtrasavath)
Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh (Dir.: Roberta Grossman; Prod.: Lisa Thomas)
Encounters at the End of the World (Dir.: Werner Herzog; prod.: Henry Kaiser)
Fuel (Dir.: Josh Tickell; Prods.: Greg Reitman, Dale Rosenbloom, Daniel Assael)
The Garden (Dir./Prod.: Scott Hamilton Kennedy)
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (Dir./Prod.: Scott Hicks; Prod.: Susanne Priessler)
I.O.U.S.A. (Dir.: Patrick Creadon; Prods.: Christine O'Malley, Sarah Gibson)
In a Dream (Dir.: Jeremiah Zagar)
Made in America (Dir.: Stacy Perlata; Prod.: Baron Davis)
Man on Wire (Dir.: James Marsh; Prod.: Simon Chinn)
Pray the Devil Back to Hell (Dir.: Gini Reticker; Prod.: Abigal Disney)
Standard Operating Procedure (Dir./Prod.: Errol Morris; prod.: Julie Bilson Ahlberg)
They Killed Sister Dorothy (Dir.: Daniel Junge; Prods.: Henry Ansbacher, Nigel Noble)
Trouble the Water (Dirs.: Tia Lessin, Carl Deal)

The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, Made in America and Pray the Devil Back to Hell all screened as part of IDA's DocuWeek Theatrical Documentary Showcase this past summer. Furthermore, Fuel (formerly Fields of Fuel) and Trouble the Water were both projects in IDA's Fiscal Sponsorship Program.

The Documentary Branch Screening Committee viewed all the eligible documentaries for the preliminary round of voting. Documentary Branch members will now select the five nominees from among the 15 titles on the short list.

The 81st Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 22, 2009, with the Oscars telecast a month later, on February 22.

I spent Friday, November 7th at AFI Fest 2008 kicking around in future space, attending the second day of AFI Digifest. Digifest is part of the AFI Digital Content Lab (DCL), a research and development incubator for new forms of digital entertainment.

Throughout the year, the Lab generates digital media prototypes conceived and built by collaborative teams of professional volunteer mentors. The first day of DigiFest, which I sadly was not able to attend, is dedicated to showing off the prototypes, which this year included project with HBOlab, the online Newshour team, ABC.com, and Earth Echo International, among others. The second day consists of a curated collection of presentations of top digital media projects from around the world. While many focused on scripted storytelling and gaming, non-fiction was well represented.

The day kicked off with Jesse Alexander, Co-Executive Producer, Heroes, talking about the "Heroes 360 Experience," the digital extension of the series. While it’s hard to compare the process of putting together a big genre television hit with that of a low-budget documentary, Alexander specifically made the point that no matter what kind of content you’re dealing with, taking advantage of new media tools like Twitter and Flickr can extend the reach of your project.

A perfect example of this is Gone Gitmo, from producer/director Nonny de la Peña and USC Interactive Media adjunct professor Peggy Weil. The two created the project, a virtual Guantánamo Bay Prison in Second Life, to extend the reach of de la Pena’s documentary Unconstitutional. The film details the way that the civil liberties of American citizens and immigrants alike have been infringed upon, curtailed and rolled back since 9/11 and the USA Patriot Act.

Four years after making her film, de la Peña was dismayed that Guantánamo was not being covered in the media to her satisfaction. She and Weil identified Gitmo’s physical inaccessibility to reporters as an obstacle in obtaining press coverage. Second Life offered a unique opportunity to make the detention center available, albeit virtually. Initially, the project was incubated during a ten day residency at the MacArthur Foundation funded New Media Producers Institute at the Bay Area Video Coalition, where they provided a Second LIfe builder for 5 days. The Second Life "land" for the project was donated, but all work since the initial residency has been done gratis or in-kind.

The virtual Guantánamo Bay center allows visitors, via their avatars, to immerse themselves in the experience of military detention, including lying shackled on the floor of a plane, being hooded and getting locked up in a cell. There’s also a Habeas Corpus game, which gives participants a sense of what it’s like to lose one’s habeas corpus rights. Rather than engage in virtual torture, de la Peña and Weil built a contemplation chamber that includes newsfeeds, statements from public figures and poetry by detainees. There are also transcripts of actual interrogation sessions read by actors.

Says Weil, “The recordings are available all over the web, but we felt that aggregating them in a context would amplify the results. There have been studies that people closely associate with their avatar, so therefore they experience this in a different way.”

To enhance the experience for participants, the creators peppered Gone Gitmo with sounds based on descriptions from real detainees. They also experimented with integrating cinema into virtual reality, incorporating footage from Unconstitutional into the virtual prison.

A chronicle of the development of the project can be found here.

Later in the day, writer/actor/producer L.M. Kit Carson showed several Moz Diaries, mini-docs shot in Mozambique on the Nokia N93 cell phone and edited on Mac iMovie. They are part of the Sundance Channel’s Africa Diary docu-series, a survey of current African nations and societies, which is currently expected to air in 2009. Tim Johnson edited the pieces and Cynthia Hargrave produced.

In 2006, Carson went to Africa to help work on a documentary, and a friend of his at Current TV requested that he shoot some video diaries while he was there. YouTube had recently launched, and Carson was intrigued with the intimacy and immediacy the site brought to video. He wanted to bring this same spirit to the video diaries, and thought a cell phone camera might just do the trick. The tri-band Nokia N93 has a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, which give it superior picture quality (the N95, the latest version, has a 5 megapixel camera). But the most important thing to Carson was that the phone's small size meant that it would not intimidate the his subjects the way a larger video camera might.

Says Carson, “I started shooting with this because everyone thinks it’s a joke, so there’s no filter.”

One of the diaries Carson showed at DigiFest explores the contrast between the Mozambique “green” agricultural economy and the influx of money from places like Saudi Arabia. Shots of hand-picked cashews contrast with footage of the new five star hotel just built by a Saudi Arabian sheik.

The footage is grainy and raw. The images are powerful. Carson solves the problem of the limited screen real estate of the cell phone by panning across wide images like newspaper headlines. He does this throughout the diary, creating a visual motif for the piece, and in the process, inventing a new mobile cinema aesthetic. One can’t help but be drawn into the intimacy of the storytelling.

Would I perhaps feel differently if I didn’t know it was shot on a cell phone? It’s hard to tell. I was too busy enjoying this rare glimpse into life halfway around the world.

There were many other fascinating presentations throughout the day, ranging from all encompassing Web 2.0 experiences such as 42 Entertainment’s Year Zero, a project to promote Nine Inch Nails’ album of the same name; to Christopher Sandberg’s Truth About Marika, a “participation drama” that blends the boundaries between traditional television drama and alternate reality games; to Scott Snibbe’s whimsical interactive museum installations. And of course, the latest from the Guitar Hero World Tour had the entire audience envisioning themselves as rock stars. For more on the AFI Digital Content Lab and all of the presentations, click here.

In her closing remarks, Suzanne Stefanac, Director, AFI Digital Content Lab, mentioned that she had recently seen a statistic from CISCO that said that video in all its formats will constitute 90% of all IP traffic by 2012. Said Stefanac, “There are many modes of distribution and ways to exchange data. The projects we saw today had many other homes, such as television, the big screen or the gaming console, but almost all of them had some type of home on the Internet.”

As the traditional theatrical landscape continues to evolve, her statement perhaps offers a clue as to how to think about the future of distribution. Yet instead of letting the unknown be a source of panic, maybe instead it can be a source of inspiration, as evidenced by the new forms of compelling storytelling demonstrated in the projects at Digifest 2008.

Spending your hard-earned dough to round our your Kurosawa DVD collection might not be the best idea as the U.S. heads into a possible recession. But the Criterion Collection people have made a good case for a spending spree by slashing the prices in their online store. Why? We'll let them explain:

Dear Criterion viewers,

We’ve got some big news. We’re launching a new website on November 25, and we’re moving warehouses in the process. To clear the way for the new site, we’re selling everything on our current site at 40% off the retail price. That includes clothing, posters, mugs, totebags, and of course every Criterion DVD in stock! You’ll still get free shipping on orders over $50, and your purchases will still count toward our loyalty program if you create an account on our new site. We won’t be taking new preorders or back orders--this sale is strictly “while supplies last,” so shop early and often. Come on down, browse around, and stock up on holiday gifts at unbeatable prices, while you also help us move to our new digs! Sale ends Monday, November 24, at midnight.

Happy Shopping!

Get the economy back on track at http://www.criterion.com.

BritDoc, the three-year-old, Oxford-based documentary festival, announced that it would close up shop and join forces with the more established Sheffield Doc/Fest. The Channel 4 BritDoc Foundation, the fest's parent company, announced that it would be taking the BritDoc brand "online and on the road to deliver our services to British filmmakers wherever they are." As part of this re-purposing, BritDoc is hosting a "Saturday Service" about making docs that make a difference--November 8 at Sheffield Doc/Fest.

As Sheffield Doc/Fest continues throughout the weekend, veteran docmaker Nick Broomfield, in town to teach a masterclass November, shared his "Five Documentaries That Broke the Mold" in the UK-based Independent. Also in The Independent is an assessment of the state of the doc in the UK.