Tonight at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the International Documentary Association announced plans for the Documentary Film Conference 2014. Co-presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the conference will take place October 2 through 4 in Los Angeles. Under this inaugural year’s banner "Getting Real", the Documentary Film Conference 2014 is a 3-day national conference that will serve as a major platform for critical discourse on the most pressing issues affecting the documentary film community.

With major focus centered on the areas of art, impact, and career, the Documentary Film Conference seeks to answer questions important to those involved in the world of documentary film: What will the documentary form look like in the future? Can my film change the world? Does it have to? How can we create a sustainable environment for documentary filmmakers?

The Conference will also include an evening retrospective of documentary film classics that will be linked to the issues discussed during the day's events.

"This conference is first and foremost an opportunity for filmmakersto participate in a discussion of critical issues affecting the documentary film community," says IDA Executive Director Michael Lumpkin. That’s why we need to hear from you! We want to know what you think are the most critical issues facing our community. We've crafted a brief survey to help gather your thoughts and share your input. Weigh in with your opinion today and have your voice heard at the Documentary Film Conference 2014 in October!

Funding for this conference was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Catapult Film Fund, and the Albert and Trudy Kallis Foundation.

Learn more about the conference

And away we go!

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced the Academy Award® nominees for Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short Subject this morning. The Academy Awards will be presented Sunday, March 2.

Here's the lineup:

Best Documentary Feature

The Act of Killing—Joshua Oppenheimer and Signe Byrge Sørensen
LEARN MORE: The Art of 'Killing': How Much Truth Comes from the Lie that Tells the Truth?

Cutie and the Boxer —Zachary Heinzerling and Lydia Dean Pilcher
LEARN MORE: Meet the IDA Awards Honorees: Zachary Heinzerling

Dirty Wars  —Richard Rowley and Jeremy Scahill
WATCH: Dirty Wars Director Richard Rowley Explains How to Tell a Global Story Through One Journalist

The Square—Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer
WATCH: Actor Khalid Abdalla Speaks About Collecting Footage from Tahrir Square

20 Feet from Stardom—Morgan Neville, Gil Friesen and Caitrin Rogers
LEARN MORE: Unsung Heroes: Twenty Feet from Stardom Hails the Singers behind the Hits

Best Documentary Short Subject

CaveDigger—Jeffrey Karoff

Facing Fear —Jason Cohen

Karama Has No Walls —Sara Ishaq

The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life—Malcolm Clarke and Nicholas Reed

Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall—Edgar Barens
This film was a part of IDA's Fiscal Sponsorship Program. Learn more

Save the date! You can see all the Oscar-nominated docs at IDA's annual DocuDay of on Saturday, March 1. Stay tuned for more details.

This week, both the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) and the MacArthur Foundation announced the latest recipients of their respective documentary funds for the 2014 granting cycle.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a supporter of independently produced film and video for more than 30 years, announced today the recipients of 18 grants totaling $2 million for documentary film projects. The documentaries address a range of important issues, including immigration, wrongful convictions, and the aftermath of genocide. Several IDA Members make up the list of grantees for this funding cycle, including Pamela Yates (500 Years), Heidi Ewing (The Arrivals), Jamie Meltzer (Freedom Fighters), Byron Hurt (Hazing), and Danny Alpert (The Schools Project). View a full list of all 18 films set to receive funds from MacFound in 2014.

Also earlier this week, TFI announced the grantees of its TFI Documentary Fund for 2014. The fund "aims to advance character-driven, non-fiction filmmaking featuring creative and unexplored perspectives from around the world." For the 2014 funding cycle, TFI has chosen 11 films who will together receive a total of $175,000 to fund their projects in various stages of development.

The IDA is proud to see Diamond, Silver & Gold, which is a part of our Fiscal Sponsorship Program, among one of the 11 films to receive funding this year. Directed and produced by Jason Kohn, Diamond, Silver & Gold is a story about the origins of life, synthetic diamonds and other nagging issues. Our fiscal sponsorship program has been helping hundreds of independent documentaries, which may otherwise have been unable to secure funding, get funded and finished since 1988.

TFI also announced winners of the second annual TFI/ESPN Prize and of the inaugural Influence Award, part of TFI’s new multi-year partnership with the Europe-based Influence Film Foundation. This year, the two prizes went to Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund grantees The Punch and Check It, respectively. A program of the International Documentary Association, the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund—made possible by The New York Community Trust—supports full-length documentary films that exhibit objective research, artful storytelling, strong visual style, high production values, artistic writing and outstanding music composition.

The Punch, directed by Andre Hörmann, tells the story of a fateful relationship of a father and his son living a shared fragile dream in their little boxing community. The film is a tale about failure and hope—and what it means to live with dignity. The Punch was the recipient of the TFI/ESPN Prize, an annual grant extension of the TFI Documentary Fund given to a feature-length work-in-progress documentary that presents sports, competition and athleticism as a backdrop within a character-driven story.

Directed and produced by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer, Check It is about a gay African-American gang struggling to survive in one of Washington, DC’s roughest neighborhoods. Started by a group of bullied 9th graders, the crew is trying to claw themselves out of gang life through an unlikely avenue: fashion. The film received a grant through the Influence Award, which supports documentaries through grants, equity investments and audience development. The award provides an annual matching grant to a feature-length work-in-progress documentary that sparks meaningful dialogue around an area or issue that has been overlooked or under-represented in the media.

View the full list of films to receive funding from the TFI Documentary Fund

Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence
Editors: Joram Ten Brink & Joshua Oppenheimer
New York: Wallflower Press, Columbia University Press
$25.00, 330 pps.
ISBN 978-0-231-16335-4      

On the heels of his acclaimed documentary The Act of Killing, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has co-edited and contributed to Killer Images, a volume of scholarly essays and interviews, reflective of his own filmic inquiry into the routinized mechanisms of violence as well as the imaginations that beget this violence in society and cinema.  Part of a larger research project entitled "Genocide and Genre," Killer Images is the latest release by the Nonfictions series from Wallflower Press. Together with the support from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Westminster, Oppenheimer credits the Vision Machine Film Collective for contributing to the collaborative exploration for this book.

Within these pages, you may find a timely resource for researchers; strong filmic interpretations—accented by careful, mise en scene analysis—are employed alongside an erudite chronicling of the holocaust documentary genre, for example. Emerging documentarians will benefit from interviews with such celebrated filmmakers as Errol Morris and Rithy Panh, to name a few. Cinema's unique abilities to function as a tool for articulating histories of political violence and operate as an actor in these histories are depicted here with a relevant urgency. In the words of Joram Ten Brink, co-editor and contributor to this book, "Cinema is often directly implicated in the imagination and machinery of mass violence. Thus, if the cinematic image and mass violence are two defining features of modernity, the former is significantly implicated in the latter."   

In an interview conducted by Oppenheimer, Morris discusses his 2008 film Standard Operating Procedure and exposes a problematic cultural condition: the misunderstanding of photographic images, attributed in large part to the impact images have on us, the ways in which we deal with them and the wrongful inferences we make from them. "Standard Operating Procedure is about how we can't make those kinds of inferences," Morris asserts. "The Abu Ghraib photographs are a perfect example of that sort of thing. We think we've seen Abu Ghraib and we think we've seen the crimes that were committed at Abu Ghraib, when in fact what we've seen is a couple of hundred images which were taken during a very restricted period of time on Tier 1A of the prison during the fall of 2003."

Next, as Oppenheimer hones in on the trajectory of Morris's film efforts over the years to deal with movie images, television and photography, he addresses how these are implicated in how we see ourselves and ultimately, our social responses to violence. Referencing an on-camera interview with Emily Miller, an eyewitness to the murder examined in Morris' 1988 film The Thin Blue Line, Oppenheimer posits, "And what your film reveals is that the detective movies that Emily Miller watched seemed to have conditioned her to what she thinks she saw. I had this feeling that these ingrained habits of seeing had very, very serious consequences. Indeed, they were going to cause Randall Adams to be killed." Morris' response reveals that we are all in a position to confabulate and conflate different realities-something he attributes to the proliferation of media sources. 

Oppenheimer links these misperceptions in The Thin Blue Line with those in Standard Operating Procedure: "That misperception of the Abu Ghraib photographs, which was encouraged by the government, has led us to misperceive ourselves, and our complicity or involvement or engagement in what happened and what was continuing to happen when the film was released. In the case of the Abu Ghraib photographs, top administrative personnel concocted and promulgated the bad-apple narrative to help us fill in the gaps between and around each photo, thereby transforming photographic evidence of what in fact was a vast pre-meditated and institutionally sanctioned crime into a tool in the cover-up of that same crime. The irony is that photographic evidence of a crime became tools in a cover-up, and allegories for the visible become mechanisms of blindness." Drawing comparisons to Mark Twain and to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Morris likens this story of Abu Ghraib to the true stuff of nightmares.

In Oppenheimer's interview with filmmaker Panh, we learn of the layering effects of the uses of photographs in his documentary S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine. Once again, Oppenheimer takes us on a detailed journey through the filmmaker's processes, and methods of an excavation—of what happened and of people's memories. Describing a key element of the mechanisms of genocide—that of the guard's actions of photographing each victim prior to interrogating them within S21—Panh points to the dehumanizing effect upon them. "To have an effective genocide, it's very difficult to kill a human being," he notes. "But if you take away the identity of that human being, if you dehumanize that human being, it's much easier for that machine to work effectively.

"In making the film, the dead were with me always," he continues. "The very fact that I am here, to a certain degree, suggests that somebody left a place for me. So, my job is to transmit to the following generation what happened, but also not for them to feel guilty for what happened."

Finally, Oppenheimer and Panh discuss the upcoming trials in Cambodia for some of the perpetrators. For Panh observing the tribunal process has afforded him a deeper insight into documentary filmmaking: "If you want to make a good documentary, it's much more important to spend your time observing what happens, what people say, what people understand sometimes and what they cannot understand sometimes."

Grappling with the visual representation of violence in the Holocaust documentary, filmmaker/educator Brian Winston delivers in his essay a sound chronicling of the genre and points to the problems of the archive—expressly, misrepresentation. Winston categorizes the existing realist factual holocaust footage into three areas: the modicum of amateur material, some of which has been reworked, for example, by film essayist Peter Forgacs; the deliberately misleading Nazi films of the ghettos; and Allied footage of the liberation of the concentration camps—the most disturbing footage of all, in Winston's view. "Here are the living skeletons, the bulldozed bodies and the emotionless faces of the guards," he writes. "Here is the indelible record of the consequences of otherwise unimaginable violence, the very fons et origio of our collective visual memory of the holocaust."  

Winston makes the distinction of the claims of the images as being misleading, yet it is still not to deny their authenticity. As with Morris' films, the question of the limitations of photographs as evidence arises, but by contrast, they mislead due to an absence of other photographs, and cannot possibly represent the whole of the die Endlosung. Winston reminds us of Claude Lanzmann's strategy in his 1985 film Shoah, favoring witness statements over the inclusion of any liberation footage. "This was as much determined by necessity as by any self-imposed Bilderverbot," Winston explains.  "Shoah is specifically about the extermination camps, of which there is no footage; Lanzmann's strategy is, first and foremost, a response to this absence of imagery." 

Theory meets practice in Killer Images in an especially effective way as these cutting-edge contributions prove; documentary theory is moving away from traditional film theory and toward a more phenomenological treatment that reflects necessary applications of archives.

Mary Moylan is a San Francisco-based writer and independent scholar. She has a professional background in documentary film production, and has worked with the George Lucas Educational Foundation on Web documentaries about public education. She is currently writing a book, Unstable Intersections: The Films of Lourdes Portillo. Follow Mary on her blog, Docuthinker, at marymoylan.net.

Synopsis: Directed by Tony Award-winner and frequent Sondheim collaborator James Lapine, Six By Sondheim is a highly personal profile of a great American artist as revealed through the creation and performance of six of his iconic songs. Told primarily in Sondheim’s own words, this feature documentary weaves together dozens of interviews with the composer, rarely seen archival material spanning more than half a century (including newly discovered footage of Ethel Merman performing "Gypsy") and re-stagings of three songs produced especially for the film.

Six By Sondheim screened as part of the IDA Documentary Screening Series in December at the Landmark Theater in West Los Angeles. KCRW's Matt Holzman spoke with director James Lapine about how confident the famous composer in an interview, a direct contrast to his vulnerability in front of the piano.

Watch below:

You can watch more moments from this Q&A at our IDA Screening Series playlist on our YouTube channel

Learn more about the other docs set to play in the IDA Documentary Screening Series

Synopsis: Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey follows the real life rock 'n' roll fairy tale of Filipino singer Arnel Pineda, who was plucked from YouTube to become the frontman for the iconic American rock band Journey. In this Cinderella story for the ages, Arnel, having overcome a lifetime's worth of hardships, must now navigate the immense pressures of replacing a legendary singer and leading a world-renowned band on their most extensive world tour in years.

Don't Stop Believin' screened as part of the IDA Documentary Screening Series in November at the Landmark Theater in West Los Angeles. KCRW's Matt Holzman spoke with director Ramona Diaz and producers Capella Fahoome and Josh Green about being on the road with one of the world's most famous rock bands.

Watch below:

You can watch more moments from this Q&A at our IDA Screening Series playlist on our YouTube channel

Learn more about the other docs set to play in the IDA Documentary Screening Series

If there's one image that sums up the overwhelming workload of our nation's public defenders, it can be found in the middle of Dawn Porter's recent documentary Gideon's Army. The image surfaces when we enter the office of Travis Williams, a young attorney who is practically buried by mountainous stacks of papers and files that amount to his current and ongoing caseload. At times tackling over 100 cases simultaneously, Travis is just one of the 15,000 men and women who provide proper legal council and services to those in the US who could not otherwise afford an attorney. Along with several other optimistic public defenders based in the South, Travis's undying spirit and motivation drives this film to its final payoff, which reminds everyone that hard work is all about the small victories.

Director Porter, who was a practicing attorney before beginning her filmmaking career, felt that entering the courtroom and the legal system through the conduit of the underrepresented would make her film more than just a captivating story. Her hope was to shed light on a severely strained criminal justice system in desperate need of funding.

Gideon's Army screened as part of the IDA Documentary Screening Series in November at the Landmark Theater in West Los Angeles. Criticwire Associate Editor Steve Greene sat down with Porter to discuss why she wanted the criminal justice system at large to stand in as the "bad guy" in her film.

Watch below:

You can watch more moments from this Q&A at our IDA Screening Series playlist on our YouTube channel

Learn more about the other docs set to play in the IDA Documentary Screening Series

In the deeply religious Christian nation of Uganda, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. But after returning from a stint in South Africa, David Kato wanted to fight to liberate oppressed Ugandians who were forced to remain in the closet due to the nation's anti-homosexual bill. As Uganda's first openly gay man, David Kato fights to defeat this bill while overcoming brutal physical and verbal persecution in Call Me Kuchu, a documentary by Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Fairfax Wright. Working against a violent culture of anti-homosexuality, David's story is highly personal; the film is deeply embedded in his everyday life, following him from his home and out into the world among his peers and his enemies. The film takes a turn for the worse when a senseless act of voilence rocks the movement, but the central theme of hope prevails as the narrative clings to its message of promoting international human rights.

Call Me Kuchu screened Monday, November 11 at the Landmark in Los Angeles as a part of the IDA Documentary Screening Series. Directors Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Fairfax Wright spoke to Criticwire's Steve Greene about the slow process of building trust with the Ugandan LGBT community.

Watch below:

You can watch more moments from this Q&A at our IDA Screening Series playlist on our YouTube channel

Learn more about the other docs set to play in the IDA Documentary Screening Series

Filmmaker Alex Gibney, who is usually working on a handful of documentary projects at any given moment, doesn’t have much time to respond to questions. But seeing how the IDA just honored him with the Career Achievement Award at the 29th annual IDA Documentary Awards, he spared us a few minutes of his time to email back some short quips.

Luckily, since Gibney has been in the field for so long, we can also draw from a wealth of other articles about and by the man himself. We invite you to read a few words, both new and from the archives, from this year’s IDA Career Achievement Award honoree, Alex Gibney, below:

On Gibney’s father, who started his career as a naval interrogator.

He was also a journalist. He was curious and a truth-seeker. Learned that from him.

What was the inspiration for his first film?

The death of pinball and the coming of videogames. After that, a classroom that was run as an imaginary country with disastrous results: corruption, mendacity and greed from the boys; gossip and civic responsibility from the girls.

On following the path of corruption.

I am interested in abuses of power. I tend to be more interested in the perps than the victims - though the suffering of the victims can never be ignored. But to stop crimes, you have to understand how the criminals work.

How his documentaries "break the rules":

The playful archive in Enron, the murder mystery narrative in Taxi, the actress and the mood in Client 9 (one friend called it "documentary noir," a term I like a lot), the graphics in We Steal Secrets—one character revealed entirely through his online chats.

Is all documentary filmmaking personalized, inextricably linked to its creator?

Enron was narrated by Peter Coyote, but I think the style and the "attack" makes it personal. One of the great things about docs now is that they are "authored" films: they are nonfiction, and respect the unpredictability of nonfiction, but are also told in ways that reflect the point of view of the author.

About his company, Jigsaw Productions:

I work with talented and dedicated people and genius editors. My films all take a long time to make (Armstrong took five years) but I do a number of them at one time. Not unlike a law office, or, perhaps better, the office of a private eye. Lots of cases and clients with interesting stories that sometimes take time to tell.

On not getting an interview with Julian Assange for We Steal Secrets:

I had this one meeting very late in the process. I sat in a room with him for six hours straight, maybe two bathroom breaks. It was a negotiation. He had no intention of giving me the interview. I kept trying to steer him to a discussion of larger principles in which he seemed not to be particularly interested. He was sucked down into his own maelstrom of malice. When he comes down off his pedestal, he can be a kind of charming, funny guy. But too often he’s on this pedestal doing nothing more than image-burnishing, which I found very dispiriting. I thought it was going to work, that he was going to agree to an interview, and then the next day we got a note from him saying that he was too tired.

Why filmmakers can be more effective than investigative journalists:

I do think that documentary filmmakers sometimes have an ability to use different cinematic methods that may be more effective at combating the doublespeak of officials in power. People in power today often use the traditional media’s rules of "objectivity" and phony balance to insure that lies are often given the same weight as the truth. But like many indie docmakers, I have a formal freedom that can sometimes allow me to expose official depravity better than traditional news reporters.

On the use of dramatic reenactment in Client 9:

There's something about this kind of escort service that involves acting. It's like the clients walk into an erotic film. The bookers will tell the women what the clients are interested in...so miraculously you show up for your "date," and your escort is chatting with you about Carmen. Well, that's a fiction.

About his visual choices for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room:

The visual style of the film followed the themes of the story. My cinematographer—the incomparable Maryse Alberti—and I used Sony's 24P HD camera to create a look as glossy as the image Enron had sought to create. And because the film was about the illusory nature of a fraud, we made an aesthetic out of reflections—whether in the way we shot the gaudy facades of the Enron buildings or the way we emphasized the mirror images of our interview subjects in the reflective surfaces of the tables around them.

On his receipt of the IDA Career Achievement Award:

I’m honored and a little afraid. Is this a hint?

Read more from and about IDA Career Achievement Award honoree Alex Gibney:

Winners in the 2013 IDA Documentary Awards were announced during tonight's program at the Directors Guild of America, giving Jehane Noujaim's The Square top honors with the Best Feature Award. The first major film acquisition by Netflix, The Square follows a group of Egyptian activists as they battle leaders and regimes, and risk their lives to build a new society of conscience.

Also announced in the ceremony was the Best Short Award, which honored Slomo, directed by Josh Izenberg. An inspirational portrait of neurologist turned rollerblader, Dr. John Kitchin, Slomo has been an audience favorite at festivals around the world garnering a number of audience and jury awards.

During the ceremony, which was hosted by comedian and award-winning stage and screen actor, Paul Provenza, two series awards were also presented. The Best Continuing Series Award went to the PBS series Independent Lens. Now in its 12th season, the weekly series features original documentary films made by some of the best independent filmmakers working today. The Best Limited Series Award went to the CNN Original Series Inside Man, hosted by Oscar®-nominated documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock.

IDA’s Career Achievement Award was presented to Academy Award®– and Emmy Award-winning director, producer and writer Alex Gibney whose body of work includes Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012), Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010) and Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), which won an Oscar® for Best Documentary Feature. This year saw the release of Gibney’s latest films We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks and The Armstrong Lie. Producers Matthew Tolmach and Frank Marshall (The Armstrong Lie) presented the Career Achievement Award to Gibney.

Presented for just the fourth time in the 29-year history of the Awards, the IDA Amicus Award went to Impact Partners co-founder Geralyn Dreyfous, who also founded the Utah Film Center. Dreyfous’ executive producing and producing credits include the Academy Award®-winning Born Into Brothels, The Invisible War, as well as 2013's The Square and The Crash Reel. Presented by Academy Award®-winning actor and advocate Geena Davis, the IDA Amicus Award recognizes friends of the documentary community who have contributed significantly to the field.

Filmmaker Laura Poitras received IDA’s Courage Under Fire Award, in recognition of "conspicuous bravery in the pursuit of truth." Along with Glenn Greenwald, Poitras broke the story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealing the PRISM program. Poitras is working on a trilogy of films about America post 9/11, which includes My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010). Poitras is currently in Berlin editing the third film of the trilogy, a documentary about NSA surveillance, and accepted the award via live remote. Presenting the award to Poitras in Los Angeles was William Binney, who worked at the National Security Agency for over 30 years before resigning in protest over the agency’s data mining programs.

The Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award, which recognizes the achievements of a filmmaker who has made a significant impact at the beginning of his or her career in documentary film, was presented to Zachary Heinzerling. Cutie and the Boxer, Heinzerling’s feature documentary debut, premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, receiving the US Documentary Directing Award.

A complete list of nominees and winners can be found on the IDA Awards page.