We’ve officially landed three amazing personalities from the world of non-fiction to host this prestigious fundraising event. Representing the dizzying diversity of documentary filmmaking, filmmakers Josh Fox and Tiffany Shlain and IDA Board President Eddie Schmidt will each bring their own unique flavor to the events of the night. Accompanying the MC responsibilities will be Oscar®- nominated documentary filmmaker, Lucy Walker, who be spinning live during the show.

Emmy Award-winning and Academy Awards-nominated filmmaker Josh Fox is also the founder and Artistic Director of International WOW Company, a film and theater company that works closely with actors and non actors from diverse cultural backgrounds. Fox’s work is known for its mix of gripping narrative, heightened imagery and its commitment to socially conscious themes and subjects. With International WOW Company, Fox has received a Drama Desk Nomination, an Otto Award, five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and five prestigious MAP Fund Grants, an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship among many other awards and honors. Fox’s film work includes the Emmy Award winning, and Academy Award® nominated, documentary Gasland and Memorial Day.

Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is a filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards, co-founder of The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences and a Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute. Her work in film & technology has received 48 awards and distinctions and her last four films premiered at Sundance, including The Tribe and Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology. A celebrated thinker and speaker, she is a visiting professor at The University of Wales, is on the advisory board of M.I.T.’s Geospatial Lab, has advised Secretary Clinton and presented the 2010 Commencement Address at UC Berkeley.

Eddie Schmidt is an Oscar®-nominated filmmaker, writer/producer, and commentator, as well as the Board President of the International Documentary Association (IDA). He produced four feature documentaries that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, including This Film is Not Yet Rated, and Twist of Faith. For television, Schmidt has directed, produced, and written documentary and comedy specials and series for the likes of HBO, IFC, Lionsgate, PBS, A&E, E!, Current, and GSN. This year, he appeared throughout Current’s 50 Documentaries to See Before You Die, and was one of six experts consulted on the series. Since 2009, Schmidt has served as President of the IDA, a nonprofit community and resource for documentary filmmakers.

Lucy Walker is an Academy Award® and Emmy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, whose directing credits include the Oscar-®nominated Waste Land, Countdown to Zero, and Devil’s Playground. Lucy has won many festival and critical accolades for her films. Her television credits include Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues, for which she was twice nominated for Emmy Awards for Outstanding Direction in a Children’s Series, and several award-winning narrative short films. As a film student at NYU'S Graduate Film program, Lucy moonlighted as a musician and DJ – hence our choice for Ms. Walker’s spinning skills at the Awards!

The 27th Annual IDA Documentary Awards will be held on Friday, December 2nd at the Director’s Guild in Los Angeles.

Buy your tickets today!

To continue to secure and protect the rights of documentary filmmakers, so that they/you will remain free to create this unique and essential art form, we need your support to sustain our advocacy work.

Currently, the IDA is working on many pressing issues affecting documentary filmmakers. Particularly urgent is the work we are doing to renew the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) exemption, as well as to have the exemption apply to Blu-Ray footage. The IDA initially helped documentary filmmakers win a three-year exemption that allowed a filmmaker to take materials from DVDs and use those film clips for criticism and commentary. For over a century, filmmakers have had the right to make fair use of copyrighted work in their films, and we are working hard to ensure that this right remains protected.

If the exemption is not renewed, filmmakers will lose their ability to utilize footage from DVDs.

What can you do to protect the rights of documentary filmmakers?
Become an IDA member, and encourage others you know to join. If you are already a member, donate and please donate generously.

And, there are benefits!
All members receive a complimentary subscription to Documentary Magazine and invitations to various IDA events throughout the year. And, depending on your membership or donor level, you may receive reserved VIP seating at the 27th Annual IDA Documentary Awards, IDA’s annual fundraiser, set for December 2nd at the Directors Guild of America.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ONGOING SUPPORT.

Editor's Note: Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon's The Warriors of Qiugang has been nominated in the Best Short category at this year's IDA Documentary Awards, to be held at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles on Friday, December 2. Below is an interview we conducted with Yang and Lennon last February in conjunction with her film having been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

In the days leading up to DocuDay LA and DocuDays NY, we at IDA will be introducing--and in some cases, re-introducing--our community to the filmmakers whose work has been nominated for an Academy Award for either Best Documentary Feature or Best Documentary Short Subject. As we did in conjunction with last summer's DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase, we have asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films--the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far, and the impact of an Academy Award nomination.

So, to continue this series of conversations, here are Ruby Yang, director, and Thomas Lennon, producer, of The Warriors of Qiugang, which is nominated in the Best Documentary Short category.

Synopsis: Zhang Gongli is a farmer who grew up in the village of Qiugang, in Anhui Province; his house and fields lie near the banks of the Huai River. In 2004, private chemical companies took over an old state-owned enterprise that had long produced pesticides and dyes in Qiugang. As production ramped up, black waters disgorged from the plants and flooded the fields of Qiugang. Fish died, crops failed and villagers grew alarmed by the large numbers of their own succumbing to cancer.

When his own fields could no longer be farmed, Zhang filed a lawsuit against the factory that adjoins his land. He lost. This marked the beginning of a stubborn and often dangerous campaign that spanned five years. The Warriors of Qiugang follows Zhang and his allies in the village as they draw up a petition to bring to Beijing, recruit support from the local media, reach out for help from a local NGO, and in time, make contact with environmental activists from across China. From clandestine trips to the nation's capitol to private negotiating sessions with factory representatives, the film reveals a rare portrait of grassroots activism in contemporary China--of villagers wrestling with, and transformed by, China's headlong rush into modernity.

IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Ruby Yang: In 1979, I was at San Francisco Art Institute studying painting and enrolled in a class on avant-garde films. I was mesmerized by the beauty and simplicity of the films by Bruce Conner, James Broughton and filmmakers from that generation. One year later, I started to make my first short film.

Thomas Lennon:  I thought I wanted to be what back then was called an experimental filmmaker. I would go to hear Stan Brakhage speak, would watch films like The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes. And then, quite late--I was out of school and trying to earn a living in New York--I realized that content really mattered to me, information mattered to me. 

IDA: What inspired you to make The Warriors of Qiugang?

RY:  A supporter told me about an NGO she was excited about, Green Anhui, in Anhui Province--not too far, actually, from where we'd done our AIDS film, The Blood of Yingzhou District. I'd been wanting to do a film about the environment in China. Tom was reluctant, actually. He was engrossed in trying to jump-start a public health campaign in China about tobacco, about smoking--similar to what we had done with Yao Ming and AIDS on Chinese TV. That was his obsession and he lost over a year of his life to that. Meanwhile, the field producer Guan Xin and I started gathering footage in Anhui.  It was a while before I realized there was a film there.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

TL:  In a way, China is the most exciting place in the world to make films in because everything changes at such a staggering pace. (When I'd come back to Beijing to work with Ruby after a month in New York, there'd be a skyscraper that hadn't been there before.)  So there are stories everywhere you turn. But it's a hard place to work, too, because trust is in short supply. Permissions are always hard. It fell to Ruby and to Guan Xin to win over the villagers, who were already taking considerable risk by waging this campaign--much less having a camera on them. Guan did a great job; he became a friend, a fixture in the village. But access was and remained a huge obstacle.

RY:  The film was filmed over almost four years. [It was] Hard to sustain access, hard to sustain energy, hard to keep up with a changing story, and also brutally expensive.

 IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the pre-production, production and post-production processes?

RY:  The turning point was a scene when all the villagers gathered to sign a petition. It was nighttime, summer. The room was filled with smoke and sweat. On the one hand, the scene was crackling with contemporary excitement. But it was also a scene that went deep into Chinese history and tradition--the petition to the Emperor in Beijing. After that scene, I was committed; there was no turning back.

IDA: As you've screened The Warriors of Qiugang--whether on the festival circuit, or in screening rooms, or in living rooms--how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?

TL:  We actually haven't seen the finished film with audiences that much yet. It was a difficult film to finish; we were in the edit room for months in New York and showed it to friends in steps along the way. We made huge changes based on the reactions that we got--many of which surprised us. We would shape a scene to convey one thing and we'd be floored at how, with the cultural and language barriers, it would be read as conveying something completely different. So that was a very important set of test screenings that changed the film radically.

IDA: Where were you when you first heard about your Academy Award nomination?

TL:  By 2010, I was a scarred veteran of this process. This is my third nomination, and the second in the short-documentary category, which is structured to inflict maximum psychological damage. Here's the thing: In late October, you get word that your film has made the short list of eight films. That means you have a real shot at getting a nomination--and you know it. And then you wait. And wait. By January, you're not in good shape. The morning of, I knew the Academy was going to post the nominations. I thought, I'm not going to sit here, like Jesse Eisenberg in the last scene of The Social Network, clicking and re-clicking my computer waiting for the results. So I walked the 40 blocks up to my office. It was cold, a lot of snow on the ground. I held my cell phone in my hand. At one point I looked at it and said, Hmm, 9:00 a.m. No one has called me.  That probably means it's not going to happen. Then a friend called, screaming.

RY: Tom and I have done three shorts in China. The first won an Oscar--such a surreal experience, just a dream for a filmmaker. The second film, Tongzhi in Love, is a special film, one we really love, and it was short-listed and then...didn't make it. Tom is right: That was psychologically tough, because with a short film, even more than with a feature, the Academy is the platform. There aren't many others. This year I was trying to steel myself. The morning of the Academy nominations is nighttime where I live, Beijing. I told my husband, "Let's go out to dinner. Let's think about something else." While I was at the restaurant a Hong Kong friend called me. And a few minutes later, Tom Skyped my cell from New York. 

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

TL:  We were once asked that question by Errol Morris, except he asked, What filmmakers...And Ruby answered, Stan Brakhage. And I was speechless. When she and I started working together almost 10 years ago, we went out to lunch when we barely knew each other, and we talked about Stan Brakhage. In a funny way, that great avant-garde artist might not mind being called a documentary filmmaker. So many great inspirations, but for now let's just honor him.

The Warriors of Qiugang will be screening Saturday, February 26, at 9:00 a.m. as part of DocuDay LA at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills, and Sunday, February 27, at 3:00 p.m. at DocuDays NY at The Paley Center for Media in Manhattan.

Editor's Note: The Most Dangerous Man in America is nominated for an 2011 ABCNews VideoSource Award for best use of footage, and as part of the POV series for a Limited Series Award. What follows is an article from the Spring 2010 issue of Documentary when the film was released theatrically. 

By the spring of 1971, the United States was six years into a grisly ground war in Vietnam. The American public was fed up. Little did they know that they had an ally in none other than a key architect of the war.

Sitting in his office at the powerful RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, a high-level Department of Defense war strategist was poring over a top secret study summarizing 20 years of covert US maneuvers in Vietnam. Slowly, the analyst realized that everything he--and the American public--knew about the war was based on lies. Reaching a boiling point ten years in the making, he made a life-altering decision to leak the study to The New York Times. In the dark of night, he started copying all 7,000 pages...and prepared for jail.

The "Pentagon Papers" scandal was off and running. By June, TV anchors were reporting a shocking new statistic every day. President Richard Nixon, still embroiled in Vietnam, went ballistic and determined to crush the man that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger deemed "the most dangerous man in America." By the time the dust settled, this one-man act of civil disobedience had resulted in a landmark Supreme Court free speech ruling, Nixon's downfall and the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War.

The unlikely man behind it all is Daniel Ellsberg, the subject of The Most Dangerous Man in America. His story might seem an obvious subject for a documentary, but can you make a compelling movie when your hero is a soft-spoken expert in decision theory, whose most dramatic act of espionage was making copies?

Directors/producers Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith seem to think so. The film won a Special Jury Prize at the International Documentary FilmFestival Amsterdam (IDFA), a Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review, audience awards at the Mill Valley and Palm Springs Film Festivals and an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature

Ehrlich and Goldsmith tell Ellsberg's story through interviews with key players, archival footage and artsy re-enactments woven together by cool, dangerous music provided by The Wire composer Blake Leyh. Ellsberg himself narrates with excerpts from his book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. When one listens to him read his own beautifully turned phrases in a comforting, yet authoritative voice, it's hard to imagine anyone else bringing the same intensity and emotional clarity to the story.

But the idea to use Ellsberg as the narrator actually sparked a major creative debate between the film's directors at the outset of their collaboration, a debate that lasted well into the final cuts of the film, yet ultimately teased out the film's true narrative.

"We saw the film really differently from the beginning," says Ehrlich. She and Goldsmith first met at the Zaentz Media Center in Berkeley, where they both had an office. When they discovered they were each developing a project on Ellsberg, they decided to collaborate, but soon found they had very different ideas about how to tell the story. Ehrlich had recently directed a documentary about World War II protesters, The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It. "I saw the film as being more personal and more about a spiritual transformation," she explains. Goldsmith came to the project after making Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press, a documentary about a muckraking journalist and his ideas and ideals about his profession. Says Goldsmith, "My concern was: Are we going to lose credibility? Are we going to lose not so much objectivity, but believability?"

While Goldsmith, as lead editor, worked on cuts using an omniscient narrator and archival footage, Ehrlich and assistant editor Lawrence Lerew made alternate cuts using Ellsberg as the narrator, and even using re-creations. "We were kind of cutting two different films for a while," says Ehrlich.

But both Ehrlich and Goldsmith describe this creative tug of war as essential to their discovery of the film's ultimate through line: Not a political thriller about the Pentagon Papers leak, but a personal account of what events led a privileged military strategist to become a peace activist. "So much of the story is about struggling with decisions," explains Goldsmith, who ultimately found the objectivity he was looking for in the stories of how each of the key subjects in the film struggled with their roles in the leak. "So much of Dan's story--certainly in the first part of the film--was about that. And so much of the other people's stories, like the journalists and the lawyers and the Nixon Administration guys, was: What do I do? Do I do the right thing?"

Ehrlich and Goldsmith continued to welcome outside ideas throughout their process, and share credit for the film's success with contributions from cinematographers Vicente Franco and Dan Krauss, sound designer Jim LeBrecht of Berkeley Sound Artists, and Michael Chandler, the Oscar-nominated editor of Amadeus, who helped sculpt the final cut.

The filmmakers also struggled with how to use the extensive archival material they found, which added up to hundreds of hours. "That was the good news and the bad news," says Goldsmith who, along with Ehrlich, spent over a year just viewing and logging the material. The Nixon tapes, with no centralized source or transcriptions, were the biggest challenge. But they caught a break with the news footage--thanks to Nixon. "It was somebody's job, we learned, in the Nixon White House to record the news every night," Goldsmith explains. He and Ehrlich found Nixon's news tapes at the National Archives, and an attorney verified that all their selections for the film fell under fair use.

Ehrlich and Goldsmith made artful use of archival footage from the Vietnam War, selecting only those shots that would highlight Ellsberg's journey from war architect to war protestor. For scenes of a trip Ellsberg took to Vietnam, they combined stills of him in Vietnam with carefully culled first-person moments of archival footage to create an intimate view of the devastation in Vietnam. Says Goldsmith, "I think that's a credit to the editorial team-having the stills move and integrating it with actual footage so it feels to the viewer like you're seeing Daniel in action."

Ellsberg had no say in the film's final cut, but actively supports the film as part of his ongoing effort to challenge modern-day Americans to question US military activity. And his story does seem to resonate with a new generation. During the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January, Ehrlich screened the film for a thousand high school students. "That was my favorite screening ever, I think," Ehrlich enthuses. "A hundred hands went up with questions: What can I do to change the country? What can I do to make our government more transparent and be a better citizen?"  Notes Goldsmith, "They get that this is not a film about the past. This is a film about the present. They get that instantly."

The Most Dangerous Man in America is currently in limited theatrical release through First Run Features and airs on PBS' POV this fall. To find out how to take part in a community screening event, visit www.mostdangerousman.org, the film's Facebook fan page, or follow Ellsberg on Twitter: @DanielEllsberg.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers will be screening as part of DocuDays LA on Friday, March at 7:00 p.m. at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills and DocuDays NY on Saturday, March 6 at 2:45 p.m. at the Paley Center for Media.

Elizabeth Blozan is freelance writer and director of the documentary Rebel Beat: The Story of LA Rockabilly. She can be reached at betty@bettyvision.com.

Documentary film is critical to our culture and our democracy. When the DVD became the default media format of our time, the ability of filmmakers to make fair use of copyrighted video clips became compromised. Because “ripping” a DVD requires bypassing the DVD’s “technological protection measure”, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made the act of “ripping” a DVD illegal even in situations where the doctrine of fair use permits filmmakers to use the material on the DVDs without permission.

Fair use is a critical part of documentary filmmaking. For over a century, filmmakers have had the right to make fair use of copyrighted work in their films. Using the footage is still totally legal under fair use; however, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes sure that ripping a Blu-Ray is a crime. This law undermines filmmakers’ ability to utilize fair use with the footage in their films.

Some light shone through in July 2010 when documentary filmmakers won a three-year exemption that allows a filmmaker to take materials from DVDs and use those film clips for criticism and commentary. This year, the IDA and Kartemquin films together will be requesting that this exemption be renewed to allow all filmmakers to obtain the film clips they need under protection of the law. To do so, WE NEED YOUR HELP.

Check out our questions regarding your experience with fair use and the DMCA’s current restrictions. If you have an account of your experience that you would like to tell, please submit your story using our online form or send them to DMCAstories@law.usc.edu.

We need as many responses as possible! We’d like to hear from you as soon as possible in order to meet the deadline. Of course, we’d still love to hear from you after the November 4 deadline to help in fighting this fight to preserve our fair use rights.

Thank you so much for your help!

Editor's Note: Sara Nesson's Poster Girl airs this month on HBO. Below is an interview we conducted with Nesson last February in conjunction with her film having been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

In the days leading up to DocuDay LA and DocuDays NY, we at IDA will be introducing--and in some cases, re-introducing--our community to the filmmakers whose work has been nominated for an Academy Award for either Best Documentary Feature or Best Documentary Short Subject. As we did in conjunction with last summer's DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase, we have asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films--the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far, and the impact of an Academy Award nomination.

So, to continue this series of conversations, here is Sara Nesson, director/producer of Poster Girl (Prod.: Mitchell Block), which is nominated in the Documentary Short Subject category.

Synopsis: Poster Girl is the story of Robynn Murray, an all-American high-school cheerleader turned "poster girl" for women in combat, distinguished by Army Magazine's cover shot. Now home from Iraq, her tough-as-nails exterior begins to crack, leaving Robynn struggling with the debilitating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Shot and directed by first-time filmmaker Sara Nesson, Poster Girl is an emotionally raw documentary that follows Robynn over the course of two years as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and redemption, using art and poetry to redefine her life.

IDA:  How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Sara Nesson: I went to University of Vermont (Class of '97), and although they didn't have a film program when I was there, I did my senior thesis making my first film while studying abroad in Italy. My dad, Bob Nesson, is also a doc filmmaker, so it's in my blood. His advice to me was to avoid being a filmmaker at all costs and that selling insurance is a more stable profession. Of course, he waited to tell me that while we were stranded in Siberia on the Koni Peninsula for 12 days. That's a longer story.

IDA: What inspired you to make Poster Girl?

SN: Before PTSD was of national interest, I met a group of very young veterans who had just returned home from the war in Iraq. They were emotionally very damaged and trying to make sense of their lives as mostly hidden members of society. Yet, in their raw state of mind, they were open to sharing their stories with me, defying the stereotype I had held that veterans did not "talk about it."

Before Poster Girl, I was making Iraq Paper Scissors, which focused on the Combat Paper Project. The film followed a group of veterans transforming their military uniforms into hand-made paper, books and unique works of art. The vets were literally cutting, beating and shredding the fibers of their old "rags" into fiber. This was the beginning of a very long and slow journey to process their emotional trauma and reconcile their experiences at war.

My goal for making Poster Girl was to break through the cultural disconnect between veterans and civilians. I wanted to bridge that gap by showing the struggle and healing journey of one person. In this case, I was lucky to find Robynn Murray, whose voice was so powerful; I knew she could be a voice for the thousands that were struggling alone.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

SN: The veterans I was working with were very weary of the media and had very little trust of civilians in general. Working with anyone who has trauma is difficult because you take on a lot of their suffering. I had to learn to be patient and I never tried to control them for the sake of the film; they always came first. I also made a video for them to use to promote the Combat Paper Project. They saw the value in what I was doing for them, helping to spread their message.

I devoted several years of my life to this film, and I got very close to the vets--maybe too close. We had a lot of ups and downs, but I have a very good relationship with all of them, especially Robynn.

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the pre-production, production and post-production processes?

SN: After two years of following vets around the country for Iraq Paper Scissors, I knew I needed a deeper focus for the film. I had been a one-woman crew, filming and doing sound while directing and producing. I needed a fresh perspective.

In 2009, I took Mitchell Block's IDA Producing Workshop in Los Angeles, and he suggested that one of the veterans in the film, Robynn, a powerful, articulate woman, and former machine gunner, should be the subject of a separate film. Mitchell and I worked together to develop Poster Girl, and a long-distance, LA/NY producing/directing team was forged.  

IDA:  As you've screened Poster Girl--whether on the festival circuit, in screening rooms or in living rooms--how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?

SN: It's all been very positive. I have men coming up to me and telling me that they never cry, but they cried throughout this film. I think the film is opening people up emotionally. Robynn has a way of affecting people that way. She is just so honest and raw and her voice shivers with pain. It's hard to not feel for what she is going through.

I just showed the film at the Athena Film Festival, and a woman approached me after the screening and asked if I could share my film with her friend's son who is at West Point and wants to join the Marines. I just received an e-mail from a mother, asking me to help her bring understanding to her son's decision to enlist.

I feel so rewarded by this. I feel that if I can help to shed light on the consequences of war, it may not change peoples' minds about enlisting, but maybe it will help veterans cope with trauma once they have seen how someone else like Robynn learned to deal with it.

IDA: Where were you when you first heard about your Academy Award nomination? 

SN: I was standing in my kitchen in Brooklyn. My editor at HBO, Geof Bartz,called and said, "Congratulations." I couldn't react until I saw the film posted on the Academy website. When I saw it, I just started shouting, "I'm going to the Oscars!"

IDA: Although it's only been a month since the announcement, how do you anticipate this nomination will impact your career as a filmmaker? 

SN: It's an amazing feeling to know that I have finally earned credibility as a filmmaker. With a nomination now attached to my name, I feel it will bring more opportunity to continue to do what I love, but hopefully this time with financial backing!

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

SN: My dad, Bob Nesson. I grew up watching his films and being inspired by his thirst for learning and adventure. Born into Brothels was the first documentary I saw that got me excited about making film a work of art and a vérité journey. I love the films of Ondi Timoner, Ellen Kuras, Kate Davis, Dana Shapiro, Ross Kauffman, Jeremiah Zagar and the latest, Banksy.

Poster Girl will be screening Saturday, February 26, at 11:40 a.m., as part of DocuDay LA at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills, and Sunday, February 27, at 12:05 p.m., at DocuDays NY at The Paley Center for Media in Manhattan.

Director and cinematographer Goro Toshima doesn't set out to find individuals on the margins of society. He's drawn to telling the stories of those whom he connects with personally. This tendency is highlighted in the way he began his most recent documentary short, Broken Doors: after reading an article in LA Weekly about a homeless youth named Rico, Toshima set out to find him with no plans or intentions other than speaking with him. Thankfully, he did plan enough to bring his camera.

What followed this initial meeting was six months of trust between subject and filmmaker as Rico allowed Toshima to document the daily struggles he and his girlfriend Starr face living on the streets of Hollywood. At times so intimate we forget the filmmaker was ever present, Broken Doors is a poignant record of the lives of two young adults wrestling with their grim reality.

This multi-award-winning short subject is currently in the running for Best Short at the 2011 IDA Documentary Awards. In light of this recent nomination, we sat down with writer, director and cinematographer Goro Toshima to discuss his background, his inspirations, and why 15 minutes is all it takes.

IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Goro Toshima: In high school and college I was taking a lot of pictures and doing a lot of photography. After college I kind of fell into this job working for this production company that was doing short pieces for Japanese TV. They would call the production company or we would pitch ideas to the network about some New York story and then we would make a two- to three-minute news piece. But that was news; it wasn't really documentary.

I was always interested in documentaries, and around that time I was thinking of starting to get into documentary work. I ended up applying to a graduate program for documentary filmmaking, which I got into. I graduated from Stanford, [which] has a small documentary program. After I finished that degree I started freelancing in the Bay Area, where there are tons of independent documentary filmmakers. So I started freelancing, doing kind of bullshit work filing or paginating transcripts. For me it was kind of frustrating because it never really led to anything. I was bouncing from one office PA job to another office PA job.

I think I was doing that for five years, and then I decided that I really wanted to make my own films. I started shooting A Hard Straight on my own. Eventually I got ITVS funding for A Hard Straight and was able to not work for other people and just focus on that project for a couple years.  

IDA: How did you meet Rico and Starr?

GT: I saw this article in which Rico was mentioned. I tracked him down and met with him, talked with him and started filming with him.

IDA: And you met Starr that way too?

GT: Yeah, through Rico.  

IDA: What was it that made their story one you had to tell?

GT: I think it was a combination of a lot of things. When I first met them, I didn't know them that well. I just met them for 15 minutes and said, "Let's start filming."  I'd been in LA for a few years, and driving up and down Hollywood [Blvd.] I saw all the street kids. I wanted to do something local; something about street kids would be an interesting film.

With Rico and Starr in particular, the main thing was that they were a couple. At the time they were very close. They really depended on each other, and I thought that dynamic was interesting. They're in love, they're a couple, and they're on the streets. Their situation was interesting--them talking about the turbulence in their life and how unpredictable it was, and the struggles that they have to go through every day of being homeless. I thought all that would make for an interesting film.

IDA: So you only knew them for 15 minutes before you started shooting?

GT: Yeah. It wasn't the smartest idea!

IDA: But it doesn't seem like the camera is in the way at all. You seem to be there for their most interesting moments. How did you enter into their lives in such close quarters without the camera getting in the way?  

GT: When we were filming, we did spend a lot of time together. It was also just kind of getting them comfortable. First of all, they felt comfortable with me as a person. Even without the camera, just hanging out, they felt comfortable with me. I think one of the things was that they don't have a lot of adult figures in their lives. With me, I think they felt that they could trust me. I was this adult figure who they could confide in and talk to about stuff. I think that was a relationship that was important to them, so they felt comfortable.

IDA: What were some challenges you encountered when making this film? I imagine it was hard to not become emotionally involved.

GT: I would never do a project like this again. After a couple months it just got so difficult watching them go through what they went through. The most difficult was filming with them and then leaving them after filming and coming home to my house, which is not a great house, but compared to what they live in, it's pretty luxurious. Seeing what they went through was obviously difficult and frustrating.

Your impulse is, you want to help them. In a lot of ways I did try to help them with suggestions and to just try to steer them in the right direction. Ultimately, especially for something like our relationship, there is only so much you could do for them.

Both of them had just horrible childhoods. They have really deep, deep issues that they need help with. As a documentary filmmaker, I'm not able or equipped to help them in the ways they need to be helped. I think that was the most frustrating part--wanting to help but knowing that you can't do what needs to get done.

IDA: Your previous film, A Hard Straight, deals with other characters that are similarly on the edge of society. Do you find that you gravitate toward telling the stories?

GT: It's not like it's a particular interest of mine. It just happened that I made A Hard Straight. I didn't stumble upon Broken Doors, but it wasn't an intentional thing. It's not a theme I'm trying to pursue. The thing that does interest me is that for both those films was these people who have serious challenges in their lives. I think in terms of doc filmmaking and telling stories in the documentary format, those [challenges] are thematically an interesting subject. I wouldn't say it's a theme of the films I'm interested in making. It just happened to be the two films that I happened to make.

IDA: The skateboarding scene in the parking garage was very cinematic and almost meditative. Can you tell me how that scene came to be?

GT: Basically I was just hanging out with Rico one day, and he was like, "Me and my friends are going to go skateboarding. Let's go film it." I sort of hopped on a skateboard. I know how to skateboard and surf so it was easy for me to shoot it.

At the time I was thinking that I had so much footage of bad shit happening in their lives that was sort of depressing. At the time I was really hoping for more light themes. For instance, there's that scene where they're dancing at Venice Beach. I wanted to do more scenes like that where it showed the fun side of their lives. When we did the skateboarding scene, I was really happy because I thought that was how I would use that particular footage, [as] something that showed something a little lighter in their lives.

IDA: How much time did you spend shooting the film?

GT: I would say over the course of six months or so.

IDA: How many hours of footage did you end up with?

GT: That's kind of difficult to answer because I was shooting on P2 [cards]. These days, you measure in gigabytes instead of hours. I had something like two terabytes or a terabyte and a half. If I were to guess, I would say maybe 50 or 60 hours. A typical documentary has about 100 to 200 hours, but this was a short.

IDA: Did you set out with the intention of making a short?

GT: No, I actually set out with the intension of making the feature. As I was shooting and shooting and tracking the story, [I was] thinking in my head what the story was going to be as I was filming. The thing is, not a lot happens in their lives. There are moments that are super unpredictable and dramatic, like they lose their place, or Starr gets pregnant, or Starr gets the abortion. But I'd say in general, their lives are kind of static. There's not much movement in their lives. The same thing was happening over and over. Rico and Starr lost their place when I was filming with them two or three times, and Starr actually got pregnant a couple of times. It was sort of the same thing repeating itself. I cut a feature-length version and started getting feedback. Everyone was saying it was cyclical and too repetitive. At one point I just decided to contain it into a short.

IDA: Who are other filmmakers that inform your work or inspire you?

GT: I'd say the people who inform or inspire my work the most are my friends who work in documentary. There's this guy Mark Becker, who's a good friend of mine. He helped me a lot with this film. This guy named Daniel Baer, another independent documentary filmmaker; a friend of mine, Tim Roberts, who's an editor. Those were the people who I went to Stanford with who were the closest to me in terms of filmmaking and who inspire me the most.

IDA: What has the audience reaction been when you screen this film? Have you been surprised by those reactions?

GT: It's a little bit hard to gauge because it's gotten into festivals, and I've gone to festivals but there haven't been big audiences as the screenings I've been to. I get the basic questions of how I found them and how they're doing, and what it was like filming with them. The reactions are more of curiosity about Rico and Starr and my relationship with them. It's a little difficult to gauge a general audience reaction because I haven't been exposed to a lot of audience reaction yet.