Position Among the Stars, the final installment of Dutch-Indonesian filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich's trilogy about the struggles and hopes of an Indonesian family amid the tumultuous socio-political changes that country has undergone in the past decade, earned top awards at IDFA and Sundance this past year. With the previous films in the trilogy, Eye of the Day (2001) and Shape of the Moon (2004), Position Among the Stars follows the Sjamsuddin family--Rumidjah, the grandmother and de facto matriarch; Bakti, her son; and Tari, her teenage granddaughter and Bakti's niece--as they negotiate life in the slums of Jakarta.

Domestic friction abounds here: Rumidjah and Bakti both pin their hopes on Tari, a bright but rebellious secondary school student, to graduate and go on to university; Bakti struggles to get by as a neighborhood manager, while spending time raising fighting fish--much to the dismay of his long-suffering wife, Sri, who, in a moment of rage, fries them; and Rumidjah and Bakti differ in their respective faiths--she's a Christian, he recently converted to Islam.

It takes a wise and patient filmmaker to capture the poetry and complexity of this family melodrama, and Helmrich delivers.  Through a remarkably intimate cinema-vérité style that he calls Single Shot Cinema, which emphasizes camera movement and long takes, the filmmaker unveils both the universal in the Sjamsuddin family and the intrinsic in Indonesian culture, weaving in interstitial scenes of an armless beggar who operates a cell phone with her foot, and a little boy running through the alleys of Jakarta.

Documentary spoke with Helmrich in between screenings of Position Among the Stars at the Los Angeles Film Festival last June.

How did you develop Single Shot Cinema?

Leonard Retel Helmrich: Well, my background is actually in fiction, and in fiction you always shoot and cover the scenes from the inside, and that's actually what I wanted to do when I switched to documentary at the beginning of the '90s. Then I thought, you always have to be an observer from the outside [in documentary].  I didn't want that, and I did not want to manipulate because in fiction you can manipulate the situation, while in documentary you cannot.

Then I found that the best way to not manipulate but still cover a scene from the inside is to be part of the event itself. But that doesn't always mean that you have to be physically there; you are just one of all the people who are experiencing something in one place. And that was quite a hassle with the big cameras at the beginning of the '90s, so I couldn't develop it right. But later in the 90s, with the DV cameras, you could do that.

And it's all kind of a mindset--being part of a moment, among the people, and shooting scenes from the inside, from all angles, which is normally only done in fiction--without manipulating the situation. The only way to do that was Single Shot Cinema. You can only cover a scene if you also capture all the nuances in between the different moments and elements and objects that are interacting with each other.

In order to be able to capture all these nuances, there are certain things you cannot do and certain things you can do. I don't use panning movements, but I do use orbital movements. I always like the relation between different objects in order to capture things as much as possible from the inside. And, according to Andre Bazin, the film critic from the '50s, who also inspired me to develop this technique, when you shoot something, you have to shoot it in the pace of reality. I call it temporal continuity. You have to use camera movements as main narratives; it becomes a different film language. It's not the frame that's the focus; it's the movement of the camera. The movement of the camera, according to Bazin, is the essence of cinematography.

There are some specific aspects of your work that struck me, particularly with Position Among the Stars. One is your affinity for nature. The dewdrops on the blade of grass...what you captured within those dewdrops, following a cockroach, following rats... How does nature figure in your work?

For me, nature is such an important element, especially in Indonesia, where there are always insects crawling around, lizards on the wall or cats walking around. I'm just aware of it.

Also, I want to use this family in my film as a microcosm for what's happening in the whole country--the political changes, the economic changes. In order for viewers to understand this, you have to go deeper, to a smaller world, to ensure that you [shift] in perspective from small to big and from big to small.

You capture scenes at remarkably low angles. In one scene, you're filming a cockroach's view of a street, you follow this cockroach up to the rooftop, then you shoot Bakti from the cockroach's point of view. How did you do that?

I have a special device called a Steadywing. It folds underneath the camera, and when you're filming you can unfold it during shooting and you can almost fly around. You can go very low to the ground, you can go high up to the ceiling--you're very free and still very steady. So steadiness and flexibility are very important in order to move your camera around. Then you can use your camera like you write; you describe the scenes with your camera movements.

That's actually the essence of Single Shot Cinema--capturing the moment as much as possible in one shot. Since reality is always longer than you can use in your film, you capture everything in one shot. Then it'll always be possible to condense it in shorter scenes without having to think of editing too much; you can always cut from movement into movement. That gives you all the freedom to go over very low surfaces, high ceilings, everything.

And that's what enabled you to follow that boy through the streets? How did you achieve that scene?

Well, it started off with very small things: The little boy started running suddenly, and I ran after him. I was behind him, then I managed to be in front of him, so I could film him. It was so nice that these shots were captured, and I thought, "Now I have to build it out to a more cinematographic story."  I built a special crane device from a bamboo stick, a kind of joint so I would be able to be move the camera with some ropes. I could control the camera as if it were a marionette.

So much of documentary is about achieving that sense of trust so you can capture intimate, very emotional moments. There is a particularly tense scene in the film-the confrontation between Bakti and Tari--and after the screening at Sundance, you talked about holding the camera away from you while filming that scene.

I'm never behind the camera. I always have my camera beside me or above me or underneath me, but not where I'm standing; the Steadywing enables you to do that in a very gentle way. When I was shooting that scene, I saw what was happening. Bakti was angry at his niece and he called her, so she had to come downstairs. I had the camera in front and then suddenly he slapped her. It really shocked me that he was doing that. Then he pushed her into her room. If you are part of an event, you are also responsible for what's happening, so if he had gone too far, I would have halted him.

I always had my camera with me. At a conscious level, you can say, I'm here physically; that's who I am: the camera goes in my hand and goes to my emotional point of view. My physical point of view is where my eyes are, but my emotional point of view is where the camera is. So I try to find those camera angles that you normally wouldn't use.

Is it just from years of experience of knowing what's in the viewfinder or frame that you can keep your camera out there and know what you're capturing?

Well, many times I don't know--I'm just pointing the camera in the right direction and I know already that angle would be good because I taught myself how to shoot without looking through the viewfinder. I just check it. Sometimes, especially in emotional moments, it's not always that you have to look at the faces of the people; it's also the moment itself.

I remember that scene of Bakti's wife frying his prize fighting fish. He then demolished her store and all the rubbish was lying on the ground. She was standing in it, shouting at him. I went with the camera to the rubbish and filmed over it. That moment I remembered that she was crying, Bakti was sitting there complaining--and I did not want to see the faces; I wanted to shoot the damage done. I had the feeling of a scene from Taxi Driver, at the very end, after the shoot-out and the camera goes over the whole situation. So I just follow my intuition. Where my view would go in reality, that's where I'll go with the camera.

You are both the director and the cinematographer. Is there a challenge of thinking as a director vs. thinking as a cinematographer?  

For me as a director, cinematographer and also a sound recordist, there is no difference between them. So I don't separate them. It's like a painter-you don't give the brush to someone else and say, Can you put this line here from left to right?

When you're filming a scene, how much do you think ahead to the editing room?

I'm thinking ahead mostly at the very end--the moment I have a feeling that I think I have seen a good beginning, a good middle and a good end.

When I'm shooting, I try to be in a kind of trance--still aware of what I'm shooting, but not thinking of the editing too much. I just film the details of the moment , then slowly pull out when the whole drama fades away. Then I become aware of what I've seen, and then I think, Will I understand everything that's in the scene? If I feel that this scene is complete, then I'm thinking of what angles may be used for an introduction or ending of the scene-and I'm also thinking of sound. Then I keep running the camera and I just shoot atmospheric sound.

What kind of cameras did you use for Position Among the Stars?

I shot with the Canon HVX A1. I actually used five different cameras, including that one; a JVC Ethereal, which is what I used for the cockroaches, for instance, because it was very good in micro; the Sony A1; and the Contour HD, which is a very small camera, but very good in wide angle. I also used a bigger camera for the little boy running that is fantastic for crane shots because they're so small and light. You don't need counterweights, so I just use a stick. I don't even have to lift it with both hands because then you'll be unstable. Just put it on the ground, put your foot there and it will not slide away. Then with a rope you pull it up.

There are a number of interstitial pieces in the film that are so poetic--for example, the armless woman who operates a cell phone with a foot. Was it a challenge to figure out how to fit these moments into the story?

In The Eye of the Day, we had lots of these moments of people who were not related to each other, who didn't know each other. The storyline was less clear, but I was very free to use these kinds of moments.

I still wanted to have the freedom to have sidesteps. That's why at the beginning, just to expose Jakarta as a city and what it looks like--and using this metaphor of how people live--I thought of the woman with no arms who could still operate the cell phone while begging. It was quite striking.

Going back to Single Shot Cinema, you teach workshops around the world, and you have a position at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute now as an adjunct professor. In teaching this, what are your goals and objectives, and what you do hope the students will take from it?

Film language was for a long time quite stuck into a fixed way of storytelling, editing and framing. I think Single Shot Cinema can help to bring it further. When you look at the whole history of how the language has evolved, it's evolved out of the technical changes of what happened in film. And those changes are happening quicker and more frequently, so you have to be ahead of that. One of the things that I now promote is using orbital camera movements, where you put that moment in its surroundings.  You can use orbital camera movement for dramatic reasons and shoot by intuition.

Young people understand film language so well. At NYU Abu Dhabai, they had bought many of the Canon 7D cameras--the photo cameras you can use for shooting. But I heard that many of the younger people had a problem with depth-of-field because that's not their way of thinking. They want to be free, move around and that's a hassle because depth-of-field is actually a photography way of thinking, not a cinematography way of thinking. If you want to think as a cinematographer, instead of using depth of field, you move gently with the camera--and then you also have the same feeling as with depth of field. That's what I want to teach.

Going back to old school, who were your influences, particularly in bdocumentary, both directors and cinematographers?

When it comes to documentary, of course the direct cinema or cinema vérité people, even though they didn't have the freedom yet to move like I do; the cameras were too bulky. But still, I know what they wanted to achieve, what they were aiming for, and they were very good at it. Further on, I always liked documentaries about nature. And there are many fiction filmmakers like Bertolucci and Visconti, when he goes for very slow, very nice movements. Or Sergio Leone, who used camera angles that were never thought of. Also Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa.

For more on Single Shot Cinema visit www.singleshotcinema.com. Position Among the Stars airs September 28 on HBO.

Thomas White is editor of Documentary magazine.

Every day the detonation of four million pounds of explosives echoes through the West Virginia mountains as a small army of companies lays bare the coal formed under the mountaintops over 200 million years ago. Like all wars, even environmental ones, there's collateral damage. 

"It's like living in Afghanistan or Pakistan," says Maria Gunnoe, whose childhood home where she still lives is just below ground zero for the Jupiter Mine's explosive mountaintop-clearing operations in Boone County.

Removing 800 feet of mountain also destroys the ancient hardwood forest, which not only provides shade and supports wildlife but also gives the land the ability to retain water when it rains. Without the protection of the forest, a devastating flood in 2000 put Gunnoe's home underwater and made her aware of the damage caused by what's become known as mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining.

The flooding was not the only problem caused by MTR. "The water and the air that our children breathe is the worst in the country," says Gunnoe. The blasting emits silica-laden dust from shale and granite, and if inhaled can lead to silicosis--obstructions on the lungs that block the flow of oxygen into the blood. This alone can be debilitating or even fatal but it also weakens the immune system and increases the likelihood of contracting other lung diseases such as tuberculosis or pneumonia. Studies have linked exposure to silica with various cancers (lung, stomach, lymphatic and skin) and kidney diseases such as nephritis and end-stage renal disease.

 "We've had medical studies done," Gunnoe asserts. "We're finding silica dust in our homes, even in our refrigerators. We as community members are breathing more dust than the workers. They have respirators; we're sitting ducks."

Instead of accepting defeat, Gunnoe transformed from waitress to activist, and now works full time to stop mountaintop removal. "I became an activist to fight for what's important to me," she maintains. Recognizing the importance of jobs to the community, she joined other activists to search for alternatives to blowing up the mountains. "We're at a crossroads now and we cannot sacrifice our planet for fossil fuels," she says. "They're poisoning our planet."

A study was commissioned that showed that the prevailing winds blowing across the tops of the ridges would provide more energy than the coal being blasted out of the ground. Building and maintaining wind energy devices would also provide more jobs than coal mining, and would not harm people or the environment. Unfortunately, once you destroy the mountaintops, what's left won't be high enough to be used as wind platforms. There's no second chance.

Gunnoe's fight to stop MTR and transform the Appalachian Mountains into a wind-energy powerhouse attracted filmmaker Bill Haney and his partners, who feature her in their feature-length documentary film The Last Mountain, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. "I found this amazing community who were pushing to do something extraordinary," says Haney. "They're reminiscent of the farmers who fought the Redcoats during the Revolutionary War--no chance of winning but they forge ahead and win. They're the wellspring of our democracy; democracy is a participatory sport."

The film makes it clear who the opposition is and how tough it's going to be to defeat them. We meet Don Blankenship, who until recently was the CEO of Massey Energy. He became known nationally in 2010 when the Massey-owned Upper Big Branch Mine exploded, killing 29 workers--the deadliest mine disaster in 40 years. This mine had over 3,000 safety violations before the explosion, but Blankenship was the master at delaying compliance. He was rewarded with a $6.8 million raise after the accident, pushing his salary to $17.8 million, not counting a deferred compensation package of $27.2 million that year. 

The film outlines how Blankenship earned his keep by "closing mines and re-opening them with non-union labor." The result: the majority of the miners in West Virginia who were once represented by the United Mine Workers are not today. According to author Michael Shnayerson, "Virtually none are." This has driven down wages, kept miners working longer hours and eliminated jobs. "It's like a jungle, where a jungle is the survival of the fittest," says Blankenship in the film.

According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's also featured in the film, there are a lot fewer miners today in Blankenship's "jungle." Kennedy remembers first traveling to West Virginia with his father and meeting coal miners: "There were 156,000 miners there when I was growing up; now there are fewer than 18,000." It's the industry's strategy to "fire the workers and use machines instead." Of the 18,000, "There are only 6,000 in mountaintop removal."

Using an old union-busting tactic, the company brings in many of these workers from outside the state, lured by ads in USA Today and other papers. These are not permanent jobs or careers. A typical mountaintop removal mine is blown up, mined and covered up in nine years; the workers are as disposable as the mountain. The company plays on the miners' outsider status, pitting them against local activists who are concerned with their community's health and future.

The film takes us to a Labor Day rally Blankenship organizes for his workers and their families, and we see how he uses the stage like a magician who deceives his audience by shifting their attention to something else. In magic, it's called misdirection.

 "Environmental extremists are all endangering American labor," says Blankenship to the crowd. "In fact, they are making American labor the real endangered species."

The crowd eats it up. But the film shows us the reality as it takes us to towns that have been abandoned as a result of the company's policies to eliminate jobs. "We're living in a dead zone," says Gunnoe. 

The misdirection continues as Kennedy joins other activists at a rally outside the State Capitol to protest MTR. They're confronted by a counter-demonstration of angry miners who deny there are any negative health impacts from their work or the use of coal.  They blame chemical plants for mercury emissions and defend coal, since the "Indians" used it too. What appears to be a genuine outpouring of worker sentiment is questionable because, according to Kennedy, they were given the day off by Massey and told to stand in an area "organized as a barricade" between the protestors and the capitol building.

One of the film's best scenes takes place in a local café as Kennedy and Bill Raney, the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, an industry trade group, exchange views. Kennedy delivers a blistering denunciation of Massey for racking up 60,000 violations, many of which result in polluting waterways with toxins such as mercury. He says it's worse than "robbing a bank because a kid could eat a fish and get sick and get cancer." Raney retorts, "You guys from up North talk fast." His only defense is to point to the number of jobs coal brings to the state--to which Kennedy responds, "If this is so good for the economy of West Virginia, why is this one of the poorest states in the nation?"

While Raney and Blankenship rail about the outside agitators coming in to stir things up, they don't mention that the Frasure Creek Mine above Gunnoe's house is owned by Essar Energy, a company headquartered in Mumbai, India. "This is beginning to look like a banana republic," Kennedy observes. "This is the model for a colonial economy."

The film doesn't tackle the growing number of foreign companies engaged in mineral extraction in the US and the huge coal mining operations across the country that are feeding the growing energy demands of the developing world. But it does provide an in-depth analysis of the impact coal has on climate change, public health and the true costs of subsidies and tax breaks. It also lays out a prescription for a non-fossil-fuel future, making the case that developing wind power alone would provide more good paying jobs than coal does and these jobs won't contribute to the destruction of the planet. Instead they'll build a sustainable economy.

"Coal is a transition fuel," says Gunnoe. "We can't sacrifice our air, water and health. We've got to look to the future."

The Last Mountain opens June 3 in New York City and Washington, DC, through Dada Films, with a theatrical rollout across the country to follow.

Michael Rose is a writer, producer and director.

At first glance, Danfung Dennis' Hell and Back Again gives the impression of a highly cinematic fiction film. Terrence Malick's latest war epic, perhaps? The filmmaker's access is so intimate, the sound design so engaging, and the imagery so arresting, it's unfathomable that the film could be shot, and the sound recorded, by one man.

But it was. And its success is the result of a confluence of factors--right place, right time, right characters--but perhaps most remarkably, the filmmaker's unrelenting tenacity learned from years working as a war photographer, and the fairly recent development of the Canon 5D Mark II--the first (and perhaps still the best) DSLR camera that can record 1080p HD video.

The film takes us deep inside the war in Afghanistan, where we join a US Marine Corps unit on a mission to take down a Taliban stronghold in the South. Sergeant Nathan Harris leads the charge but is critically injured in battle, and returns home to his devoted wife in North Carolina to rehabilitate. The film contrasts his brutal, albeit exhilarating, experiences on the frontlines in Afghanistan with the mundanities of life back home--shifting back and forth between the grand vistas of the war-ravaged country, to the claustrophobic view from the back seat of Harris' car as his wife drives him to doctors' appointments and fast-food drive-thrus. We witness Harris' struggle with depression and his growing dependence on painkillers with a painful intimacy rarely captured in documentary film.

The 5D Mark II was the ideal camera for both settings, says the filmmaker, mainly because it's a small camera capable of superlative, cinematic-image quality. "I think that was one of my aims," Dennis maintains. "To borrow from the language of cinematic film and bring it to documentary...I wanted people to forget that they're watching a documentary, and when they realize that it's real, it hits them that much harder, and conveys that much more emotion."

Dennis spent eight months customizing his rig for shooting in Afghanistan, which he designed to fit into a backpack. "Other film productions have big crews and cases and cases of equipment. They're very slow-moving and encumbered and the shots reflect that:  They have to set up a tripod, and sort of manufacture their shots. When you work as a photographer, it's much more fluid; you have to stay light and be able to be dynamic to whatever's happening around you."

But as anyone who's used the 5D on a documentary knows, the camera has some serious issues that can impede shooting in dynamic, hand-held situations. "I think when they first designed the camera they had no idea that people would be using it to shoot films," he says. "They thought that they'd shoot Web clips and then take pictures, mostly... I knew there were weaknesses. The audio was a huge problem and the stabilization was a huge problem, so I spent a lot of time testing and re-testing and building some components to get it to do what I needed in these really difficult situations.

"I modified a Glidecam 2000 to accommodate the 5D and my sound equipment [which included a Sennheiser 66 shotgun mic and Sennheiser G2 wireless system running into a Beachtek DXA-2s duel XLR adaptor]," Dennis continues. "Because I was wearing body armour--quite a lot of other weight--I didn't want to be wearing the traditional kind of Steadicam vest. So I got my arms strong enough to hold the entire rig, which is 10 or 15 pounds, and be able to hold it for a couple of minutes for tracking shots. Then I would rest it onto my body armour with an attachment when I wasn't shooting, just to give my arm a break. I spent a lot of time practicing to be able to pull off these shots, to be able to get the kind of fluid motion and move with whomever I was moving with."

When he returned to North Carolina with Harris, Dennis went back to the drawing table and redesigned his rig to suit shooting in closer quarters and in more emotionally sensitive situations where a larger camera setup would prove too intrusive. This time, he used the smaller Zacuto Stryker kit to hold his camera and sound equipment and had a custom follow-focus unit built from a skateboard wheel.

But some issues couldn't be overcome by the rig, no matter how cleverly he modified it.

For one thing, the camera needed to shut off every 15 minutes or so to avoid overheating, especially in the 130-degree heat of Afghanistan. "There really wasn't any way around that," Dennis explains. "I only had one camera body, so I would just limit what I would shoot and only at the most important times would I let the camera roll. It was frustrating--some of the most interesting times I wanted to be filming more, the camera would shut itself off and there was nothing I could do except to let it cool. I also didn't know when I would have another chance to charge my batteries and I had a limited number of hard drives, so I had to carefully calculate how much I should be shooting to gauge the importance of everything that was happening around me and whether it was worth it to even turn the camera on or off."

Dust was also a major problem, Dennis says, and it nearly prevented him from getting those incredible shots from the opening of the film. "Just before the operation started, when all those helicopters were lifting off, there was this incredible amount of dust being stirred up," he recounts. "It got into the camera, and the shutter button got stuck in the down position. I only had about two minutes before the helicopter I was supposed to be on was leaving, and I wasn't able to start recording.

"All these esoteric questions flooded into my mind like, 'What am I doing here if I can't document this? Should I even get on when I don't have my tools? What's the purpose of being here?' And I just took my fingernail and scratched the dust out of the shutter button to pop it back up. I was able to begin recording, and I stepped onto the helicopter and began the operation. So, cleaning it every single day, getting as much dust out as possible was critical."

Keeping things in focus was yet another challenge, particularly because Dennis wanted to shoot at a very shallow depth of field to achieve a cinematic look. "I wanted to be able to ... isolate the subject and direct the viewer to certain points in the frame," he explains. "So I shot almost everything at f2.8 in Afghanistan, and then back in North Carolina even shallower depth of field, so f1.4, f1.2. At that depth of field, you're focused down to a couple of inches, so if anyone moved they'd go out of focus. So I had to re-rack or move with them, and with no auto focus, once you start recording my mind was constantly thinking about focus just my subject and keeping things sharp."

To do this, Dennis says the technicalities of the job have to become second nature. "Your fingers need to work with your mind in a way that doesn't require explicit thinking. It just automatically changes the exposure or the focus. Your tool has to become an extension of you."

But aside from all the specific technical challenges that he overcame, the question of motivation still remains. Where does the drive to go to such great lengths and at such great personal risk to achieve the aesthetic of this film? Turns out the answer lies in his background as a photographer: "It was the past work of other war photographers--mostly from Vietnam, Bosnia and Rwanda," he says. "I wanted to follow in that tradition of trying to contribute images that could burn into the collective consciousness and try to inform others of those realities and try and show what mistakes that society had made so that we don't repeat them.

"And it's very important to always be looking towards new technology to try to shake people from their indifference. It's easy to think of these wars as distant and complex and far away and as an abstraction, that they don't really affect our daily lives. So we do need stories to try to bring this war close to home."

Hell and Back Again is current screening at Film Forum in New York, through Docurama Films; the film opens in Los Angeles on October 14 at the Laemmle Monica, with additional opening dates scheduled through November.

Sarah Keenlyside is a Toronto-based producer and writer.
 

How can a filmmaker insure that their proposal gets to the top? What can you do to really stand out? Do you understand the distinction between distribution, outreach, and community engagement?

Attendees of Saturday, October 15’s Doc U: Focus on Funding – Getting Grants for Your Documentary were lucky enough to get the answers to these questions and more straight from the mouths of five documentary film funders from five leading organizations.

IDA Executive Director Michael Lumpkin gives his opening remarks and introduces moderator Morrie Warshawski.

The day began with the Meet the Funders panel, which was moderated by nonprofit and fundraising consultant Morrie Warshawski and included Tamir Muhammad of the Tribeca Film Institute, Rahdi Taylor of the Sundance Institute, John Lightfoot of California Council for the Humanities, Emily Verellen of The Fledgling Fund, and Lisa Kleiner Chanoff of Catapult Film Fund.


Established and emerging documentary filmmakers take down priceless advice from the funders.

Emphasizing that the morning would be full of dialogue, Morrie started off by asking everyone what makes each of them passionate about their work. The powerful and inspiring responses set the tone for the rest of the morning, which was filled with sound advice and practical notes on how to make sure your documentary project has the greatest chance of achieving success.


Our esteemed funders in front of an eager crowd at the Downtown Standard Hotel.

We have since received an overwhelming amount of support and praise for this Doc U:

"The fundraising speakers were all awesome, insightful and illuminating. I gained a lot from hearing how the different organizations approach the selection process."

-Anonymous seminar attendee

"The seminar with Morrie was one of the most interesting and enriching educational moments if my career. It totally revitalized and focused my current projects and kickstarted me into a new way of thinking about my work and the scope of it. He was engaging and funny and enlighting in many ways."

- Alessandra Pasquino

Upset to have missed out on such a unique opportunity? Register for a free IDA account and start receiving email updates and newsletters about upcoming events today!


After the panel, several lucky attendees got the chance to have lunch with one of the five funders. Here are several aspiring documentarians chatting with Tamir Muhammad.


Another table full of lunching documentarians.


After lunchtime, Morrie took over with his talk on The Art of Getting Grants.

All photos ©2011 Humberto Mendes, IDA

Doc U is the International Documentary Association's series of educational seminars and workshops for aspiring and experienced documentary filmmakers. Taught by artists and industry experts, participants receive vital training and insight on various topics including: fundraising, distribution, licensing, marketing, and business tactics.

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