The PaleyDocFest2011 may already be underway, but don’t feel like it’s too late to dive in headfirst and start catching up on some of the best documentary films of 2011. This year, The Paley Center for Media in New York City is featuring 10 documentary features and several in-person appearances, panels and workshops in the company of many leading names in documentary film.

One such exciting event is The Doc Filmmaker Taking On Power, a surely inspiring panel presented by the International Documentary Association. Scheduled for Thursday, October 20 at 6:30pm ET, this panel will feature Josh Fox, director of IDA Pare Lorentz Award finalist and Academy Award-nominated Gasland, and Joe Berlinger, director of the acclaimed Crude. Along with influential lawyer Karen Shatzkin and moderator Joe Neumaier (film critic, New York Daily News), the panelists will discuss how the independent documentary filmmaker often confronts powerful entities – including corporate and governmental – that make production difficult and troublesome. This panel is a must for any emerging filmmaker who desires to make a socially conscious film.

Alongside this fantastic panel, PaleyDocFest2011 is screening 2011 DocuWeeks alums Miss Representation and Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey on the evenings of October 14 and October 17, respectively. Miss Representation, an interrogation of the skewed image of women in the media, will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom. At Monday’s screening of Being Elmo, we can promise that director/producer Constance Marks and a colorful cast of characters (wink!) will be in attendance after the film.

The best part about this whole event is that IDA Members receive the special Paley Center member discount on all events and screenings! IDA Members can enter the code "groups" to receive special discounted ticket price when purchasing online. It’s a good time to be a supporter of documentary!

Find out more on PaleyDocFest2011 here.

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.

Special support also provided by:

• The PGA will consider only documentary feature films no less than forty (40) minutes in length;
• The PGA’s rules also require that to be eligible, all documentary films must be in the English-language; 
• Foreign productions in the English language qualify, if the production has a U.S. distributor; and
• The entity in charge of designating the producing credits must have an established place of business in the U.S.

Winning the documentary Humanitas Prize for Louder Than A Bomb is a tremendous honor. It's also a validation that we may just have succeeded at doing what we set out to do from the start: make a film that's both entertaining and uplifting, without sacrificing one for the other.

That also happens to be exactly what the kids we followed strive to do—tell their stories as precisely, as honestly, and as entertainingly as possible, while still making a powerful connection with the audience. The last thing we wanted was to tell a crappy story about kids who are amazing storytellers. So we are profoundly grateful to Nate, Nova, Adam, and The Steinmenauts for inspiring us to tell our story in a way that did justice to theirs.

Always start at the beginning. Remember the importance of first reactions. Read or listen to poetry. Work out your voice. Simplify.

Sound like good advice to live your life by? All these tidbits of guidance could of course apply to everyday life, but at IDA’s most recent Doc U panel, these pearls of wisdom were meant to also apply to writing for documentary. And that was just the beginning of the advice!



Moderated by writer/producer and IDA Board Executive Member Sara Hutchison, the Writing for the Nonfiction Screen panel was comprised of award-winning writers Steven Reich, Sharon Wood, P.G. Morgan, and Freida Lee Mock, all of whom were eager to share their projects and guidance to an audience of around 80 documentary filmmakers and writers.



Each filmmaker had a chance to focus on their experiences and their most successful projects. Sharon Wood, writer/producer of The Celluloid Closet, focused extensively on the importance of treatments and outlines when attempting to get initial funding and interest for a project. After showing clips of the film Paragraph 175, Wood informed the audience how she set rules for narration and text before beginning the writing process.



Writer/producer P.G. Morgan spoke of his shared writing duties with Chris Paine when they were fleshing out the story of Revenge of the Electric Car, and how they literally locked themselves in a room for hours with cell phones turned off in order to find their four main narrative strands. Academy Award®-winning writer/director and producer Freida Lee Mock shared that while working on Wrestling with Angeles: Playwright Tony Kushner, she made sense of her story through the act of writing. She also encouraged aspiring writers to think about not just the dramatic arc for the film, but also for each scene.

In one of the more intruiging moments of the night, IDA Board Member Steven Reich (Avalance: The White Death) allowed his work to speak for itself by showing a three-minute clip of unedited, unorganized footage, followed immediately by a three-minute clip that had been totally rewritten. The difference was indeed startling, and proved the importance of research and a focused voice.



All in the all, audience members and panelists alike agreed it was a successful and inspiring evening—at least, that's what we heard over wine and hors d'oeuvres on the Cinefamily's Spanish patio!

Stay tuned for video clips from the event and upcoming Doc U events in your area.

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.

Special support provided by:

Last night at the 2011 Primetime Emmy Awards, the major headlines were made by Mad Men and Modern Family, which swept up significant victories for Fiction programming. The winners from the non-fiction categories were almost entirely overlooked by both the live broadcast and the popular media, but there were a few things that caught our eye over at IDA.

Namely, the fact that IDA Pare Lorentz Award finalist Gasland took home the statue for Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming. Directed by Josh Fox, Gasland explores “fracking” drilling technology and secrets, lies, and contamination brought on by Halliburton’s oil-extracting techniques. We’re proud to have a relationship with this great film, which also screened as a part of DocuDay back in February 2011.

We are proud to announce that 2010 DocuWeeks alum Freedom Riders took home three different Emmys last night, including Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming, Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming, and Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking. This story goes behind a courageous band of civil rights activists called Freedom Riders who in 1961 challenged segregation in the American South. From award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson, Freedom Riders features testimony from a fascinating cast of central characters: the Riders themselves, state and federal government officials, and journalists who witnessed the Rides firsthand.

We’re so proud of our strong relationships with these films, and hope that you’ll take the chance to become of fan of both Freedom Riders and Gasland on Facebook.

IDA offers a hearty CONGRATS to the big winners!

Editor's Note: On October 17 at the IDA offices in Los Angeles, IDA will present a Master Class on Directing and Executive Producing with Abigail Disney. The filmmaker will discuss the specific challenges of making social issue documentaries and using them as a tool for change. Learn more and purchase tickets.

Women in war: Images that spring to mind are of women being dragged away from their children, raped as spoils or abducted as trophies. Seldom do we visualize them in combat, or as more than passive victims. But victims they increasingly are, as women and children have come to be acceptable collateral damage and targets of war strategy.

Rarest of all, until now at least, are images of women aggressively pursuing peace and justice in the midst of war. But these images are plentiful in the stirring Women, War & Peace, a five-part public television series about the changing role of women in global conflict and peacemaking.

Women, War & Peace, conceived by veteran documentary filmmakers Abigail E. Disney, Pamela Hogan and Gini Reticker, launches Women and Girls Lead, an expansive, three-year, ITVS-sponsored "public media initiative designed to focus, educate and connect citizens across the globe working to help women and girls realize their potential in the 21st century." According to Tamara Gould, vice president of ITVS International, this initiative "is built around a slate of 50 documentaries by independent filmmakers from around the world, telling character-driven stories of leaders on the frontlines of education, human rights, economic development, health and democracy."

Women, War & Peace airs on successive Tuesdays, from October 11 through November 8, as a PBS special. Other projects in Women and Girls Lead include Half the Sky (Prods.: Maro Charmayeff, Jamie Gordon, Mikaela Beardsley), based on the book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which is slated to air on Independent Lens in late 2012; and Kind-Hearted Woman (Dir./Prod.: David R. Sutherland), about an Oglala Sioux woman fighting abuse, which will air on Frontline in 2013.

Asked how this slate of programs plans to reach beyond the white, middle-class, middle-aged viewer of public television, Gould says the initiative will target niche communities on mobile devices, gaming platforms and social media, as well as international audiences through partnerships with foreign broadcasters and through the Internet. "We're in this moment where independent filmmakers are telling wave after wave of stories of women and girls from every corner of the world," she asserts. "Sex trafficking, maternal mortality, child marriage... So the first challenge is how do you tell these stories and not have people turn away? Another challenge is the deafening media din: How do you take these stories and break through the noise? Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is that there's so much progress being made and yet too little attention and collaboration. So how can you help bridge the gaps and help people focus and connect on the issues that matter most?"

One theme that Women and Girls Lead focuses on, and which Women, War & Peace emphasizes, is women and girls as agents of change. It's not only a time-tested storytelling trope, but it steers viewers away from the uninspiring, and often repellent, image of women as eternal victims. Says Gould, "It was so clear that the subject and approach of the series­­--really examining how war and conflict can look different from a female perspective--was emblematic of what we were looking for in the Women and Girls Lead initiative."

In its first episode, Women, War & Peace tackles a daunting documentary challenge: How to depict the heroic actions of women whose faces, and even voices, must be disguised and distorted? I Came to Testify focuses on the Muslim women and girls of the Bosnian town of Foca who were raped by their own countrymen--sometimes their neighbors--in the Yugoslav wars. In the early 1990s, the world became aware of the existence of rape camps in Eastern Bosnia and horrifying statistics of rape victims in the tens of thousands.

Beginning in 2000, the United Nations Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague was convened to record the women's stories and prosecute war crimes, and for the first time in history, rape was defined not just as a war crime but as a crime against humanity. Women such as Witness 99 and Z.R. courageously risked ridicule and shame to testify in a global forum, revealing that rape had become a systematic and deliberate tactic in ethnic cleansing.

Producer/writer Hogan says her crew was prepared for the necessity of hiding the women's identities for their protection. Rejecting facial pixilation as dehumanizing, cinematographer Kirsten Johnson let the women's simple hand gestures like stubbing out a cigarette bear all the pain, rage and dignity of their experience.

Episode 2, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, shows the horror of rape and violence through imagery borrowed from public posters in Liberia, where the multilingual population can easily understand the issues at stake. The film, which earned the Best Documentary Feature award at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, is making its US broadcast premiere in this series. Directed by Reticker and produced by Disney, Pray the Devil Back to Hell follows the riveting Leymah Gbowee in her successful efforts to bring together Christian and Muslim women in forcing Liberian dictator Charles Taylor and his enemy warlord factions to negotiate a peace in 2003 after years of brutal civil war.

The women left their homes and traveled to Accra, Ghana, where they sat outside the negotiating hall. The male faction leaders, unaccustomed to fully subsidized junkets, treated the conference as a holiday and didn't take the talks seriously until the women, led by Gbowee, barricaded them inside until they came up with a plan. Ultimately, the women went from cowering in their homes, unable to feed their families, to becoming a force for peace that exiled Taylor and brought regime change to Liberia. "We campaigned until we forgot that we could even be raped," Gbowee maintains in the film. Their efforts helped elect the first African woman head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in 2005. Sirleaf acknowledged "the powerful voice of women," which brought her to triumph and stable leadership over a murderous strongman.

Episode 3, Peace Unveiled, moves to Afghanistan and the fortunes of women in wartime there. When the Taliban were in power before 2001, education for women was banned. As a result, almost 90 percent of Afghan women are unable to read or write, and women working outside the home are subjected to terrifying death threats. In this atmosphere, members of the 3,000-member Afghan Women's Network risk their lives to educate and gain electoral seats for women in the administration led by Hamid Karzai, to have a voice in its negotiations with the misogynistic Taliban. The AWN's view is that Karzai's regime concedes too much to the Taliban, and it is up to them to venture out into the unsafe streets to campaign for votes. "This terrible suffering inflicted on the women and girls of Afghanistan is not cultural--it is criminal--and we must do everything we can in our power to stop it," says US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the film. "I pledge to the women of Afghanistan: We will not abandon you. We will stand with you always."

Clinton is a strong presence in this series, a trusted player in global peacemaking. Hogan maintains, "Her confirmation hearing as Secretary of State made it loud and clear: Women's issues would be treated not only as a humanitarian issue but as national security policy. She is a pivotal figure for us."

Episode 4, The War We Are Living, highlights the fight for the life of a small village of Afro-Colombians who have lived off small-scale, artisanal gold-mining for centuries. They are now being bullied off their ancestral land by multinational interests--just the latest stage in the country's 40-year civil war. Two women have stepped up to fight both shadowy paramilitary forces and moneyed corporations, determined not to be chased out of the only home they've ever had. This episode dramatizes another deliberate tactic of war-displacement--and how it kills human dignity and tradition. Narrator Alfre Woodard says of one of the women, Clemencia Carabali, "She found that in wartime, women could organize more freely than men." Carabali and her network of African-Colombian women drive on country roads and rivers along which hundreds of people have been killed in deliberate terror campaigns, keeping track of the citizens and fighting for the right to own the land they've worked for generations.

Episode 5, War Redefined, is a magisterial summation of the themes introduced in the more sharply focused preceding episodes. Disney quotes Don Steinberg of the International Crisis Group as saying that peacemaking is the most dangerous profession in the world. Hogan hopes that Women, War & Peace will "cause it so that, when people think about or prepare for war, their discussion will include the impact on everybody--not just the soldiers but the true, human picture of the impact of war. In many places, it is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier. If we can provide a different lens through which to view war, to cause a paradigm shift, we want to play a role in it."

Frako Loden is adjunct lecturer in film, women's studies and ethnic studies at CSU East Bay and Diablo Valley College.

What do Ken Kesey, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the late Formula One racecar driver Ayrton Senna have in common? Some of you might be thinking, "King organized a bus boycott, and Kesey drove a painted bus full of psychedelic experimenters across the country. So, maybe it's wheeled transportation that would bring in Senna."

Well, what ties them together is that they are all featured in three recent nonfiction features that seamlessly use archive footage as if it were the raw material from a vérité documentary.

 "We call it archival vérité," says Alison Ellwood, who edited and co-directed (with Alex Gibney) Magic Trip, which chronicles Kesey and the Merry Prankster's acid-fueled trip across the US in 1964. The film was released in August through Magnolia Pictures and will air on HISTORY in 2012.

Ellwood and Gibney were sitting at the Sundance Festival reading a New Yorker article about Kesey's odyssey; the article mentioned a trove of 40 hours of 16mm footage of the Pranksters that Kesey had stored in his barn. "When we got back from Sundance, we contacted the family," Ellwood recalls. The filmmakers learned that there were actually about 100 hours of film and several hours of audiotapes. Unfortunately, the footage was shot by a bunch of very stoned and tripped-out amateurs.

Moreover, the Pranksters had repeatedly tried over the years to edit the footage, but instead of making work prints to create the numerous cuts, they used the original reversal film. Then they projected these cut versions over and over again for their amusement. This celluloid abuse tore sprockets and scratched the film and didn't result in a coherent, finished epic. Kesey eventually gave up trying to edit the footage, and he packed it away in his barn, where its damaged fragments began to decay.

Ellwood and Gibney were initially disheartened--until the UCLA Film and Television Archive received a grant from the Film Foundation to restore what is now dubbed the Ken Kesey Merry Prankster Collection. Audio was another story. HISTORY Films stepped in with some support, and Don Fleming from the Alan Lomax Archive set about working his digital magic on the hours of wobbly, scratchy sound captured on a Nagra, as well as numerous interviews recorded while the participants were watching various rough cuts of the film-which would serve as a running commentary for Magic Trip. 

Ellwood explains that she and Gibney had originally planned to re-interview the surviving Pranksters, "But we found that the earlier interviews were fresher." The filmmakers did shoot one interview and cut it into the film, but "It took you out of it."

They decided to go with the off-camera commentary approach and create a seamless narrative feel. Three of the archival interviews defied Fleming's skilled approach, however; test audiences couldn't hear the dialogue. As a solution, the filmmakers hired actors to perform the transcripts of the interviews, as well as a few re-creations of key scenes that the Pranksters had missed filming, but later recollected in the interviews. In addition, actor Stanley Tucci plays an unseen narrator/interviewer. These conceits, as well as animated maps and the use of a few newsreels for context, enhance the overall approach to constructing Magic Trip.

The six-year process has brought back to life a moment in American history that Ellwood thinks is important. It was a time during the Cold War when Americans were afraid of nuclear annihilation, and the country was shrouded in a "darkness of fear. Kesey was trying to tell people to get out of the bunkers, and don't listen the fear mongers," she maintains, and sees parallels between that all-encompassing fear of a nuclear Armageddon and the hysteria that gripped post-9/11 America. Her hope is that after seeing Magic Trip, "People walk away with a sense of adventure." 

A similar motivation to revive interest and re-interpret seminal events in American culture prompted Swedish filmmaker Göran Olsson to create his film about the Black Power movement in the United States. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, which premieres September 9 through Sundance Selects and will air on PBS' Independent Lens, is largely comprised of footage shot by various Swedish television crews during that era and stored in the network's basement.

 "I'd heard rumors among documentary filmmakers for 20 years about this footage," says Olsson. "When I found it, it was obvious to me that you could create a very interesting film." Resurrecting this cold case file of archive footage and making a film "was my duty."

The original productions aired on Swedish television and were very popular because, according to Olsson, "There was a connection between Sweden and the Civil Rights movement, especially after Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize." We see that King and the Black Power movement were being vilified by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in the US as Communist-inspired threats to the United States, and Hoover singles out the Black Panthers' school breakfast program as proof. Olsson wanted to show audiences "the effort the FBI put into harassing these people." 

The creators of the original documentaries gained unprecedented access to the Black Panthers and others because they were trusted as sympathetic. Most American producers at that time wouldn't have driven into Oakland neighborhoods, let alone knocked on Panther leaders' doors. But the Swedish journalists did, saying, "We're from Sweden and we're wondering if we could talk to you."

The producers earned their trust, and consequently some of the prime movers of the Black Power movement--Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale--discuss activism, democracy, social change and civil rights with a candor and openness largely unseen in their engagements with the American media. And there are intimate moments as well, such as Carmichael at home with his mother as she expresses her concern for her son's safety.

Finding the footage and turning it into a new project didn't present the same technical challenges for Olsson as it did for Ellwood and Gibney. The original films were shot by talented documentary crews and were well preserved. The Swedes had used reversal film stock, but had also made a dupe negative and work print, so the camera masters had never been cut or projected. They were pristine. The transfer to high-definition video, using modern color correction, actually made them "look better today," says Olsson.

The biggest dilemma was whether to intersperse the historical footage with contemporary interviews or let the scenes play out. Inspired by DA Pennebaker's commentary tracks on his DVDs, Olsson decided to "keep the audience in the room" and not cut away to interviews. Instead the interviews he recorded with contemporary authors, professors and hip-hop artists such as Erykah Badu and Talib Kweli play out as a sound bed without interrupting the images. These new sound bites are mixed with existing "audio commentary" from Harry Belafonte, Bobby Seale and Angela Davis. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 earned the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award for Olsson and Hanna Lejongvist.

This vérité approach to creating something new from found footage was the solution that British filmmaker Asif Kapadia opted for as he grappled with how to transform 5,000 hours of archive footage into a compelling film about three-time world champion Formula One driver Ayrton Senna.

The producers of Senna thought their project would take a traditional route--archive footage, plus fresh interviews, some re-creations and location shoots blended together to create something new. But as Kapadia began slogging through the hours and hours of material, he realized, "This is a movie." 

Each race was covered by numerous cameras, including cameras mounted on board the cars. The pre-race meetings were covered by crews that the drivers trusted, so the crews captured some very candid and tense moments; and since Senna was a hero in both his native Brazil and Formula One-crazy Japan, TV outlets from those countries had covered him exhaustively. Adding in home movies, other news footage and some amateur videos, Kapadia figured that Senna's life and career was "all on camera."

The filmmaker worried that breaking away from this amazing cache of footage with on-camera interviews and other bits would break the spell over an audience that a movie can create. His background in theater enabled him to engage the material as a drama and the raw video as coverage.

 "No interviews, no stills--we had to dramatically make the points," Kapadia explains. He did conduct interviews with people who actually covered the races and knew Senna. These form a running audio narrative in much the same way that Ellwood, Gibney and Olsson render their interviews. Unlike in the Magic Trip, though, Senna doesn't employ a narrator. 

Doing something out of the ordinary is usually a hard sell to an executive producer who's happy to see a project delivered in a conventional format. Kapadia was relentless, and after repeated showings of renditions of the film using his approach, he won over the producers who saw his vision of "cinema."

The resulting 104-minute film won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival band had grossed over $8 million at the box office worldwide at press time.  

Not every subject is ideally suited for an "archival vérité" film, but if you stumble on a project with a vast amount of footage and compelling central characters--and you're supported by forward-thinking producers--you may want to let the footage tell the story.

Michael Rose is a Los Angeles-based writer, producer and director.